[Start of Lecture]

[Start of Lecture]

We have a subject on which there is no basic agreement, and about which, none of us don't know much, evidently.

Thank you.

A subject however which is quite current. A subject which we find doled out from time to time. A subject which makes or breaks men with the greatest of ease. A subject which is really the root of a great many love affairs. A subject which is quite convertible. A subject for which there are probably more slang terms than any other subject in the language. That subject is money.

I want to talk to you now about something else that is very vague, but something that might be of some interest and is certainly in the field of total speculation. Total speculation is, of course, seldom obtainable, but in this case it is. And that is the future. This we can say is in the realm of speculation.

We have in our midst some small samples of this particular commodity. But if any of you have your acquaintance with it strained or if you have not recently been introduced to it, why, I'll tell you what it is, and thus give you a much greater familiarity with the subject. Just a minute.

Now, a person who is apt to be challenged by his peers or "infeers" is very apt to fly into the future for his very solid utterances. The only trouble with that is, although he can never be challenged at the time, the future has a habit of catching up with one. And you could describe the future as a discarder of discredited prophets, which becomes the past. So we then have a definition for the past: The past is an area which is entirely full of discredited prophets.

Well, I don't have any myself but you know what the stuff looks like. You know what the stuff looks like. It's uh... well, I've got kind of a foggy recollection actually. I think it has the United States of America on it. And over in England it has the – I distinctly remember it had something on it. Yeah, yeah, it said that the controller of the treasury as an individual would pay to anyone who challenged him the same bill that they paid him. I remember that.

But when we speak of the future we normally think of ourselves, our family, a particular group. How about the future of society? Very seldom has a man ever walked forward and seriously discussed the future of any given culture. He has hoped for it. He has worked for it. He has speculated about it. But to make any sound pronunciamentos, on a cultural level, concerning any given society, is not usually done.

U.S. notes vary, they're different. The money is much better than English money because there are more vias. American money is much better than the English money because there are more vias.

But when it is done – no matter if it is badly done – it is quite often fantastically successful. Why? It's because everybody is too timid to put down a postulate for an entire culture. Most people are too timid to do that. They're too afraid of becoming a discarded prophet.

Now, English money is issued by an organization which is part and parcel of the British government. In other words, there was some authority to issue the money. But in America that's not the case. Money in America, most of it that you have issued to you is issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York City, which is a very private organization. I know, I tried to walk in there once (I thought there might be something lying around loose). And only after I had shown them my Intelligence cards, only after I had shown them my citizenship papers, had answered up on a lie detector, did they then throw me out. Boy, are they exclusive!

But perhaps it is better in the minds of some men to be right only for ten days or a year, and to have made a postulate which did at least become right for some period of time, than never to have prophesied at all.

Well, this is a private organization and it issues pieces of green paper which are beautifully engraved. Of course, the whole subject of engraving is in disgrace, you realize that. Because the best engravers of the country are in jail. This is so much the case that the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, when it wants somebody to make some money for it, you know, they go down to the local pen and parole somebody onto their payroll. Actually, that's how it got to be known as the Federal payroll.

Now, there have been chaps on the track who did prophesy; fellows of very ill repute indeed. We have fellows like Hitler. His prophesies were not the prophesies for a culture. They were prophesies for an insatiable ambition.

Anyway, the difficulties attendant to the issuance of money are as many as the money is good. That becomes obvious doesn't it? That's the first thing we have to learn about money, is that the difficulties attendant to issuing it are the validation of it.

There have been other fellows on the track who have made prophesies for an entire culture – men like Hitler. And they have produced disaster, because they, again, were not really prophesying for an entire culture. They were prophesying because of ambition, and ambition alone. And so the ambition of an individual is crammed down the throats of an entire multitude, and necessarily then this becomes chaos. Wreckage is strewn in the wake of such an action.

In other words, here's British money issued by the British government, and it says that if you give them a pound note, they'll give you a pound note. Boy, is that direct. That's really direct. That's right there, you know. And they're having trouble with their money. They've had trouble with their money ever since it became issuable directly by the government.

Only in the field of – well I hate to say religion – in the field of philosophy has a prophesy of the future (laying down a postulate as to what the future would be like) ever been vaguely successful. And in this field we find the society going forward and not particularly disintegrating because of. And we find that from the field of philosophy we have achieved what future the culture does have.

They didn't have trouble with their money as long as they had a few more vias on the line. But people can look at that now and say, "Hah, we know where that came from. It came off of a printing press. It came directly. The government said, 'We'll issue some money,' they issued some money and we're expected to take this stuff? Ha ha!" Obviously, has no value because it isn't crooked enough.

It's an interesting thing to look back and isolate the source, usually, of any given era or period or political entity. We look back into Greece and we can actually spot the exact people and the exact statements which became Greece. We look at such chaps as Pericles. Pericles was just a politician, but we know him best because in his age Greek freedom and Greek art came toward the ultimate, and actually were never as good afterwards and had never been as good before.

So, the point is that American money is better. It's better. It buys more things in the world than British money does, and that's only because American money has additional vias on the line. Now, the British system of releasing currency is very short and to the point. Parliament says, "We authorize currency." And the Bank of England authorizes the printer to run some off and they get somebody to make some plates out of their local Dartmoor, you know, and he comes over and they run off the plates, they run off the money and they bring in bales of the stuff, wheel it in on carts. And people throw it across the counter at the Bank of England. Anybody can see this happen and their money's gone down.

But this chap had some interesting ideas, and he was not totally and only a politician. As a matter of fact, it's rather interesting to look over his record and discover he was a rather bad politician. So we must say he was a better prophet for his own culture than he was a politician for himself.

Well now, American money is much more valuable and it is not issued by the government. We never see bills relating to the publishing of bills, nobody quite traces where it came from or how, and I thought you might be interested in how it came to be money. Would you be interested?

But he was a pretty good prophet. And he postulated the future, not only of Athens, but for other Greek states, for the Roman Republic (getting pretty wide), for France, for England and for the United States of America. Because he laid down a singular principle, and that principle was that the citizen should know more about government and should participate in it to the fullest extent. And this, carried forward – as he carried it forward in his own government – became the Age of Pericles. There was no higher level of Greek culture than this one age. "Everyone may participate. Every man's voice should be heard." And this was a wonderful thing, and so far as I know, had not been said before politically.

Audience: Yes.

And so we have one man giving forth a postulate, since he just didn't say this should be, he said this will be. And he bent his own political efforts in the direction of making this come about. And even though he himself was not a successful politician, he put his postulate on the next 2300 years. He put his postulate on the world we live in much more solidly than another chap who used to give lectures by the Sea of Galilee. That's for sure. Because the great nations of the world which have since arisen, have arisen, actually, because they wished to emulate and follow in the path of free Greece.

Well, it's quite an amazing story. It has to do with a fellow by the name of Alexander Hamilton, who was killed in a duel. And this is not why he was killed in a duel. He was killed in a duel because he was... Well, his name had been closely associated with George Washington's. As a matter of fact, he'd been an aide-de- camp. And when George used to sign official orders, "All soldiers must be ready to cross the Delaware by two o'clock," you look over in the corner and it said "Alex Hamilton." It said "Official, Alexander Hamilton." It's quite interesting. I mean, after a while, anything that Alexander Hamilton signed was official, see? Get it?

The scholars of 150 years ago in this country were known as scholars simply because they knew about the Age of Pericles. If a man knew enough about that period he was learned, he was educated. If he could speak Greek as well, well, on a Sunday you might be able to touch him on the sleeve if you were lucky.

So when he proposed this cockeyed system of banking, everybody said, "Well, that's contrary to the Constitution."

The learned men of the society studied these things. The Founding Fathers of the United States were themselves very educated along this line and practically no other. George Washington's aides were the glibbest chaps you ever saw in your life on the subject of what Greek general had done what, when. But they couldn't for the life of them have told you anything at all about what some American frontiersman had done fifty or a hundred years earlier. They were not educated in that. They were only educated in the classic tradition.

And he said, "Well, ha, it's official." And so they adopted it. And the U.S. from that day to this has never had money as authorized by the Constitution. And it just isn't legal. That's why it's so valuable.

This very word classic tradition at one time meant only the Age of Pericles. Classic. What made it classic? Just that one thing: "Every man may have a voice and may express his opinion in his government and the actions of his culture. Men are entitled to that voice. And the culture itself should contribute to them the availability of information so that they can know what the culture consists of."

That's right, that's right. You think I'm joking. I'll show you how this happens.

In other words, it was the duty of the culture to educate men into the existence of the culture. It was the duty of the individual, knowing these things, to contribute his own knowledge and his contribution to his own culture.

The Constitution said that Congress shall have the power to coin money. And Congress never has. They don't coin money. I've been up there on the Hill looking for their coiner. Closest I can get to it is flipping quarters, heads or tails, with some of the senators. I get some of the Middle-Western senators – they're the only ones that will flip coins with you and let you use your quarter. The Eastern ones don't. They insist you use their quarter. Of course, the Western senator, he's pretty liberal. He's more open-minded and he always says, "Well, we'll use somebody else's quarter." That's the general difference in districts of the country.

This was something new, and man had never learned this... had this before the Age of Pericles. Therefore, the great nations of earth since, which have sought to rise under the mantle of tyrants, have perished. They are dead. There isn't one alive today anywhere within the sphere of learning which we know as classical Greek history.

Anyway, they never have coined any money. They have yet to do so. But they pass bills every once in a while saying, "It shall be coined." But they don't ever pass the bill and just exactly say that, you see? They say, "The secretary of the treasury," who isn't authorized in the Constitution, "shall as the executive branch of the government," duties of which are not defined in the Constitution, except that he shall be commander in chief of the army and the navy...

Now, we might point to Persia and say this wasn't the case in Persia. And I can point out to you that Greek history was never taught in Persia, any more than we now teach German history in our schools. They were enemies. The Oriental world was not taught any of this until recent times, and you'll find the entire Oriental world in foment. You find it bursting its bonds and leaping at the throat of every tyrant who raises his head. You find these people ungovernable. You find [the] entirety of Asia in a state of revolution today. Why? They just got through reading Greek history.

They've just gotten around to that recently, being constitutional. We have forthrightly a general. But he's not an admiral so he's only half legal. I haven't seen him in an admiral's uniform yet.

We read it 170, 180 years ago. Our learned men, our own leaders, the men who were to become captains and majors and generals, who were to become the fellows who wrote such things as the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution – these men were learned only if they knew Greek history. And the very learning of it was really more than they could take, because they did not conceive within the compass of their own training that England was following through classic tradition.

English manage these affairs much better. They don't bother so much about the rank but, boy, they sure issue uniforms. You get to ruling things around there and you're a lifeguard and a blackguard and all kinds of things, you know? A guy comes out one day as an admiral, another day as an air marshal, and so forth. Boy, I tell you, it's terrific! I'm going to ask them sometime when I see somebody around like that – "You got your commission handy?" And you know, I bet he hasn't got a commission. If he has, he signed it.

Taxation without representation was not described as a sound principle in the Age of Pericles. Plato frowned upon it. Aristotle might have subscribed to it in a loose and drunken moment at a banquet of Alexander's, but never amongst his own friends. And so they frowned upon it. Across a bridge of two thousand years these men were taught to revolt against tyranny, and they did. And that is what the Age of Pericles did, and the postulate it laid on the future.

Well anyway, U.S. money was found to be unissuable after Alexander Hamilton had talked to everybody up on the Hill. (The Hill was up in Philadelphia at that time. They've moved it down since.) And Alex talked to the boys. And I think he kind of got them off in a corner somewhere, and he says, "Now boys, you know very well that someday Hubbard's going to tell you that something is as valid or as incomprehensible as it has vias. Now, if anybody understands money its going to be worthless, you know that."

A fabulous thing to observe: We think "Love thy neighbor" has been the civilizing influence. It has not been. "Be free" has been.

So the boys said, "Well, I don't savvy that."

The religious world may have dominated, at one time or another, the Middle Ages, but the religious world consisted in itself of a tyranny and was itself antipathetic to this very thing called freedom. Where we could have the word of one man saying, "All must now believe; all must now worship; you must keep your hand in your upper breast pocket while quoting Psalm 66 and in no other place," we did not have freedom. We had slavery.

And he said, "Well," he says, "you can make more out of it personally." Well, they bought that! – immediately formed an organization called the Federal Reserve, which organization was composed of half a dozen bankers. In that day a banker could have good repute. It's terms that just don't go together today. But you'll have to stretch your imagination and realize that there was a time in the country when bankers did have good repute. People looked up to them. And these boys got together, and Congress authorized a bill saying that they could exist, and that any time it wanted to, the Federal government could buy all of its stock out at par value. You got that now? I mean, it's very interesting but that par value at this moment is 385 million dollars. That's the par value of the total stock of the Federal Reserve Bank which exists as a private organization in New York.

And we also never taught very much about Greece until the day of the Scholastic. And it was an unhappy day that they reached into the tombs below the Vatican where they have kept all the books which were salvaged from the old Greek and Roman libraries, and brought out and gave to the world, like a little tidbit, the works of Aristotle as a scientific work, and formed the basis of what we called Scholasticism. And people read a little bit further and they found the rest of them. They found people like Plato. They found this fellow Socrates. They found these other chaps who had a lot to say. And all these chaps were talking about was freedom and there went the church. Boom!

Well now, this Federal Reserve Bank issues money this way. You won't believe this, but this is the way they do it. They have a book, have a ledger. It's probably a common school-composition book, you know? And they get a stubby pencil, and they write down in it, "Owes us ten billion dollars." Got that? Who does? "The U.S. government owes us ten billion dollars." Well, that's the start of money. Now, it issues, then, ten billion dollars worth of stock, which the Treasury Department is permitted to issue. And then because they permitted the Treasury Department to issue these ten billion dollars worth of stock, then the Federal Reserve can issue ten billion dollars worth of currency that is backed up by the stock. You get that? That's backed up! See that? I mean it's backed up real good. It's for sure. There it is, see?

You can recognize the truth of this. There was no stronger force on the face of earth, in 1400 and something, when Cesare Borgia was letting his sister poison some fellows so his uncle the pope could sell a few more seats in a few more monasteries. This was a tight, capitalistic, highly profitable tyranny, and it blew up in their faces. And it did an awful lot of very violent blowing up before we begin to hear about anything like freedom. Things started to blow up in sections, and they blew up in the face of religion.

There's somebody around here looking puzzled. I mean, I'll go over this again.

We had such oddities as the entirety of Holland in revolt against tyranny. We had the oddity of Philip of Spain coming up to Holland and burning people in the streets for heresy. We had the people of Holland being butchered and run into the dikes, and we had them fighting down to the last man. With their preachers, they considered their first freedom, freedom of religion. And their preachers went about in the fields on a Sunday reading from a forbidden book called the Bible. And because Philip ran out of troops before Holland ran out of population, the yoke was overthrown. And that was the end of that particular regime.

They have this composition book – ledger – and they write in it with a stubby pencil, and they say, "U.S. owes us," see, "ten billion dollars." And then they say, "ten billion dollars worth of stock," you see. They issue it, but the Federal treasury issues it to them so that the Federal Reserve can then issue ten billion dollars worth of currency. You got that? Well now, that's valuable money!

And from there we had blowups the length and width of Europe. They were first striking for freedom for religion and out of that crew came the Puritan Fathers. It's very interesting, very interesting to trace it back, not as something speculative and not as something that you or I would then guess about, but to trace it back with such heavy-heeled strides straight back to the Age of Pericles.

Now, why is it valuable? Well, it's got more vias on the line, you see?

Religion became free. And when it became entirely free, it itself, as a last tyranny, began to blow up. Freedom of religion destroyed religion.

Now, when they retire money then they have to retire bonds. That makes it equal, doesn't it? You get it? That keeps it legal. Only we don't quite see how either the bonds or money were worth a damn, because in fact, by current economic theory, neither one represents real property, coin, specie, gold, silver or anything else. They don't even represent promise to pay. See?

Now, where did the United States ever believe that it could at any given time set up a regime upon the backs of people who were taught to be free? This would be one of the most adventurous actions ever taken by a man: to throw the United States under a tyrannical yoke. Oh, he might get away with it for five years. He might get away with it for ten years – if he had enough troops, maybe twenty-five years. But during that twenty-five years there'd be an awful lot of troops dead. And certainly at the end of that time man would have reasserted his birthright.

Now, it says – if you look at a bill – the bill says, "The Federal Reserve promises to pay the bearer on demand ten dollars." Ten what kind of dollars? The same kind he's got his hands on. Well, this is a paper swap. Well, sometimes people like clean paper. Now, that's essentially it.

It would not really be possible to enslave the population of the United States. It would be possible to permit them to forget, or to teach them so much that was otherwise "very important" that the data would become swamped. You could over-educate them, swamp and drown these lessons of freedom, and gradually ban all the books that mention the Age of Pericles, the classic Greek, the history of Rome. You could throw these data away if you did it very carefully, but with what care it would have to be undertaken.

No, I was joking before about not having any money. I held up my wife tonight just so that I would have a couple of bills here, various kinds, so that I could talk about this more idiotically.

Chaps like me would have to be shut up first. That takes some doing.

Now, if you look on one of these bills, you will occasionally be dumbfounded to find one of them headed, "silver certificate." That's not a Federal Reserve note. Well, what's a silver certificate? Well, a silver certificate is quite different than a Federal Reserve note. It is actually issued against the amount of silver down here in the treasury.

Now, it's an interesting thing to look at a stable datum and discover that that stable datum has been the resulting cultures for some twenty-three hundred years. And that stable datum was, "I have a right to know about my government, to voice my opinions concerning it, to contribute to and participate in the political and economic activities of my age, time and people." Man believed that. Somebody told him he could. And that was back in the days of the classic Greek. And nobody's been able to stamp it out or handle it since. Wasn't that a terrible thing to do?

That's a different kind of money. That's the kind that was more or less authorized by Congress. But there's very little of this.

Think, think, think of what an awful thing this was to do. Think how mighty some of these rulers might have been. Think how overwhelmingly huge and beautifully carven their thrones might have been. Think of the architecture we've missed in their palaces and shrines of worship which were never built. Think of these poor chaps that dedicated to an enslavement of man, without any capabilities and no man to enslave. Awful. You can just see these fellows now. The uniforms they would have worn, never manufactured. The gallows they would have erected, never built. The prisons they would have filled, never even planned. I think it's a dirty trick on these fellows, don't you? What ambition has gone to waste here, because they've never managed it.

Now it says, "This certifies that there is on deposit in the Treasury of the United States of America, ten dollars in silver, payable to the bearer on demand." And you can walk right in and you can get yourself ten dollars worth of silver just like that, except they'll give you another bill. Now, that's valid money. I'm not joking now, that's what you know as money. That money is backed up as money and it does consist of money.

We have just gone through a considerable cataclysm that none of us really understand for what it was. The cataclysm was World War II. Why do we pay attention to World War II and not pay much of attention to the Korean War? Well, you could say one was fought by the United Nations and the other was fought by the United States. Yes. Yes, yes, that's true, except we lost all the troops in the Korean War.

Now, here's the bulk of the money in the country. That was money that I just showed you there. This says, "Federal Reserve note. The United States of America will pay to the bearer on demand ten dollars." You say, "Ten dollars? Now, just a minute, who will pay to the bearer on demand? The United States of America? Or the Federal Reserve note?" Now we see. We match up the print and we find out that it's the Federal Reserve. Probably, though – probably – the United States of America will probably issue it out for the Federal Reserve, but that makes the Federal treasury an agent of a private bank.

No, the Korean War was not for any outright principle that we ourselves could define as part and parcel to our own beingness, so we had very little in common with the Korean War beyond the boo-boos of a few politicians who are since demised. These chaps are not politically active today. One of them tried to advise his own party about something just a few months ago and they laughed themselves sick.

Quite amazingly, it has on its face the picture and portrait of Alexander Hamilton. Now, that is valuable. That is valuable. It's a nice engraving, it's a nice picture and it's worth money. But I don't think anything else here is. Unless money is just money.

Well, no, there was a difference between these two wars. They were quite similar in casualties. You may not realize that the Korean War lost three hundred thousand young Americans, but it did. It was a big war. We certainly didn't pay much attention to it. That's because it wasn't on the line of our own principles. But World War II was. We thought that that war was right down our alley and had to be fought when we really got busy fighting it. Everybody was insulted that he wasn't permitted to personally end the war. That was an interesting war.

Now, here's what makes it legal. It says right up here, "This is legal tender." It says, "legal tender," for something or other – "for debts public and private." Well, that means if you don't accept it you get a bayonet in you. Well, I wish I had somebody around that would make my creditors accept my IOU's. But that's what it says, and that's what it is. Now, that is money.

Why? Because it was a war against tyranny. Because once more somebody had risen up within reach of our culture, and had dared to say "A tyranny shall exist. Men may not speak. Religion may not be free. No one has a right to either understand, participate in or contribute to his own government save as he is told to do so." And boy, we fought that one with enthusiasm. And boy, did he get killed! Wow! He got killed so hard his people doubted he's dead! He went into an inverted kill!

The bulk of the cash in the country is composed of that. Here you see Federal Reserve note, a twenty-dollar bill. Federal Reserve notes are the usual thing. You see a few silver certificates and you see a few ones, fives and tens that are silver certificates. You see much more of them in Washington than you do any other part of the country for some reason or other. It isn't that the Washington government employee is more critical than others. He is not known to be.

This guy Hitler had done something that was an anachronism. It was out of time and place. He thought he was living back in 450 B.C. He got stuck on the time track, and he set up a tyranny. And the next thing you know, everybody started shooting at it. Why? Because Hitler was a bad man? No, I dare say he was quite a clever fellow. Probably very nice to meet socially. You needn't have put out your best rugs, but probably got along all right socially. Chewed the rug, of course, and raved a bit, but he probably wasn't too bad. This fellow became – well, to put it very mildly – non persona grata. He was...

Well, you see this stuff, it's money. See, here's... I've got a bunch of silver certificates here and that's really terrific.

It's interesting that long before he became unpopular with Chamberlain over in England, that two or three hunters from England had already gone over to Germany and conducted still hunts on Hitler. Why this strange enthusiasm? Why Hitler? Well, he was handy and he had certainly set himself up as a target.

Now we're getting up into sizable currency. Here we have a Federal Reserve note, one hundred dollars, that says that "The United States of America," evidently – only it isn't – "will pay to the bearer on demand one hundred dollars." In what? In this. It's the same show as the Bank of England, don't you see? Except it's a private bank that does it in this case. You throw them a hundred-dollar bill; they give you a hundred-dollar bill. You give them your hundred-dollar bill; they give you another hundred-dollar bill.

And thus you have the definition of it. A man who perpetrates a tyranny does not set himself up, if you please, anymore, as a tyrant. He sets himself up only as a target. Big difference. Once he set himself up to be invulnerable. Now he sets himself up to be vulnerable, and shot.

I'm going to stay down in one of these cages someday, just passing back and forth hundred-dollar bills. And maybe I'll find out after the thirtieth or fortieth pass that it suddenly turns into gold or something else. But it might not. I might be disappointed in that.

Look at the way this culture is educated. The die is cast and there it sits motionless in time. It says, "Man is destined and dedicated to freedom. He's destined for a long future span of self-rule, and that span shall not end until the knowledge itself of man has ended."

Well, I thought you might be interested in this singular fact, because all I'm really trying to teach you is not that Federal money is no good. It has become so valuable today, actually it is so terribly valuable today, that they have upped interest rates all over the place and it's very valuable stuff. It isn't no good. It's just money.

Now, today, just as in any other time, we do have amongst us men who believe it is possible to become tyrants without becoming targets. There are always psychotics and fools in any society, and they do set themselves up, and they do try to conduct themselves in this fashion. Whether they conduct themselves this way as a little Napoleon in some capitalistic level of a factory, or whether they conduct themselves as the manager of some cell down in the West End, or whether they conduct themselves in some tyrannical fashion even in their own home, they still set themselves up and they still get knocked down. In fact, I don't know what we'll ever do for tenpins if such men cease to set themselves up. It has become an unpopular action, no matter whether it's conducted on the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth dynamic. It's unpopular.

And what is the character of money? Money is a commodity. It is a substitute. It is a thing. It is something that people push around. It is something that is defined in economic textbooks. It is something which is exchanged. It is something which is printed, it is coined, it is minted. It is something for which people get killed. It is something that makes it worthwhile to become a robber. It is something with which you pay dues, tithes, taxes. It's, in short, the weenie in any given culture. It is the thing everybody is after. If you didn't have something that everybody was after then you wouldn't have any game.

I imagine if you were to describe God in a popular fashion today, I'm afraid you would have to describe him as a fellow who let you make up your mind. I'm sure that would restore some of the popularity of this. Because he's not popular today. The government down here says that it was founded under God, but it doesn't believe it. The Senate opens itself in every session with a chaplain. They have an awful time keeping the senators quiet. It's an interesting world we're living in, They're still paying lip service to something, but they're not following it through.

And so we get down to one of the most fundamental agreements of our present society: that money is something everybody is after and very few people have. Now, it takes that stable datum. It is valuable. In order for a thing to be valuable, it is, of course, somewhat scarce. If you gave people enough money they would simply go on and buy produce and live happy lives and carry on and so forth, and you couldn't have that.

Everywhere we have these small efforts to tyranny, and everywhere we see them fail. Do you know once upon a time it was entirely different than this? A man was only an important man in his village, he was only an important man in his area, if he was a tyrant, if he knew how to act like a tyrant. That was the way one had to know how to act. One had to know how to act like a tyrant.

So you keep it scarce and they have a game. They get up in the morning worrying about how they're going to get another one of these pieces of paper. And they go to bed at night realizing that they've spent one of those pieces of paper that they shouldn't have spent. And they have nightmares that somebody has suddenly filled up their bed full of money and they wake up to find out that it's not money, it's bills. We get into all sorts of interesting complexities by which one man owes another man money. And he doesn't pay him the money, so the court gives him a summons and then they take him down to court and they have a big case. And if it's on a piece of paper and he had a piece of paper saying it, why, then of course the other fellow could pay him the money because he's got proof that the money didn't change hands when it should have changed hands. You get the idea? And you get a very nice game going that nobody can understand. And they can't understand it for the basic reason that there isn't anything there to understand.

How does a ruler act? Well, "Off with their heads. Nobody must think. Everybody must bow down." Oh yes, he was a good ruler. Every time he walked down Main Street, why, everybody knelt and bowed his head to the ground as he passed. That was a twenty- five-hundred-year-ago description of a good ruler. He was very well liked by his people. Nobody tried to assassinate him during his entire reign. Do you see this? In other words, a man that was a good ruler or a good family man or a good something or other was tyrannically good. He oppressed everything. He smashed down anything that came in his path. He was totally dominant where anything in his surroundings was concerned. And that was a man before Pericles.

Now, let's look at this much more closely. We put some vias on the line. Very nicely and neatly, we put some vias on the line. In other words we put some extra terminals. The Federal Reserve has the Federal government issue some bonds so that it can issue some money so that the Federal Reserve's bonds... Get the idea? Then we talk about the shortage of money and the scarcity of money and the superfluity of money, and we talk about inflation and deflation; we hire people to fill up pages in the newspapers concerning the business credits of this moment. And we have authorities and we teach economy in all of the universities.

He's not a man today. He's a target. And wherever he lifts his head: "Knock him off! Kill him! Shoot him! Drown him! Arrest him! He's crazy!" Oh, but this was once the socially acceptable thing to be and do – tyrannical, completely unreasonable, utterly didactic, completely conscienceless, without mercy – that was the way one acted. But not today.

And boy, we get more stuff piled up – bang-bang-bang-bang. Much more. Thick, thick books. We get all kinds of things stacked together on this one subject called money, in the hopes that somebody will not penetrate the secret and split up the inner sanctum by saying "Money is as valuable as it is complicated. But when it is too complicated, it isn't. So money is the optimum level of complication that can still be, to some slight degree, uncomplicated."

Well, how do you suppose a society operated in those dark days? How do you suppose men really acted in those dark days? How did a society respond or not respond back in the days when every ruler had the right to cut off the head of every citizen without further protest of any kind whatsoever? Did man prosper? Nope. He prospered so badly, to tell you the truth, that he seldom wrote records about it. Now that's below writingness.

Now, you may be taking a preclear apart someday, thinking fully that you are taking a preclear apart, and discover after Lord- knows-how-many hours of auditing, that all you were trying to do was take care of his ideas about money. There was something there but there was nothing there.

Every once in a while we read on a pyramid the saga of King Hamaradahugabunga, and it's all about King Hamaradahugabunga, but it's not about any subjects. It doesn't tell you, "Thirty-five thousand six hundred and ninety-two point three peasants were killed building this pyramid." Doesn't tell you that. It says, "Hamaradahugabungy built this pyramid as a toast to his own regime." Big guy. Big guy. When he walked through the streets he had people who walked before him with long whips and beat the populace out of the road. Great man. Quite a boy. He's awful dusty now. They dig up his mummies now and then, and dust them off and say, "This is Hamaramahugabunga." Put him in a museum for the little kids to sit and look at and suck lollipops and say, "Huh." They say, "Look Mummy: mummy."

You take a capitalista. This is a term... I don't like to use the term straight out, because it's gotten to be a nasty word. There are two nasty words in the society: the one is that one and the other is communist. Communist got to be a nasty word because it fought the capitalist. Capitalist got to be a nasty word because it was one.

Now, did they fare well? Yup. Society ran on an entirely different stable datum. Stable datum was this: that a society consisted of a number of slaves who work for a ruler. See? Simple. That's all you had. That's all there was to it. And some of the fellows who work for him are a little more in-team than others. They can wear hats. Otherwise, it's total oppression.

Now, the capitalist got to be nasty because he put too many complications on the thing and he stressed it. He went overboard beyond optimum. Don't you see? He made money do more than money could do. He made money itself manufacture money. Now, that's different.

Well, did these societies succeed? No! Hamaramahugabunga succeeded, and maybe some of his guards succeeded, and maybe some of his torturers got good practice, but the society as a whole never did.

Now, it's bad enough to have the stuff issued someplace that you don't quite know about, and spread around, but how about the fellow that takes two dollar bills and then presses them hard enough with an iron to get three? Now, you see, that's pretty downgrade. That's pretty downgrade.

Those societies rose and fell with remarkable rapidity. They seldom became populous. They were engaged in petty wars and warfares which decimated them. They overran each other madly in all directions and wiped each other out. Why? Well, Hamaramahugabunga's army couldn't have cared less, to tell you the truth. And life didn't mean anything to them so they might as well chew up and slaughter any town they went through. Who cared? They didn't. Nobody cared about them, why should they care about anything else? And you had in action a society of criminals without responsibility or decency, and their arts have not endured.

Fellow can't face outright creation. He hasn't the nerve merely to go and get a counterfeiter out of prison himself and just print some. Nor can he produce a machine or a building or a parkway or something which people then give him money for. That is not what a capitalist does – something you should very clearly understand.

Now, you could say, "Well, somebody dug up a bunch of stuff down on an island in the Mediterranean and it was great stuff. And it showed the Cretan society and the Minoan and the bull and all kinds of things, and they had nice palaces. And look at this beautiful society, because here we've just uncovered this beautiful palace. And it had eighty-nine rooms and, golly, it must have been quite a society." You bet it was quite a society! What did they dig up? They dug up the palace of Hamaragahugabunga. Sure. You bet it's a good society! From his viewpoint. Naturally it was a big palace. Where did the slaves live? Well, there are no real remains of those. You can occasionally find the remains of the officers' quarters.

I'm not rabble – rousing now on the side of the liberals, the socialists, the communists, and so forth. But the old saw, that if you were against capitalism you were at once a liberal, I'm afraid has worn all its teeth out a long time since. Just because you are a bit against the capitalist is no reason that you're even vaguely liberal. See, it's not necessarily true at all. Capitalism is something that you either laugh about or cry about, as it may strike you.

Well, what happened to the people at large? Well, they didn't last, and these other people didn't last either. And their reigns rose and their reigns fell.

Now, here is this fellow who doesn't produce. He, in some fashion, accumulates some money. Now he makes the money make money, got that?

Well, what's amazing is the very few arts which they developed per century – the few arts which were developed per century. You'll find one art hanging on, rather badly done. Listen, you can talk a lot about the fancy cloth they used to have but you wouldn't wear it in a sports jacket. Nah. Leather is nice, but not for stockings. You wouldn't have put up with it. You would've considered it a hardship.

Now, the capitalist has sort of disappeared out of the society. He's been killed off. It's too unpopular an activity.

And yet they'd use that cloth and wear that cloth. You take the dye that used to come out of Tyre all the time, this indigo. They had a bunch of bugs there under the sea and they'd squash them and they got indigo dye. Now, that's the truth. That's why Tyre was so popular. And this purple, as absolute requisite for a Roman emperor and for other people, that all came out of this town called Tyre. And you know it wasn't sunfast? I hate to tell this on them. But it sure was popular for about a thousand years. For a thousand years? A sunfast color might have been popular for a thousand years but certainly not one that wasn't. That doesn't show very high progress, does it?

It's interesting that in that part of the country – the New England states – where capitalism was once pretty doggone rife, we had (before the advent of the white man into this country) a tribe of Indians which, of all the tribes in America, understood the charging of interest. There was actually a tribe of Indians up in Maine that knew how to charge interest and did charge interest on anything loaned. When they put out some wampum they wanted some wampum-plus back, you see? And that was up in the New England states. And the boys that came in after that, they got the idea that if you could just get some wampum together then you could make wampum make wampum and you were all set. But who is all set?

Well, I'll tell you how they did it. They had a boss, you see, and he was grabbed off by the King of Tyre, and this boss had a bunch of slaves, and they walked around and walked on the bugs and squashed them into the dye vats and that was the stuff. And then they sold that produce, and that was that. And that was the way they produced it and...

Well, obviously, the only fellow in such an arrangement who is all set is the fellow who is making wampum make wampum. That's the only fellow who is all set. Why? Because it's a drag on the actual existing currency, and a heavy drag on it, because it has a nonproducer who is totally a consumer, who then is quite a drag on the remainder of his community. It's just the same as having somebody there who is totally indigent, you see? But this total indigent now has authority in his community.

Well, you talk about tyranny of production. There was no self- determinism used in squashing those bugs with your feet at all. Somebody would say, "I'm only going to use my left foot today." Huh-unhhh, that didn't go. Somebody would say, "You know, I don't like purple feet."

How would you like to have somebody down here who couldn't make a dime, he couldn't do a day's work, he couldn't do anything. And yet he insisted on being fed nothing but the finest of roast beef and pheasant's tongues, and he had to be driven everywhere in a golden chariot and that sort of thing. And you'd after a while say, "This guy is for the birds," and probably should be for the graveyard. And you'd say, "There's something wrong with that fellow." Well, the society as a whole has finally said, "Yes, there is something wrong with that fellow." The capitalist never produces anything. Now, don't ever then get capitalism really mixed up with the entrepreneur, the producer, the manager. Just separate those out.

They'd say, "Get in there, bum."

What is meant by a capitalist is one who makes money make money. You see, that's all he does. That's his total philosophy.

That was the dye industry of Tyre. And it went on that way for about twelve hundred years, I think – that I know about personally. Of course I don't know what the history books say. I never do. I don't read them. I either invent my history out of whole cloth or remember it. Because I find most historians are liars.

Thorstein Veblen was mad-dogging around about this at the turn of the century in a book called Theory of the Leisure Class, which is one of the doggonedest books you ever cared to read in your life. You've got to have a leisure class to consume the goods of the worker, otherwise the society caves in. That is the theory. Oh yeah? Since when did workers not like to ride around in gold- plated Cadillacs, huh? All right.

For instance, I'll tell you all I know about self-determinism and so forth taught in an academy. We had an academy that was up the street. It was about three blocks above Plato's old place. It was kind of fallen into disrepute at the time. And if you missed a question during the interrogation period you were given full power of choice. You were permitted to fight, with staves, the toughest boy in the school. You didn't miss many questions but you became a pretty good soldier.

Now, let's look over this thing, the nonproducer. And we realize that somebody who stands there and simply shuttles money back and forth and takes so much of it is a bog in the economic world. He's a bog. He must replace the money he takes out with something – service, good looks, winning ways, a pleasant smile, something! But if he puts nothing on that line the economy is apt to cave in, simply because there's somebody there who is consuming who isn't producing. And therefore, capitalism is not a sound theory of economics, and it goes up and down and people revolt against capitalism.

They taught self-determinism. They say it was the biggest crime in the world not to make up your own mind on a question. It was an interesting thing. It was an interesting thing. It was an academy, a walking academy. Academy means a place where you walk around and talk about it.

Listen, the peasants of France of the fourteenth century had never heard the word communism. Well, that didn't restrain them from revolting against the first capitalist in France who started to issue paper money. They revolted like mad! This doesn't restrain anything.

I'm not to be quoted as an authority for history, because my memory gets spotty. But I can tell you this, I can tell you this for sure: that Tyre didn't change its manufactures, quality of production, and didn't much change its quantity for twelve centuries. Its revenues from this were very high, but never adequate to the feeding of the people of Tyre and no other industry was invented.

It doesn't matter what words you put on it; as long as you're dealing with this commodity called money, you get this phenomenon called capitalism. See, it's an interesting phenomenon. But just regard it as a phenomenon, not necessarily bad or good about anything but the economy. A capitalist is simply bad for his own economy, you get the idea? He's bad for his own economy, not necessarily a bad person.

This is a culture? This is a forward-looking, active, producing culture?

All right. We take this whole lineup and we look at the other end of the scale that gets created thereby. A fellow is made to produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, and he can't have any of this stuff called money. Got the idea? And we therefore get a peasant or a worker class that is way subnormal.

Somebody walked into Tyre one day, and he said, "You know, I have some political opinions" – about 1000 B.C. – "political opinions." People didn't know what the word politics was, so they assumed that he was selling something, so they wanted to know where he kept the opinions and so forth. And he just got more wound up and more wound up, and the next doggone thing you know, they hanged him. The population hanged him. Why? Well, they couldn't understand him.

So, when you get a fellow way up at the top who is taking money off the line without contributing anything to it, somewhere or another there's some fellow who is going to have to work twice as hard and get nothing for it.

But after fifteen or twenty fellows like him had walked into Tyre, somebody got the idea one day. And he said, "What do you mean, political opinions? You got political opinions. You mean a person could have opinions on government? I get it! I get it. You could have an opinion about government. I'll get this in a minute. Now, a government – let's see, an opinion – a government could be good or bad, and I could say my opinion is the government could be good or bad."

And that's what starts revolutions in the world. That's really the basic woof and warp of revolutions. They're nine-tenths economic, only one-tenth political. And we see the whole of the world getting tangled up this way. Well, what are they tangling up over? They're tangling up over the fellow who can't work.

Oooh! This is pretty revolutionary. Made him awful nervous. It was actually during the reign of that great democrat (heh-heh), Alexander the Great (who finished off, actually, the Age of Pericles), that Tyre fell. First use of the submarine. Alexander put some fellows in buckets and made them go around and saw down the piling on which some of the walls of the city stood, and that was the end of Tyre.

The Indian tribe that goes to pieces, goes to pieces because there are only fifteen men of the tribe who are hunting: there are ten other men of the tribe who are just eating. And the fifteen men after a while can't shoot enough game for twenty-five men and all the women and children that went along with it, so the tribe starts to starve to death. What made them starve to death? The guys who were eating without hunting. You see this? So we get an imbalance because of indigence.

To show you how apathetic the joint was, by the way (it was very apathetic), Alexander, when he came by, gave some sacrifices out on the plain to the gods of the city, and the priests in the city nailed their own images – gods – to the altar and maligned them for wanting to betray the city to Alexander. See? I mean real high toned. You know? Lot of savvy. You know, smart.

Whenever you get this created situation whereby you get something that is only pulling off the line, it is only absorbing or only receiving and is never paying out, you get an imbalance in some other part of the system. You see this? It's rather clear.

And the population, seeing the priests do this to the idols, then knew it was all sunk anyhow and you couldn't get the walls manned. That was the end of Tyre. I mean, a good high state of enthusiasm, you know? Get in there and punch, you know?

All right. Let's look at this whole thing about money. You put enough vias on the line, it becomes valuable – but only if it is somewhat scarce.

Well, today you don't find too many of these bogholes, but that was a boghole. Nothing invented, nothing produced, nothing changed, no opinions, nothing to talk about, no-game condition, straightforward. You uncomfortably lay out under the sun and fried, and that was about the end of that culture. And I don't think any of you would say this was a good culture.

Now, how scarce should money be? Well, what is an optimum scarcity of money? Well, it has to be scarce enough so that people will consider it more valuable than the goods they're holding or making. It has to be just a little bit harder to obtain evidently than the goods themselves. Otherwise they'd consume their own goods to some degree, wouldn't they? You must have just a little bit more value.

It was a culture without ice-cream sodas. But worse than that it was a culture that had no desire for ice-cream sodas even when they're extended. And that's pretty low down as a culture. I've even taken a Chinese culture in the lower villages of China, and so forth, and got them slap-happy on the subject of ice cream. I mean, ice cream you can pick up anybody on.

Therefore, we have a situation in terms of money whereby somebody has to produce and receive money for. Well, this is all based on the fact that people produce different things and everybody wants a little bit of everything. So we use money as the communication line with which to adjust this economy. Now, horribly enough, when money is used for anything else, the whole culture goes to pieces.

What and where does such a culture as that which grows under a tyranny – what and where does it do? Go? What happens to it? It never goes anyplace. It doesn't invent anything. It has no future. It's only future is represented by the many tombs of the tyrants which you see planted nakedly upon the plains where once- great cities stood. The tombs of the tyrants; that's about all that remains of those cultures.

That is actually what money is. That's all it does. That's all it could pretend to do. There isn't any, really, further end to it. It is simply a substitute. If you threw money into a little village it would seek the level of the production at which it was scarce. The prices would eventually range themselves so that it was scarce, just slightly scarce, so that people wanted it more than anything else. Well, why would they want it? It's because it's convertible into other items which they themselves don't produce. And therefore you have a system by which you can get an exchange.

But, by golly, you wouldn't say that this is all that remains of Greece. Do you know that very recently there was no archaeology outside of the Age of Pericles? Do you know that within the last seventy-five years a school had to rise and say, "There were civilizations before and after the civilizations of classic Greek. Why don't we study them?"

So, if you've got to have a production-exchange system – you see, that's not necessarily necessary – but if you've got to have a production-exchange system, then money is a very good answer to this and so has remained in vogue.

Everybody said, "Ho-hum. That's not archaeology." Archaeology was totally and completely anchored in only one spot – the high peak of Greek culture and the little period before and after it. And that was archaeology. That was the definition. It was the study of Greece. There was just nothing else.

But when we complicate money any further than that, why, you start to see shifts and imbalances of power. We finally find that the indigent can have power. How can they do this? Well, they start mixing up with this money, and without producing they yet can alter the flow of currency. And people sit around for a long time. They'll permit this. And they'll see this lazy bum that can't even step out of a carriage by himself, you see, driving in a carriage. They haven't got carriages. They see this fellow who never produces anything, he never made a witty crack in his life. He's produced nothing, see? And they look at that and they say, "What do you know? What do you know?"

And when this Mycenaean culture was finally discovered here at about the turn of the century, nobody would confess that it was an archaeological discovery because it wasn't related immediately to ancient Greece. And that famous businessman that dug it all up down there, this chap (this was right at the turn of the century) actually had to invent a bunch of fairy tales and get Achilles and the Trojan Wars and so forth all tied up with some of the Mycenaean discoveries to get anybody interested in them at all. Total thing was a total fabrication of fairy tale. He had to relate it to Greece before anybody would believe that it was archaeology that he was studying. Do you follow me?

Well, there are two answers to it: Either we will not work and see if we don't get more – that's a strike – and the other one is "Let's just knock off everybody." And the society sort of varies between these two decisions. "Let's gun everybody down that isn't working," see? "Let's take the capitalists and shoot them all up" or "Let's go on strike and refuse to work until we get more money."

Well, you can't say that that society that taught us to be free, at any time along the line, is only a collection of ruins. They're still shooting down there. The commies are fighting with other people and so forth. They're still shooting things up. They're still messed up one way or the other. After World War II, no great peace has descended, but those are not really the same people who lived in that period. But it is not a bunch of ruins. It is a bunch of ideas. It is a tremendous society.

What are they trying to do? They're trying to adjust by force something that is at best a flimsy idea. They're going to adjust by force this very flimsy thing called money. And I say if production is necessary, then money is a good answer for the exchange of goods.

The ideas in the Age of Pericles extended out to an entirety of the known world, and are here, and are around us today – this is a rather fabulous thing – to such a degree that I don't think anybody could set up a tyranny no matter how hard he tried. Hitler tried. Thirty million dead men later, he's failed. That took an awful lot of shooting, didn't it?

Actually, "a promise to pay" is a sloppy definition for money. A promise to pay is only really valid if you say in what. A promise to pay is only valid from a person who can produce, not pay, don't you see?

Well, all right. If you're going to set up a group, if you're going to set up a practice, if you're going to become active in any political sphere, then you'd better remember what succeeded. You'd better remember what has succeeded. The basic data of the last twenty-three centuries is still the basic data of a culture, and it is that basic data which will determine the future of this culture.

So, what do we have in the final analysis? We have society in a commotion and in turmoil over an abstract commodity which itself doesn't have any more validity than how many vias are on it. It has a use. That doesn't necessarily give it validity.

If the future is to be turbulent and upset it will be because some tyrant has become overly ambitious and his tyranny fails because of revolt against it. In other words, the turbulence of the future will be determined on the basis of whether or not somebody tries to upset this tradition or not. And if somebody tries to upset this tradition, then this culture is going to collapse, to the degree that it revolts.

Give you some kind of an idea of what you can do with economies and currency if you... You want to hear something about it?

Now, the only way you could get a total lose was for everybody to be dead, but there won't be any tyrant who will be able to impose his will upon any of the modern cultures to this degree now. Such a thing is all but impossible.

There was a fellow by the name – one time – a fellow by the name of Christophe. Terrific man! The French had been holding Haiti for a very, very long time. And they had been killing off Haitians and burying them in the ground, and knocking them over the head and doing interesting things that were only interesting to them. And after a while the chaps there in Haiti got the idea that the French meant them very little good, if any, and decided to eject them from this island.

So you can predict that the future may have some wiggles and wobbles, and the future may have some wars, and the future may have some manning the barricades and shooting in the streets. But short of obliterating mankind with one bomb (the ambition of the AEC)... No, I beg your pardon, that's a confidential remark I made there. I miss these things. You're not supposed to mention the AEC. Let's see. What's something that can't fight back? Atomic science is one bomb that wipes out everybody at once. That's their ambition. Or one fallout that cripples everybody at a longer period. Now, that's their ambition.

Well, there were several leaders rose, but the greatest of them was Christophe. And this chap was a tremendous figure of a man. He was about – oh, I don't know how tall he was, but he must have been about six foot eight, six foot ten, something. To hear them speak of him, he's obviously that big. He might have been five foot two but he sure looked six foot eight or six foot ten to everybody. And this fellow decided that he could set up a better nation than the French. And after the revolt against the French and so forth, he proceeded to do so. And he did set up a rather successful one. He did this because the French didn't think he could.

All right. Now, that of course does vary the future. If that is continued in existence, and if that motto and hope for everybody's demise is permitted to continue, then it will have wiped out all parts of the game, and that will be that. And we won't have to worry about the future at all. And we won't have to worry about the trends of the culture and which way it's going and which way it's not going.

The French thought, "Haiti will collapse economically the moment we are swept out of it." They were thinking only in terms of money, weren't they?

Well, I can tell you that there's one thing that would wipe it out as a threat, and that would be the same postulate as began in the Age of Pericles. Men have a right to political opinions on any subject, and they have a right to express those opinions freely in any place to anybody.

Do you know what Christophe did? He said, "Hereinafter, as aforestated, by command of what bayonet units and machetes we have to hand, all gourd trees become the property of the state of Haiti." And he sent his soldiers out, and they chopped every gourd they could find out of every gourd tree on the island and made every gourd tree sacred to the treasury of Haiti and carted them in, and the following morning-after it was all done – declared the only currency current to be accepted for goods and produce was gourds.

Now, given that, let's take a look at the AEC – excuse me, I keep mentioning that word. These bastards down here on the other end of this – these fellows actually are less information, less freedom of expression, confidential, secret, top secret, super- frantic-hysterical secret, don't even let yourself know when you read it. These chaps are going in the direction of a tradition which was dead twenty-three hundred years ago. Do you think they'll succeed? No. No.

And to this day, to this day, the notes, the money which you are issued in Haiti is called gourdes. And they have pictures of gourds on them. That was back in 1810, 1812, sometime back then. And a hundred and forty, fifty years later, why, we still have the money being called gourdes. You see?

They're trying to use "science," the new religion of this century, as a means by which to impose a tyranny upon the world - - but it is just another tyranny. That's all it is. It's just another tyranny. I don't care what kind of clothes it's wearing, it is just another effort to do more or less the same thing – deny people their right to speak to whom they wish about what they want to speak about. It's just another action.

It was basically an idea. There was a finite number of gourds in Haiti. So he established that as the economy, and it gradually sought its own level and there he was. And he had an economy.

You get a bunch of atomic scientists together, you'd find they were almost human. They'd talk amongst themselves. They'd exchange opinions. They wouldn't care whether it was Russian or British or French or American or anything else. You throw them in a room together and they'd yackle-yackle and get across the language barriers – probably talk with sine waves or something, you know. They wouldn't care less.

And the French stood back absolutely flabbergasted. They said, "This man can't possibly succeed." Oh, yes he could! He had all the money there was in the country!

But people can make political capital of these boys. They can say, "You have something that's very secret. It is so secret that it appears nowhere except in every textbook in every library on the subject of atomic physics, in every library in the world. It's very secret. It would take a moron with an idiotic case of amnesia, days to figure out your most secret formulas. So therefore, you boys being possessed of this secret, mustn't talk. So that we (some unnameable we) can then impose our will on the communication lines of the world." Which is a tyranny.

Well, here's another example. They were absolutely sure, down here at the other end of Sixteenth Street, that a fellow by the name of Schicklgruber could never succeed back in '33. And they laughed their stomachs sore, if you will excuse me ladies, after they heard that he was going to refinance Germany. With what? He didn't have any gold, he didn't have any silver, and he didn't have any credit, and he didn't have any produce. How in the name of common sense could he possibly do so? Obviously, Germany was broke, could not then rearm and could not thereupon ever become a menace to the rest of the civilized world.

"Now, if we could create a depression at the same time, then people would be willing..." (Ha. You see? See how the reasoning goes?) "...then people would be willing, you see, to accept a little further yoke, you know, a little government handout here and there and we could tell them where they are supposed to work and how they were supposed to work, and we'd give them money if we wanted to and if we didn't want to..." Real nice.

Man, was this a pauperized notion of money talking! They knew nothing about money. They didn't even know enough to read the history of our own Western Hemisphere. They didn't even know the story of Christophe. They should have. Because what did Hitler do? He just issued some stuff and says, "This is money." And people disagreed with him and they didn't live long. And after a while, boy, that was the bestest money you ever heard of. And today the mark is worth about twenty-two cents and is the most stable coin in Europe. It is accepted right with the American dollar. It is much better than the pound, much, much better than any francs.

And they expect this beautiful, idyllic society to grow on the beauties of that new postulate. "We have secret weapons and secret sciences and people pretty soon will be in want so they will have to accept the mandates that are handed to them."

What is this mark? It's a mark. What's a mark? It's a mark! Of course, you can say, "Well, it's backed up by U.S. economy." Well, that I seriously doubt. Because if this economy over here is in any shape to back up anything, I haven't heard about it. It's in shape to back up.

Yeah. The people will accept them. Did you ever hear little Johnny imitating gangsters and machine guns? Yeah. People will accept them. Um-hm. As a matter of fact, people never fight until they're desperate. Things have to go pretty wrong. It has to be pretty obvious. There have to be a couple of citizens hung on a lamppost. There has to be darn little bread in the locker. There have to be a lot of things present before people really look up.

No, here's this fabulous thing. This fellow, he had a lot of tricks, you know? But every one of his tricks went along this line of law: a via. He put another via on the line. The money was good because it had gone through somebody else's hands before it was printed, you see? The money was good because it had another kind of picture on it than somebody else's money. Of course he had a hard one to fight there, because they'd already learned in Germany that when you turn printing presses loose you eventually bought loaves of bread – you bought great big loaves of bread or little tiny loaves of bread – with wheelbarrow loads of money. See, and they'd had that. And that's inflation, that's bad! Huh! That is not inflation. Inflation is not defined as "That's bad!" See, it's a condition. It's a condition.

And when they do look up and when they do notice, at last... The French Revolution's typical of this. They said, "You know, I wonder..." (along about days before the Bastille; years before the Bastille fell), you know, they sit around and they say, "Do you suppose that fellow that lives up in that big house that calls himself Sieur de Montaigne, do you suppose he has anything to do with the... with us not feeling exactly relaxed?" And finally some guys came along and they dug up the Age of Pericles in the textbooks and got them reprinted into "peasant." And they sold them under the counter and the next doggone thing you know, why, the French Revolution started when people stopped wondering, "Do you suppose there's any effort around here to suppress us?" It was how you defined suppression at the time, you see?

So we get to the other interesting thing. If we want to know all this about money, and we find out there isn't very much to learn about money, except money is money, what the devil is regulating the economy of any given country or preclear or president or businessman or anything else? What is regulating it? Is it money? No, it isn't money. It's produce, ability to produce, and existing production. That is all that can stabilize any economy.

And one day they said, "You know, I'm sure there is. I'm sure. I could swear it. And Joe, Jacques, Jean! What do you know? You know I bet somebody's trying to keep us from speaking our right mind!" And boom! No Bastille. Boom! No monarchy.

Now, that is dependent upon manpower and natural resources. You must have men who are willing to work, and you must have natural resources to be worked. And if you don't have them you'd better invent something to produce that doesn't need them. But certainly we're dealing with something real. We're dealing with something that has solidity. We're dealing with mass. We're dealing with a commodity. Whether it's a pair of nylon stockings or the pasteboard boxes to put them in, it is a produced item. And the production must be wanted and consumable. You understand that?

And they got in the habit. And for just years, anything that put its head up that – somebody came up and wanted to sell you some crackers, all you had to do was point at him and say, "Tyranny – guillotine." Madame Guillotine made another widow. It was a most amazing reaction. All Europe was upset.

A little clock, by the way, is consumable if it's just sitting on a shelf See, it's used, it's usable. Why is it sitting on the shelf? It doesn't even run. It's merely pretty. It's just because somebody wanted it, don't you see?

England was upset at the time, too. England was saying, "What do you know? That canaille has roused up and is killing our sacred brothers and we don't do a thing about it." They didn't, either. They quickly liberalized their laws. Very, very significant change. There was practically... By 1804, why, people were treading very cautiously politically in England, and by 1834, why, newly arisen King William quickly signed the Reform Bill, which restored freedom to everybody in all directions, fast. I think there was one riot. I think he was hit by one piece of mud. He signed that bill quick. In other words, tyranny had been educated to fall fast. And so it did.

Desire for produce then creates the interchange. The produce itself establishes the possibility of an economy, the desire for it brings the economy into an existence whereby it is a third- dynamic function.

Well, the soil in which a tyranny is sown, of course, is not when everybody is in want. That is the soil in which revolution grows. Tyranny is sown in times of plenty, when people exchange their rights for some material gain – they think. Tyrannies are sown at times when nobody is very watchful; where everybody has a full stomach; where everything is calm; nothing much appears on the surface, and then tyrannies show up and become very obvious when individuals, growing a little hungrier, a little less possessed of production, suddenly notice that there is somebody saying they mustn't talk, somebody saying they mustn't have opinions. And when people notice this they begin to get very restless. And if after that they get very hungry, there is a total fatality as far as the tyranny is concerned. That total fatality will ensue.

So we get all sorts of fellows with long hair rushing around saying, "Woikers of the woild arouse." "Woikers, them capitalists consider youse is lice." I've heard fellows, by the way, that spoke with a perfect Harvard accent, off the speaker's platform, use English as bad as that. "He was a popular mug, see?"

Now, it may take years for people to find these things out. But we're in such a period today – a period artificially imposed. I don't suppose there's any individual anyplace who wants actively to impose a tyranny on the United States (except a bunch of sons of bitches I've ran against recently).

They go around and they rabble-rouse. Why? They conceive themselves to be dealing with the only people who produce. And if they can get control of these fellows who produce, then they can loaf in the stead of the capitalist. See what a neat scheme it is? The only difference between a commissar and a capitalist is spelling.

Ah, these boys who do this today merely want gain for themselves. They say, "It'd be very nice and I would be very safe if," you know, "if I could suppress certain opinions being spoken. If I could do this." They nibble away just a little bit, you see. And then one fine day you look up and find a whole sphere of knowledge partitioned off for some good, adequate, reasonable reason.

Now, we have these fellows, we have these chaps who get this clue about production, and they themselves try to do it all by production. But remember, the production is nothing, as I just said before, without the desire to have the pretty little clock on the mantel shelf. In other words, there must be desire to have production. That must exist. So it does no good to stand up people against the wall and say, "We're gonna shoot you boys all down if you don't produce." If you do this to a whole nation, you eventually wind up, see, with nobody able to want anything. The desires of a corpse are measurable by worms alone.

What is this sphere of knowledge? Well, it's science. You say, "But we're supposed to have science. That's progress."

So if you knock out the wantingness, if you knock out the consumingness and if you just stress producingness, the cogwheels keep turning and turning and pretty soon some worker asks, he says, "Hey Joe, hey Joe, what we making?"

All of a sudden they see an electronics engineer and they say, "You know, you're supposed to be over there in that uh... behind that barbed wire over there." Well, the electronic engineers of the country have not yet noticed that they're inside barbed wire – they are – that they go backwards and forwards past armed guards to get to and from work.

And Joe says, "I don't know. What is it?"

I wouldn't work under these conditions. A fellow offered me a job one time. He said, "All you have to do is walk in here, leave your gun at the gate, walk in here and you're supposed to walk around for eight hours a day, and do so-and-so and so-and-so."

"It's a little box, some kind here. Comes out at the other end. See, there's one."

And I said, "In where?"

"What is it?"

He said, "In that enclosure there."

"I don't know. Hell, I only been here ten years."

And I said, "What's the difference between that and a prison camp?"

You have this silly picture of everybody producing with nobody consuming and, of course, you don't have a third dynamic. You have a series of firsts.

"Oh," he says, "you're nonsense. You get paid in there."

So these great group social movements, based on "snare the worker," usually wind up as a first-dynamic action. See this? Totally first dynamic, you see? Everybody out for nobody. Not even out for themselves, by the way.

That was the first and only time the government offered me a post as a nuclear physicist. That was the end of that. The government offered me that post. They tried to kidnap me on another one, by the way.

Do you realize, everybody out for himself is a better society than everybody out for nobody. At least you've got a possibility of fighting on the first one. When you yourself, you see, feel that everybody should be out for himself, you can go around and accuse people of this. But if everybody is out for nobody, then who'd care whether you accused them or not?

They said, "You know you're still in the reserves and we can call you back to active duty on research in the field of the mind."

All right. So we look at this huge economic network and we recognize that a network does require a certain amount of consumption, but the consumption of course must be ranged somewhere along desire. And we mustn't take this automaticity of food. We must say, "Well, people must always eat." I don't know that people must always eat. I think it's a bad habit. I almost cured somebody of eating the other day in a processing session. Stopped just in the nick of time.

"You're still in the service," this admiral said. "Ha-ha. You change your mind any time, you know, about coming in. You can volunteer. Of course, I can put you back on active duty at any time, so you'd better volunteer. You'd probably feel better in there making seventy-five hundred dollars a year" – rather than whatever officers get these days – twenty-five cents an hour or something.

Here's this interesting fact: I don't know that any of these desires are anything more than somebody's idea that he wants. Well, you could ruin an economy two ways. You could ruin an economy by making the people cut their production down. See, "Don't produce that much Joe. You don't produce that much. We don't need all that. And you skip making that this year. And nobody wants any of that over here." And we just keep this up, see? Plow the pigs under, you know, sort of thing.

And I said, "Well," I said, "if you put it that way," I said, "I'm overwhelmed." I said, "There's nothing much I can do."

And then we would go around and say, "Now, all of you people should be self-sacrificing, and you shouldn't go around being greedy and wanting all these things, see."

Here is actually a proposition of a person being seized because of his own knowledge, just the way you might seize a fellow who carved ivory well, back in the Dark Ages. He carved ivory well so he was seized. He was taken away and put into a position that he couldn't object to and he was made to work at a trade that he was good at but didn't particularly like. What's the difference? What's the difference?

It really takes both of these actions. Because if you don't have the second action then the first one will never get corrected if it goes out of line. In other words, if people did sag on production, you must still have another crew (even if they're just the women of the family, you know) to go around and say, "I don't care what it costs, I don't care how many miles you have to walk for it in snow; when I say mink, I mean mink!" There must be somebody there.

Not very much. Except maybe I walk with faster feet sometimes. Of course, it was impossible at that time to resign from the service. A reserve officer had to continue as a reserve officer from there on out. But I was down to the Potomac River Naval Command, and I was through Bureau of Naval Personnel. It was Monday when he came to see me, and he was going to come back and see me Thursday. And when he came back and saw me Thursday he said, "Well," he said, "you've decided to come into the service as a civilian?"

Now, this current economy has this interesting aspect: everybody's being hammered and pounded all the times with "must have" – "can't have." You look at the TV ads: "Get into this beautiful new Cadillac. Drive down this smooth road."

And I said, "No, I haven't. I decided not to."

At first you say, "Don't I wish I could." And after a while, because it's just glass with some light playing on it, you say, "All these rich dogs ought to be shot!" It's your next reaction.

And he said, "Well," he said, "I'll have to call you back to active duty."

And after a while, you would unfortunately say, "What Cadillacs? I don't even read the ads anymore." Do you get the idea?

And I says, "Try and do it," and handed him my resignation, accepted. He was crushed.

You could overstimulate the desire to have and then not gratify it to such a degree that everybody would become apathetic about possession, and an economy would go bzzzsst! That'd be the end of that economy.

But do you know that immediately predated, by one week, the opening of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of Elizabeth, New Jersey. There would have been no Dianetics, there would have been no Scientology, and there would have been no publications on the subject anywhere had this succeeded. Interesting, isn't it?

Now, the funny part of it is, the only thing I don't think you could do would be to overproduce variety. Of course, if everybody in the world all of a sudden started growing watermelons and wouldn't grow anything else but watermelons, and every plant would only manufacture synthetic watermelons, I think the economy would be shot.

They didn't want to prevent Dianetics. They didn't want to prevent Scientology, the publications of books. All they wanted to do was get a piece of research done which they in their tyrannical fashion had decided was far more important than any other research that could be done. They wanted me to work on a project to make men more suggestible. Can you imagine me working on such a project? You can imagine me working on admirals to make them more suggestible, but not on people.

A variety of production – people producing what they can produce, producing consumable goods, goods that did fill various needs – it's almost impossible to overproduce.

No, even in myself or any other scientist, in any engineer today, there is this background, there is this tradition: That man has a right to his own opinions, has a right to study them, has a right to know his government and his duties as a citizen, and to exercise himself in performing those duties. And he has a right to contribute to the society. And this we've known for twenty- three hundred years, and so today call ourselves a civilized race.

Now, just why you think somebody has to be a rich skunk to drive a Cadillac is, of course, traceable only to ads. Ads show rich skunks driving Cadillacs – you know, the black-white plumed tail waving in the air behind the Cadillac.

But in only the last six years have we known why. Only in the last six years have we actually directly contributed to this stable datum to make it more stable. Only in the last six years have we found the methods and modus operandi by which to make this future culture come true; the future culture in which men are actually all permitted to do this.

No, it's a fact. It's a fact. There is no reason under the sun why this economy couldn't build a Cadillac for everybody that wanted a Cadillac. They're rather simple to build. They require no more metal really than a Ford. They just make it thinner. And you've got this vehicle.

Men can become so depressed that they are not themselves capable of exerting their own self-determinism, because it doesn't exist. We can give it back to them. We can give them that thing which twenty-three hundred years ago, it was stated they must have in order to continue to be free. Therefore, we have a stake in the game, too.

Well, now, it is true that everybody in the society couldn't have a gold-plated Cadillac. There isn't that much gold. You'd run out of gold in very short order. You'd have to tap the government down here at Fort Knox and say, "Give us some of that stuff that belongs to us."

Thank you.

And they'd say, "No, no. We've got to have that to back up the money."

Thank you.

And you'd say, "What money?"

Of course, they'd say, "Oh, you're invalidating the currency of the United States. Well, that's a criminal offense." I think it is, too. Be the fifteenth statute I've broken today. Well, I – anyhow...

Within the range that you didn't want a gold-plated Cadillac, then, I'm sure that everybody could have a Cadillac. You get the idea? Everybody that wanted one could have a Cadillac. Well, somebody would have to be producing gold, you see, for everybody to have a gold-plated Cadillac, because there are finite limits of gold available. Get the idea?

In other words, these economic checks are monitored by desire to have and ability to produce. And of course, if you don't have the raw materials you can't produce it. But the only wide-open track along the line that looks relatively wide-open is production. You can't overdo it and still maintain a variety of production. Unless you enter in a new number of factors.

Now, you can enter in this new factor which would have to do with money, scarcity of. You could tell everybody carefully, "Now listen, in order to get any produce you have to give money for it." Everybody learns this. That's a new lesson. They learn it. They learn it well. They go around, they say, "All right. I want a new Cadillac. That means I have to have ten thousand dollars and I pay it on the line here, and they give me a new Cadillac." Everybody learns that lesson well.

And then all of a sudden some cheap dog forgets to write down something in this composition book. See, they look at the composition book and say, "Well, that page is full. We're not going to issue any more money." And you look in your pocket and you don't have ten thousand dollars, you just have ten cents. So you don't get a Cadillac, you get a hamburger. Get the idea?

Well, supposing you were producing like mad, or supposing there wasn't enough money to pay you for your production. Supposing there wasn't enough money for anyone to buy your production. Ahrhyeah! So we find out there isn't much you can do about people from a production angle. And it wouldn't do anybody any good to monitor production anyway. The place to hit it is for money, money. You make the money scarce.

Now, there's two ways to make money scarce. Both of them add up to no value for money. Just print it by the billions of bills. Let it blow all over the streets. Show pictures of your president lighting cigars with thousand-dollar bills. Or don't print any. Everybody'll forget what it looks like.

The whole society might or might not stay on the subject of money if it weren't for the fact of taxes. There is a monobrained, puppy to the root – well, monomaniac sort of an organization in the country. It's composed of tax collectors. And it only collects taxes in money. Does you no good to take down eggs. Does you no good to park that Cadillac out in front and say, "There it is." They'll only settle for money. You could print some money and give it to them, they wouldn't be satisfied. They got to have a special kind of money. They got to have their own money. But they didn't make any. How can you pay them?

Well, I'm afraid that's a problem that's being solved right here at this moment. It's being solved in this fall of 1956. How you pay taxes in money which isn't being manufactured.

The financial low of all time since the depression has been reached within the last four days on the subject of the amount of money available to buy Cadillacs. That ratio is now below 1931. There is less money in the economy for the amount of goods in the economy than there were since 1931. The money is getting scarce. The money is getting very scarce. It would be very unkind of me - - who keeps my eye open (I should say who keeps me eye open) on things like this – not to tell my friends about it, which is the only reason I'm talking to you tonight. Because this is an unsavory subject – money – because they got it so rigged that when you got no dough you don't eat. "No dough, no chow." That's the motto of this society.

But money is not production. Money is money. And if money is not produced, it doesn't exist. To that degree it is simply another production.

I'm not trying to scare anybody to death. I'm not trying to scare you anymore than... Mortgage brokers and other people are hysterical right now. As a matter of fact I'm trying to do quite another thing as far as you're concerned. I'm trying to show you why you shouldn't be particularly upset and alarmed, and perhaps you can understand what's going on in this society around you just a little bit better.

Yesterday, or a many yesterdays ago, you ordered a radio set. You didn't pay the fellow for thirty days. You forgot it. At the end of thirty days you gave him your check. You said, "Here's your check."

The fellow said, "All right, that's good."

Today you buy a radio set. Your checkbook does not come out of your pocket quite fast enough, the fellow's hysterical. You buy a commodity today and you have somebody on the other end of the line within twenty-four hours if he has not instantly received pay. Why? He's going broke! He has certain set, fixed expenses. People all around who want things. People all around want his produce. They want what he's distributing. But they haven't got any money to buy it. But he has to pay salaries. But he has to pay the manufacturer. But he has to pay rent. And above all he has to pay taxes. And he might be able to get away with his rent with a couple of new TV sets, and he might be able to square the beef in some other direction. But he can't square it with the tax collector in any other way than money.

So, he's apt to be on the phone within a week. And he's apt to have you in court within two weeks if you don't pay it.

In other words, hysteria. What's that hysteria based on? Not enough little printed pieces of paper such as I showed you at the beginning of this lecture.

Why should you get hysterical about little pieces of paper?

Well, everybody knows. It's just another one that "everybody knows." It is such a solid agreement that everybody has agreed on it.

What does this mean, perhaps, to the auditor? It really doesn't mean anything but good news.

When economies go bad, people become worried about themselves. People can find money to pay for treatment when they can't find money to feed their kids. Now, this is a horrible fact.

People have to become more able in order to survive. And the business of an auditor is really never better. So an auditor (of all people) should never become the least bit upset about a depression. It's in depressions that great movements move forward. It is in depressions that old regimes are overthrown. It is in depressions that people are willing to learn. And out of such a depression, a whole new culture might arise. This doesn't mean that we couldn't cry a little when we see how grim it is probably going to get within the next couple of years in this country.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.