The Problems of Work 1956 Chapter 5

Chapter Five: Life as a Game

It is quite obvious that if anyone controlled everything he would have no game. There would be no unpredictable factors, no surprises in life. This might be said to be a Hell of considerable magnitude.

If one could control everything absolutely he would of course be able to predict everything absolutely. If he could predict the course and action of every motion in the entirety of existence he would of course have no real interest in it.

We have already looked at the necessity of controlling the immediate objects of work, but remember it is necessary, if one controls these immediate objects, to have other objects or environments which one does not absolutely control. Why is this?

It is because life is a game.

The word “game” is used here advisedly. When one is mired down in the sometimes titanic struggle of existence he is apt to discount the fact that there is joy in living. He is apt to disbelieve that such a thing as fun can exist. Indeed people, when they reach into their thirties, begin to wonder what happened to their childhood when they actually could enjoy things. One begins to wonder if pleasure of living isn’t itself some sort of trap, and one begins to believe that it is not a good thing to become too interested in new people and new things, since these will only lead to heartbreak. There are men who have decided that in view of the fact that loss brings so much pain, they had better not acquire at all. It is far superior according to these to live a life of only medium privation than to live a life of considerable luxury, since then if they lost what they had the pain would be much less.

Life, however, is a game. It is very easy to see a game in terms of cricket or football. It is not so easy to see life as a game when one is forced to rise before the sun and reach his home only after it sets, after a day of arduous and relatively unthanked toil. One is likely to dispute that such an activity could be a game at all. Nevertheless it is obvious in various experiments which have been made in Scientology that life, no matter what its emotional tone or lack of it, is in essence a game and that the elements of life itself are the elements of games.

Any job is a game.

A game consists of freedoms, barriers and purposes. There are many more complicated factors involved in games, but these are all listed in Scientology.

Primary amongst these is the necessity in a game to have an opponent or an enemy. Also a necessity is to have problems. Another necessity is to have sufficient individuality to cope with a situation. To live life fully, then, one must have, in addition to “something to do”, a higher purpose, and this purpose, to be a purpose at all, must have counter-purposes or purposes which prevent it from occurring. One must have individualities which oppose the purpose or activities of one, and if one lacks these things it is certain that he will invent them.

This last is very important. If a person lacks problems, opponents and counter- purposes to his own, he will invent them. Here we have in essence the totality of aberration. But more intimately to our purposes we have the difficulties which arise from work.

If we had a foreman who capably controlled everything in his area and did nothing else, and if that foreman were not entirely mentally balanced in all ways (which is to say if he were human), we would find that foreman inventing personalities for the workers under him and reasons why they were opposing him and actual oppositions. We would find him selecting out one or more of his workmen to chastise, with, according to the foreman, very good reason, but in actuality without any further reason than that the foreman obsessively needed opponents. Now very many involved classifications can be read into this by ancient mental analyzes but none of these need to be examined. The truth of the matter is that a man must have a game and if he does not have one he will make one. If that man is aberrated and not entirely competent he will make an intensely aberrated game.

Where an executive finds all running far too smoothly in his immediate vicinity he is likely to cause some trouble just to have something to do -unless that executive is in very good mental condition indeed. Thus we have management pretending, often without any actual basis in fact, that labor is against it. Similarly, we occasionally have labor certain that management, which is in fact quite competent, is against labor. Here we have invented a game where no game can actually exist.

When men become very shortsighted they cannot look actually beyond their own environment. There is in any office, plant, or activity the game of the office, plant or activity itself versus its competitors and versus its outer environment. If that office, plant or activity and all the personnel within it are conducting themselves on a wholly rational and effective basis they choose the outside world and other rival concerns for their game. If they are not up to par and are incapable of seeing the real game they will make up a game and the game will begin to be played inside the office and inside the plant.

In playing games one has individuals and teams. Teams play against teams; individuals play against individuals. When an individual is not permitted to be fully a part of the team he is apt to choose other members of the team as his opponents for, remember, man must have a game.

Out of all these complexities come the various complexities of work and the problems of production and communication.

If everybody in a plant were able to control his own sphere of interest in that plant and if everybody in the plant were doing his own job, there would actually be no lack of game, for there are other plants, other activities in the outside world and these always furnish game enough for any rational organization. But supposing the people in an organization cannot control their own sphere, cannot control their own activities, and are obsessively attempting to create aberrated games all about them. Then we would have a condition whereby the plant, office or concern would not be able to effectively fight its environment and would produce poorly, if not collapse.

Aberrated or not aberrated, competent or not competent, remember, life is a game and the motto of any individual or team alive is, “There must be a game.” If individuals are in good mental and physical condition they actually play the game which is obvious and in plain sight. If they are not in good condition and if they are themselves incapable of controlling their own immediate environment, they will begin to play games with their tools. Here the machinist will find his machine suddenly incapable of producing. One would not go so far as to say that he will actually break the machine so that he can have a game with it, but he will be in a mild state of fury regarding that machinery continually. The bookkeeper, unable to control his immediate tools of trade and not well-fitted into his concern, will begin to play a game with his own figures and will fail to get balances. His adding machine will break down, his papers will get lost and other things will occur under his immediate nose which never should happen, and if he were in good shape and could play the actual game of keeping other people in the plant straight so far as their accounts and figures are concerned, he would be efficient.

Efficiency, then, could be defined as the ability to play the game to hand. Inefficiency could be defined as an inability to play the game to hand, with a necessity to invent games with things which one should actually be able to control with ease.

This sounds almost too simple, but unfortunately for the professors that try to make things complicated, it is just that simple. Of course there are a number of ways men can become too aberrated. That is not the subject of this book. The subject of this book is work.

Now realizing that life must be a game, one should realize that there is a limit to the area one would control and still retain an interest in life. Interest is mainly kindled by the unpredictable. Control is important. Uncontrol is, if anything, even more important. To actually handle a machine perfectly one must be willing to control it or not to control it. When control itself becomes obsessive we begin to find things wrong with it. The individual who absolutely has to control everything in sight is upsetting to all of us and this individual is why we have begun to find things wrong with control. It sounds very strange to say that uncontrol must also be under control, but this is, in essence, true. One must be willing to leave certain parts of the world uncontrolled. If he cannot, he rapidly drops downscale and gets into a situation where he is obsessively attempting to control things which he never will be able to control and thus renders himself unhappy, begins to doubt his ability to control those things which he actually should be able to control and so at length loses his ability to control anything. And this, in essence, is what in Scientology we call the dwindling spiral of control.

There are mental factors which we will not discuss here, which tend to accumulate the failure to control to a point where one is no longer confident of his ability to control.

The truth of the matter is an individual actually desires to have some part of life uncontrolled. When this part of life hurts him sufficiently he then resigns himself to the necessity of controlling it and so makes himself relatively unhappy if he never will be able to do so. A game consists of freedom, barriers and purposes. It also consists of control and uncontrol.

An opponent in a game must be an uncontrolled factor. Otherwise one would know exactly where the game was going and how it would end and it would not be a game at all.

Where one football team would be totally capable of controlling the other football team, we have no football game. This is a matter of no contest. There would be no joy or sport in playing that game of football. Now if a football player has been seriously injured playing football, a new unknowing factor enters into football for him. This injury lodges in what we call the “reactive mind”. It is a mind which is unseen and which works all the time. One normally works on what we call the “analytical mind” and this we know all about. Anything that we have forgotten or moments of unconsciousness and pain become locked away in the reactive mind and are then capable of reacting upon the individual in such a way as to make him refrain from doing something which was once dangerous. While this is a rather technical subject it is nevertheless necessary to understand that one’s past has a tendency to accumulate and victimize one in the future.

Thus, in the case of the football player, while he plays football he is apt to be restimulated or react from the old injury received in football and so feels less than a spirit of fun while playing football. He becomes anxious. He becomes very grim on the subject of football and this is expressed by an effort to actively control the players on another team so that they will not injure him again.

In a motorcycle race a famous motorcycle rider was injured. Two weeks later in another race we find this motorcycle rider falling out on the fifth lap without injury or incident but simply pulling over into the pits. He did this immediately after a motorcycle swerved close to him. He recognized at once that he was unable to control that motorcycle. He felt then incapable of controlling his own motorcycle and so knew one thing -- he had to get out of that race. And just as this motorcycle rider abandoned that race, so all of us at one time or another have abandoned sections of life.

Now, up to the time he had that accident the motorcycle rider was perfectly willing to not control any other motorcycle on the track save his own. He did not worry about these other motorcycles since they had never injured him and the motorcycle racing game was still a game to him. However, during the accident there was a moment when he sought to control another motorcycle than his own and another rider. He failed in that effort. Thus in his “reactive mind” there is an actual mental image picture of his failing to control a motorcycle. Thus in future racing he is less competent. He is afraid of his own machine. He has identified his own machine with somebody else’s machine. This is a failure of control.

Now, in order to become a good motorcycle racer again this man would have to resume his attitude of carelessness regarding the control of the other machines and riders on the track and reassume his own ability to control his own machine. If he were able to do this he would become once more a daring, efficient and winning motorcycle rider demonstrating great competence. Only a Scientology practitioner could put him back into this condition -- and a Scientology practitioner would be able to do this probably in a very few hours. This, however, is not a textbook on how to eradicate former ills, but an explanation of why men become incompetent in the handling of their immediate tools of trade. These men have attempted to leave uncontrolled all the world around them up to the moment when the world around them hurt them. They then conceived the idea that they should control more than their own jobs. They failed to control more than their own jobs and were instantly convinced that they were incapable of controlling something. This is quite different than leaving things uncontrolled. To be capable of controlling things and to be capable of leaving things uncontrolled are both necessary to a good life and doing a good job. To become convinced that one cannot control something is an entirely different thing.

The whole feeling of self-confidence and competence actually derives from one’s ability to control or leave uncontrolled the various items and people in his surroundings. When he becomes obsessed with a necessity to control something rather beyond his sphere of control, he is disabused of his ability to control those things close to him. A person eventually gets into a state of mind where he cannot pay any attention at all to his own job but can only reach out into the outer environment and seek, effectively or otherwise, to stop, start or change things which have in reality very little to do with his own job. Here we have the agitator, the inefficient worker, the individual who is going to fail. He is going to fail because he has failed at some time in the past.

This is not quite as hopeless as it looks because it takes actual physical injury and very heavy duress to make an individual feel that he is incapable of controlling things. The day-to- day handling of machinery is not what deteriorates one’s ability to work or handle life. It is not true that one gets old and tired and his ability to do things wears out. It is true that one becomes injured in sudden, short moments and thereafter carries that injury into his future work and the injury is what causes him to deteriorate. The eradication of the injury brings him back to an ability to control his own environment.

The entire subject of work, then, brings us to the value of uncontrol. A machinist doing a good job should be able to relax as far as his machine is concerned. He should be able to let it run or not let it run, to start it or not to start it, to stop it or not to stop it. If he can do these things, all with confidence and a calm state of mind, he can then handle that machine and it will be discovered that the machine will run well for him

Now let us say the machine bites him, he hurts his hand in it, some other worker jostles against him at the wrong moment, some tool given to him is defective and shatters. An actual physical pain enters into the situation. He tends to fall away from the machine. He tends then to concentrate much more heavily on the machine than he should. He is no longer willing to leave it uncontrolled. When he is working with that machine he must control it. Now as he has entered duress into this situation and as he is already anxious about it, it is fairly certain that the machine will hurt him again. This gives him a second injury and with this injury he feels an even stronger urge to control the machine. You see, during the moments of injury the machine was out of control. Now while out-of-control is a game condition, it is not desired or welcome to this particular machinist. Eventually, it is certain he will look upon this machine as some sort of a demon. He will, you might say, run the machine all day and at night while asleep run it too. He will spend his week-ends and his holidays still running that machine. Eventually he will not be able to stand the sight of that machine and will flinch at the idea of working it a moment longer.

This picture becomes slightly complicated by the fact that it is not always the injury delivered to him by his own particular machine which causes him to feel anxious about machinery. A man who has been in an automobile accident may return to the working of a machine with considerable qualms about machines in general. He begins to identify his own machine with other machines and all machines become the same machine and that is the machine that hurt him.

There are other conditions which enter into lighter phases of work. In the matter of a clerk we may have a circumstance where he is ill from some other area than his area of work and yet, because he has little time off, is forced to work, sick or not. The tools of his own work, his filing cabinets or his pens or his books or the very room, become identified with his feeling of sickness and he feels that these, too, have bitten him. Thus he becomes obsessed in his control of them and actually degenerates in his ability to control them just as the machinist does. Even though these tools have not actually injured him he associates them with being injured. In other words, he identifies his own sickness with the work he is doing. Thus even a clerk whose tools of trade are not particularly dangerous can become upset about his tools of trade and can first exert enormous control over them on an obsessed basis and at length abandon any control of them and feel he would rather be beaten than do an instant’s more work in his particular sphere.

One of the ways of getting over such a condition is simply to touch or handle one’s various tools of trade and the surroundings in which he works. If a man were to go all the way around an office in which he had worked for years and touch the walls and window ledges and the equipment of tables and desks and chairs, ascertaining carefully the feel of each one, carefully locating each one with regard to the walls and other items in the room, he would feel much better about the entire room. He would be, in essence, moving himself from a moment of time where he was sick or injured, up to present time. The maxim here is that one must do one’s work in present time. One must not continue to work in old moments of injury.

If acquaintance with one’s tools, or touching one’s tools of the trade and discovering exactly where and how they are, is so beneficial, then what would be the mechanism behind this? We will leave until later in this book some drills and exercises calculated to rehabilitate one’s ability to work, and look for a moment at this new factor.