DMSH 1950 CBook 2 Chapter 8
← Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)
Contagion of Aberration
Disease is contagious. Germs, traveling from one individual to another, wander through an entire society, respecting none until stopped by such things as sulfa or penicillin.
Aberrations are contagious. Like germs they respect none and carry forward from individual to individual, from parents to child, respecting none until they are stopped by dianetics.
The people of yesterday supposed that genetic insanity must exist, for it could be observed that the children of aberrated parents were often themselves aberrated. There is genetic insanity but it is limited to the case of actually missing parts. A very small percentage of insanity falls into such a category and its manifestation is mental dullness or failure to coordinate and beyond these has no aberrative quality whatever (such people receive engrams which complicate their cases).
The contagion of aberration is too simple in principle to be much labored here. In dianetics we learn that only moments of “unconsciousness,” short or long and of greater or lesser depth, can contain engrams. When a person is rendered “unconscious,” people in his vicinity react more or less at the dictates of their engrams: in fact, the “unconsciousness” is quite ordinarily caused by somebody’s dramatization. A clear, then, could be rendered unconscious by an aberree who is dramatizing and the aberree’s dramatization of his engram would enter as an engram into the clear.
The mechanics are simple.
People under stress, if aberrated, dramatize engrams. Such dramatization may involve the injury of another person and render him more or less “unconscious.” The “unconscious” person then receives as an engram the dramatization.
This is not the only way contagion of aberration gets about. People on operating tables, under anaesthetic, are subjected to the more or less aberrated conversation of those present. This conversation enters into the “unconscious” person as an engram. Similarly, at the scene of accidents, the emergency nature of the experience may excite people into dramatizations, and if a person is “unconscious” because of the accident, an engram is received.
Aberrated parents are certain to infect their children with engrams. The father and mother, in dramatizing their own engrams around sick or injured children, pass them along just as certainly as if those engrams were bacteria. This does not mean that the total reactive bank of a child is composed solely of the parents’ engrams, for there are many exterior influences to the home which can enter into the child when it is “unconscious.” And it does not mean that the child is going to react to the same engrams the way either parent might react, for the child, after all, is an individual with an inherent personality, a power of choice and a different experience pattern. But it does mean that it is utterly inevitable that aberrated parents will in some way aberrate their children.
Misconceptions and poor data in a society’s culture become engrams because not all the conduct around an “unconscious” person is dramatization. If some society believed that fish- eating brought on leprosy, it is quite certain that this false datum would find its way into engrams and sooner or later some one would develop a leprosy-like disease after having eaten fish.
Primitive societies, being subject to much mauling by the elements, have many more occasions for injury than civilized societies. Further, such primitive societies are alive with false data. Further, their practice of medicine and mental healing is on a very aberrative level by
itself. The number of engrams in a Zulu would be astonishing. Moved out of his restimulative area and taught English he would escape the penalty of much of his reactive data; but in his native habitat the Zulu is only outside the bars of a madhouse because there are no madhouses provided by his tribe. It is a safe estimate and one based on better experience than is generally available to those who base conclusions on “modern man” by studying primitive races that primitives are far more aberrated than civilized peoples. Their savageness, their unprogressiveness, their incidence of illness all stem from their reactive patterns, not from their inherent personalities. Measuring one set of aberrees by another set of aberrees is not likely to lead to much data. And the contagion of aberration, being much greater in a primitive tribe, and the falsity of the superstitious data in the engrams of such a tribe both lead to a conclusion which, observed on the scene, is carried out by actuality.
Contagion of aberration is very easily studied in the process of clearing any aberree whose parents fought. Mother, for instance, might be relatively unaberrated at the beginning of the marriage. If she is beaten by her husband who is, after all, dramatizing, she will begin to pick up his aberrations as part of her own reactive pattern. This is particularly noticeable when one is clearing a person who was conceived shortly after his parents’ marriage or before it. Papa may begin with a certain dramatization which includes beating a wife. Whatever he says in such a dramatization will sooner or later begin to affect the wife and she may — unless extraordinarily well balanced — begin to dramatize these things on her own. Eventually, when the child is born, she will begin to dramatize on the child, thus putting him into a continual state of restimulation.
Birth is one of the most remarkable engrams in terms of contagion. Here the mother and child both receive the same engram which differs only in the location of pain and the depths of “unconsciousness.” Whatever the doctors, nurses and other people associated with the delivery say to the mother during labor and birth and immediately afterwards before the child is taken away is recorded in the reactive bank, making an identical engram in both mother and child.
This engram is remarkably destructive in several ways. The mother’s voice can restimulate the birth engram in the child and the presence of the child can restimulate the giving- birth engram in the mother. Thus they are mutually restimulative. In view of the fact that they have all the other restimulators also in common a later life situation can cause them each to suffer simultaneously from the engram. If birth included a slammed window, a slammed window may trigger birth dramatization in both, simultaneously, with resultant hostilities or apathies.
Should a doctor become angry or despairing, the emotional tone of birth can be severe. And if the doctor talks at all, the conversation takes on its full reactive literal meaning to both mother and child.
Many cases were cleared where both mother and child were available. One such case found the mother (as heard by the child in dianetic clearing) moaning, “I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed,” over and over. The child had a neurosis about shame. When the mother was cleared, it was found that her mother at birth was moaning, “I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed.” One can presume that this has been going along, by contagion, since Cheops built his tomb.
In the larger sphere of society contagion of aberration is extremely dangerous and cannot but be considered as a vital factor in undermining the health of that society.
The social body behaves similarly to an organism in that there are social aberrations which exist within the society. The society grows and may fade like an organism which has people, not cells, for its parts. Where pain is leveled by the head of the society at any member in that society, a source of aberration is begun which will be contagious. The reasons against corporal punishment are not “humanitarian,” they are practical. A society which practices punishment of any kind against any of its members is carrying on a contagion of aberration.
The society has a social engram, society size, which says punishment is necessary. Punishment is meted. The jails and institutions fill. And then one day some portion of the society, depressed into Zone 1 by a government’s freedom with government engrams, jumps up and wipes the government out. And a new set of aberrations is formed from the violence attending the destruction. Violent revolutions never win because they begin this cycle of aberration.
A society filled with aberrees may feel it necessary to punish. There has been no remedy other than punishment. The provision of a remedy for unsocial conduct by members of the group is of more than passing interest to a government for a continuance of its own corporal practices; adding these to the continuing aberrations of the past seriously depresses the survival potential of that government and will some day cause that government to fall. After many governments so fall, its people too perish from this earth.
Contagion of aberration is never more apparent than in that social insanity called war. Wars never solve the need of wars. Fight to save the world for democracy or save it from Confucianism and the fight is inevitably lost by all. War has become associated in the past with competition, and it has been believed, therefore, by shifty logic, that wars were necessary. A society which advances into a war as a solution of its problems cannot but depress its own survival potential. No government was ever permitted to enter a war without costing its people some of their liberties. The end product is the apathy of a ruling priesthood, where mystery and superstition alone can band the insane remnants of a people together. This is too easily observed in past histories to need much amplification. A democracy engaging in war has always lost some of its democratic rights. As it engages in more and more wars, it eventually comes under the command of a dictator (rule by a single engram). The dictator, forcing his rule, increases the aberrations by his activity against minorities. Revolt begins to follow revolt. Priesthoods flourish. Apathy awaits. And after apathy comes death. So went Greece, so went Rome. So goes England. So goes Russia. And so goes the United States and with it goes Mankind.
Rule by force is a violation of the law of affinity for force begets force. Rule by force reduces the self-determinism of the individuals in a society and therefore the self-determinism of the society itself. Contagion of aberration sweeps along like a forest fire. Engrams beget engrams. And unless the dwindling spiral is interrupted by new lands and mongrel races which escape their aberrative environments, or by the arrival of a means to break the contagion of aberration by clearing individuals, a race will reach downward to the end of the cycle — Zone 0.
A race is as great as its individual members are self-determined.
In the smaller sphere of the family, as in the national scenes, contagion of aberration produces an interruption of optimum survival.
Self-determinism is the only possible way a computer can be built to give rational answers. Holding down seven in an adding machine causes it to give wrong answers.
Entering fixed and not-to-be-rationalized answers into any human being will cause him to compute wrong answers. Survival depends on right answers. Engrams enter from the exterior world into the hidden recesses below rational thinking and prevent rational answers being reached. This is exterior-determinism. Any interference with self-determinism cannot but lead to wrong computations.
In that a clear is cooperative, a society of clears would cooperate. This may be an idyllic, Utopian dream and it may not be. In a family of clears there is observable harmony and cooperation. A clear can recognize a superior computation when he sees one. He does not have to be slugged and held down and made to obey to make him put a shoulder to the wheel. If he is made to obey, independent of his thinking, his self-determinism is interrupted to a point where he cannot get right answers; the society which holds him has penalized itself his ability to think and act rationally. The only way a clear could so be forced would be to give him
engrams or turn a neuro-surgeon loose upon his brain. But a clear does not need to be forced for if the job is important enough to do in terms of general need, he will most certainly do it according to his intelligence and do it as well as possible. One never observes the forced individual doing a job well, just as one never observes a forced society winning against an equally prosperous free society.
A family which runs on the godhead plan, where somebody must be obeyed without question, is never a happy family. Its prosperity may be present in some material aspects but its apparent survival as a unit is superficial.
Forced groups are invariably less efficient than free groups working for the common good. But any group which contains aberrated members is likely to become entirely aberrated as a group through contagion. The effort to restrain aberrated members of a group inevitably restrains the group as a whole and leads to further and further restraint.
Clearing one member of a family of aberrees is seldom enough to resolve the problems of that family. If the husband has been aberrated, he will have aberrated or restimulated his wife and children in one way or another, even when he used no physical violence upon them. The parents implant their mutual aberrations in the children and the children, being potentially self-determined units, revolt back to stir up the aberrations of the parents. In that so many of these aberrations, by contagion, have become mutual and held in common with the whole family, the happiness of the family is severely undermined.
The corporal punishment of children is just another facet of the problem of the forced group. If any one cares to argue over the necessity of punishing children, let him examine the source of the misbehavior of the children.
The child who is aberrated may not have his engrams entirely keyed-in. He may have to wait until he himself is married and has children or a pregnant wife to have restimulators enough to cause him to become, suddenly, one of these things they call a “mature adult” blind to the beauty of the world and burdened by all its griefs. But the child is nevertheless aberrated and has many dramatizations. The child is in a very unlucky situation in that he has with him his two most powerful restimulators — his mother and father. These assume the power of physical punishment over him. And they are giants to him. He is a pygmy. And he has to depend upon them for food, clothing and shelter. One can speak very grandly about the “delusions of childhood” until he knows the engram background of most children.
The child is on the unkind receiving end of all the dramatizations of his parents. A cleared child is a most remarkable thing to observe: he is human! Affinity alone can pull him through. The spoiled child is the child whose decisions have been interrupted continuously and who is robbed of his independence. Affection could no more spoil a child than the sun could be put out by a bucket of gasoline.
The beginning and end of “child psychology” is that a child is a human being, that he is entitled to his dignity and self-determinism. The child of aberrated parents is a problem because of the contagion of aberration and because he is denied any right to dramatize or counter. The wonder is not that children are a problem but that they are sane in any action for, by contagion, punishment, and denial of self-determinism the children of today have been denied all the things required to make a rational life. And these are the future family and the future race.
This is not a dissertation on children or politics, however, but a chapter on contagion of aberration. Dianetics covers human thought, and human thought is wide ground. When one gazes at the potentialities inherent in the mechanism of contagion, respect for the inherent stability of Man cannot but arise. No “wild animal” reacting with inherent “asocial tendencies” could have built Nineveh or Boulder Dam. Carrying the contagion mechanism like some Old Man of the Sea, we have yet come far. Now that we know it, perhaps we shall truly reach the stars.