It may be of interest to you that all of the material in Dianetics continually stays in an evolving state. There are a number of drawbacks for such a thing to be in that state, but it has been so since 1930. (I didn’t even know I was working on it, actually, in 1930.) In 1938, ‘40, ‘45, ‘48, ‘49 or ‘50, this material at any point could have been cut off and we could have said, “Well, that’s it.”

In this lecture I am first going to give you the relatively rudimentary data that we have on groups, and then we will go into the application of this material. I will use the Foundation, just as a group which many of you have observed and know something about rather than for any other reason, to show you what happens in groups.

Now, does one just stop thinking or working in this field for the benefit of a stability? I believe the stability in it would be zero. I believe that a body of ideas is alive as long as it is being contributed to and being consistently reformed. An old Greek said, “The mixture which is not shaken stagnates.” Nothing could be more true for such a body of ideas.

I could of course continue to use governments. In the past nearly everyone who has been interested in the subject of groups has immediately looked at governments. I don’t know just why this is; governments are not that important. The groups in which man is primarily interested are small groups where he is in relatively intimate contact with his fellow man. It is here that the group works best.

This poses a difficulty to some degree in the field of instruction. The instructor’s problem is that he has got to put through a certain amount of information, and it would be very nice and comfortable if he could just take this body of information and for the next century teach nothing but that. That happened, for instance, in the teachings of Aristotle. They remained constant and practically unchanged for about eighteen hundred years, and all of a sudden they were awfully out of date. They stultified the whole field of education. The remnants of Scholasticism can still be found around in the modern universities. (Did I say remnants?) In other words, a body of information moves forward rather rapidly.

We could treat a group in terms of its evolution or we could treat a group in an almost mystical sense, and we would arrive more or less at the same place. I am going to treat it for you from both quarters.

An oddity in looking over Dianetics, however, is the consistency of its changes, because no effort whatsoever has been made to be very consistent. If tomorrow we were to find a technique which would sweep all the engrams out of the bank in fifty hours, although it violated five principles that have been laid down practically with a club into the professional class, believe me, that technique would be released as soon as proven and tested. There would be no block at all on its advance, even though the instructors would probably feel like blowing their brains out and the certified auditors in the field, out of touch momentarily, would find themselves enormously lagging.

In evolutionary terms it has been considered that man developed and evolved to what he is now by varying stages out of a principle known as natural selection, and in this development, which is entirely regulated by survival, he evolved certain definite methods of getting along. Every species evolved certain protective and attacking mechanisms.

This is true, though, of any progressive society, which is a parallel. A progressive society is a group of ideas as well as a group of individuals.

Now, one of the things that man might be considered to have evolved is the pack, the basic unit of groups. Man might be considered to have been a hunting pack. Man did not walk alone. (By the way, neither do cats.) Man, as a hunting pack, found out that he could achieve more victories more often by being in a group, the combined strength of which would overcome his enemies, and that he could eat better and get along better in general. It is obvious that if a member of the pack falls by the wayside, the rest of the pack can pick him up and carry him along until he is in better shape. There is an interdependency. The group operates, of course, in a very, very close liaison. Actually, up to a certain point, man’s survival value rises in ratio to the solidity and interdependence of the group. There is, then, an actual survival value in groups.

For instance, in any big company such as Western Electric, there is always a better, more up-to-date model in the research department than there is on the construction assembly line and being sold to the public. I know that in 1928 there existed radios which didn’t make their appearance in the general society before 1936. At this moment there exist many things back in the laboratories which, survival permitting, won’t make their appearance for perhaps another five years.

There are many points here which one could touch upon along the way, such as “the law of tooth and claw” being considered as the basic law of nature. I assure you that if “tooth and claw” and self-preservation of the individual were the basic laws, we wouldn’t have any people on the face of the earth today.

There is a danger in advancing too much material too fast and in changing too fast and getting too little agreed upon before one releases it. For example, a lot of things were developed about phonographs and recordings and so forth very early in the war, and some of them were brought out. All of a sudden at the end of the war we had 45 rpm records, 331/3 rpm records, tape recordings, wire recordings, and we had the old 78 rpm records too. At the same time the Dictaphone company was still using cylinders. All of these types of recordings got into the general public at a moment when it was unproven and unjustified as to which was which and which was best, so the person who wished to play records had to be equipped with a machine able to play this terrific barrage of sizes and types. Actually, there is no machine built which will play all of these. I think record sales probably suffered because there was a lack of agreement, and therefore a certain lack of reality about it.This is not actually comparable to Dianetics. Dianetics keeps coming along a line of advance which was codified about 1938. Everything which has come away from that point has had a consistency, oddly enough. That is to say, it was workable at any moment from there on. When the processing came out and processing techniques started to evolve, the advance was just in the interest of making it faster and easier and not requiring as much brilliance, perhaps, in the auditor. The techniques that kept coming were refinements; however, the reason these new techniques kept taking place was because the philosophic echelon kept advancing. There is an actual correlation there.

The next animal in order of intelligence below man happens to be an elephant, which is a very, very smart animal. The elephant also goes in groups. The elephant, by the way, has quite a good-sized set of prefrontal lobes. He is apparently quite an analytical animal, and you find elephants in groups responding in a very remarkable way. Hunters in Africa are very often completely bemused when one elephant is wounded and two elephants come alongside of him, one on either side, and prop him up and carry him off the scene. That is a pack reaction.

Now, the prediction of new techniques is a very simple thing. Anybody who knows his Dianetics can take just a glance at a technique — he won’t even have to test it or anything else — and he will know whether it will hold together. There is that strange consistency about this body of knowledge. It keeps on advancing, and just because one gets to milepost 135 on this road is no reason why milepost 15 should have vanished. I attest by that that it must be a fairly solid road. I hope that it will keep on evolving out in that direction.

A great many things have been written and noted about groups of this character, but interdependence of individuals is the point of greatest stress.

Every once in a while, however, I get a protest about the fact that it keeps on advancing. As a matter of fact, it is advancing faster than a body of information really should, but so are the times advancing rather rapidly. Certain urgencies in this make it necessary to go on and to bring the new technique which is in the research department and the technique which is being used very close together.

Immanuel Kant sought to give innate moral sense to man, but then in his next book he stated that man was paid very highly for having this innate moral sense because, actually, it was just an outgrowth of his own selfishness. I don’t like Immanuel Kant, by the way, because he was so confoundedly, resoundingly abstruse that nobody could follow him, and nobody dared goup against the resounding character of his German articles and verbs. He codified the whole field of philosophy and it rather stayed that way. He completely stultified philosophy for about 162 years.

There are actually refinements in advance of what I have been talking about. They are still a trifle nebulous but I want to give you just a taste of those to show you what I mean by an advancing philosophic echelon.

As a matter of fact, Dianetics is the first major breakthrough of philosophy for 162 years — an interesting fact. One of philosophy’s main points of action is epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, and Dianetics is a study of epistemology. Dianetics is actually a study of knowl- edge and almost incidentally has to address the vessel and the computation point of knowledge, which is the human mind. What you are studying in terms of processing and so forth is a little bunch-up on the track on Dianetics. It is terrifically important material, but way before you get there and way after you have gotten there are the basic tenets of Dianetics. Dianetics may or may not be great or true or anything like that, but it at least turns around and upsets the tenets laid down about 162 years ago.

It is a fact that it doesn’t matter what numbers you put on these dynamics as long as they are more or less in the same order that they are numbered. One can very easily, for instance, begin with number one as big theta. Let’s use big theta, bluntly, in terms of God (of course, there would have to be a comparable magnitude there) — that would be number one. Number two could be considered, and number three could be considered little theta, which is the pure thought line and is a segment of big theta but is not the side of the picture. It comes down then to number four, life; number five, mankind; number six, groups; number seven, the family; and number eight would be the individual. One dynamic is not, as far as the dynamic within the individual is concerned, particularly of more importance than another.

Man has been thinking along these rather stultified and awfully stupid lines that the group consisted of a number of individuals who for their own self-preservation and for no other reason somehow or other associated with each other, and that any pack was mutually self-supporting just so the individuals in the pack could go on living. The egocentricity of the philosopher who dreamed that one up is second only to the personal aggrandizement thirst of a dictator.

Now, one could say that the end product of all this was the individual; and one could look in the opposite direction, as people have looked, and say the end product of all of this was the real big theta, which is plus little theta — in other words, God. Here is your infinite number. It depends on which way this thing goes. There is something wrong, always, with assigning numbers of order. However, these things are in an orderly progression in that list.

You can’t look at a mental processing using the principle that only self exists and is important and have it work. That is why there has formerly been no mental processing; dynamic one was considered exclusively.

Then there is the question of what comes after the individual, or what comes before God, in this. There is some slight evidence being worked on at the present moment that the individual who is here as an individual in this life was many times an individual in the past. There is an early-lives project going on right now. We keep telling people that these early lives are dub in and so forth, but the point is that we don’t know yet, completely, and until we have a lot of validation material one way or the other we won’t be able to tell. It is not necessary, evidently, to run those early lives — but if one does get into one he had better run out the death of it, otherwise it will restimulate!

Now, I want to single out to you a point on this evolutionary scheme: Regardless of the individuality of each member of the group as individuals, the more analytical the beast, the more cooperative his group seems to be. The accomplishments and so forth of these groups advance in ratio to the active fact that the individuals are amalgamated into a group.

For centuries the question has been asked, “Who made God?” There seems to be a fixation on the idea of “Who made?” That is not pertinent to the problem. The manufacture of, the manufacturer of God — these are not really parts of the problem at all. There might be other big thetas in dimensions and in terms. As far as big theta is concerned, little theta combining with and going into harmonics with, and so forth, may not be all the purposes of the big theta. Maybe this progression goes out in a wheel fashion. Maybe other progressions go out from

We come up the line and look at animals. We get to elephants and get up to man, and now we look at the various stages of man’s development. We find out that man’s society has come up to a point, now and then, where he has had a golden age. And we find out that his golden ages, very interestingly, are at a certain point where the self and the group and the future all have relatively equal stress, and man is man. There is relatively equal stress along these factors just before these golden ages take place. This balance more or less comes into being, and then the other factors of food, climate and the rest of it enter in and man will proceed then to have a golden age of one sort or another. Then, through too much collision with matter, too many wars and so on, a force will gradually introduce itself into the society; and from running on dynamics one, two and three very nicely, man gets to a point where all of a sudden maybe dynamic two will fold off, and he starts into a decline. Of course, if dynamic three were to fold up, the group dynamic itself, you would have the same sort of a situation; he would go into a decline.

God, which are little thetas out there and there and there doing these various things. An infinity of progression is possible.

Each one of these dynamics becomes blunted by the amount of force which is entered against it, the amount of suppressor entered, or the amount of confusion and entanglement that it gets into with the material universe. Once it starts to become blunted it is liable to fold up all the way down.

The reason you consistently get the assignment of four dynamics is simply that those are the dynamics intimate to man who is alive. Those are the life dynamics. As such, that is a relatively low order of magnitude of observation, because life is little theta plus. Little theta plus — that’s life.

This happened to the old Roman pagan society with their gods and so forth, just before the onslaught of Christianity. Christianity came in and the whole pagan religious group folded up and dived out of sight.

Little theta plus, for instance, would be the first bracket. Little theta plus is your future and your family. Little theta plus would be the overall composite of the group. And as far as mankind is concerned there could be little theta plus again. In other words, those are life; but then life itself is little theta plus. Then as we begin to expand out on this, of course is, and little theta is little theta, and big theta combines these two.

There is a society down in the South Pacific where the second dynamic, the future, more or less folded up, where infanticide became a ruling passion. It developed quite logically and naturally because they were living on a set of islands which had a limited food supply, and of course they wanted to keep down their birth rate. They started to keep it down with abortion, and where that didn’t succeed they murdered the babies after they were born without much selection or anything else. The second dynamic collapsed and this group almost disappeared. There are very few members of it now.

We are actually not going out on a very orderly progression of magnitude or combinations. We are going out in terms of trinities. The individual, little theta and make a trinity, and it builds up into the bigger one of the family, the individual and the unit of life itself. Now we go out on the next dynamic and we get three more and three more, only they are enlarging magnitudes, each one of which has a substitution of the last one in it.

There is another group that folded up as a group, and did that rather consistently. This was the early Christian church. There is practically nothing in existence, historically, about these people as a group. There are a lot of words written on pieces of paper, but they are neither particularly informative nor innocent of having been altered one way or the other down through the years. I don’t want to step on any toes on this, because there is a complete difference between talking about Christ and the philosophy of Buddha and so forth and talking about an aberrated group. The fact that aberrated groups have attached themselves to some of these causes doesn’t modify the causes.

There are all kinds of mathematical patterns which can be offered to explain this. There is not one, as far as I know, that cannot have holes found here and there where it is not quite as orderly as it ought to be. But no hole so far found was a hole of error which invalidated the past system. All it did was make more workable and make a little bit bigger the present system. It is a problem of filling in unknowns, rather than a problem of shooting out errors.

The early Christian church went in at a mad rate in a sort of overall effort against the Roman group, and the Roman courts and so forth tried to include these people into the laws and then tried to exclude them out. It was a very, very bad proposition.

As we go up this line we find that we could regard the individual as being the most intimate connection to big theta which we will know. In other words, we could consider the individual as an actual segment of God, and a very close one. We could consider, for instance, as one religion does, that the closest we get to a knowledge of big theta is in the individual himself. Therefore man could very well worship man as a god; part of man is God. Now, this is also expressed in terms of the soul, the spirit. There are any number of these concepts. The individual is very important because he is a basic unit that holds the rest of these things together, but he exists interdependently with all the other individuals.

What happened in Rome was one group attacked another group without setting up in its place any kind of an actual group. Part of the reason for this was they were running on a strange kind of a first dynamic. It was the first dynamic computation of “MEST is no good.” They had turned around and completely retreated from the idea that their mission was to take over the material universe. They had gone out of balance to that degree, and promptly everybody started to negate on the first dynamic. These groups folded up with great rapidity.

As we look over the problem we cannot say “Now we are going to deliver to you the ultimate truth which man will ever know and everything he could possibly reach in the way of knowledge.” This has been the big mistake in the past.

Actually, the history of Christianity is a history of upstart groups which peel off and die as other upstart groups come on. It is tremendously cyclic, and that is fascinating; there must have been something wrong with the general group. The main church that has carried along through this field does not operate that way, and they were able to persevere by including in the groups various peoples as they came along. In other words, various modifications occurred in this group all the way along the line. They have had a very stormy time of it for about two thousand years in various places. You have to look at this thing bluntly as a cultural aspect.

This was somewhat the tone of Aristotle in some of his lines, really: A sturgeon was a sturgeon, and the description of the sturgeon was so-and-so and so-and-so; if the student didn’t accept this description he was flunked. The reality was Aristotle because everybody agreed on Aristotle, and nobody thereafter was supposed to look at the world of life and matter. So the old joke arose that if a professor were giving a lecture about sturgeons according to Aristotle and had his Aristotelian sturgeon drawn on the board, and a sturgeon from some other part of the world had walked in on it, he would have turned and said, “If one of you gentlemen will remove this strange beast I will continue with my lecture.”

The main thing is that the initial shock that Christianity received at the hands of the Roman nation and that the Roman nation received at the hands of Christianity formed a basic engram there.

In other words, this material was not to be compared with the real world. That is the basic definition of authoritarianism. Anything which one is forbidden to compare with the reality he sees around him is authoritarian. It is laid down as an arbitrary. It leads to an enormous number of errors.

This gives you an idea of the magnitude of an engram in a group. The killing of martyrs by the Roman nation reacted in such a way. The people who had been drawn to the colors to a large measure had a great deal against the Roman nation — lots of them were slaves, people who had been very badly abused — and there was a great shock of impact against pantheism and the Roman government.

We are going out on an entirely free line. Nobody is laying down this material as authoritarian, saying “This is the way it is and you are not to compare it to the real world.” Compare it to the real world, and if you find discrepancies in it, that is up to you to remark upon. For heaven’s sakes, remark upon it!

People have a tendency, because of a Disorientation, to regard the Christians as a people who came in from someplace and attacked the Roman Empire, but this is not true. These were the citizens of the Roman Empire who were attacking from the inside. We are dealing strictly with a group within a group — a group of Romans — and these people attacked the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire attacked them, and an engram was laid in.

So the material is very fluid. On any such material which is not being held in line authoritarianly you can expect evolution and change, and that evolution and change will go forward and better the subject until such time as it is laid down, for some strange reason, by somebody who is being very forceful, as the authoritarian line. The second that happens the whole field stultifies.

The thought was certainly reactive in that engram.

Commander Thompson told me that Sigmund Freud was one of the easiest men to converse with that he ever met. Freud kept thinking and changing things around and wondering and postulating. But talking to Freud’s disciples was a horrible proposition because it became an authoritarian line: Freud had said this, therefore it was true and it was not to be compared to the real world. So, the whole field walked directly away from comparing these things to actual observations.

People in the Roman Empire lived rather luxuriously as far as food, clothing and shelter were concerned, in Rome. Rome was a very large capitalism and stayed remarkably so, practically to the end of her days.

You find, for instance, in books on Freudian psychoanalysis, “A kleptomaniac when unable to steal anything always burns down the house,” or “A kleptomaniac, when she steals anything, always has an orgasm.” I am quoting to you directly from some of the works which came from the works of Freud; these are secondary works. There is nothing more idiotic than those two statements. They are not true. And yet some line had been found in Freud which nobody had bothered to look around.

But here was this tremendous impact. The Romans bathed, so to revolutionize this group it was necessary to eschew bathing. The Romans practiced athletic skills and 90 forth, so to revolt against this group it was necessary to completely negate against any of such skills. One had to deny the body completely and take no care of the body, nor use oils to preserve the skin and so on. So that was knocked out, as well as the type of government — which after all was a government that was good enough to rule the world for a long time, up to the time it really went into a terrific decline and into a highly reactive state itself. It had killed too many foreign armies and it had been itself too often swept over, and MEST had entered in there a great deal, so they were pretty reactive already. But what was left of the Roman culture was not particularly bad: good food, baths, games, recreation, enormous and prosperous cities complete with their arts and so on.

So, in all the information I have given you on the line of Dianetics, I have demonstrated to you — by showing that these things reverse in number and that they can be considered as triangles (you can actually go into this on the line of Dymaxion geometry and compare these philosophic principles one way or the other) — that it is a plan of thinking and of looking at a problem, and as such a plan it is producing results. But don’t confuse the statements themselves as being the plan of thinking. This is a way of looking at things, it is a way of arriving at new answers. They are just as good as they are workable, and they are no better.

When the revolution took place against Rome, anything which had been good in that group was negated against — complete reactive thought: Romans are painful = Romans eat = we don’t eat; Romans are painful = Romans bathe = we don’t bathe; Romans have codified laws, courts and governments, therefore we don’t have these codified laws, courts and governments.

If discrepancies begin to show up anywhere along this line of thought, believe me, say so. I will be the first one to shift any viewpoint on this.

One can measure the violence of what took place about two thousand years ago in the terms of how it was negated against. It’s all very well for somebody today to say there weren’t any Christian martyrs, but there must have been to have caused this much pain in a society, whereby everything that was good in that society would just be completely moved aside. And out of this, the one thing we have left is spiritual significance. That was the one thing that survived all this.

However, we must be advancing along the line of a relatively solid idea because it is predicting new data within its own body continually. It is an evolving idea, and one could consider it as a growing idea; it has actual growth. Like a child, it keeps growing, and that is more or less its goal: to grow for a long time.

But dynamics three, two and one had folded up in the process, and the Roman Empire was gone. Good heavens, any barbarian with a tin sword in his hand could come down over the borders and mop up any town! No armies were put into the field, the internal government fell to pieces, and the most weird and horrible governmental practices came into being. The entire coast of North Africa right up to the fifth century had been a great granary, with orchards and a beautiful countryside, but the agricultural pursuits there were pretty well abandoned because of armies going back and forth over it and then the general upsets. It is nothing but a raving desert now! By AD. 550 the total population of Rome consisted of two wolves wandering in the Forum. By the year 1000 there wasn’t a civilized body of people in the Western world. It rather gives you an idea of an internal convulsion.

Now, we have the consistency of this; there have been no marked inconsistencies. This is not particularly complimentary, it is merely quite remarkable. The codification’s of processing I have discussed in these lectures have been themselves a codification and an expansion of existing principles — expanded mainly in the line of easier communication of what can actually be done, rather than any new discovery. So one doesn’t immediately abandon everything which has occurred in the past, but it is in a better shape to relay.

I am showing you a group which destroyed itself from within with another group and failed to create a true group. And by failing to create a true group to replace what it had abandoned or overthrown, it had to be supported in the most shaky fashion as a group. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Christianity itself continued to progress, but I point out that Christianity was picking up the sway over new groups which were coming into this area. Christianity would fire these new groups, they would come in, and they would fold up — a cycle one right after the other.

As far as the philosophic echelon is concerned, the new thing which entered in here is the consideration of a group as actually a little theta. Considering the group as little theta, we have very workable predictions because we can look around and see that it resolves problems.

Not for a long time did the Church itself decide, along about the time of Cesare Borgia, that it had to be a good government, that it had to be good management, and that it had to have a group that would run ably and well. And when the Catholic church started to be a government, Europe pulled out of her Dark Ages. They started to really handle it as a group. We get the aspect of a king walking barefooted across the Alps to ask the pardon of the actual head of the governments of the Western world. It is interesting that the world pulled together as soon as the tenets were refined to include the fact that the Church had to be a government.

I don’t want to belabor this point; I just want to give you my own viewpoint on the philosophy and the science of Dianetics today. I hope that just because I have done so these things are not immediately closed to question. I have noticed some of that lately, and it should not be so.

Nothing I say should be construed as criticism of Christian tenets or Roman tenets; it is just an impartial survey of this field. We know there were dark ages, we know that these various things existed, and I have taken a little time in the past to look them over. When I started into an active study of groups recently, all this data showed up again. It is very important that a group went along just fine so long as it was running on dynamics one, two and three. But any one of them, knocked out, would cause a decay of the group, and it could decay from the moment one of these was knocked out.

If any of these tenets go in and agree with medicine or medical practice, that is fine. Dianetics is not versus medical practice. It will modify medical practice, but Dianetics as a philosophy, a body of ideas, information and discovered facts, will go out in ratio to the degree that it is able to contribute to existing bodies of knowledge. And Dianetics should be able to receive contributions on its own from those existing bodies of knowledge. If it does that consistently and clearly, it will continue to be a growing idea, an expanding idea and an accepted idea; and the group which is Dianetics, as represented by the Foundations, will continue to expand and grow.

We look that over from an evolutionary point of view, and we find out that man has succeeded in direct ratio to the amount of rationale and rationality within this group about what the group was doing, how the group existed and what it consisted of. Man progressed, his society progressed, he progressed as an individual.

However, any new idea which is suddenly thrown at a body of ideas, at large numbers of groups, and at individuals — many of whom have not been trained to evaluate freely but have been taught and trained instead on authoritarian lines — will have trouble. Dianetics has come up against that, but it can understand that and appreciate it, and it can also go right on through it.

But the idea of the group is very prone to shifts. We have again entered a cycle where one of these dynamics is being knocked out; not much attention is being paid to it. In the past few decades the stress has come off the individual — the worth of the individual, the value of the individual.

The point is that points of agreement have to be established. This is the central turmoil of Dianetics going out in this society. Not enough points of agreement have been established to make Dianetics, as itself, a startlingly large reality in itself. To those of us who study it, who see it in operation as a process, there is not much question about its reality.

Dianetics is a breakthrough along that line. It talks about the value of the individual. Actually the individual, the group, the future, mankind — all these things — are almost equally important. But because Dianetics was introduced into a society where the value of a human being had been discounted somewhat and was on the decline, that particular individuality was punched up.

However, every once in a while we walk up to somebody and he says, “Well, I’ve never run an engram but I’ve run them out of a lot of other people.” Sometimes people will say, “Well, I’m not sure about engrams. I don’t know what they are completely,” and they are a bit foggy about the subject. But that is just addressing the engram and processing side of it.

The collective state is the big goal right now. The collective state is the thing to have. How long will that last? That is really going to be a steep dive when it dives. Just looking over these tenets and predicting, one would say that when we knocked out dynamic three as a group and everybody became individuals, any society in the past went to pieces. When we knocked out dynamic two, any society went to pieces. Now we knock out one — and neither pay much attention to two nor negate against it — and say it’s all state, it’s all group and the individual doesn’t amount to anything.

Dianetics is a big body of knowledge. It is not merely a process of processing individuals. It emends into groups. It is an examination of thought as such, and is a science of thought, not a science of removing aberrations.

Do you know how bad that has gotten even in our own society? It is being said that the points of advance of man in history have nothing to do with individuals and that it just happens that the group at a particular moment was ripe for something to happen, and for instance, a fellow like Alexander the Great happened to be there and so more or less the whole situation opportunely resolved around Alexander and it went on from there. That’s the philosophy of history, in 1950, in the United States of America, which up to just a few years ago was ruggedly individual to a point where the password was “I’m just as good as you are!”

There is the first point of misunderstanding with past schools of mental healing. Because they are centered completely and closely on mental healing, they look at Dianetics and say, “That’s all it does, it heals these aberrations.” They take out their selected parts, look at that and say that’s all it is. That’s all right; just let them do that.

Thomas Jefferson said every man is created with equal rights under the eyes of the law. That has been narrowed down to “every man is created equal.” This was meant to be a right to their own individuality, but some clever propagandist with more propaganda skill than brains came along and said, “All men are born equal. That means we’re a collective state, you see?” So of course the first dynamic is no good; it is not here.

But Dianetics — and don’t underestimate this, because I have already seen it in operation — is a highly contagious body of knowledge, merely because it maintains and continues along a line of evaluation of bodies of knowledge. Dianetics initially is a science of thought which includes as its first echelon epistemology, the philosophic study of knowledge itself; so of course it enters into bodies of knowledge and studies them, but it clarifies and amalgamates with them.

History was made by these groups which just sort of evolved up to a point where somebody came along and made the history. Read over accounts of Napoleon — it “just happened” that things were that way.

A doctor, for instance, in looking at Dianetics, might wonder “How does this compare with the ‘umpty-gump’ treatment of arthritis?” He starts looking it over and so on. Then if he is shown that Dianetics does influence arthritis, he suddenly has the viewpoint “Hmm, umpty-gump theory — no wonder it works! It moves the person on the time track, certainly. Oh, yeah, that’s why that works. Well then, the stuff we’ve got here, that moves a person in time — hey, wait a minute! We don’t want anything to do with this Dianetics — that’s foreign stuff!” and so on. “But of course, there’s no other explanation for that. I wonder if it couldn’t be moving a person on the time track. Let’s put somebody who has arthritis on a couch, and we’ll give them some cortisone too, and we’ll see — no, we shouldn’t have anything to do with that!”

Examine Alexander the Great as a man and you find that there have been darn few men like him. Not that he was a man who was terrifically advantageous to the society to have, but let’s just talk in terms of personal courage and brains. We find him doing such tricks as going out to fight with a body of companion cavalry, going right straight through the enemy ranks, finding the enemy leader and putting him to flight or killing him. Of course at that moment the enemy army would fold up. Alexander won all these battles.

Only, ideas are not. They can’t be laid aside. An idea enters — there it is.

You find him facing a great walled city, clear over on the boundaries of the world as far as he is concerned, and two or three days have passed and they are unable to do anything to the walls of this city because nobody can get in and open a door. Alexander himself and two other men insist that they get thrown over the wall into the midst of the enemy troops, where they cut these people to pieces, cut their way to the gate, open the gate and let the army in.

So the validation program on which the Foundations have been embarked is an all-out rush. There are people vitally interested in gathering evidence such as this: “Mary Jones was sick. Here is laboratory evidence” (perhaps an X-ray or electrocardiograph) “and a doctor’s statement as to her condition. Then, right in the middle of her illness, she was given twenty-nine hours of Dianetic processing. Then we have another doctor’s certificate of examination, and it says ‘Mary Jones is well. Her state of health has been stable and she appears to be in excellent condition.”’ That is just the truth of the matter, by the way, yet to gather the pieces of paper together, to persuade somebody to actually verify that these records are in existence, has just been a gruesome task.

Was this group just opportunely set up, and could anybody have stood in this man’s boots? Oh, no! I don’t think so.

In August the confusion of the Foundation itself was enormously multiplied by the fact that we threw into an already staggering operation the processing of twenty persons selected by a psychiatrist. The staff said, “We haven’t got enough people to do this. We can’t do this well. It will probably be done poorly.” Yet these people had to be processed, and because I knew very well that no psychiatrist was going to say these people were sane and stable until they had remained so for about six months, it meant that that series would not be valid until the spring of 1951.

Take Napoleon for an example: as crazy as he was, he was at the same time an individual whose impact on the society was enormous.

The whole operation of the Foundation shook and staggered under the impact of this. There weren’t enough auditors to supervise it and it was difficult getting the psychometry. The Foundation is just now beginning to come out of this, because that wasn’t all that was thrown at it. Research on nutrition and several other projects were going on at the same time.

By underestimating the value of the individual in the society, some mighty silly answers are going to be turned up and some mighty silly predictions are going to be made about the future of the various groups of the world today. For instance, Stalin is one of the smartest party secretaries and propagandists imaginable. This man is sitting on top of and holding in line hundreds of races that don’t even speak the same language. Whether he is bad or good, or whether it is bad or good for Russia, is beside the point. This man, by personal force, is knocking into shape an empire.

I wanted these twenty people to be processed for ten days and then for thirty days, to be given Rorschach, TAT, Wechsler-Bellevue, Minnesota Multiphasic, complete medical examination with X-rays, laboratory tests and all the rest of it. The rush of the operation and the lack of proper administrative skill — which, by the way, couldn’t be supplied just like that, one just did it anyway — created an enormous amount of confusion. And this has cost the Foundation about

People sit around and say, “Well, communism is just a collective state, they don’t believe in individuals, therefore Stalin is not really that sort of a proposition.” They get into a terrible confusion about all this, because they don’t look at the fact that here is a man who is knocking together an empire. He has found the ideal way of fixing one up. He says, “There’s only one number one in this empire and that’s me! And all the rest of you people are a collective state.” Of course they are much easier to rule if there’s only one number one. And that is one of the methods of government.

$2,500 per person. That is all to create a reality of Dianetics, which is supported by the definitions of other people who are disinterested.

Now, these are individuals who suddenly surge up into the society from some quarter or other with military aims and great governmental greed’s and ambitions, kicking at the third dynamic and the first dynamic, and these dynamics get badly mixed up. But it could happen a lot more often than it does, because we have a third dynamic there which resists this sort of thing. In other words, it picks up as itself. The group as itself is something. It doesn’t exist as just a group of number ones. It is itself a something, and it resists this sort of thing. Without that resistance the third dynamic would go out more suddenly and more often than it does. Or the second dynamic could go out. In other words, these things depend for their stability on all three being in pretty good shape: the individual, the future and the group itself. There is a balance there.

The instant one creates the reality of Dianetics, it of course can’t be stopped as an idea, because people look at it and say, “It’s a real idea.” The velocity of the idea depends in a large measure upon its reality; in other words, on how much agreement there is on this idea.

Number ones coming in, all of a sudden, will take number three and blunt it, whip it into shape and do something with it. It is a funny thing, but some of that has to be done. However, when it is done too much and number three is just staggered, the instant that number one dies, there goes the whole group. The empire of Alexander the Great down in Asia Minor did not last twenty-four hours after he died. His generals immediately got together over the table and said, “This is yours; this is yours; this is yours; this is yours,” and got on their horses and rode off in nine different directions, and that was the end of the empire.

We get the doctor to agree that this person was sick and he was well, because the public accepts and agrees that doctors are supposed to know something about people, sick or otherwise. Agreement. We get them processed by psychometry, and everybody in the field of psychometry in the public agrees that intelligence tests measure something. They don’t know quite what, but the tests measure something.

It wasn’t a group. It was a first dynamic. One man had imposed himself so thoroughly upon the civilized world that the civilized world caved in the second he disappeared. So that is not a stable state to be in. That is not survival. Yet here is this collective state, and its basic law could be summed up in the idea “The individual is not important; what is important is the mass.”

We have changed people’s scores on these tests, which heretofore have never been changed to this degree. There is interesting data all the way through that is being collected, but it is being collected in terms of creating an agreement. That agreement creates the reality. It assists the communication. Terrifically wide communication of the information cannot exist until the moment that the reality exists. But let’s not be angry, in Dianetics, at these various other fields, because communication and reality can’t exist without some affinity too.

Labor is a beautiful word. I never saw a management yet that didn’t work like dogs. I never saw labor yet that didn’t do a lot of management. But we have got “labor” here, and we’ve got the “people,” and out of this we get a very interesting fact that if we followed that tenet down to its reductio ad absurdum, we would get this theorem: Five morons make a genius! So this is not good survival.

Fortunately there is always the affinity of what a man wants for himself personally. For instance, several psychoanalysts were perfectly content to have their wives processed by Dianetics. That was for themselves, not on a professional level. This was not in the body of their own ideas. This was in the family, and that was vital.

In the first place, a group is more or less carried on the backs, somebody has said, of a few desperate men. There are enormously varied abilities in people, and a group has to look around for its leaders. The fact that it finds them all too often through their military prowess or some other thing just bespeaks the fact that the group is rather hard put all the time to find leaders — able individuals who will carry on the affairs of the group. That is a very tough one!

The creation of this reality is already underway. There is a pamphlet being made up which we plan to send out to about eighty-five thousand people over the country. It contains psychometry on one series of sixty-one cases, one series of eighty-six cases and one series of seventy-six cases. It also has some specialized case histories showing changes in personality, mental health, self-adjustment, social adjustment and other things, in individuals processed for only a few days in Dianetics. It shows some astonishing results.

So we have interplay’s of these three dynamics. We can watch this in evolution back down through history and can find out that, according to history, it is evidently correct to say that there has to be an adequate balance between the worth of the individual in the society, the value of sex, the family and the future in society, and the value of a group as such. It is not just a happy compromise. Each one of these things are fully developable to a high optimum. If we pay attention to these things, as we look on this as the evolutionary picture, we find that that society would best survive which paid close attention to the fact that each one of these was important. And we find that a society will succumb as soon as it begins to neglect one of these as unimportant.

You process these cases, and you give them psychometry before and after the processing.

That is a cursory sketch of what you can learn by studying the history books. But there are many other ways to approach this problem. There is the way of sitting down and beating your skull in and just remembering everything you possibly could have picked up, plus everything that you have learned in Dianetics and a few things like that, for a month or so, and then trying to put together what you have weeded out. Then you take the rest of the tenets and amalgamate them and try to set the thing up one way or the other, and you get something that looks like Group Dianetics. The odd part of it was that this effort produced some results which predict a lot of things.

Psychometrists in the field of psychology say that psychometry will change on an individual from day to day. Personally, I can’t get it to vary the way they say it does. It is fairly stable; the variation is plus or minus a very few points, not anywhere near what they sometimes claim. Of course, if you wake someone up in the middle of the night and give him psychometry when he is still half asleep you can get a wild variation, but by being consistent and giving it at the same time of day you don’t get this.

I hadn’t recognized that Political Dianetics was a completely neglected subject up to about six weeks ago.

So, you take these eighty-six cases and sketch it across the boards, with the “before” tests and the “after” tests, and what you get is a solid line of advance — a marked and remarkable line of advance. Nobody has seen the likes of this before in psychometry.

I looked around and saw that the world situation was whipping up to a point of acceleration; something had to be done about that. I looked at the Foundation itself and found out that there must be something wrong, there must be a missing datum or two, there must be a missing viewpoint; somewhere here something needs to be rearranged, and particularly, something needs to be learned. It is obvious that we can’t have settled much in the line of Political Dianetics if we don’t know the odds and ends of laws that make up a group. We should be able to just suddenly pick up one of these laws, look at it and say, “Well, that’s being violated here,” and look over here and say, “Well, this is how you put that into effect,” and all of a sudden have a smoothly running organization.

Very little of this is on a medical validation line. This first pamphlet is mainly psychometry. This puts reality into the subject so it communicates faster.

This sort of thought action is very interesting. Go up into the abstract, up into the last end of nowhere, and look around and try to find some datum, and be very careful not to get stuck up there, and then get back and look at the real world and look at people and so on, and try to get into the swim of it and compare this datum back and forth, back and forth, till you have something.

There is another program going forward on validation; in this one we are restimulating engrams, with before-and-after psychometry. One takes a person back down the track, gets him into a hot engram, runs him halfway through the hot engram, gets it restimulated and brings him up to present time. The person has had psychometry before this point, and after it he takes some more. He is taken back down the track after his second psychometry and run through the incident again. By the way, he gets a medical examination, too.

The mystical background, the philosophic background, which goes behind this material runs somewhat on these lines: The first thing that actually comes in here as a tenet is that the group exists with a life of its own. We look at groups just as though there wasn’t a single individual anywhere in the group. First, look at it just as a collective body and examine it as such. We find that as a collective body it does have a life of its own. Oddly enough, the group does not depend for its sanity to any enormously marked degree upon the sanity of the people who compose it. Isn’t that interesting?

Working this, you could probably shoot up the person’s temperature or blood pressure temporarily, change his posture and do various things like that. I’ve had a medical doctor get so worried watching two of his patients being run that he was practically tearing his hair out. I was working these two people rather late in the evening and he was watching. I had sent them down the track and they had gotten into a boil-off, and since I was working both of them I didn’t have time to run them all the way through the boil-off, so I brought them up to present time.

It means immediately that we don’t have to clear all the individuals in the world to have cleared groups. That is heartening because when one looks it over he finds that it would probably be possible within a year or two to clear up the major groups of the world by using various tenets. That is a highly ambitious project. I would not tackle it personally, all by myself. Maybe you will help me.

One of them worked up a fever and the other one got all hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked and looked like he was about sixty, but he sat there perfectly content.

Here is actually an entity. It does not smoothly compare with an organism composed of cells. That is not an apt analogy for a group. If we consider it a living entity with its own analytical level and with its own reason for being, immediately the problem starts to resolve for us. The group does not exist necessarily for the individual, and the individual does not necessarily exist for the group. Consider the group a special entity.

The doctor said, “Let’s lay off of this now and do something about it tomorrow or in a couple of days.”

When I was a brash young man I used to be fond of saying that a government had no blood or body, it was not something which could be attacked, and that the individuals were the only thing that mattered in it, and so on. Not so. The point is that this thing does obviously have a life of its own. When we start looking at it as having a life of its own the problem of groups begins to resolve, and a lot of problems about men, that I hadn’t known hadn’t been resolved, all of a sudden show up and get solved.

I said, “What are you trying to do, kill these people?”

One of the things that led into this was done a long time ago in Dianetics; it was one of the first things postulated. A lot of these things dropped out of sight because the people with whom I was constantly in contact over the last eighteen months weren’t so much interested in groups, and in order to simplify things and explain what I was calling at that time “Abnormal Dianetics,” which only addressed the mind, I dropped out three of these elements. Therefore we have talked about the four dynamics. There are seven dynamics, not four.

“Well, they look to me like they are pretty bad off.” He took their temperatures and showed me, took their pulse, and showed me they were exhausted, and so forth.

That just goes to prove that a fellow shouldn’t listen too much, in spite of what the society has to say about he who keeps absolutely quiet and listens all the time becoming a very wise man. I fail to see what happens with this wisdom which he has accumulated if he never says anything about it.

So I took them, one after the other, back down the track (the boil-offs were over), ran out the engram at the bottom of the line and got a good reduction on it, brought them up to present time and ran a couple of pleasure moments.

We have seven dynamics. We have the first as self; the second dynamic as sex and future; the third dynamic as groups; the fourth as man, mankind; the fifth dynamic as life — life, no matter where you find it. If you find it in dogs or cats or jaguars or giraffes or any of these other things, it is life. Life in a blade of grass, life in a tree — these things are all life, and life has a great deal more affinity for living objects than it has for MEST as such, inanimate objects.

There they sat, with their faces nice and bright. The doctor thought he was watching black magic. But it isn’t black magic or anything of the sort. Something is only magic when someone doesn’t understand quite what’s going on.

The sixth dynamic we will call — as I called it in the early days — theta. What do you call this thing? There is a dynamic toward the preservation of, or the existence of, or the being of, bodies of energy. Call it God, call it anything you want to, but it is there. Man has striven toward it. We cannot equate a balanced equation about any society or man unless we really look this thing over and say “Well, there it is,” and then not make the mistake of getting into an argument about it, but just postulate it there on the basis that man has always more or less thought and researched about this. And in this direction — he has more or less sensed this — there is a certain faith that he becomes imbued with and which makes it possible for him to do things that he never would have dreamed of doing before. It’s very interesting that we have to take this into account; science has, of course, practically ruled it out. Science goes into the line and says, “Well, God is probably an exploding atom.” I am sure that to a boy whose life is all wrapped up in electronics and who is sitting by a cyclotron, God is a cyclotron. To an author, God might be a book. And to a mechanic, unthinkingly, God might seem to be a very fine racing car. But that would be a rather shortsighted view for each individual. So we have to take into account the sixth dynamic.

The results of many of these projects will be included in a hard-cover book that will be out next spring.

The seventh dynamic is MEST — the material universe.

The Foundation, as a group, is dedicated to the dissemination of an idea and of some techniques which reduce aberration, increase health, and generally can pick up the tone of the society. That is a part of its mission. So far it has run along more or less with that as a statement of what it was trying to do. It was trying to get up this information and hand it out into society. People who weren’t immediately interested in validation programs would get out of touch with them and they wouldn’t realize they were still going on. They would say, “There couldn’t possibly be any research going on because I’m not there doing it.” Every man was operating as a whole Foundation himself, personally.

The second we begin to look over this array of dynamics the problem simplifies, rather than becoming more complex because we have entered some new factors into it. Now we begin to see that man has some other things in which he is interested. We have talked a lot — too much perhaps — about processing the individual. We have talked of this to the point where we forgot that probably our main goal was processing the group, if we wanted to pick mankind up and keep him from falling on his face as he seems on the verge of doing.

As we look over this situation, we find out there couldn’t possibly have been a group anywhere along this line. It was not a group. It didn’t have all the rules and laws of groups contained in it, or any proportionate or large part of them. The Foundation was being asked to operate as a group, and people looked at them and wondered why they weren’t a group, why they didn’t function as a group and why the Foundation didn’t operate smoothly. Do you see that the name Foundation immediately postulates that there is a group? It had been named, but it wasn’t a group because it lacked several things which a group needs, on definition lines.

Now, on the seventh dynamic, man has an affinity for MEST. MEST kicks him back and he gets into terrible turmoil’s about it and it can be very brutal on him, but he does have a certain regard for MEST. It may be only the regard of a bulldog who is standing over a bone, and on the other hand it may be an actual affinity for an energy form. Whatever it is, he does have an affinity for it. He gets out and looks at the stars, at light and all these various things which compose the material universe. Of course, he is attacking the material universe; he is interested in it — we postulate that — and naturally he would be interested in these things. But we find out that an aesthetic enters into this — an affinity.

What did it have, as itself, which was a goal for itself and for the individuals within it? How far did it cover the spectrum, in other words? It hardly covered it at all. People that were working hard were operating on the third dynamic, maybe for the nation, or on the fourth dynamic, for mankind, but not so much for the third dynamic for the Foundation. They were working for an idea, but that idea was not a group idea. It was a philosophic and a processing idea. So it was the rocky road to Dublin all the way along the line, until one sat back and looked it over carefully and analyzed what on earth was going on and what was wrong. I did so immediately after developing these tenets on Dianetics, but I haven’t put all this into effect yet to make the Foundations a group.

Aesthetics are very close on this line of affinity here someplace. I have really been looking over aesthetics and trying to find out what made them “aesthete.” I haven’t had much luck, but they are in this problem someplace. They are a piece over on the edge of the board that we haven’t quite got yet.

The first act in this was that two of the Foundation executives started to amalgamate the Los Angeles Foundation into the first stage of its evolution — an actual living group rather than a dependency upon a number of individuals all of whom had the same idea. That isn’t a group. I went back to Elizabeth and put the first evolution of the tenets into effect.

Let’s look at the idea of MEST. The wind, rain, snow, blue skies, space, time and so on — all of these things are MEST, and we live on the stuff. One of the first things that folds up in the aberree seems to be his attraction for all of these things. The real world (using that in a very qualified sense) becomes less pleasant to him.

Now, the test of anything is whether or not it works, as far as we are concerned. And in Elizabeth we figured out the group situation, put it into certain lines, just using these tenets, and said this is the overall group structure. This, and several other factors entering in (making it not quite a plain experiment), picked up the morale of the eastern Foundation and its workability. It came right on up, because it was starting into the first evolution of becoming an actual group.

Do you remember when you were a little kid, and you got up in the morning and there was dew on the rose bushes, and the wind blew and all of the world looked so good? Everything was so blue and so red and so green, the sun was so bright and warm. All of these things were very, very swiftly sensed by the individual and were appreciated. There was a definite reaching out and an affinity with the world. Then this dynamic began to be blunted by collisions with MEST, and MEST became less and less one’s friend. Finally one gets to be twenty-five years old and married, and when he gets up in the morning there’s dew on the rose bushes but it’s just something that gets his shirt wet.

Los Angeles has about a ten-day or two-week lag on that (to give you some kind of an idea how fast these things can happen). This organization is nowhere near being in as good a shape as Elizabeth is right at this moment, but it is coming up to it. Because it is being evolved more rapidly, though, it will probably go past Elizabeth. Elizabeth then will have to be picked up along the line.

The definition of a dynamic is something that we have which seeks the survival of something. In other words, we have something, each one of Us, which seeks for the survival of groups. We have something that seeks for the survival of mankind as mankind, and also for life, theta and MEST. If you don’t believe that, think of the horrible state we would be in right here at the present moment if there was no world to stand on! Man very much needs the material universe.

Up to a certain point, everybody was my assistant in the organization. That isn’t a group. The organization unfortunately — and this shouldn’t have happened — was called “Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation.” That was put on there perforce by the Board of Directors when they first got together, to make it possible to hold on to the name so that Dianetics wouldn’t get dispersed and infiltrated. It had to be laid down by an individual. Then I stepped back off the thing and I did practically nothing more about it. And then the papers started lambasting Dianetics by lambasting me, and calling it a cult and all sorts of things, saying things about me which just simply are not true. And I had to come forward and make a defense of myself, so again it went into a Hubbard line.

We certainly have felt this sudden quiver of sharpness sometimes when some character comes along like one who wrote in Argosy magazine recently that all of a sudden the ice was going to form on the pole and overbalance the world. Always in the past, he figured out, the ice had formed on the poles and then suddenly by overbalancing gyroscopic action, the gyroscope would switch ends and the poles would be where the equator is. He had all kinds of facts and data. He had every datum except one: he hadn’t compared his theory to the real universe. But that article, that the world might suddenly come to an end, caused a considerable commotion through the readers of that magazine.

Dianetics doesn’t belong to Hubbard. This group is not under Hubbard’s authority. Hubbard could possibly have, exclusively on an authoritarian line, pounded the thing together as a controlled extension. But that is what a dictatorship is — a controlled extension — and that is a very bad way to go about anything, although one has to sometimes tend in that direction in order to pick up the immediacy of a situation. Any group which evolved along those lines would be a sick group, because it isn’t existing as a group, it’s existing as a man. When it begins to exist as a man and something happens to that man — he gets to feeling badly on Friday, or has a hangover on Monday — the whole group reacts, just like that.

And then we find Velikovsky publishing Worlds in Collision. That, by the way, is the oldest and corniest science fiction title in the world. We have been writing about worlds in collision for fifty years that I know about. It has gotten to a point where, in science Action, if an author sends in a story that has to do with the end of the world, the editor just picks it up and puts it in the envelope and sends it back to him again.

You can tell an authoritarian organization by this: How much does it reflect the personality, the ups and downs, and the stress and strain on its head? For instance, you go aboard a naval vessel and look it over and find out that maybe it’s a very unhappy ship. Let’s look at the commanding officer. He is an unhappy man. In other words, you get this authoritarian line where orders are delivered without qualification of any kind whatsoever. The group is not living on ideas. Its own ideas are not being perpetuated amongst it. It is living on orders. These might be ideas, but they have got in them so they are not ideas. They are mixed up. They have force in them, because if these orders are not executed, then material universe force is going to be entered against these people, bang! They will be threatened as to their survival, and so forth.

But this fellow writing about the sudden reversal of the poles of the earth had neglected one fact. It is getting warmer, not colder, and it is getting warmer to the degree that the South Pole has been melting for some time at such a rate that there is actually a possibility that the seas of the world are going to rise a little bit here in the very near future.

I am using the Foundation and demonstrating with it as a pilot project of a group. Even as one of my preclears will occasionally suffer by having five engrams run just once over simply to find out what would happen, so, I’m afraid, has the Foundation suffered a little by being a pilot project. It wasn’t even aware that it was a pilot project, but it is.

Anyway, people who had heard about the world going “loose ends” like that got awfully upset that it was going to swap ends. Nobody bothered to look over the general situation and find out that it is far from happening — that the ice is not stacking up at the South Pole but is actually melting off. It’s getting in better shape, in regard to that theory. And yet such a thing could still be published and it would still get interest.

A group is not the extension of an individual, nor the extension of an idea. I have been at this longer than anybody else but that does not mean that I can do it better than anybody else, nor that I can get better ideas than anybody else. And it certainly does not mean that a large number of human beings shouldn’t have perfect freedom of action within their own self-imposed (as a group) rules, regulations and authorities. An authority to the group is only really a workable authority when the group itself has evolved it and tested it. This is the factor which makes a short-term group look so strange. It hasn’t had the time to pick up its own mores and precedent in the line of evolution.

Now, man is very interested in the material universe. At the same time, he is very interested in God. We go into India and find out about nirvana. Maybe some of you have seen a similarity between theta and nirvana. Certainly I have been exposed to nirvana, and a few times when I’ve gotten some bad rejection slips I have sought its beauties! All one does is sort of merge with nirvana and lose his own identity, and that is the end of it.

Law comes about in this fashion: First there is a sort of a need for it, and so somebody sets up a custom. This custom gets originated there and it exists amongst the people. It gets modified as they use it, it carries along, and then as a custom it is codified by somebody. Then it is written down, and then it becomes a law.

Groups have approximated this nirvana — the merging of the individual with God. “Let’s merge the individual with the group so completely that we won’t be able to find him anymore!” Individuals cause some governmental officials a lot of trouble. I imagine they would be happy if the individual did merge and disappear and leave them with nothing but an easily run, manageable state.

Only laws which have gone through that cycle can be validly imposed. Laws which are arbitrarily laid down suddenly without having gone through that cycle aren’t worth the air that it took the legislators to discuss their passage. They can’t be enforced.

If we are going to deal with the overall philosophic echelon of Dianetics, we have to look over these seven dynamics and consider them in their proper places.

For instance, it was not a custom in American society not to drink. It was a slight custom in the society to be secretive about drinking in some places, and it was a custom to be mad about it once in a while, and it was a custom to do a lot of talking about it. All of a sudden somebody passed a law that said “Prohibition: Nobody can drink. Liquor is not available.” That law was not only never enforced, it might as well have never existed. The society as a whole was being subjected to the exact point in the evolution of custom that liquor had progressed to — do it in secret, and get mad about it. That was where the custom had progressed to in the group; suddenly it was frozen at that point. The custom didn’t get a chance to progress, and the law, of course, could not be enforced.

Now, the second we start looking here at theta, and we look at the past regard of man for it, we find that there is an enormous amount of data around about this that he thinks he has found. Scientific proof is not the only kind of proof there is as far as man is concerned. He figures that if he feels something strongly enough and everybody has gotten enough agreement on the subject, by golly, that’s the way it is. That kind of proof walks along with him through the generations. And for every race under the face of the sun, over as many years and in as many climes as I have ever been able to look, man has postulated this as part of the things which go to make up the All, and he has not only postulated it but he has gone to considerable trouble about it.

The law does not make the ideas of the group; therefore, an authoritarian organization can’t exist as a group. It is all right for a person to get ideas and for people to agree or disagree with those ideas or even to accept and amalgamate them, but that isn’t enough to make a group.

I was told that one time there was a crusade and a lot of people in Europe went down and fought a lot of people in Asia Minor, to what end I never quite could figure out. A crass and probably highly cynical individual came along and said it was because the crusaders wanted the wealth of Asia Minor that they had heard about. Well, the truth is probably in between the cynical and the altruistic explanations. Certainly somebody was excited about the sixth dynamic.

The survival value of societies is practically nil in a dictatorship or a nation which has suddenly gone into an authoritarian law level. The Roman Empire was dead very shortly after it had its first dictator. The Roman Republic had lasted a thousand years, but then, in two or three centuries, it went down the dwindling spiral by being made an authoritarian group. The people were bought into the group, finally, with corn and games, but that group didn’t belong to those people and they acted as such, and it fell flat on its face because of it.

But there seems to be a life outside of the individual. We consider a thought a force, and we can consider an energy that we call theta as something which is detachable and individualizable in greater and greater chunks. As soon as we postulate something like this, groups become not only easier to understand but easier to handle, and that is important. In other words, if we use this just as a postulate and grant it that much reality, suddenly we can handle individuals and groups sufficiently so that theta can go on and attack the material universe far more successfully. I think the main trouble with this is people have been too strenuous about it, and they have sought to use the sixth dynamic too often.

You could predict the end of any nation by its first appointment of an authoritarian regime. Also, you can estimate the place on the tone scale of that nation by its suddenly adopting an authoritarian regime.

But haven’t they sought to use the individual too often, too? The individual is practically negated and dominated out of existence in some of these societies today. They have tried to use the individual to control the future. They have said, “What’s important is the present generation; you don’t want all these future generations.” They have tried to use the second generation: “You don’t want all these future generations; what’s important is the individual.” They have used the group to smash out self. And the groups right now are trying to knock out man.

The tone scale in terms of nations is terribly interesting. It is covered to some degree in the Handbook, and that is still valid. High on the scale the group is highly analytical. This postulates that the group (not the individuals in it, but the group itself) has a very high survival value, and it also postulates that its thought is very fluid. People can join into this or take away from this very easily. They can change the general idea of the group. The group must be in the process of being enormously contributed to by everybody in it and it must be in the process of contributing to everybody in it. But there is a mean. If it ceases to let people contribute to it, but contributes to them like the United States is doing to Europe, it is an authoritarian proposition. It is buying them. There has got to be a two-way concourse.

There is interplay in this solution. The optimum solution would be that solution which did the maximum construction or creation along the maximum number of dynamics pertinent to the problem. In other words, if you got a solution which put all of these things forward simultaneously, and benefited each one of them all the way along, that would be the best solution you could possibly get for anything. You can postulate an absolute but absolutes don’t exist.

After a while some force gets entered in because something goes wrong, and the group gets down into a lower band. Then somebody enters some more force, and the group’s ideas are no longer quite alive, because the second the group itself starts to punish the individuals within it, it goes into a dwindling spiral. As it continues to decline, at a certain point it revolts as a group. It goes completely over and changes polarity.

The test of anything is its workability. Look this thing over and you find out when any solution has included more destruction for one of these dynamics than was absolutely necessary, the overall problem did not work out. But because of the complexities of problems, there is a natural, not a reactive, interplay of these interests. The individual says, “Well, what am I going to get out of this?” He has the right to ask the question if he is involved with a group. “What does this group mean to me as an individual?” But a real group has the right to ask him, “What do we get out of you, an individual, for the group?” So these solutions are interactive. As long as they are maintained in equilibrium they are in pretty good shape. The solutions of thought and life, and so forth, are contained in an adjudication of these things.

The revolution of the group is exactly the same thing as thought changing polarity, because the group is thought; it can change polarity. The people in it are sort of sucked into the idea that there is a revolt. It is going down the tone scale.

Now, theta is in violent conflict with MEST. And as a matter of fact, dynamics six and seven, when they are working as an interplay, seem to resolve a lot of our goals. If that interplay can be done harmonically, without intradestruction or turmoil, there is a successful amalgamation. We get an optimum solution. But when theta goes in against MEST with a smash, and MEST comes back against theta with a smash, the two of them will get into areas of turmoil. That is basically what an engram is. It is where theta (life force), God (life force), has smashed against matter.

An individual might have come along as one of its leaders who just suppressed the life out of it, or another nation may have come along and crushed against it; so the thought itself, the group thought, reverses polarity and becomes reactive thought. The idea turns inside out. About this time it really has to be picked up by a dictator or something of the sort. That is the natural evolution.

The whole problem in groups, then, can be much more easily resolved if we say that on the first dynamic we have a little bit of theta chopped off and individualized, and that on the second dynamic there is a trust of the future, individualized, and that on the group, there is another piece of theta individualized. Theta can’t be nailed down in one place unless there is MEST; MEST is absolutely necessary to one of these things being in place. On the fourth dynamic is a larger piece of theta, which is mankind, and on the fifth, a much larger piece which is life itself.

The revolution inevitably produces this dictator. People in a group are often persuaded to revolt so that they can be free, and they inevitably get an authoritarian regime. This is not so much that somebody intended it this way (men have better intentions than you would suppose) as it is that the person who gets into the position, not knowing these principles, is unable to give the people back their own self-determinism, the self-determinism of the group, and send them back up again. If he could do that he would be able to bring the tone scale and the survival value of his nation back up the line.

Now, actually, if you reversed the sixth and seventh dynamics to place MEST on the sixth dynamic, you would say, “Well, here’s a much larger piece,” and then all of a sudden say, “Well, there’s theta.” But this unfortunately doesn’t provide the factors and an arrangement of factors which resolve the problem. People have been trying to resolve this problem with a reversal of the sixth and seventh dynamics for thousands of years and it hasn’t yielded any solution. We reverse it and put theta on the sixth. We do not include MEST in the activities of theta. Maybe there is an “overall” that includes material universes every place, but he has obviously got an executive officer, and that executive officer is theta, that we are considering here.

When a group is on its way down it has used up quite a bit of its material, a lot of its, the soil is very often quite exhausted, the leader has got various problems, individuals in the group have been suppressed by it and the ideas which are brought in are not big enough. So it continues to decline, ordinarily, although it will fluctuate back and forth for quite a long time. Finally it will be dying.

Now, we could mark down these dynamics in a line, six of them plus MEST. But MEST would actually be — if you included this super echelon — a different kind of theta, a sort of a capital-T Theta, which would include the material universe. The individual is a little tiny piece of theta, and the future generations are there as a piece of theta in trust; then there is the group which is a bigger piece; man, an even bigger piece; life, a still bigger piece; then theta itself that we are dealing with, and then big theta, and this would be the overall thing. This will resolve problems.

This is the tone scale of an idea, not the tone scale of the individuals in the idea. Because people are authoritarianly pressing against this idea, the individuals themselves become terribly apathetic. But they don’t die. They can wander off and join other groups, various things can happen, but they get apathetic and the tone scale of the idea comes down very low.

We ask of a group, does it have a life, an entity, an individuality, and so forth? It has all of these things. It is not an organism which is composed of the bodies of man, any more than a man is just, happily or accidentally, a collection of bits of rock and chemicals which just happens to have life. If you look at a group and say “It’s just a collection of individuals,” that’s a bad mistake. The group is actually, actively, an entity.

Now, strange things can happen at this point. This is what we could call the “messiah point.” Somebody comes in and starts talking about a new idea. If it is a defeatist idea, the group will perish. If it is a negating idea of “Let’s escape and run away,” the group will perish. But if the messiah point is reached and all of a sudden an idea is entered into the group to the effect that “we must attack” (that is what the idea must consist of), this group goes on up the line again unless its natural resources and so forth are considerably exhausted, and even then I think it could pick up. It is driven up to the top. And when it gets up there it starts to get spinny; there is too much in it because it has come up to the top and has had a lot of entered into the turbulence, so it starts on down the line again.

That entity has to have within it certain factors. Certain things are demanded of the individuals by that group, and the individual has a right to demand certain things of the group. For instance, a group will start to fall apart if it cannot demand, of the people within it, contributions of effort to its life. Strangely enough, the individuals in a group have the right to be able to contribute to that group. To refuse an individual the right to contribute to the group is to push him back.

A new group starts high on the scale and is driven up along the line with a “we’ve got to attack” idea. Actually the Foundation is attacking although they haven’t recognized it. They are attacking a second echelon of — aberration — which is the turbulence between thought and the material universe. As a group they are attacking that, but it is a nebulous sort of a thing to attack, so it has to be formed up a little bit better as a recognition. It is not up to me to formulate it, but rather to the Foundation. If it formulates itself as a group, it will start on up the line, not because somebody has told it to go up and not because I have told it to go on up, but because its attack on the problem can bring it on up to the top of the tone scale. It has to be an attack on the problem as a group.

As an example, take a church where everybody is passing the collection box. A child drops his dime in the collection box, and the person who is doing the collection reaches in, picks up the dime and hands it back to him, but takes the dollar and all the rest from the other people along the line.

Now, every time in the past that men have started up as a group (they have a group, an idea — the idea being an entity, and the group being the entity), by the time they got to the top they were still terrifically active as people. But when they got up to the top they didn’t see an immediate goal to attack beyond that point. In the going they had gotten so much in turmoil with that when they got to the top the physical activity of the people, and the actual perpetuation of the ideas of the group to reach that goal, kept the engrams received by the group (the collisions with and force) from being thoroughly keyed in. And these were kept from being keyed in up to the moment when no goal was possible. Then the concentration and the necessity level of the mind of the group itself — of the idea — lowered, and key-ins started to occur. There is the golden age. The golden age in the past has been the end of a group, not its beginning.

The right to make a contribution to the group must not be denied to the individuals of that group. The only right the group has with regard to modification of that contribution is the right of coordinating it so that it doesn’t overbalance the purposes of the group. We have got to have an interplay and an interaction between dynamics one and three.

The group has generally fought, in the past, for survival in terms of luxury, possessions and material objects, and they finally get completely bogged down with these to the point where nobody is submitting any new ideas because there is nothing new to attack. The group immediately starts on the dwindling spiral of keyed-in engrams, and this idea deteriorates because it has engrams which are keyed in. Eventually it will come down to the bottom of the line again and die. That is the cycle of a group. It has tremendous force and pressure.

Now, the group must enhance the survival value of the first and second dynamics. The forecast of its survival can be made in these terms: The group has a potentiality of survival more or less in ratio to the amount it assists the individual, the future, man, life, theta and MEST. In other words, the group itself, as an entity, stays unblunted — it can thrive and survive — if it enhances the survival of all the other dynamics. It is true of any dynamic that it will survive so long as it enhances the survival of all the rest of the other dynamics. Therefore a group which considerably inhibits the survival of mankind will of course not in itself have survival value or be tolerated by the rest of mankind over a long period of time. It will be tolerated only to the point when the fourth dynamic is able to finally knock that group flat. And the fourth dynamic will try to knock that group flat. The group, then, has to enhance the survival of the individual and guarantee futures, not only for the individual but for children and the rest of it. A true group would include, in some degree, all the rest of the dynamics. If it included all the rest of them, it would be the most solid group imaginable.

When the group has reached the top of the scale, the only thing which would save it would be for somebody to give it a new goal. With a new goal, a big enough and bright enough idea, and people who could see suddenly that they didn’t have everything they needed, that there had to be a new goal, that they had to have some new target, something new to think about, or some new reason to be, that group would keep on going up. Or if they had, as part of their mores and their knowledge and their culture, ways and means to keep engrams on the group level from forming on the way up, they would arrive at the top as clears — in other words, if they could pick up their engrams as they went on up the line. I am talking about engrams in the group, not in the individuals of the group.

The family, as a small group, is a pretty stable unit. A city-state is a more stable unit within itself than a nation, inherently, except for the fact that it can’t protect itself so well from other larger groups. So it has a weakness. The compromise, but possibly not the best solution at all, is a nation. The nation provides at optimum for dynamic one, for families, for children of the future, for groups within itself — great clusters of groups — but it has a life of its own, and that nation, if it provides for the future survival of all mankind, cannot perish from the earth. That nation which threatens the survival of any section of mankind will perish and inevitably has perished from the face of the earth.

To find out how a group survives, one has to be able to exactly define the engram of the group, and for the survival of the group he has to have a process by which the processing of the group itself, not as individuals, can be done. Fortunately, the group borders over into the individual to such an extent that group engrams are quite normally little groups inside the big group which sort of act as engrams and points of contagion.

When the United States dropped an atom bomb at Hiroshima, it forfeited its rights as a group on the fourth dynamic. It actually committed national suicide in 1945, if we want to work it out philosophically. When we start working this thing out from the inevitability of that action, we find out that it threatened the survival of mankind. Other men were working on this, and other nations, but they didn’t drop the atom bomb. The United States did, so it has made a bigger thrust in the minds of other groups toward the cessation of survival of mankind than any organization ever has in the past, including Genghis Khan, Hitler, Napoleon or anyone else. In other words, the United States made a deeper stab into the fourth dynamic with that atom bomb, in the minds of the people of the groups of the world, than any other group or organization ever has. They are thinking “It can be us!”

One has to clear those. This is done by merely letting some light into the idea and clarifying the thought line. Any group that starts up has immediately three strikes on it, you might say, by being thoroughly connected to all the engrams of the past. Therefore a group would have to be pretty learned about what had been going on to really keep up. What is needed is lots of knowledge, lots of information, no secrets, no communication interruptions and nothing hidden. If it went on along that level it would succeed, providing it had a specific goal.

The reason for this is it demonstrates immediately that the sovereignty of nations ceases at this moment. On what depends the sovereignty of a nation? The right and ability to protect, to govern, to rule and to control its populace. In international law a government is one so long as it has its government in action over a small number of people. By definition, for instance, Chiang Kai-shek’s government in 1950 in Formosa is not a government, because it doesn’t occupy any of its terrain or any of its people or, so far as I have been able to learn, even any of the minds of its own people. It is like somebody standing outside the house saying “That’s my house” but being unable to get in, and nobody will let him in, and he has no deed of title.

The Foundation went along fine up until the moment when they reached Plan “B” in the Handbook. They had not had anything assigned as a Foundation beyond their own creation. There was no goal assigned beyond their existence. Now what were they to do?

What does an atom bomb do? There is no single defensive weapon right now which can resist or face an atom bomb. I don’t care how calm the U.S. Government has been about this business of the atom bomb in its efforts to calm panic where it doesn’t exist, saying you can live through an atomic war, and things like that. What happens to the sovereignty of a nation when it cannot protect itself against those things which might close in upon its borders? The United States Government today, in the face of the Russian possession of atom bombs, would not be able to protect any community in the country. You can’t intercept a guided missile going three thousand miles an hour. There are no radar screens. Jet planes don’t go this fast. You can’t pick up these things, spot them, cut them off. Force screens that would bounce them off are just a happy dream on the part of science fiction writers.

Actually they had some things to do. One of them was to validate Dianetics. A lot of people are working on that, but not everybody. So one of the palpitating heartbeats that keeps the group going is just this validation project, which will go on for a long time. That is a heartbeat but not the central goal. It doesn’t occupy enough space. This is how we are going about the business of surviving, not what we are surviving toward. What is our goal? What are we going to reach? What is the end product of all this work and formation that we are doing here for the individual group? Where does it end? What is it supposed to do? What does this group offer the individuals who are in it? What do the individuals in this group offer to it? And what is the goal? Yes — what is the goal?

Defense and offense depend upon fifty percent offensive strength and fifty percent defensive strength. A balanced army contains that, a balanced force of a nation contains that.

Now, as soon as that goal is defined thoroughly and adequately and is an agreed-upon thing amongst the people who are members of this group, which is an entity in itself, then the idea — the entity — becomes that much bigger. So the Foundation at that moment would in actuality become a group. Its government would be government by its own election.

Once before in the history of man, between 1500 and 1300 B.C., a guided missile — that is, an unlimited missile weapon — came in upon mankind. He had no defense for it. All of a sudden here was one hundred percent offensive strength and zero percent defensive strength. He couldn’t defend himself against this weapon, and all Europe was in chaos for two hundred years. The nations that existed there, whatever they were, were so thoroughly mixed up that we have virtually no records for the period to amount to anything. It will rather amaze you when I tell you what the weapon was against which there was no defense. It was a man on a horse with a sword.

As a matter of fact, no group could possibly exist long as a self determined organism which wasn’t able to exercise a good, solid power of choice on what was going on.

There were no walls or walled towns that were able to stand up. Cavalry’s unlimited offensive action was of such an impact value that foot troops standing around with a few crude knives or something like that couldn’t stop them. So, the cavalry came in off the steppes, horse and sword, and practically wiped things out. There was chaos and there was no government possible.

Actually, groups do exercise a power of choice even when somebody is appointed to take care of them. If somebody is appointed to take care of the group and the group gets restive, then that person can, in the interest of efficiency, no longer take care of that group. But this requires that the group have a bigger thought above it to keep it fixed up, so it had better be stable in itself. That doesn’t mean that it would be stable in itself. So there has to be some power of choice within this group.

The United States has now, with this guided missile weapon, worked itself up to a point where the second anybody starts really throwing around atom bombs, no government will be possible on a national scale. The groups will have to fall back to very small units. It’s an interesting philosophic observation that here we have a violation of the fourth dynamic to this degree by a third dynamic with a guided missile weapon.

Tremendous confusion arises in any group where any point from which ideas are emanating is suddenly confused as the point of authority for action and being. In other words, it could be thought that authoritarian action should be expected from the source of an idea.

The point I am making here is that it requires a balance of all seven dynamics, actually, to work easily and well. Now, when we regard hard facts such as an unlimited missile weapon, and that a nation, a group on the face of the earth, has threatened all mankind, we cannot blind ourselves completely to the fact that the rest of the dynamics are going to sort of cave in, particularly on that nation.

Groups evolve ideas. The Foundation is always evolving ideas. I stand with the group and I pick up ideas, formulate them and work with them and so on. I am working on various ideas of processing. People immediately turn around to me because I work with ideas.

So what must a group do? This is the only reason I discuss this. It must have within it the potentialities of supporting and assisting the other six dynamics. It must help the individual. It must help the future. It must help groups (because there are always groups within groups). It must help man, who is not just another group. Man is not organized as a group, he is a species — an entirely separate thing. It must go into the remaining three dynamics too. That group must assist life. Going out and planting corn, planting trees and planting rose bushes is assisting life. It must be in concordance with theta and the dynamic toward theta. And on the seventh dynamic it should have as one of its functions the assisting of. That happens to be the utilization of in a harmonic fashion, rather than the destruction of. It must create with.

If I want a favor done, the group will do the favor. It is far better to have it on the line of a favor than to have it on the line of an order, because the second that this idea starts to become authoritarian on the individual, then these people are not contributing to that group because they aren’t the substance of that group. The body of the group then is laid away a bit.

Let’s look over the problem now and see what we have gone over here. Any time you want to find out what is lacking in a group, inspect the group carefully and patiently from the standpoint, one by one, of the dynamics. What does it offer the individual? Does it permit the individual to offer anything to it? Does it offer anything to the future? Does it permit the future to offer anything to it? In other words, is it providing for children to be able to contribute to it? Does it offer anything to groups or does it merely seek to destroy groups within itself? Does it offer anything to the groups surrounding it? Is it permitting those groups to contribute to it, and is it contributing to those groups? We are talking now of one group sitting in the midst of many other groups not allied to it. It must have an interchange with these other groups. It must have a possibility of interchange in them, and then it must also have an interchange with the groups which are within it as a group. It must be able to contribute to and receive contributions from those groups within it.

Now I will just show you how an authoritarian regime would go, using this as an illustration. The point would be “He must certainly be the administration of this group because he is a source of the ideas of this group. He therefore must be the source of authority for this group.” It could work that way, very easily.

The only way you could really knock a big group apart would be to set up a number of small groups within it and then fix it so the small groups couldn’t contribute to the big group, and then fix it so the big group wouldn’t contribute to the small groups. Because the essence of a group is thought, it is fairly easy to interrupt this sort of thing.

So a man who is furnishing ideas to the group is put in a very serious position. A fellow by the name of Lenin got poisoned for it! There is an interesting aspect there: He had picked up Karl Marx’s work and he was furnishing all kinds of ideas, and everybody kept pushing him forward as administrative executive. They were in a point of turmoil and confusion, there was not much time, and the only way he could regulate the group, he thought, was by an elective line. But this group did not need an elective, self determined thing at that moment. It was at a point on the curve where it was in the throes of a revolution, and it couldn’t be selective itself. It was impossible. At that point on the tone scale it had to have an authoritarian punch!

All this hocus-pocus about minority rights, the minority individual, the crushed minority and so forth, is actually one of the cruder operations. First one convinces a minority that it is a minority and then one convinces it that it isn’t permitted to contribute to the big group, then one convinces both it and the big group that the big group cannot contribute to it — and the big group of course is destroyed from within. A small group which is not permitted to contribute to the big group will, as its reverse action, turn against the big group and destroy it. It is acting on dynamics, and the dynamics interact regardless of direction; the dynamics will interact. And in order to keep the thing balanced this interaction had better be a creative one, because if there isn’t a creative interaction, then there is going to be a destructive interaction. There is no question of there being a null — a complete, utter null. That is like the highly theoretical, hair-thin point of zero on the scale between right and wrong.

Lenin died. It wouldn’t have mattered who killed him. The group would have killed him one way or the other. The group expressed the fact that it killed him by accepting the leadership of the man who has very often, by rumor, been declared responsible for having done so — in spite of the fact that this group loved Lenin! It shows the amount of convulsion which can go on when some of these simple tenets are completely overlooked.

The group could be estimated as to what it intends. It could be estimated as to its future and as to its size. Things could be estimated about a group by examining its relationships with the other dynamics. Does it assist them? How much does it assist them? How much does it destroy them? Of course, one must not overlook the fact that it is impossible to construct and create without at the same time to some slight degree destroying, because one has to convert. The conversion is a destruction of something.

Let’s return to the analogy of the Foundation. It has to be a group. What are its purposes? What are its ideas and so on? It doesn’t have a foundational goal! The idea of Dianetics is to do this and that, but as a group it has to have additional goals which will take care of the people within it all the way around the clock, because there are other things vital to the business of living. And a group, to be a real group, must care for practically everything there is in the periphery of life. The group is a true group in ratio to the extent it does compare with these things.

Any group’s future could be estimated. That means that the Elks Club could be estimated, as could be the Polynesian nation or a Boy Scout troop. You can estimate the survival potentials of that group and its growth, because — and this is true of all of the dynamics, all of them — as it contributes to the survival of the other groups it is granted more theta. Groups might be said to be on an allocation basis. A small group that starts to contribute constructively, the interplay being excellent on all the other dynamics, gets more and more and more things going into alignment and there’s more and more theta present until, all of a sudden, nothing could possibly interrupt this group’s progress — nothing. It is as inevitable as bulldozers.

For instance, a university is not a group. A university only occasionally furnishes the future of its individuals. It is assisting an individual, as a man-to-man sort of an effort, to go out and work with a group. It is just giving an assist. Furthermore, the university does not offer within it such units as the family, and so on. It doesn’t have the center units necessary.

One just looks over the problem to see what this group has to contribute and what permits the group to be contributed to, and he looks and sees how much it complements the other dynamics, and that group can be estimated. If it does all of these things very well, it grows, bigger and bigger and bigger. Actually, at the final end, unless something again reverted against it and the cycle of life changed — the cycle of all these dynamics changed — it would embrace pretty well all of mankind.

One of these social clubs, like the Elks Club, will get started and begin calling itself a group and try to behave like one. It wonders why people don’t dash in suddenly and join up, and people will starve and sweat along trying to get this thing to work as a group. But the essentials are missing, so they have an awful time.

The only reason why groups in the past have not reached out and embraced mankind was because they violated very flagrantly several of these dynamics. Every one of them did. If one were to look over these dynamics he would find that the plane of interaction is such that if a group were to support the dynamics creatively in just a halfway fashion, that group would still go out and embrace all of mankind. It would get the whole universe into it after a while.

Without all these essentials as a group it does not exist. It is not necessary for the group to own a single piece of land. It can have an occupancy, just exactly as much land as the people themselves have, but the group itself doesn’t have to own that land. This is another mistake that government makes. All that a group can do is protect the land the individual owns. If it protects the land the individual owns, it will continue to hold sway over the individuals. It offers protection.

There is the interesting point. A group is thought. You might say a group has a soul. A group is its own soul. It is a thought, and it has a body. The body is its perpetuating or perpetuated ideas, its ethic, customs, precedents — all of these various things — and its understanding of its own goals (ideas again). That is the body of the group.

We look over a national government in the light of these tenets now, just as we’ve looked over the Foundation, and we find out what it offers and what it doesn’t offer. We find that a national government is taking far more in contribution than it is giving back in service, by means of the income tax and so forth. For instance, it is taking contribution on the pretext — or the fraud if you want to call it that — that it will protect the personal property and the persons of the individuals who are dedicated to it. Supposedly, 36.6 percent of the United States tax dollar is dedicated to protecting the person and property of individuals from incursion by other elements, groups or individuals.

Now, the heartbeats of the group are the ideas on which it runs from day to day, the interplay’s as it resolves the major ideas and problems and thoughts. The heartbeats are the small ideas that go along in the midst of it. A group has a survival potential, then, which is theoretically infinite.

The only trouble is the weapon of today cannot be so defended against. The moment the atom bomb was delivered onto the national stage, nations ceased to be able to fulfill their full functions as groups. Individuals have’ more or less sensed this to some degree. They have become rather lackadaisical right now about war, infantry and so forth. They are waiting for the big punch.

The group’s size has to do with the size of its idea. This is not that it has got a big idea that it is going to do something or other; we are talking now about the fact that the idea is good, that the goals of this group are good. If the ideas which perpetuate those goals are good and it is following along the line set up on these seven dynamics, that group is a body. It is a thought which has taken on an actual body. It exists as such to a theoretical point where you could, for instance, strip half of the individuals out of it or put ten times as many individuals into it and it would carry on.

In other words, the United States has got this tremendous budget which is supposed to protect the citizens from the incursion of other nations. Why then do we find civil defense motions?

The finest groups in terms of morale, esprit, ideas, goals and futures have been made in the past out of criminals, psychotics and aberrees beyond aberrees! The individual aberration state is only a minor influence upon the group, actually, because there is such a small part in each one. But the group influence upon the individual is tremendous. Man is so thoroughly evolved, he is so constructed and he exists to such a degree as a group person that he is lost and doesn’t exist actually at all unless he is part of that body of ideas. Exile from a group is actually tantamount to death to an individual. Exile from all groups would be the most hideous thing that could happen to an individual.

People are suddenly very interested in civil defense. I was in New York City about a year ago, and all of a sudden I got completely roped off in the traffic. The American Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and several doctors were practicing evacuation of an atom-bombed area. They had permission from the government of the city of New York to do this.

We see this when we go down to any prison. What is the worst curse we throw against these people? We say they are antisocial. We could say they are against the third dynamic. They are individuals that the third dynamic has kicked out. They are not permitted to contribute and the third dynamic doesn’t contribute to them — they are out, they are dead, and they act like it, too.

One small organization outside of Philadelphia issued a little notice in the paper and said they were holding a meeting to discuss civil defense — and the place was crammed! A place which was to accommodate a couple of hundred people received a couple of thousand. People are very serious and practical about the whole thing.

There you have the picture of groups. These are axioms on a philosophic echelon. I would not even begin to tell you that this whole subject has been thoroughly worked out, but these are evidently the basic tenets — for this reason only: When one uses them and uses this viewpoint, he sees so many things which he did not see before, he can predict so much information, and when he looks for it the information is found to be there.

The government has taken the attitude that we are very tender-minded, that we must be protected from these shocking horrors and so forth, but nobody knows better than the authorities themselves that there is no protection against this thing to amount to anything, and they are in a complete state of apathy about it!

In this discussion of the basic laws, the basic fundamentals and postulates of the group, I have given you a new basic and a new background for the evaluation of any dynamic of the seven.

For instance, we found out that the city government of Los Angeles had put one man, part time, and a couple of secretaries under the Parks and Memorials Commission, and this was the atom-bomb civil defense program. The newspapers are having a holiday with this.

That god which does not contribute to the society and to which the society does not contribute is very soon off his pedestal. Have you ever noticed that? Take, then, thought: you can consider any thought as a godlet, you might say, or as a small devil. You can consider thought — pieces of thought — as ideas, actually, in their interaction. The Greeks deified these thoughts. Venus was love, the thoughts of love, everything that had to do with love. They fixed up an anthropomorphic thing and set it on a pedestal, and that was Venus, a godlet. And then we say afterwards they were pagans and heathens to do such a thing, but I don’t think they were. I don’t mean that it was right to set up a statue and worship that, but they were absolutely right in their analogy that a thought and a body of ideas is, to some slight degree, an immortal entity and is an entity. And the overall immortal entity, of course, has been worshipped by man as one entity for a very long time.

The officially designated groups to which we are dedicated are suddenly not only not protecting property but are actually in a state of apathy about their ability to do so. But the citizens aren’t. People study, study, study. One of the best sellers on the market right now is a little pocket book about what to do in case an atom bomb drops.

Now, if you look at the problem, not from a religious standpoint, but just from this philosophic standpoint, I think you can look around and spot the bad, non-survival points in any number of groups of which you know. You can find out why these groups do bad things or good things to individuals, and what the individual is worth to the group. We can get a sentient estimate, then, of the survival value and the force of a group in the society.

I am afraid that the government hasn’t an element in it which can be supported by the people at this time. There must be something missing; the idea is decaying but the people aren’t. Here we have an elective type of government. Certainly, if there was a solution being offered by the government, we would be putting it into effect. The people themselves are evidently trying to work under a new cooperative idea, and you get the first germs of its evolution in the fact that you get public meetings without government sponsorship, and public interest in a governmental function — the protection of the person and the property against foreign invasion. That is the first germ of a new idea.

The fact that communism is spreading all the way over Eurasia and into the rest of the world merely states that it is a body of perpetuating and perpetuated ideas which happen to be superior to any of those which have been advanced to those people in those places.

Anybody could come along and start pushing this idea — it’s right there waiting to be pushed. In the ordinary course of human affairs, if left alone, it would evolve very easily into a new kind of a government. If it weren’t hit from abroad, if missiles didn’t hit it, it could evolve into a new idea.

The United States fell back by a lack of, you might say, “God power.” It didn’t throw into the breach its own tenets or contribute itself to those people to the extent the other group did. We measure this up and find out that the United States had a principle known as isolationism between 1938 and 1941. And then all of a sudden it was engaged in a great and awful war. And in 1950 the United States is trying belatedly to contribute something to these people that it “liberated.” But it is not permitting them to contribute anything back. There are tariffs and all sorts of reasons why they can’t contribute anything to this country — their books, music, their languages. In the United States there are very few people who speak even one European language. They are taught in the high schools, but I shudder to think of what a high-school student does with the Spanish language, which is right next door to him in Mexico, not to mention what he does to French and German. Other countries have not been permitted to contribute very much. Yet American arts, sciences and all the rest of it originate massively from these countries. We can look at any society and see the enormous interchange that exists with it. We have taken things from China, Japan, and many other countries as well.

We are in a period of change, but it is not going to get a chance. The second that this country suffers an onslaught from a foreign source, an atom-bombing or something like that, it will be a shock, and it is going to be an engram laid against the federal government which will practically nullify it. We’re not interested in the horror tale of whether it will kill off half the people all at once. (I notice Japan is very much of a going concern.) The point is that there is no defense against it, and it will catalyze. There will be something else. One of the main reasons is that the center of the federal government probably will cease to exist.

Groups are mutually interchanging all the time. When that interchange is interrupted, watch out! And when any group suddenly rears back and out of some mistaken philosophy says “Now we are in a position to smash all of another dynamic,” it is inevitable that that group will perish, or mankind itself will perish. So the die is cast, right now, between the United States and the rest of mankind.

It is interesting what ripe, ripe ground this is for a revolutionary. The people and the whole group idea at that time will be down into the tone 1 band. Somebody could hit this country on an authoritarian line and actually do remarkable things on this line. It could happen that some general of forces will find himself in possession of an untouched army corps somewhere in the continental limits of the United States.

The United States has been taught to think of itself as a benefactor of mankind. There are a lot of agents that are undoing that teaching in the world. Actually, Americans know what they consist of in the United States, but do other people know? No, I’m afraid they don’t. And we wonder why there is unrest and turmoil, why our taxes are going up, why things aren’t running quite right, why programs aren’t going right.

I’m not just writing science fiction now. I’m showing you what the score is with regard to something like this.

I knew basically what could be done and that something could be done about this, but I had never until recently crystallized that into a recognition of the fact that a group is a segment of theta. As soon as one recognizes that, he finds that where any group offends against the higher echelon of theta, theta is going to twist over and come back upon that group.

So the government goes out; but the second that first bomb hits, the trust and faith of the people in the government vanishes because they know there are no radar screens out there to intercept these bombs. The government hasn’t got them to put up. Here is a weapon against which there is no defense. Now somebody else has got the weapon. On specious or spurious grounds of some character, but mainly just because there is disorganization, somebody will insist that what we need at this time is not a self-determined state; and “In view of the great emergency of the situation . . .” and the fact that he has the Fifth Army Corps or something at his back, some joker with a few stars glittering will undoubtedly move in. There goes the first spark on this group.

Now, it is an odd thing that picking engrams out of groups is not terribly hard. One only has to expose them to view. But that is true of every engram, isn’t it? It just comes to view. And it is easy to treat thought and bring a hidden thought to view. It is hard to get thought out of, but it is easy to get and expose a thought within a body of thought. All one has to do is pick up the curtain slightly and show people what it was. There is nothing easier than “de-engramifying” a group. It depends upon very fast, excellent communication within a group. Groups can be big in exact ratio to the amount and speed of communication and transportation existing.

Now, a new group idea, not having been postulated at that moment, will be absolutely vital to this operation. Unless it exists, the survival value of the group is very bad. It will go down into apathy. It will skid down from the dictatorship instead of going up, because a dictator cannot possibly introduce back into the society authority which he took away from it so suddenly and quickly, and suddenly relax and withdraw, unless he has taken away also the aberrations which made it necessary for the setup to take place.

So, to actually go back and look over a group and knock out the society’s aberrations and heal scars that have passed before, it is only necessary to pick up the curtain. One can clear a group but that is not enough, because a group consists of ideas. The group must be given more theta. The ideas have got to be better. The group must understand more closely what it is as a group. One sees that the interplay between theta and the group is very close.

Claudius I, for instance, tried very hard to give the Roman Empire back to the senate and back to the people. He worked on it diligently but he was not able to do so. He had not realized that he was dealing with a philosophical principle: a tone scale. The people of Rome were fluctuating around the lower end of the scale and nobody had pushed them up, and they certainly weren’t en route up to the top of the scale. They didn’t have any future goal. After all, the Roman Empire had conquered the world. Where else did they have to go?

Here sits a nation, the United States, which has an atom bomb. But this nation happens to have within its borders the majority of communication technicians and communication facilities of mankind, and yet it sits and talks about an iron curtain!

Alexander had gone out and conquered the world. Where else did he have to go? All his army could do as a group was to fall back. They had reached their top scale and they were on their way down.

The breaking up of the engram and the clearing of engrams from the social order would have to be accomplished by, at the same time, offering the rest of the groups a greater contribution than has been given to them in the past. This is not in terms of. One doesn’t contribute in terms of. One contributes in terms of ideas, thought and life.

It isn’t a question of whether or not this country would get atom bombed. The second it starts talking about throwing atom bombs — and it was the first one to talk about it — it is just inviting them. I am afraid that the future could be better thought about in terms of having a new set of goals ripe and ready.

The solution is actually very, very simple. One just gives the rest of the groups a far better idea than they have, and believe me, that is very easy. A bunch of boys over at one of the big advertising agencies could sit down for a single morning and whip up a better idea than communism or democracy, were it not that people aren’t permitted to think about these things.

It wouldn’t be up to me to outline any goals, or even to you as an individual to outline any goals, but it might help if somebody made suggestions with regard to what these goals might be. The goals should not include just plain self-preservation, which was never the first law of nature. The self-preservation thing which says “Because we’ve been slapped we gotta fight back, we gotta kill ‘em, we gotta kill ‘em, we gotta kill ‘em” is not sensible. A group could only have this as a momentary resurgence. That is your relapse into apathy at the end of a war.

Democracy is an organizational plan. Communism is an ideological set of ideas. And here is an organizational plan that is trying to face a set of ideas. When that bit of nonsense is pointed out, all of a sudden we realize that we need an ideology. We have got to have a body of ideas, and they have got to be good ideas. Imagine, the best salesmen on earth stumped for an idea. Oh, nonsense!

People don’t realize how much of a borderline this whole idea has been going through since World War I — the psychosis of war and relapse. The goals get more and more basic as more and more enters against thought and ideas. The general tone starts coming down, to the point where the only time a country has a goal is when it is fighting.

All the United States has to have is much better ideas than are being sold to the rest of the world, and to communicate them faster. With all its communication equipment it could consolidate the thing and make sure that there is an inter-contribution to the rest of the dynamics on the whole subject, and actually the world picture would collapse in terms of all of this provoked war. One of the first things the United States would have to do, however, is to get rid of the hot potato which it picked up at Los Alamos — give it to the United Nations — and then build another Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would not take long to do that.

Actually, you can see that the societies of men have been insane for a long, long while if you measure them on the tone scale, because they are going from tone 2 down to tone 0 and back up to tone 2, and there has never been one yet which really, one hundred percent, went up to a

Nothing travels with the instantaneousness of thought. It is very, very fast. The velocity of a thought is directly proportional to its ability to assist the dynamics. If it has a large value to the survival of all the dynamics it has a terrific velocity.

4. It has been a very low order of fluctuation.

People have an idea that there is a social inertia. There is no such thing as social inertia. A body of people is not hard to move in any particular direction. That is one of the things by which people have sought to keep their groups stable. Recognize that as an idea with which groups were trying to hold themselves stable when they didn’t have anything else to offer. They said,

What the society needs at the present time, more than anything else, is some kind of a goal for the whole society. (This isn’t including Dianetics at all.) What are they really going to do? What is the country going to do as a whole? The United States had a big goal as long as it was moving west. Then it hit the Pacific Ocean. “Oh, what do we do now? Well, let’s develop everything.” “Well, we got everything pretty well developed. Now what do we do? Well, lets fight!” But this kind of thinking isn’t very good thinking in the periphery and arena of the world.

“Groups are very hard to move.” Newton’s laws of interaction definitely state that a body tends to remain in a state of inaction or persist in a state of constant motion unless influenced by outside forces. That is inertia. And they said, “The inertia of the people is such that they could not possibly accept anything like this.”

I can visualize a General Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom saying, “In view of the existing emergency — the death of the president of the United States, the vice president and all cabinet members except three (whom we have just executed) — the government of the United States is hereunder and hereafter to be conducted in the forms of martial law until the civil populace can be rescued!”

That is a survival mechanism and a sort of a little engram, and the second we pick up the corner of it and expose it, it is gone. It is just an idea. There isn’t a nation or a body on the face of the earth that in the face of good ideas and fast communication couldn’t be changed overnight. We are playing with ideas; we are playing with thin air. But the second that bigger and better ideas are entered into the picture, then the ideas which have to overcome them or face them have to be bigger and better.

And people will go on being rescued, being dragged up here and there. Then they will say, “You know, I don’t think that this Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom is a good guy.”

Communism came along and offered to the world a bigger and better idea than the world had up to that time. The only thing that could possibly have been done about that was to offer a still bigger and better idea.

This is reported to Zachariah by his subordinates. He will say, “Who said that?” “Oh, a fellow by the name of Smith, and another by the name of Jones, over there.”

What does a nation of individuals ordinarily do when it confronts an idea — a revolutionary idea — springing up in its midst? It goes out and worries in terms of. It thinks in terms of, not in terms of theta. It says, “Shoot ‘em!” It says, “Send ‘em to Siberia,” which is a space preventer. It says this, it says that, but not in terms of theta.

“Well, what town are they from? Well, is there any more dissension over in that town? What’s the name of the town?”

Now, the second we get the ideas combated by ideas, then we are all right. The only possible way, evidently, that communism could have been swept away was for some nation or some group to have given the world a much better idea than communism, much more workable, that assisted the seven dynamics better. And the second it gave a better idea than communism, there would not have had to have been anybody shot. Communism would have folded up.

“Jenkins Center.”

Advertising campaigns are continually trying to build up these ideas.

“Any more dissension in that town?”

They do it in various ways, but all an advertising campaign needs to go is a better idea. When we are talking in terms of ideas we are talking about the product.

“Well, we don’t know. Somebody over there said this morning he didn’t think that last communiqué of yours was very . . .”

What we are talking about is the interchange through the society of these ideas. People start to get killed over something that can be changed practically overnight if you have the communication. So it is a very silly thing to fight a war, because all the war will do to the idea is confirm it by injuring enough people for that idea to get mixed up so thoroughly with that kicks back and forces the idea, and it becomes an aberration. But as long as it is kept in a fluid line, as long as it isn’t attacked particularly but just a better idea is furnished for it, the dangerous idea will go away and a better idea will come forward.

“They said what?”

By this time the man has really been slugged around. I don’t care which Zachariah Q. Swivelchairbottom it is, administration is a tough job and it makes men nervous! All of a sudden he is faced with this, faced with that — emergencies, emergencies. He has found out that one man can run things in a very, very short space of time and can get an awful lot accom- plished. The communication lines all come in to him, and he has dispatch riders running out, and it all goes across his desk. But then he has to back off that spot.

Management, by the way, is the process of backing off consecutive spots.

So he backs off that desk, but then a high priority comes in and he has got to form another desk. That gets too tough, so he steps back further. The first thing you know, every piece of information he gets comes from one, two, three, four, five, six posts; and these fellows are trying to hold their jobs and they have got relatives and their own pet vendettas. One of these assistants — number five in this particular case — was through Jenkins Center as a boy, and the doggoned gas station attendant spilled some grease on his pants. He doesn’t quite remember exactly what happened, but he knows this town Jenkins Center isn’t so hot, and now he hears of these subversive activities.

So of course Zachariah has no other choice but to say “Well, let’s see, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Military Police Divisions with their armored tanks are just too fully occupied. You’ll just have to do something about Jenkins Center. We’re not quite sure what, but its obviously a foments of rebellion.”

So a couple of police go over and say, “What’s the matter with you people? You’re talking wrong. You’re saying the communiqués aren’t any good. You know those are the best-written communiqués that have ever been issued. Now you know that!”

And the others say, “No, we don’t know it. The literary prose is terrible. It’s awful! And quite in addition to that it says that all city reservoirs shall be twelve feet deep, and we’ve got one nine feet deep, but it’s all right for our town. But you say they’ve all got to be twelve feet deep because there might be water shortage. I don’t know what you guys are talking about! There’s no water shortage around here! Haven’t you heard? This is Jenkins Center, northern Oregon! No water shortage up here!”

“Well, we have got to take care of those deserts down there in the south.” “Well, what are you sending us this order for?”

“Well, it’s all right. Overall administration — these things have just got to happen, that’s all! Well, you go out and fill that reservoir up to the proper point where it’s supposed to be filled or we’ll blast it up. And by the way, you’re fired.”

It starts small. This person didn’t like the idea of getting fired. The next thing you know, somebody else gets sour on this thing. He gets a communiqué that says, “Hereinafter, at four o’clock all shoes shall be polished by somebody named Betty.” And there isn’t a girl named Betty in the whole town!

Yes, it is just about like that, because administration is a tough job. Until you are in an administrative post, you don’t really realize how confused it can get. Information is colored by self-interest, it’s colored by bad things, it comes from various sources. Finally you hire an intelligence corps that gives you more information — only their reports make even more administration. And then you get some administrators to administrate the intelligence corps so that they can administrate the administrators, and soon it is so complex that everybody is passing around paper clips and going slowly nuts. So this sort of thing cannot be run efficiently on an authoritarian basis beyond the point where easy communication is possible amongst all members of the group.

Easy communication makes for the development of the ideas, the heartbeats upon which the group members are working to accomplish their highest goals. Communication makes it possible for the idea itself to live and survive. We find out that ease of communication necessarily makes for a high affinity level. Affinity is just another word for little theta.

When we find this is the case, a group quickly slops over its natural dimensions, unless it is so thoroughly amalgamated throughout the society by easy communication channels that it can actually set up many groups more or less doing the same thing. Then if they are still in easy communication with each other the agreement can still exist, but not on an authoritarian level.

There is a natural group size, although I don’t know what it would be. It is that group size in which ease of communication currently is very possible. That keeps the affinity of the group up and their agreement goes along beautifully. In other words, the big idea runs.

An authoritarian line, every time a forceful order goes down, chips off a little piece of affinity, which cuts off a little more communication, which knocks down a little more reality. They go into this dizzy dwindling spiral.

A dwindling spiral is simply on this triangle of communication, reality and affinity. When we break some of this affinity, a little bit of the reality goes down, and then communication goes down, which makes it impossible to get affinity as high as before; so a little bit more gets knocked off affinity, and then reality goes down, and then communication, and then a little bit more dwindles off affinity and all of a sudden reality goes down, and so on. This is a marching line of consecutive triangles, and there is your dwindling spiral in progress, until it hits the bottom — death — which is no affinity, no communication and no reality.

When any group embarks upon an authoritarian line, where administration is not compared to the general idea on which the group is operating, where everything is enforced by orders given without consultation with the group itself, and where the administrator does not exist because the group wants him and is not practicing as a servant of that group — a point of service to that group — you get an authoritarian type of regime and enter the dwindling spiral.

Now, there are moments of emergency (and these are inherent in the evolution of groups) where an individual will suddenly arise and say, “This is the thing to do! “ He is followed because it is a good idea, not because he is a particular person. He is as good as the idea, and he should be followed as far as the idea and no further.

So, in other words, when we talk of putting a group together, we see how one is going to be taken apart.

Let Us speak of an atom-bombed nation. A central government, which has been operating more and more on an increasingly authoritarian line all the time, which is trying to put up the semblance of contributing too much to certain members of the populace and which is taking too much from other members of the populace, which doesn’t have a parity of interchange for all the individuals in it, which is creating classes and various things on an authoritarian line, gets hit suddenly and savagely by something which it cannot prevent. At the moment that happens the admission is right there that the government was not preventing it. That will be a moment of rage and revolution against the government even though it never fired a shot. Even though the government is gone and now can’t be revolted against, people are going to get sore. They are going to be mad.

They might be kept from revolting, if their attention can be suddenly focused on something far away. A fellow says, “Russia did that to us. The solution to all this is to go to fight Russia. Let’s go to war with Russia right now!” and he centers all of this rage which has suddenly accumulated, and channels it and sets up an artificial short-term goal. And these short-term goals, of course, start into the dwindling spiral. You’ve got to have long-term goals to succeed. You have to think to get a long-term goal; that’s why very few governments ever evolve them.

The line of the dwindling spiral coasts into nothing. But each time there is a revolution a strong man will pick it up. A strong man can catalyze a group. A group can be catalyzed and is continually catalyzed by the few effectives within it. But it can only be catalyzed by them. The group itself must be catalyzed into a point where it carries itself, where it governs itself, where it operates with its own consent and evolves its own goals. If it is to go up the line, it has to be able to keep itself, as a group, processed of the things that happened to it in the past, and if it does that, man might possibly be able to get up to a tone 4 and get a continuous golden age. Until that time he will be unable to do so.