Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 25

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How to Study a Science

The whole subject of a science, as far as the student is concerned, is good or bad in direct ratio to his knowledge of it. It is up to a student to find out how precise the tools are. He should, before he starts to discuss, criticize or attempt to improve on the data presented to him, find out for himself whether or not the mechanics of a science are as stated and whether or not it does what has been proposed for it.

He should make up his mind about each thing that is taught in the school. The procedure, techniques, mechanics and theory. He should ask himself these questions: Does this piece of data exist? Is it true? Does it work? Will it produce the best possible results in the shortest time?

There are two ways man ordinarily accepts things, neither of them very good. One is to accept a statement because Authority says it is true and must be accepted, and the other is by preponderance of agreement amongst other people.

Preponderance of agreement is all too often the general public test for sanity or insanity. Suppose someone were to walk into a crowded room and suddenly point to a ceiling saying, “Oh, look! There’s a huge, twelve-foot spider on the ceiling!” Everyone would look up, but no one else would see the spider. Finally someone would tell him so. “Oh, yes, there is” he would declare, and become very angry when he found that no one would agree with him. If he continued to declare his belief in the existence of the spider, he would very soon find himself institutionalized.

The basic definition of sanity, in this somewhat nebulously learned society, is whether or not a person agrees with everyone else. It is a very sloppy manner of accepting evidence, but all too often it is the primary measuring stick.

And then the Rule of Authority: “Does Dr. J. Doe agree with your proposition? No? Then, of course, it cannot be true. Dr. Doe is an eminent authority in the field.”

A man by the name of Galen at one time dominated the field of medicine. Another man by the name of Harvey upset Galen’s cozy position with a new theory of blood circulation. Galen had been agreeing with the people of his day concerning the “tides” of the blood. They knew nothing about heart action. They accepted everything they had been taught and did little observing of their own. Harvey worked at the Royal Medical Academy and found by animal vivisection the actual function of the heart.

He had the good sense to keep his findings absolutely quiet for a while. Leonardo da Vinci had somehow discovered or postulated the same thing, but he was a “crazy artist” and no one would believe an artist. Harvey was a member of the audience of a play by Shakespeare in which the playwright made the same observation, but again the feeling that artists never contribute anything to society blocked anyone but Harvey from considering the statement as anything more than fiction.

Finally, Harvey made his announcement. Immediately dead cats, rotten fruit and pieces of wine jugs were hurled in his direction. He raised quite a commotion in medical and social circles until finally, in desperation, one doctor made the historical statement, “I would rather err with Galen than be right with Harvey!”

Man would have made an advance of exactly zero if this had always been the only method of testing evidence. But every so often during Man’s progress, there have been rebels who were not satisfied with preponderance of opinion, and who tested a fact for themselves, observing and accepting the data of their observation, and then testing again.

Possibly the first man who made a flint ax looked over a piece of flint and decided that the irregular stone could be chipped a certain way. When he found that flint would chip easily, he must have rushed to his tribe and enthusiastically tried to teach his fellow tribesmen how to make axes in the shape they desired, instead of spending months searching for accidental pieces of stone of just the right shape. The chances are he was stoned out of camp.

Indulging in a further flight of fancy, it is not difficult to imagine that he finally managed to convince another fellow that his technique worked and that the two of them tied down a third with a piece of vine and forced him to watch them chip a flint ax from a rough stone. Finally, after convincing fifteen or twenty tribesmen by forceful demonstration, the followers of the new technique declared war on the rest of the tribe and, winning, forced the tribe to agree by decree.

Evaluation of Data

Man has never known very much about that with which his mind is chiefly filled: Data. What is data?

What is the evaluation of data?

All these years, in which psychoanalysis has taught its tenets to each generation of doctors, the authoritarian method was used, as can be verified by reading a few of the books on the subject. Within them is found, interminably, “Freud said ....” The truly important thing is not that “Freud said” a thing, but “Is the data valuable? If it is valuable, how valuable is it?” You might say that a datum is as valuable as it has been evaluated. A datum can be proved in ratio to whether it can be evaluated by other data, and its magnitude is established by how many other data it clarifies. Thus, the biggest datum possible would be one which would clarify and identify all knowledge known to man in the material universe.

Unfortunately, however, there is no such thing as a Prime Datum. There must be, not one datum, but two data, since a datum is of no use unless it can be evaluated. Furthermore, there must be a datum of similar magnitude with which to evaluate any given datum.

Data is your data only so long as you have evaluated it. It is your data by authority or it is your data. If it is your data by authority somebody has forced it upon you, and at best it is little more than a light aberration. Of course, if you asked a question of a man whom you thought knew his business and he gave you his answer, that datum was not forced upon you. But if you went away from him believing from then on that such a datum existed without taking the trouble to investigate the answer for yourself—without comparing it to the known uni- verse—you were falling short of completing the cycle of learning.

Mechanically, the major thing wrong with the mind is, of course, the turbulence in it; but the overburden of information in this society is enforced education that the individual has never been permitted to test. Literally, when you are told not to take anyone’s word as an absolute datum, you are being asked to break a habit pattern forced upon you when you were a child.

Test it for yourself and convince yourself whether or not it exists as truth. And if you find that it does exist, you will be comfortable thereafter; otherwise, unrecognized even by yourself, you are likely to find, down at the bottom of your information and education, an unresolved question which will itself undermine your ability to assimilate or practice anything in the line of a technique. Your mind will not be as facile on the subject as it should be.

A Look at the Sciences

The reason engineering and physics have reached out so far in advance of other sciences is the fact that they pose problems which punish man so violently if he doesn’t look carefully into the physical universe.

An engineer is faced with the problem of drilling a tunnel through a mountain for a railroad. Tracks are laid up to the mountain on either side. If he judged space wrongly, the two tunnel entrances would fail to meet on the same level in the center. It would be so evident to one and all concerned that the engineer had made a mistake, that he takes great care not to make such a mistake. He observes the physical universe, not only to the extent that the tunnel must meet to a fraction of an inch, but to the extent that, if he were to judge wrongly the character of the rock through which he drills, the tunnel would cave in—an incident which would be considered a very unlucky and unfortunate occurrence to railroading.

Biology comes closer to being a science than some others because, in the field of biology, if someone makes too big a mistake about a bug, the immediate result can be dramatic and terrifying. Suppose a biologist is charged with the responsibility of injecting plankton into a water reservoir. Plankton are microscopic “germs” that are very useful to man.

But, if through some mistake, the biologist injects typhoid germs into the water supply—there would be an immediate and dramatic result.

Suppose a biologist is presented with the task of producing a culture of yeast which would, when placed in white bread dough, stain the bread brown. This man is up against the necessity of creating a yeast which not only behaves as yeast, but makes a dye as well. He has to deal with the practical aspect of the problem, because after he announces his success, there is the “yeast test”: Is the bread edible? And the brown-bread test: Is the bread brown? Anyone could easily make the test, and everyone would know very quickly whether or not the biologist had succeeded or failed.

Politics is called a science. There are natural laws about politics. They could be worked out if someone were to actually apply a scientific basis to political research.

For instance, it is a foregone conclusion that if all communication lines are cut between the United States and Russia, Russia and the United States are going to understand each other less and less. Then, by demonstrating to everyone how the American way of life and the Russian way of life are different and by demonstrating it day after day, year after year, there is no alternative but a break of affinity. By stating flatly that Russia and the United States are not in agreement on any slightest political theory or conduct of man or nations, the job is practically complete. Both nations will go into anger tone and suddenly, there is war.

The United States is a nation possessed of the greatest communications networks on the face of the earth, with an undreamed-of manufacturing potential. It has within its borders the best advertising men in the world. But instead of selling Europe an idea, it gives machine guns, planes and tanks for use in case Russia breaks out. The more threats imposed against a country in Russia’s tone level, the more dangerous that country will become. When people are asked what they would do about this grave question, they shrug and say something to the effect that “the politicians know best.” They hedge and rationalize by saying that, after all, there is the American way of life, and it must be protected.

What is the American way of life? This is a question that will stop almost any American. What is the American way of life that is different from the human way of life? It has tried to gather together economic freedom for the individual, freedom of the press, and individual freedom, and define them as a strictly American way of life—why hasn’t it been called the Human Way of Life?

In the field of humanities, Science has been thoroughly adrift. Unquestioned authoritarian principles have been followed. Any person who accepts knowledge without questioning it and evaluating it for himself is demonstrating himself to be in apathy toward that sphere of knowledge. It demonstrates that the people in the United States today must be in a low state of apathy with regard to politics, in order to accept, without question, everything that happens.

Fundamentals

When a man tries to erect the plans of a lifetime or a profession on data which he, himself, has never evaluated, he cannot possibly succeed.

Fundamentals are very, very important, but first of all one must learn how to think in order to be absolutely sure of a fundamental. Thinking is not particularly hard to learn. It consists merely of comparing a particular datum with the physical universe as it is known and observed.

Authoritarianism is little more than a form of hypnotism. Learning is forced under threat of some form of punishment. A student is stuffed with data which has not been individually evaluated, just as a taxidermist would stuff a snake. Such a student will be well informed and well educated according to present-day standards, but, unfortunately, he will not be very successful in his chosen profession.

Do not make the mistake of criticizing something on the basis of whether or not it concurs with the opinions of someone else. The point which is pertinent is whether or not it concurs with your opinion. Does it agree with what you think?

Nearly everyone has done some manner of observing of the material universe. No one has seen all there is to see about an organism, for example, but there is certainly no dearth of organisms available for further study. There is no valid reason for accepting the opinion of Professor Blotz of the Blitz University, who said in 1933 that schizophrenics were schizophrenics, and that made them schizophrenics for all time.

If you are interested in the manifestation of insanity, there is any and every form of insanity that you could hope to see in a lifetime in almost any part of the world. Study the peculiarities of the people around you and wonder what they would be like if their little peculiarities were magnified a hundred fold. You may find that by listing all the observable peculiarities you would have a complete list of all the insanity’s in the world. This list might well be far more accurate than that which was advanced by Kraepelin and used in the United States today.

If sanity is rationality and insanity is irrationality, and you postulated how irrational people would be if certain of their obsessions were magnified a hundred fold, you might well have in your possession a far more accurate and complete list of insanity’s and their manifestations than is currently in existence.

So, the only advice I can give to the student is to study a subject for itself and use it exactly as stated, then form his own opinions. Study it with the purpose in mind of arriving at his own conclusions as to whether or not the tenets he has assimilated are correct and workable. Compare what you have learned with the known universe. Seek for the reasons behind a manifestation, and postulate the manner and in which direction the manifestation will likely proceed. Do not allow the Authority of any one person or school of thought to create a foregone conclusion within your sphere of knowledge. Only with these principles of education in mind can you become a truly educated individual.