Dianetics 55! 1955 Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Dianetics
Why should anyone want to know anything about the human mind? And, for that matter, why should anyone believe that knowledge of the human mind is either unobtainable or undesirable? Why should men ostensibly seeking answers to the mind stray so far from it as to examine rats and entirely avoid looking at human beings? And why should anyone pretending to treat the mind stray so far afield as electric shock?
The answers are relatively simple. Anyone who knows the structure, function, and dynamics of the human mind is very difficult to control. The only way a mind can be controlled is by enforcing upon it ignorance of itself. As far as study and treatment is concerned, a mind which has been made ignorant of itself would have to have restored to it awareness of its fundamentals before it could be considered to be recovered. And when one restores full awareness to a mind one is no longer able to victimize it. And a profession or a society would have to move out of slave orientation into action by freedom and consent, were it to be effective.
Just as you do not want people to control you, so you should want knowledge of yourself and others. Just as you fight away from knowingness concerning self, so you will be controlled.
A simple and conclusive science of mind is a vital necessity in any society which desires to become free and remain free. The only elements in a society which would combat, or contest, or dispute an effort to attain such a science would be those interests which desired, by ignorance, to maintain their control of a slavery. Each and every impulse of freedom is an impulse towards sanity, towards health, towards happiness. Every impulse towards slavery is an impulse in the direction of misery, disease and death. One can say alike of the arthritic and the neurotic that the basic cause of disturbance, physical or mental, germinated in efforts to reduce the freedom of the individual, the group, or Mankind.
Dianetics is an effort towards the attainment by Man of a level of freedom where decency and happiness can prevail, and where knowledge of the mind itself would prevent the unscrupulous use of the mechanisms of slavery. Dianetics can be contested, it can be vilified, its founder and practitioners can be publicly pilloried, but Dianetics cannot be ignored. It could neither be drowned in praise, nor burned in some purge to its total eradication, for it is a wonderfully observable fact that the one impulse in Man which cannot be erased is his impulse towards freedom, his impulse towards sanity, towards higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors. This is Man’s one saving grace, and because Dianetics is such an impulse, and because its basic purpose, from the moment of its conception, have been dedicated unswervably to the attainment of even greater freedom it cannot perish – a fact which will become doubtlessly more annoying to the slave-masters as the years roll on.
There is much argument upon which we could adventure concerning whether Dianetics is an art or a science, whether it is a humanity or a hoax, but all this would avail us very little for we would only be quibbling with words. Dianetics is what it is, and the totality of it can best be summed by the description, ‘an understanding of Man.’ We do not care whether or not it is a science. We do not care whether or not it is more properly catalogued under Adventure or Mystery. We do care whether or not it is promulgated and known, for everywhere it walks slavery ceases. That mind which understands itself is the mind of a free man. It is no longer prone to obsessive behavior, unthinking compliances, covert innuendoes. It is at home in an environment, not a stranger. It is the solver of problems and the maker of games. A mind that is enslaved is weak. A mind that is free is powerful, and all the power there is, is defined by and contained in freedom.
Why should you know something about your mind? A question of a similar magnitude would be: „Why should you live?“ A science fiction writer once conceived a world composed entirely of machines, composed to a point where the machines were repaired by other machines, which, in turn, were repaired by yet other machines, and so the circle went ‘round and the machines survived. He wrote this story from the fondest belief of nuclear physicists that there is only a machine, that man derives from some spontaneous combustion of mud, that the soul does not exist, that freedom is impossible, that all behavior is stimulus-response, that causative thought cannot exist.
What a world this would be! And yet this world, this pattern, is the goal of the slave makers. If every man could be depressed from his freedom to a point where he believed himself but a cog in an enormous machine, then all things would be enslaved. But who would there be to enjoy them? Who would there be to profit? Not the slave-maker, for he is the first to succumb. He succumbs to his own mechanisms. He receives the full jolt of his own endeavors to entrap. What would be the purpose of this world of machines? There could be no purpose worth contemplating which does not include happiness and experience. When a man is no longer able to envision happiness as a part of his future, that man is dead. He has become nothing but an animated robot, without understanding, without humanity, perfectly willing then to compose missiles of such desolating quality that an entire civilization can perish, and that the happiness of all can be destroyed in the experience of radiation – an experience which might be considered digestible by an atomic pile, but not by a human being. Thus as we depart from the concepts of freedom, we depart into a darkness where the will, the fear, or the brutality, of one or a few, no matter how well educated, may yet obliterate everything for which we have worked, everything for which we have hoped. This is what happens when the machine runs wild, and when Man, becomes a machine, runs wild. Man can only become a machine when he is no longer capable of understanding his own beingness and has lost his contact with it. Thus it is of enormous importance that we understand something about the mind, that we understand we are minds, that we are not machines, and it is of enormous importance that Man attain at once to some higher level of freedom where the machine reaction of destruction may be controlled, and where Man himself can enjoy some of the happiness to which he is entitled.
“Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health“ was written into a world where atomic fission was yet in its early stages. But „Dianetics 55!“ is being written in a world where bombs exist of such fury that a continent could be laid waste. The recent declaration of the Secretary of War of the United States of America that such weapons exist, and are capable of being used, and his assumption that men exist with such insufficiency of humanity that they would use such weapons, tells us that it is time someone, somewhere, took a hand in this game. The intimacy of his promises cannot be escaped. You would think anyone a madman who essayed to destroy every book in every library in the United States and Russia. You would think a man quite insane if he insisted upon the destruction of all your personal possessions. You would know he was mad when he insisted that the only course for the future was the destruction of your body and any future race to remember it. Only a raving, drooling madman could contemplate the ending of all goals everywhere on earth. And only an apathetic fool would stand by motionless before the inevitable destruction of his most intimate dreams, his fondest hopes, his possessions – even on down to his identification cards and the money in his wallet. Such destruction permits no inheritance. It means an end of everything for which we have all hoped, for which we and our ancestors have striven, and it is my belief that an individual who can contemplate this with equanimity and without an impulse to act is so lost to the race and lost to himself, to his family, and to his friends, that he must personally believe there is no hope for anything, anywhere, at any time. Such depravity is difficult to envision. We know, definitely, that the wrong thing to do is nothing. Whenever any situation may develop, we always have that answer. It is wrong to do nothing. The only time anyone has ever gotten into serious trouble was when he decided he could do nothing about something.
This was the entering threshold towards death. When one knew, at last, that he was powerless in the face of all fates, or of any one particular fate, he was, to that degree, a slave of those fates. Thus, the wrong thing to do in this world, at this time, is nothing. No matter what fantastic or incredible plan we adventure upon, no matter how we put it forward, it would still be better than the abandonment of all plans and all action. It may be that we have better plans than fantastic plans. It may be that we, possessed of a knowledge of the mind and of Man, can yet restrain this dreadful crime of oblivion from occurring.
Dianetics, then, is a weapon. It is a timely weapon. It is the only weapon of defense in existence which can confront with equanimity nuclear fission. Dianetics can fail only if it is not used, only if those who know about it do not use it to its fullest extent. Were you to take the technologies of Dianetics this day, and seeking out anyone even remotely connected with the responsibility for waging atomic war, apply these techniques to them, you would soon have the man into a sufficiently high stratum of humanity that he would recognize some of his responsibility to the human race. Your task would be made hard, for all those who are connected with the waging of war with atomic fission are restricted by law from receiving any psychotherapy. If this seems incredible to you, you should realize that anyone in a top-secret or confidential classification in government is not supposed to impart any information of his calling. And it is the fear of governments that some of this information might be imparted to someone practising in the field of mental healing. And thus, if anyone connected with nuclear fission is discovered to be undergoing processing of any kind, he would be immediately relieved of his post and his top-secret classification would be cancelled. But this is not a hopeless picture. Supposing one processed them all and had all their top-secret classifications cancelled, who would be left? Or supposing one pointed out this idiocy with sufficient conviction to those in charge of (but who are not responsible for) the destinies of Man, and made it mandatory that the sanity of anyone connected with the creation or use of atomic fission be required to have a sanity passport. Only the insane will destroy. Remember that! Only the insane would bring about the end of earth. One of these men, fumbling forward, uncomprehending, a mere machine, given processing begins to realize that he is not without responsibility for the safety of humanity. Only when he is a slave could he be forced to use such weapons against mankind. There is no argument on earth of sufficient emergency or violence to require war, much less war by atomic fission with the consequence of the destruction of at least one continent, and within a few years, the destruction of the planet earth.
Who would believe that anyone could wipe a continent clean of life without at once so polluting the atmosphere of earth as to endanger or eradicate all further life-forms on this planet? What argument could there be amongst men which could occasion such a fate for earth? There is no such argument amongst men. Such an argument could arise amongst machines which, conscientiously, might push buttons, reach conclusions for which they had no responsibility.
There are many ways in which a higher state of security could be attained for earth. None of these ways include violence or revolution, and all of them include a greater freedom for Mankind. Dianetics is the key technology necessary for the control of atomic fission. Remember that, and remember also that Dianetics is a precision science, that it works only when it is used as a precision science. That if you are to accomplish anything with it, whether the rescue of a relative from the pain of continued psychosomatic illness, of a group, a nation, or a world, it works exactly along the lines it is designed. It does not work with innovations. It is a precision science. It has a precision mission. It contains more answers than Man has ever had before, and it contains enough answers to make Man free – if it is used!