[Start of Lecture]

[Start of Lecture]

Okay. I'd like to talk to you now about something I don't know anything about.

Well, probably for the first time in my career I am saying very honestly that I have nothing to talk to you about tonight at all. Usually I use that as a sort of a gag and so on, but it's absolutely true.

The difference between me talking about something I don't know anything about and somebody else talking about something he doesn't know anything about, is the fact that I'll tell you so.

I was going to say a few words about organization and the handling and functions of organizations, finishing off what I was talking about last week. But you possibly wouldn't be much interested in that, so I thought I'd go off onto something else – unless, of course, you wanted to hear something about that.

I want to talk to you about testing. Don't know anything about it, see. As a matter of fact, this is factually true. Don't know anything about testing and so it's a very, very good subject for a lecture.

Audience voices: Yes.

Now, testing was invented sometime, I don't know when, see. I don't know when it was invented. I don't know who invented it. I could hazard some guesses. I could say it developed originally out of the cave days. One caveman would get out and he'd pull a woman by the hair for a quarter of a mile, and he'd say, "I'm feeling weak today, I guess. Only made it for a quarter of a mile," or something like that.

Well, I don't see any great note of enthusiasm there. Organizations are something that get on one's nerves with the greatest of ease, but nevertheless, my talk, I'll have you note, is devoted to getting it off and getting them off our nerves. So you see it is a different kind of a feature.

It might have developed then. It might have developed some other time, but I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know. I never read a book on the subject, either.

If organizations get on your nerves, then this talk is to get organizations off your nerves, don't you see? And not only get off of your nerves but get into your bank account. See? Got that? Got that?

The whole subject of testing is probably, though, a very great subject. I've met an awful lot of people who knew an awful lot about testing, and so on, but I never had the benefit of listening to them say very much. They're sort of reticent about the thing. So I'm quite sure that there is a huge subject known as testing. I'm sure of it! In other words, I am convinced.

A Scientologist should have a great deal to do with organizations in view of the fact that organizations do not know what organizations are or how to run organizations; they just happen. An organization says, "We're going to organize now," and they set up a command line, and then they use that for their communications line, and the next thing you know, why, boom! Either everybody is in confusion – so much in confusion that nobody dares kill the organization (that's usually how they survive), or the organization simply knocks itself off. Because it uses its communication line – as its communication line – its command line. From general down to private is used as their communication line.

But the facts of the case are that it has never been proven to me. See, I'm convinced that there is such a subject as testing. But it has never been proven to me – it's never been proven to me conclusively – that up till the days of Dianetics and Scientology, it had any value at all. Because what was the good of knowing somebody's existing state – what was the good of knowing it – if you couldn't do anything about it?

Now, this has evidently happened recently to a very large electronic recorder company in America, one of the best, because it is losing all of its good people. Now, when a big organization starts to lose all of its good people, then you can be very sure that there is something wrong with its communication system. It means that those people cannot make the organization and its communications systems function in order to permit them to continue a good, productive level.

Oh, well, maybe it merely convinced him he was in bad condition. I know, but what do you want to convince him he's in bad condition for if you can't do anything about it? Got the idea? Factually?

An organization is a servomechanism to the doingness of people. Now, I've told you what an organization is. An organization is a group of terminals and communication lines associated with a common purpose. That's what an organization is. All right. Talked to you about that for a whole hour, didn't I? Fact.

So all the tests that we have and are using – most of them – are based on just one premise and one premise only: that Homo sapiens is in an existing state, and their textbooks say that it can't be altered. So all testing was designed to prove, evidently, before 1950, is that man couldn't change.

Now, here's something very peculiar: An organization never does anything. Never. It can't hurt. It can't bleed. It can't think. It can't act. It's a postulate of a purpose sitting there with communication terminals and communication lines, and that is the totality of the organization. We have to move something alive in on it before it seems to do anything. But the organization never actually does a thing – never. Never accomplishes a second's work.

Now, it's interesting that we have found an area where man can't change. It is very, very difficult to change a man downward. Very difficult to change a man downward. The things you have to do to him to change him downward made very good newspaper reading throughout the end of the Korean War – brainwashing.

All an organization can do is to assist and facilitate those people's doingness who wish to do. That's all an organization can do. It can help you with your doingness.

But even a psychologist who only knew these methods couldn't change people downward with any consistency. And as a consequence he assumed people couldn't change.

Therefore, what an organization is, very sharply, is a servomechanism to the doingness of people. Now, what do you mean by a servomechanism? It means a mechanism which serves, services or aids something. That is all that that is – servomechanism. If it is not a servomechanism, it becomes a sort of a monster, a peculiar sort of a monster too, because the monster never does anything, except interrupt the willingness and doingness and workingness of human beings. When an organization becomes a monster it has ceased to assist the doingness of the person and has begun to block the doingness of the person, and then that organization is a monster. It is apparently something which exists which kills people.

But what would a group that assumed people couldn't change – what could it have been trying to do?

A bad organization could actually, factually slaughter everybody in its ranks. But what do we see here? We merely see then that ignorance of organization is what slaughters people in their ranks. Since the organization itself can never do anything, then attempted doingnesses go so awry on the organizational lines that they succeed in knocking off all the parts of the organization. You follow me that? It's something that man has never learned, and it's one of the reasons I have been talking to you about organization. Man has never learned this. He has never learned that an organization cannot do. He has never learned that it cannot bleed. It does not suffer. It cannot be punished. There is nothing there to receive or become cognizant of punishment.

Now, a man can be changed upward with such ease that it's fantastic that nobody ever found this out. I mean, if I could think up something anybody could think it up, see. I mean, it's easy. How come he never found this out?

And when you look at what an organization is, you find it's a series of communication lines and terminals associated with a common purpose. What about these terminals? No, a terminal is never a body, and that is a fantastic error that is made by 99 percent of the people in organizations. They think of themselves as terminals. They exist as terminals only when they do not have proper communication facilities. I already talked to you about that. I said it snapped in on the body: They use the body as a terminal.

Now look, you think I'm trying to lay at the door of psychology and psychiatry a criminal intent, don't you? Well, that's absolutely correct.

Well, let's look over this whole principle of organization, and let's take one person who is attempting to do something. Now, all he's attempting to do perhaps is to deliver some cartons of nuts and bolts from A to B and get a receipt for them. That's all he has to do. Now, he is a terminal known as shipping department. He has to stay pegged there if there is no real terminal. There's nothing to receive communications in his absence; he is then tied in to this. If there's any way people can write something on a slip of paper and drop it in a basket there, then we do have a terminal. It's a basket or the folder in the basket is the terminal. He can be reached. Therefore, he himself is not glued to this terminal at once. And he has received an order to ship two cartons of nuts and bolts over here to the assembly department. Now, he has to procure these from the people who are storing all of the spare parts and things like that. It's a very simple action. Nothing to this at all.

The discovery that man could not change could only have followed an effort to degrade him. And for the first time, we are trying to scale him upwards, and we find that the most elementary things can change a test upwards. Very elementary things can change a test upwards.

He calls, phones, writes – in other words, indicates a despatch – to the storehouse and says, "Cartons of nuts and bolts, if you please." He then operates as a communication particle: He picks them up. He walks over to the assembly room. He lays them down. He says, "Give me a receipt." He walks back to where he normally operates to see if there's anything else in his basket. Isn't that a simple arrangement? There's nothing to that.

If you, for instance, were to sit and smile pleasantly at a preclear for twenty-five hours, he'd probably get better. If you just said, "Yes, is that so?" you know, "What do you know!"

Let's see how an organization could foul him up.

If any psychoanalyst had ever contented himself with sitting and listening to some patient rattle on, I'm sure that some patient not deficient in havingness – which the comm would have cut down – but not terribly deficient of havingness, would have improved so considerably and so markedly that we would now have libraries full of books on this one case. That's a "series" in psychoanalysis – one case.

No communications lines exist whatsoever coming in to Mr. Jones, who is to deliver these nuts and bolts – no communication lines. All of a sudden there's a pink slip appears in front of his face that says "You're fired! Why are you fired? Well, you're fired because you didn't deliver the nuts and bolts." What nuts and bolts? Most elementary situation in the world. He never heard about it. Why did he never hear about it? Because there was no organization there, or the organization that was there was not really a good organization at all. The messages, the calls, the orders, anything to procure the nuts and bolts, went someplace else. They went up to the blueprints factory or something.

The only series on schizophrenia in psychiatry, for instance, that I know of, that is real schizophrenia, is a series of one: one girl who assumed five personalities. And although it's been banned in Boston as pornography, it has made good reading for everybody else for a long time. And that's a series of one and that is total information concerning. That's a book by Morton Prince. You, by the way, would just have a ball reading that book because he gives you all the dope. He gives you all the clues necessary to solve the case, and minimizes every one of the clues and maximizes all the things that are completely unimportant about the whole thing.

See, here's how that'd work. The office boy drops by and he says, "Oh, I'm walking over toward the procurement desk and I'll take this along" – he sees it on somebody's desk. And he walks up to the blueprint place. And he isn't looking, and he just lays down a whole bunch of stuff, and also amongst it is some other stuff that really belonged down in the engineering section. He puts that on the desk up there, too. Some messages went awry.

Now, I am not trying to indict psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis or phrenology, or – I don't know, what are some of those others? There's one there that had to do with transmutation of gold into lead or lead into gold or something like that. Yeah. Alchemy. Oh, yes, yes, modern chemistry.

Well, most organizations specialize only in methods of making messages go astray. That is the only thing they really want to do is to introduce more vias on the line. They try to introduce more vias. If they find a command Jam anywhere along the line, they follow an exact principle.

And I'm not trying to degrade these, because they don't need it. It's sort of pouring mud in a mudhole, you know.

Now, you think this is just a quip or a joke, but it's not. It's actually a rule that is followed by bad organizations – by the people who run them. It's a rule followed by them just as meticulously and as carefully as Newton followed his three laws, right or wrong. And that is, whenever you have a communication difficulty you add people. If something isn't happening, you add people. If you can't get the job done, you add people. That's all they know. It's a sort of bluh-bluh. Just add some more people.

But when you look over this astonishing fact that today our testing programs... I don't know a thing about testing, but our testing programs demonstrate that we can change people and change them upward at a great rate – very fast. I mean, it's not difficult to change people upward – it's not very difficult.

"What! You mean you can't get these nuts and bolts from this desk over to that desk. Hire three more shipping clerks."

If a person is on the bottom, sometimes you get some suction trying to pry him off, but once you get him rising a little bit, why, he generally goes on up, as long as the auditor will sit still and listen.

Now, wait a minute. One couldn't receive despatches; do you think three more can?

But where do we have any use for testing? You should ask the question, "Why don't I know anything about testing?" It should have occurred to you there that there might be some hooker in the statement, because I don't go around saying, "I don't know," you know, except when I'm being honest.

Oh, no, but they can certainly pass despatches amongst themselves to add to the confusion to such a degree that nobody has any responsibility for ever shipping anything. And the remedy of the organization people in charge of that organization would be, in antediluvian times, to add more people to that desk again. See, one man couldn't do the job, so they added three. The four men now can't do the job, so now we're going to add ten. See, I mean, this is the rule they follow.

But there is really a hooker in the subject. I want to know if there's anything to know. See, I don't know anything about it. I've read some books on the subject, and I've done some testing, and so forth. Is there anything to know about it at all?

Now, you want to watch this very carefully as you look around. You will see a bad organization grow in personnel all out of proportion to how they grow in business. Do you see that? Their business doesn't increase, but they keep adding personnel. What's wrong with this organization?

Well, the actual fact of testing – no. There is very, very little to know about that. The actual fact of existing state is such a mystery that there's nothing you could know about that. You see, because it would simply be comparable data. "This person compares to a twelve-year-old schoolchild." That's a statement, that is! In what school, which teaches what curriculum, in what part of the world? See, they don't ever say.

Well, two things could be wrong with it: One is your business, and the other is your business on telling people what organizations are. The people comprising this organization have no doingness about them of any kind whatsoever. It doesn't remedy their no-doingness by adding more people.

They don't ever say "Jefferson High School, Lincoln, Missouri," or something like that, you know. They say a twelve-year-old schoolchild has the intelligent equivalent of..." I suspect statements like this. They're not specific, they're not exact, they have no location, they're floating in space.

The other thing could be wrong is the organization itself doesn't have terminals and communication lines. It cannot communicate inside itself.

So what about this? Well, I do know something about the change of tests or recorded change. That I know something about. And if they were more honest, and if they'd ever changed anybody, I guess that's all a psychologist would know, would be alteration of condition. Because you can compare one condition to another condition, but when you say a person has a test like this... What is the proper curve? Is it up here? Is it down here? Is it over here? Does it have lace pants on it? What is this? What's the proper test? What's the proper curve?

I'll give you an example of how bad communication, and so on, works: Here's Jones. He gets fired for not delivering something. It's very seldom explained to the organization at large what happened to the shipping clerk. They think something bad happened. Management never bothers to inform anybody. It says, "That's nobody's business. You know, we're protecting the guy." So people begin to believe that he robbed a bank or he has a criminal record or something real bad, or reversely, that management is merely being arbitrary, you see? It's very upsetting.

Somebody says, "This is the curve of Joe Jones. Joe Jones's curve is just like that." Everybody stands around and says, "Yeah. What do you know. That's pretty good. Mm-hm." Or "That's pretty bad, isn't it?" Compared to what?

Actually, management thought it had a reason to fire Jones, and it never aired this reason. Therefore, the organization never is able to come forward as individuals and say, "What are you talking about – the two cartons of nuts and bolts that weren't delivered? I've been sitting here for three days with that communication on my desk, wondering where it was supposed to go. What do you mean firing Jones for this!" In other words, somebody could talk; somebody could communicate.

Well, it's compared to something called the hidden ideal, the false ideal, the understood ideal, the suspected ideal or the represented ideal. Do you understand what the word would be? It would be an ideal which doesn't exist. But everybody knows it exists, and we have testing dramatizing this more than any other single human activity.

Well, there are two things punished in this universe: One is being there, and the other is communicating. Those are the only two punishments there are, let me assure you. Just two, one is being there, and the other is communicating.

It is a hidden fact behind all criticism – whether of plays or a person or cats, kings, coal heavers or bats or pigs with wings – that there is an ideal, there is a perfection "That I know about, but you wouldn't," which is never spoken. And we should call this the pretended ideal.

Now, they actually are joined together. Being-thereness is advertised by communicatingness. Got it? But these are the two things that are punished. So people hear people communicating, and they say "Shoot them!" Somebody notices somebody is present, they say, "Make him run!" Got the idea?

There is evidently an ideal state in Mother's mind when she says we are bad children. There is evidently an ideal state in the sergeant's mind when he says we are poor soldiers. There is evidently some ideal of some kind or another in the priest's mind when he says we are sinful.

So in spite of the beauties of the periodic chart, this universe could be said to be against organization, since organization consists entirely of being-thereness and communicatingness.

But they damn seldom say anything about what it is! They say we don't measure up in comparison to it. What?

Well, how could an organization have an entire universe against it? Oh, very easily, very easily. You merely have to fill it up - - all those posts in the organization – full of people that have already totally succumbed to the ardures and duress of the universe. That's all you had to do: just get a bunch of people who've already caved in and have closed terminals completely with the physical universe, and let them behave in a chaotic fashion. Then they would take any organizational plan or pattern and scatter it, confuse it and nonexistence it at such a remarkable rate that you would no longer have an organization if you had a perfect one to begin with. Do you see that?

We read in the papers, "This is a poor play." See, some critic, he's sounding off, "It's a poor play." Well, you could say, "Who said so?" That's easy – the critic. But by whose standards of playwrighting? Now, this thing did appear on Broadway, and I'm sure compared to Bill Smith's play – Billy Smith being only in the third grade – that it shined. See? So that would make it an excellent play, wouldn't it, huh?

So we get to that thing which most intimately concerns the Scientologist. An organization is the easiest thing in the world to lay out. It is the easiest thing in the world to understand, as long as you understand that it is simply a collection of terminals and communication lines associated with a common purpose. Very easy to understand. Nothing to it. You can lay out an organization, scat, just in a moment. Until we run into this other fact: an organization, then, would never exist in any other way than as a collection of individuals. Given a perfect organization and given a collection of individuals – see, a perfect organization and then just a collection of individuals – the doingness of those individuals would confuse or upset the organization to the degree that these people could not straightly do. If they could not do, then the organization itself would be upset. Do you understand?

But compared to one of those little things Shakespeare dashed off between sonnets, the thing might not be quite so good. But then I am sure that people walked up to Shakespeare and said, "Well, Bill. Ah, well. This thing – this – this thing you've done tonight – what was its, name? Uh... uh... Hamlet. Hamlet? Was that it? Uh... Bill, uh... I don't think it'll go. It won't go, Bill. It's a poor play." Compared to what? The one that the critic said was a poor play, or Billy Smith in the third grade said was a poor play, or compared to the Passion Play as done at Oberammergau, or a poor play compared to Bill's last effort. Well, possibly, you could get a comparison there, couldn't you?

So every organization under the sun is composed of people – individuals. There isn't a duo or a trio in the whole works. We hear of cliques in organization. We hear of four or five people who kind of run things over there in the machine shop. We hear of the four or five people who sort of run things in the west wing of the jail. We hear of these cliques, and we get the idea that these groups are not individuals but are operating on a group basis. Well, we know already that a group can sort of gather to itself a spirit. We know this. Groups are very hard to knock out. But in the final analysis, you yourself, in your approach to organizations, governments, groups of people in any way, must remember that these numbers of people are composed of individuals, and the general tone of the group is remediable by a change of tone of the individuals in the group.

So we've moved into about the only standard that could exist, "Is the fellow being bad or good compared to himself?" And that is what testing is in Scientology. Is he being bad or good compared to him? Is he being better or worse than him?

There is no such thing as the United States government. There is no such thing as the British government. It isn't, if by government you mean something alive, something that acts, something that has volition, something that can receive, something that can send. It isn't. It's a bunch of individuals, and it wouldn't matter how many constitutions, how many Magna Chartas, how many customs you had laid out. It wouldn't matter how many rules and regulations you had on the communication lines if the individual occupying those terminals and using those terminals and lines was himself incapable of keeping lines and terminals straight and separate and was himself incapable of doingness. We get immediately to this fact about organizations. Organizations exist – if they have any general purpose at all – they exist or could exist only to assist the government of themselves or the doingness of people.

Well, unfortunately for the guy, we happen to know how good he can get. So we can measure him up against this standard. So, being honest, we can say a change is attainable in existing state and we are interested in the change, we are not interested in either existing state, don't you see.

You could have an organization which existed solely to exist. You could have that. It could exist only to run itself You know, everybody taking in everybody else's laundry sort of thing, you know? The total purpose of it was to have an organization. This is possible. Many kids have gangs just to have gangs, not to do anything. It's quite interesting. They have an organization there.

But there are certain existing states necessary to the performance of auditing – we say to auditors – so, therefore we know that auditors that fall below this existing state, fall below it. This we know for sure. They fall below being able to audit. They crack up somewhere along the line. They say to the preclear, just about the twenty-fifth time, "Now, go over to the book. That's right. Look at it. What color is it?" And they all of a sudden say, "Heh-uu-hu-hm-hm, let's go out for a Coke." The preclear at this moment has somatics; he's about ready to drop his eyeballs on the floor. "Let's' knock off the, session. I can't stand it anymore."

But where the organization itself has a purpose which is exterior to itself, then its only reason for existence, the only excuse it would have to exist, would be to assist the doingness of the individuals within it. And if an organization cannot assist the doingness of individuals within it, then it had better not exist at all, because it will impede the doingness of the individuals within it.

And we know that they will do certain things below that state. But we, then, do have some kind of an idea about the state auditors should be in. And if we're certifying an auditor, we want to know if he's in some comparable state, but that again is against a known standard. It's a known standard.

When you have a very large number of people under one of these canopies like government (state, city, federal; I don't care what), you see a weird phenomenon take place, very weird: People look at this thing called a government or an organization or a group or a club – they look at this thing and they say, "The organization did this. The organization did that." In such a way, the organization is simply a shield for cowardly men whose doingness is very poor. Nobody there stands up and dares be there. They say, "The organization. The government did this. The government thought that." The devil it did! At no time did a government ever do a single thing anyplace in the history of the world. A guy did it. A guy cooperating with some more guys did it. That's all that did it. And they used a set of communication lines and terminals that we call government, but they did it.

Well, who's it known to? Well, boy, if you were this guy's preclear, you'd know it. See, it'd be known to you too. The fellow has to be able to persist, duplicate, communicate, acknowledge communications. He has to be able to get in there and pitch. He has to be smart enough to be able to figure out where the preclear won't go and make him go or knock his head in. He has to be able to do certain things, see. And we can test what sort of a condition a fellow has to be in, in order to make somebody do those things. That's very easy. It's very easy. But it is a standard. It's a known standard, not a hidden standard. It's very important.

If you're looking for basic cause in a society – its economic or legal duress or distress – for heaven sakes never be fooled by looking at this huge, nonextant thing called government. Don't ever look at that to be cause for anything, because you are assigning improper cause. That's an improper cause and will wind you up into a concatenation of bad logic, because you didn't start at cause and therefore you won't get distance or effect. You say, "The government did it." The devil it did! It never did any such thing.

This pretended standard, this hidden ideal, this thing which lurks in the back of people's minds when they say "We aren't smart enough. We aren't good enough. We aren't quick enough," is actually the basis of all criticism to which we object. Because we essentially are not objecting to their statement that we aren't good enough. We're objecting to the fact that they never say in comparison with what. They never say what we are supposed to be as good as, what we are supposed to be as fast as.

Now, this is something you must know if you are ever going to counsel a business or a group and get it into any kind of a shape. If you're ever going to do this, you would have to know this. I'm not just here cursing governments. Actually, there have been good governments on earth, because there have been good men on earth. And when there are bad governments on earth, there are bad men on earth, and that's all it amounts to.

Therefore, we rather favor physical tests, things like that. Can we broad-jump five feet? Anybody in order to join this team has to broad-jump five feet, see. We know what we're doing then. We can broad-jump five feet, therefore we have passed the test. But it's only a standard that is set down, and somebody has found out that an athlete or a soldier or somebody has to be able to go through certain actions, since athletes and soldiers go through these actions.

When we address immediately, directly and intimately a business (and by the way, Scientologists these days more and more are addressing businesses), then we must never make the mistake of believing for a moment that the business exists as a living, breathing entity, because there win be something there that we feel called upon to process that we can't reach, and therefore we're up against a hidden menace of some kind or another; we're up against a hidden influence.

Therefore, the only sincere and honest test that you possibly could lay down, really, in actuality, would be a test against observable performance – observable performance.

We go in and say, "Well, the Salisbury Company" – how easily we say that – "The Salisbury Company wants me to process their employees." You've uttered a common human statement. But because it's a common human error you will never be able to achieve it. Some people in the Salisbury Company want some processing. That is the correct rendition.

Now, to show you how thin this bad and good thing is, a soldier goes out, sets up a machine gun, fires at a mad rate and misses completely his target. He doesn't kill a single human being. Bad soldier. He goes back into civilization, runs down the street, doesn't even knock over a human being, hits a cop, and we say he's a bad citizen. The common denominator of these two remarks is that people are critical.

Now, the Salisbury Company itself couldn't ever be processed, never. The individual idea of how communication should exist or not exist, however, can be processed. The Salisbury Company will never do or be anything. It assists or impedes the doingness of the individuals within its comm lines and terminal boundaries. That's all it does, if it does anything.

Now, testing had its origin, I am sure – this is my suspicion, since I really know nothing about the subject – had its origin in the early days of brainwashing. It was an effort to make people self-critical, which is a keynote of brainwashing. If you would test somebody long enough and often enough, you'd drive him daffy if you never told him what he was being tested for, or against what standard. You'd have to have a standard against which he was being tested so that he could achieve, himself, a comparison of result.

Now, its communication lines and terminals are as good as the people will let them be, and they're as bad as, and as murderous, as the people insist that they are. So you see a bunch of communication lines and you see them all tangled up and so on, don't think that some bright guy in the company can't draw up more communication lines and terminals. They can draw them up by the – oh, I don't know. Sometimes you doubt this when you suddenly shove under the hands of an executive and say, "Here. Draw me a map of your own secretarial service."

Therefore, I would say that all those tests which simply evaluate by the observer...

And he says, "What do you mean?"

I tell you, here's a test that – we have a technical expression which is a condemnatory expression in Scientology – "It's for the birds!"

"Draw the communication lines that you use every day."

This thing is called a Rorschach. A Rorschach is probably called a Rorschach uhm... It's a Rorschach. Anyway.

And he comm lags for two and a half hours. Chews on the pencil, his tongue over here in his cheek. Squints up. "Let me see now. I write a letter... No, I really don't write the letter. Now, let's see. The letter comes in to me. Well, the letter comes in to me. I get a letter. Well, it's easy. I get a letter. I answer it. That's my communication line."

You go four years to a university to learn how to interpret one. Boy, there sure must be an awful lot there to know how to interpret. There sure is. I'm sure there's more significance racked up in less time – wow! Four years to learn how to interpret one of these things.

You say, "No. No. No. Come on. Come on. Just where does this thing go?"

You know what people do with these things? They're inkblot tests. Kids back in about 1820 used to take some ink, spill it on a piece of paper, fold the piece of paper over and open it and they have a pattern, you know.

"What thing?"

Well, some psychiatrist got stuck in this period, got the measles and died back in 1820 or something. And he died when he was doing this and it's a dramatization, you see, or something like this. There's an explanation to its origination I know.

"The letter."

Anyway. He shows this to people, he shows this test to people, and he looks at them and he says, "What do you see? What do you see?"

"Thing? You mean a letter. Well, it's a bunch of stuff that says something."

And people say, "Ohhh, I see a fox or a bat or a kangaroo or, uh... it's a flying carpet," or something or other. Each time they say one of these things, they say, "Well, I think it's a fox."

"Oh, it is, is it? Well, what is a letter?"

"Ahhhhh," he says. "Patient thinks it's a fox." "What else do you see?"

Wow. Guy will tell you it's anything. He'll say it is a communication. That's dodging the issue nicely. He'll finally find out that a letter is a piece of paper with some words on it. But this will escape him, particularly a business executive, by the hour. What is a letter? He won't be able to tell you. What is this thing? You can hold one up and shake it in front of his face. I've done this. "What is this thing?" I've said.

"A bearskin!"

He says, "It's a communication! What are you talking about? That particular one is a demand for eighteen cans of something or other."

"Patient thinks it's a bearskin. Patient thought it was fox, then bearskin. F-B. F-B."

And you say, "Fine. Fine. What is a letter?" You know?

Well, they have about five or fifty of these plates and people are supposed to read them and so forth.

And he finally says – after you plague him and chew on him and beat at him for a long time, he finally up and admits it is a thing; it's a piece of paper with some words on it.

And it was a source of great embarrassment when one of them showed me one of these tests. They used to test everybody during the war. They didn't have anything else to do. And you get shipped in. They'd run out of clinics to send you to, you know. Go get your teeth fixed, go get this fixed, go get that fixed. Nobody would let you out of the joint, you see. You were there awaiting receipt of orders or something of the sort, you know, and so they would keep sending you to clinics, here and there.

And having cognited then that a communication particle was a particle, that it did have some mass, that it could go across space and distances, we say, "Now, let's get to work on the subject of where your communication lines go, and where they come from." And boy, they sure end always at the door of his private office. They never go out to his secretary. They just never arrive out there. They get taken out there in some fashion, or something of the sort. But when he processes one of these things, he really has no idea that it ever goes anyplace. It sort of magically disappears out of his own brain and appears in somebody else's brain in some fashion, and if it doesn't do that very magically, he gets very upset. He cannot allow any communication lag. He can't allow time for his communication, his letter now, to go through a couple of hands, to be transcribed, to go through a couple of hands and appear on somebody else's desk and to be put into a slot and read in due course. He can't allow for that.

So, of course, they'd send you to a testing clinic. They'd send you to the psychological clinic. They'd send you to the psychiatric clinic. They'd just send you around. You go around and people would spend an hour or so looking you over, and that sort of thing.

So you find these boys are mostly concerned with jamming their own lines. They write the letter on Thursday – Thursday evening usually, very late. The girl comes in. She has already a jammed line, so she gets this letter typed as soon as she can, sometime around 11:30 or something like that. She gets it into an envelope. Mailboy comes along and picks it up and it goes over to somebody over here. But what do you know, this was Friday and the offices are closed on Saturday. And Monday this other guy reads it in his desk, and so on. This would be optimum, you see. And then he answers it in some fashion, and it goes back onto this communication line. Monday afternoon our executive is saying, "Let's see. It was clear last Thursday when I wanted to know what happened to Jones. Uh... uh – rr-rrr! I'll have to call him up on the telephone," see? So, he says, "Referring the... Hey, Jones," on the phone, "referring to the letter I wrote you."

I almost got scared out of my wits! It just – it frightened me. I was very timid in those days. And I sat down and... I was supposed to go to the psychiatric clinic, the eye clinic, and so forth.

"What letter?"

The eye clinic didn't know what was the matter with me. I couldn't see. I kept telling them that was what was the matter with me – they didn't believe me. And anyhow, I went in the psychiatric clinic, and I sat down. And all of a sudden he says, "Ahhh!" he says, "Ahhh!" And it was a very, very learned "Ahhh!" I will say.

Now, I don't know why, but they always at this moment search for the letter. When he gets all the phone lines all tied up, and he gets Jones' secretary tied up and his own secretary tied up, and he gets everybody all tied up and everything off the groove and off the line, and finally he's satisfied he hasn't got an answer to it yet, Jones told him he'd answer him tomorrow. He's got it all tied up. He's all set, see?

And he shoved a Rorschach test at me. He didn't have anything else to do, or I was the wrong patient or something. He was confused maybe. And he shoved this test at me, and he says, "What's that?"

Somebody's trying to crowd, push and crunch, not his job, he's trying to punish the line itself Got this? You'll find most executives are in this condition. The lines themselves don't exist to serve them, they exist to be beaten. Then you wonder why everybody in the plant can't find out anything. It's all sitting on the executive's desk usually. It's someplace unanswered. He has all the data.

And I said, "It is a piece of paper with some ink on it! What do you suppose it is!"

I've met some of the most remarkably, wonderfully efficient men. Boy, these guys could tell you at any instant what the production figure was, where it was, how it was, zim-zam. Oh, boy! Straight genius, see? And anybody ten feet away from that desk didn't know a thing, and yet they were expected to do, and they were expected to function.

Four days later he was still looking in his manuals.

One notable case – one fantastic case of this – ran a government-surplus sales organization. He bought government surplus and he sold it. He had a staff of fifteen salesmen. He himself would receive all of the lists of the material he now owned. You see, he'd buy those over the phone. He'd take these lists. Then he would call up his own prospects. He would sell them. But in the meantime, routine communication had distributed these lists to his salesmen and they would be out there beating their brains out trying to sell things which had already been sold. And then he'd sit back and say, "You see how much better I am than any other salesman in the place, you know? My sales record is way up, and yours is way down. What's the matter with you people?"

I don't know to this day whether I'm supposed to be sane or insane, you see. Because there's nothing in any Rorschach manual that tells you what this response means. It frightened me all right, and he turned sort of pale and he jumped up on the table and took off his glasses. He started to chitter, you know.

Well, the funny part of it is, every single one of those salesmen knew what was the matter with the people – him. He might have been fooling himself, but he wasn't fooling them; they knew what he was doing. And they knew that – some dim way – that he possibly was not conscious of this fact. He never let anybody have any information anyplace in the place. Nobody ever could find out a thing – secrecy.

So I took the test and I showed it to him! I said, "All right, you don't like that answer! What's it mean to you?" So he got back in his chair and sat there, and when I left he was still staring at it. Anyway...

In other words, here was an individual who stopped every comm line that he could get his hands on. He'd stop it. He himself would act. He was a case of "I have to do it myself " He couldn't let another soul do a thing anywhere else in the world. And this man's whole organization was in chaos, if you called it an organization.

We didn't have much respect for people in those days.

And one day it up and went broke. And he could never understand why those salesmen hadn't gotten out and sold the stuff for him. They knew that anytime they had an old secondhand ship, or something of the sort, then they knew if they got a sale for it, it would have been sold the day before and they never would have been told. So they didn't dare sell anything. They just didn't dare sell a thing. In other words, he achieved the cutting out of all of their doingnesses by cutting the comm lines which would have assisted those doingnesses. Got it?

Well, anyway, having been given a Rorschach from beginning to end, of course, I'm wise enough to know I don't know all there is to know about Rorschachs. But this isn't the case with most people. When they've been given a Rorschach, you see, they become experts on Rorschach. And I'm smart enough to know that I have my limitations. Definitely have my limitations. I couldn't even read anything into it. And that's pretty good for a science-fiction writer. Anyway... I should have at least told him there was a spaceship there.

So that's how organizations are wrecked. That's how they get into the state they get into. But all an organization is, is a series of comm lines and terminals, so what gets wrecked? The comm lines and the terminals. That's all that are there to get wrecked, so that's all that gets wrecked.

Anyway, looking over the whole subject of testing, one learns that there could be tests which simply measured against a standard necessary for performance, see. You had to be able to do something. Well, where did they come in relationship to that so they could do that? Well, you see, there'd be a role there for testing, definitely a valuable one.

Now you, in handling any group, then, in view of the fact that anybody can dream up an organization, would actually be wasting your time to lay out a beautiful pattern of communication from here to there and so on. You would really be wasting your time. There's no sense in this, beyond this one point: People who are accustomed to this activity can feed you data at both ends, and you, because you hear both ends of the story, can act as mediator. And it sounds like a real bright idea – the idea that Joe gave you and the idea that Bill gave you, see? You put them together into the idea that will agree, and they both say, "You're real bright, Mr. Scientologist. You're all set. You're absolutely right. See, I mean that's a good idea. That's a terrific idea you dreamed up." Who dreamed up? They dreamed up. But they dreamed up an idea that was within their ability to agree with communication. See, that was the idea they dreamed up, and you have to pay attention to that.

Now, that's fine. But they don't call that psychological testing, usually. There is some sort of testing in psychology that goes in that direction, but usually that's done out on the athletic field, or it's done somewhere else. "Can you drive this car around the block?"

You either, then, have to dream up or agree with what they will consider communication – at which time they will communicate in that pattern – or you've got to change their acceptance level of communication, and I'm afraid there are no other answers.

"Yeah."

You cannot have a soldier standing alongside of each government desk saying, "Communicate." Somehow or other they'd foul up his supply of bullets.

"Well, if you drive well, you can have the job. Well, get in the car and drive it around the block." He does, he drives it around the block, and he says, "Okay, you've passed." See, now that is a type of testing which is against a standard. A person to be able to drive a car must be able to sit in the car, must be able to operate the throttle, the brake, and wiggle the steering wheel. That's all that is required in the District, anyway.

Here we have, then, this oddity that you could get people to agree on data, agree on organization, agree on patterns of data, patterns of logic. You could get people to agree on these things. But to hammer them with it and say, "You must not think about this now. This is not called to your attention any further. It is for your acceptance and memorization." Wow, they won't communicate with it, and they won't do.

Here then is testing. When we reduce it into a tremendous additional significance, we are liable to get into more trouble than we care to get into, unless we wish to measure a state of case against a state of case. We take a state of case this week, and a state of case next week. We take these two states of case and find the difference between them.

I didn't mean accidentally to describe college education as it exists today. I didn't mean to. I mean, I'm sorry. I keep running into it, though, every once in a while.

Well, in view of the fact that nobody has ever been able to make states of case vary like this, it would really amuse you how stable these profiles are. I saw one the other day which would utterly knock your hat off.

You couldn't possibly ask anybody to do anything if you insisted on your evaluation of communication as the thing he must follow. Do you see? You can't then have him do anything. If you take your idea of communication – see, your idea of what is a good communication here – and then insist that he accept it right there, and like that... He'd have to be in terrific shape. If you gave him a Scientology definition of communication – you said that is it – he could look at its component parts but he couldn't put them together. It's not his idea of communication. He knows what communication is, it's "Huh!" That's communication. What do you do when you get a letter, you say, "Huh!" What do you do when you want to ask somebody hello? You know, you greet them on the street, you say, "Huh!" What do you do when you want to sell something? I'm afraid it is also, "Huh!" And we wonder why he isn't a good salesman.

This fellow was given a profile – a type of profile which we have had in use in the organization. And he was given this profile before he went in the army. And in the army they used him for a guinea pig or something of the sort, and he had a nervous breakdown and had a lot of psychiatric treatment and so forth. And at the end of this time he had varied about fifteen degrees on "Nervous," and the rest of the profile was all the same.

No, I'm afraid we would have to take this subject of communication up with him very directly, and we would have to say "What is a letter?" Until he can finally find some definition in himself that tells you and at the same time tells him what this letter is, he's going no place from there. Do you see that? He's going no place because you've never found an entrance level to the case. There's no entrance level to the case unless you have some communication that is a communication: He understands it's a communication, and understanding it's a communication, he then accepts it as a communication. Don't you see?

In other words, here's this tremendous career, all this treatment, this hammer and pound, and the only variation on the test was about fifteen percentile in "Nervous." He was a little more nervous. It took them years to manage that.

Now, if you process people just into an understanding of communication... After all, you have its basic definitions. If you have its basic definitions, if you just went over each one of these definitions – let's take a whole group of business people, see; whole group of business people. We just take the longest, most arduous definition of communication we have. You know, the one that's cause, distance, effect, and attention and intention and all the rest of them – duplication – we take all of these parts and we just rack them all up into an arduous stack over here, see? And we take the first one off the top and we say, "Now, what is this? What is this? What is this thing called attention? What is attention? Oh, you, Jones over there, what is attention?"

Well, that's an existing state. But as long as it's not against anything, as long as all states measured are the states measured, we really don't know anything about this thing called sanity, because nobody ever found anybody that everybody agreed was sane. See, so there is no agreed standard for sanity. So a test never could tell you whether you were batty or walking down the chalk line. No test really could factually tell you this.

Oh well, Jones'll say, "Attention. Attention is something people demand of YOU.

There is an oblique way of using a test that way which will amuse you, and that is if the person can't and won't take it, why, you can assume something wrong – either in your offering it to him or his acceptance of it. And that's pretty positive evidence – we don't know for what, but it's pretty good.

And you'd say to the rest of them, "Now, what do the rest of you think about that? Do you think that's what attention is?"

But these tests when given are stable. They are very stable. In Scientology, we push the guy upscale – a direction nobody ever went before – and they just move upscale just like that. Bzzzzz. Really, really fabulous. I mean, we change the existing state, and then we can measure how much it's changed by the new state. Interesting that we have now a comparison of states.

Finally you'd get them to define, to their own satisfaction, what all these words were. You'd get them to define them as well as you could get them to define them. And I hate to tell you this, but if they're a group of business people that are in an enforced kick on communication all the time, the definitions they give you are not, at the end of hours, going to even approach satisfactoriness. They're going to be still something real wild, something you don't want at all. But they agree that's what it was, and so you say that's fine. You take the next one, and you go through the lot of them.

And in view of the fact that we have some standard required for a fellow to audit, and knowing this is more arduous than living, why, we can say the fellow has to be in this kind of a condition with this profile to get along fairly well in life, and we can do something about it. But we still don't know anything about testing.

How many evenings of training do you think a group like this would have to have, huh? All you did was take the most arduous, long formula of communication we have and took every single part of it and asked them what it was. But the funny part of it is, you would wind up with people who, by and large, could then form and carry on an organization which would serve their doingness. Because once they find out they can communicate, they're apt to be willing to appear. As soon as they appear, they're willing to be terminals. As soon as they are willing to be terminals, why, they're perfectly willing to have terminals and confront terminals and work with terminals. And then you would have an organization. You follow me?

We really don't know anything about testing. We know about a comparison with a comparison. We compare his new profile with the profiles that we know are necessary to auditors in order to audit, and we compare this profile with his old profile. And the only starting ground it has is auditors have often folded up when they weren't fairly high in tone on certain points. And when they are high in tone in these points, they couldn't care less. I mean, they can get chewed up like mad and they're not chewed up. You get the idea? But it's by comparison.

In order to reform the United States government – formidable project; one which I advise you never to attempt; don't ever attempt it – don't think it consists of going down to Congress and beating on the drum for a bunch of new laws to be passed. That has nothing to do with it! Has nothing whatsoever to do with it, not for a minute. All those new laws will do is they will enter new arbitraries which will cause additional new confusion. That's all. Because you're feeding into a vast bad organization a lot more ways of stopping, and boy it's on inverted stop now. It can stop everybody.

Now, nobody, then, would ever be able to give you a test, get any answers off of it and be able to say that you were peculiarly sane or peculiarly insane. Nobody would be able to give you a test and say this, just bluntly, bang, without comparison to something. It'd have to be "saner than what?" see? "More insane than whom?" You'd have to have some sort of a standard.

Now, the gay, heroic spirit of the young second lieutenant who goes into the army is a touching sight. I often see somebody with some shoulder bars or something like that – brand-new gold bars. It's wonderful. It's a beautiful sight. I think, "Well, there goes another one, you know? He'll get in there, and he'll want to change this, and he'll want to change that, and he wants to do this, and he wants to do that. And he thinks that this is the thing he ought to do. And he looks and finds his troops are in kind of bad morale and in bad condition, and he wants to get them a little bit better off, and he wants to shape this up, and so forth. And there's no mechanism there to serve his doingness at all. He has no comm lines to serve his doingness.

Well, in view of the fact most tests are developed from some standard or another, we then have some concept of their accuracy.

Just let him try to address something to the major. Uh-ha, well, the major: that's a real close look. Let him try to receive something from the general staff. Comm lines are the command lines, so they're all forbidden. What's a command line do in a large organization? It forbids. See? What is the standard command? It's to forbid. "No, you can't." So if this is then the communication line, what do you get on the comm lines? Forbid. Now, after a while they forbid the comm line.

I'll give you some idea of how tests are developed as to standard. It's an interesting way to get a standard. We take 259 Safeway store managers and have them grade their stockmen. We take the 259 managers, and we say whether their stockmen are bad or good, happy or unhappy, efficient or inefficient, you see. And then we test the stockmen, and then we assign the value of the Safeway manager, and we've got the leading – huh! – leading efficiency test of the country.

Did you ever see anybody get mixed up with government who is in a much higher state of action afterwards? Think it over for a moment. Did you ever see anybody get mixed up with a government who came out in a much higher state of ambition and action, hm? Well, they'd have to have had a lot of processing to have made it if they ever did, because the lines are not there to serve the individual. The individual is there to serve the lines. Get the reverse look? And so the doingness of the individual is neglected. And if you neglect the doingness of the individual, you will make everything very gruesome thereafter, because there'll be a lot of bodies around and they won't be moving.

Now, listen, I've known some Safeway managers, and they were good men. Nothing wrong with that, but they weren't ever noted for their human charity. In other words, what have we got, finally, as the standard? We've got the opinions of 259 Safeway managers, not coordinated against each other at all, but each one assigned to his particular stockmen. And this is a standard? That's why I don't know anything about testing. Get the idea?

War is not a symptom of the anger of peoples. Governments go on a routine and regular cycle which drops into absolute destruction at relatively regular intervals. Its own organizational lines get down to forbid, and its own laws forbid killing the other fellows in the army, so somebody in the army has to kill somebody, and they go out and find an enemy and knock him off. I don't think that it has a single thing to do with the international situation. I don't think there's even any relation whatsoever between war and politics. I think war is an insanity which is achieved when a bad organization descends to a complete anxiety, and you get a condition of war.

It also says the scores were weighted. I don't know why they were weighted though. In other words, we test the efficiency of people against the opinion of Safeway managers, and I'm not working in a Safeway so the test couldn't possibly work on me, don't you see.

Now, where would you get an organization that would assist the doingness of people? Well, it would have to be amongst people who were doing. And those people, in doing, must be able to tolerate communication. So what would be a good organization to work for? A good organization to work for would be an organization that would tolerate communication. And that wouldn't be too hard to work for. That'd be all right.

But we could take any test, no matter how arbitrary, and get a curve on quite a few people, and then process them for a while, and then get a new curve. And we could say then this process on these people gets us this change. You got it? And in view of the fact that nothing else has ever been able to change this test, we must have been changing the test. Not even Russian brainwashing or sergeant brainwashing could alter this profile, thus an auditor must be doing something.

Work, of course, you understand is "always" arduous. But how can we get it to not a complete death sentence? And that would be to be in an organization where people were doing, and people were willing to communicate. And if this was the case, then that organization would gradually find that it could have and could construct communication lines to serve the doingness of people.

Now, we observe the fellow in life, and we find out that he no longer – well, he's dropped a lot of his nastier habits. He's dropped a lot of his nastier habits. For instance, he no longer sits silent while his mother-in-law is talking. See, that's dropped a nasty habit. He hasn't permitted himself to be arrested for just months, see. I mean the guy's getting in better shape.

Somebody has an idea that coordinates his action with somebody else's action; there must be some way where he can communicate this. And having communicated it, the other person doesn't go straight up and a mile south and forbid the communication and get all upset about it.

For instance, he used to read all the time the Wall Street Journal. Although he didn't buy stocks or anything else, he used to – you know, he had nasty habits. And he'd never read the "Ball Street Journal." (That's another paper entirely.) And now he only reads the "Ball Street Journal," see. In other words, he changed, his conduct in life changed.

The other person also has the freedom to say "That's nutty. That's crazy. Dopiest thing I ever heard." Free line, see?

It used to be that he let the other fellow keep the job for him, and now he can even work. See, something has happened here. Performance has shifted.

And the other fellow say, "What's dopey about it?"

So, we in Scientology come straight back to performance. What is our standard? The standard is "Can an auditor who gets this curve on this test audit?" Our findings have been, yes. So that's a satisfactory curve. He's able to stand up to a lot of clawing. All right. Therefore, his auditing performance is acceptable. To whom? To us! We're not reticent!

"Well, I don't like it."

Well, if it's acceptable to us, why, it's probably acceptable to preclears because that's what's acceptable to us. We're honest. And it's true enough it does. It is acceptable then to preclears. And the fellow leads a successful life. He even has a successful auditing career. He's able to do things with Scientology and auditing, don't you see. But that's a performance test, isn't it?

"Well, that's not good enough."

And can he hold his own in his environment – domestic environment and so forth? Yes. All right. Therefore, that's a performance, an observable performance, isn't it.

"Well, all right, it'd make me more work."

Well, now, the reason I don't know anything about testing at all is because testing itself is an esoteric subject. It is a very deep subject, and the reason I don't know anything about it is its standards are all hidden

"Oh, if it'd make you more work... How would it make you more work?"

Original psychological testing was designed to tell us that people were bad or not quite bad or worse. And it was designed against these lines and so on. I'm sure I'm maligning them. There are many psychologists that have gone out and made a sincere effort to test, actually, four or five living beings before they released a test which was standard sanity for everybody in the United States. I'm sure they've done this. I'm sure they have, before they released it and said, "We have tested a thousand people." I'm sure they did test a couple, maybe the wife.

"Well, I'd have to make everything out in quintuplicate," like they have to do for machine-gun ammunition on the front lines. To get more machinegun ammunition you have to make out the requisitions in quintuplicate, you know? One copy goes to the enemy for okay.

But the main thing that I'm getting at is that we have found – we're very tolerant – we have found that these tests were useful, very useful, extremely useful. For the first time we found a use for them. And I should be standing here sounding off about psychologists, when they worked, for I don't know how many hundred years they worked. It was since 1879 on physiological psychology, and a lot longer earlier than that on a noncommunist line of approach. And they worked for all of these decades. They worked, they slaved, they amassed figures, papers, they tested people, they thought of things, they filed things, they unfiled things, they published books, they plagiarized each others' stuff; just all these years and years and years and years and years, just so that we could come along and find, for the first time, a use for their activity. And so I should malign them. I shouldn't at all. They undoubtedly have done us a very great service.

All right. Now, if we look over this we see that we are facing not an unsolvable problem at all. We are facing a problem which is peculiarly solvable, because we can solve the problems on the individual level, therefore it is obvious that we can solve problems on a third-dynamic or organizational level, because they are individual problems.

Well, they've done us a tremendous service as a matter of fact. Tremendous. I've known just exactly what to throw away here in the last week or so that I've been working on a new test battery for us. Yes, I have. I mean, they've given me all the things you don't do. A tremendous number of things, tremendous assistance.

You can actually give people a test, spot them on the Tone Scale and know exactly how the communication lines will behave in their immediate vicinity – the easiest thing to do a Scientologist ever did. The only thing that happens is the Scientologist, having nothing to do with a science, usually has a good heart, and he is always prone to assign a better value to the individual than the test indicated. This is fabulous. This works everyplace but the HGC.

You look down the thing, and you say, "Well, that couldn't possibly tell you anything. Therefore we won't write that kind of a test. This test over here is highly uninformative. It wouldn't be of any use to anybody. A total verbalization. Might test somebody's verbs, but we're not interested in verbs, so we can push that one aside."

HGC – we know this so we're always on the safe side, always undercut the actual state of the case by three stages and process there. That's the only place where we do this. Every place else we say, "Well," (charity, sweetness and light) "I mean, they mean all right, even if they are a stupid bunch of jerks," so on – keep giving people the benefit of the doubt. Well, it's a fatal thing to do in taking an assessment of people when you're trying to treat an organizational series of personnel. You better look at it right straight on the button all the way across; be accurate. I know that's not a human characteristic, but be accurate anyhow.

They've done this tremendous amount of work and it has been extremely useful. It's been extremely useful, and I've been able to lay it aside. I haven't been able to learn anything about it particularly – I don't know anything about it yet, as a matter of fact. But I do know that it isn't against a performance, and where it isn't regularly and routinely against a performance, of what use is it?

We had it figured out one time that it is impossible to be human and to be right – utterly impossible. You could not possibly be human and be right. To be human it is an absolute necessity to be wrong! Well, that's for sure.

Now, if somebody had gone out and tested a thousand racing drivers or a hundred race drivers and said, "This test on a thousand (or a hundred) race drivers got this curve" – wow! Boy, would I have riches. Boy, that would be riches. If somebody went out and said, "We routinely took right on down the block in Des Moines, Iowa" – see, I'd be able to grade that, for sure – "right down the block, Des Moines, Iowa. And we tested each housewife in succession down the block in the year 1927, and we got this final result." I could even find some use for that. I'd know that wasn't the curve for all housewives in the country.

Now, look it over. You sit down at a table. You have a glass of milk while somebody else is finishing dinner, something like that, and you're waiting to go to the movie, see? And so you have a glass of milk to be polite. You didn't want it at all, but you just joined them and you're waiting for them to finish dinner, and they're going to go to the movie with you. That's fine. And they say, "You don't mind waiting, do you?" And you say, "Oh, no. I don't mind waiting." The feature only goes on in three minutes, you see? And you sit there smiling, you know? What a liar you are. Now, is that being right? No, you're not being right. You're telling lies. You're just lying like mad.

If they'd said, "We've taken a great many schoolteachers teaching elementary school, and we've given them this test and we've gotten this result." If these factual things on which we could really count were actually listed, what riches we'd have. But we actually start from scratch in Scientology.

There are many other ways that it is impossible to be right. For instance, somebody says, "Well, you know that the cube root of Newton's second law is one of the more factual facts." And you know it's for the birds, but you don't want to offend him, so you say, "Well, that's right. Yeah." God have mercy on my soul, see?

All we can do is take a series of questions – almost random questions – plot them on some kind of a random curve and say, "This is a good Scientologist because we know he can audit" – by experience. See, we know he's all right.

You are always forced, being human, to tell lies, to be wrong – just as routine, routine activity, see, be wrong. And you look this over carefully, and you discover that it's really not possible to be human and to be right. The penalty of being human is to be wrong.

And we take and run it again, and we say, "Well... not this guy." And then we know something else. We know, with processing, we can take this low curve and we can put it up higher and put him into a bracket where he can perform. See, we know these things. That's all we know. We don't know anything about testing.

Somebody wrote a play one time about a fellow who told the truth for twenty-four hours – told nothing but truth, twenty-four hours – and I think in the play he did not get shot, so the play itself was a lie.

In the first place, there is no such thing as standard performance. Your behavior today was undoubtedly the best possible behavior that anybody could have behaved in this society at this time. But if you had behaved as you behaved today in the middle of the African jungle, there wouldn't be a one of you alive tonight. Do you see the slight difference? Now, that's an extreme example.

But we look this over and we properly evaluate people, and we would be able then to forecast what they would do, what they would be, how they would work and react, and all we're interested in is how they would communicate. If we're interested in how they would communicate, then we can spot the fact that they will be able to do. A person is so accustomed to trying to do something that he cannot then communicate that communicatingness cuts down his doingness. And there's a direct coordination between these two things: his communicatingness and his doingness.

Therefore, who could say what is a survival test? – unless it would be a survival test against an environment. In other words, the test must always be against conditions which exist in an environment. It must always be a test of performance. You follow that?

So, let's look it over and let's see very plainly that an organization depends upon the tone level of its personnel, and that is really all it depends on, unless of course we grade goals. Some goals of organizations are better and some are worse, some are more pervasive, some are less. But this again was the idea, ordinarily, of a person.

It's important, because for years people have been telling you that you were dumb or mediumly bright or something, see. They have been telling you that you were bright and dumb or telling you that you could be smarter or something of the sort, and they've never told you against what standard. What's the standard? Brighter than whom? Dumber than which?

Communism doesn't like this idea. They even swear at the cult of the personality. I know they kept people from going to circuses in droves when they told Popov the Clown that he must play a background role now because he was trying to erect a cult of the personality. The Moscow Circus was being jammed throughout Europe; people were going to it wherever it appeared because of this famous clown, Popov. And the anti-Stalinists said that this must be a bad thing, that he was there and he was communicating, so they were going to cut his throat and they did.

I know I had a teacher used to tell me I was awfully dumb all the time. She used to say, "You are the stupidest child I ever had!" She used to say this just routinely. "You're the stupidest child I ever had." She'd just would keep this up. Every day, you know, I'd try to read something or do something – "You're the stupidest child I ever had."

And they get the idea that goals and songs and other things float in the air; they are conditions which exist, never caused. See, a folk song is an uncaused song. Nobody ever wrote it. That's one of the silliest things. You get to looking this over and you'll see that somebody is so stuck in conditions they can't have terminals. So it's rather a fabulous thing that communism operates at all. And we look at it closely and we find out it doesn't operate. What's operating there is a capitalism state- size. Well, we won't go into that any further.

Finally found out what was wrong with her. I went into consultation with a couple of other kids and I says, "What is the matter with the old babe?" you know. "What's the matter with her?"

But if we have all things uncaused, why, then we can never treat them. Do you understand that completely? Things which have never been caused can never be erased. Only things which have been caused can be factually erased.

And they said, "You know, there's times when you're diplomatic."

A fellow has lumbago: You have to find some basis for his lumbago satisfactory to him before it goes away. He has to understand that he caused it or somebody caused it or something caused it. And all of a sudden he cognites, and he says, "That's when I was going on that sleigh ride. Ah, I remember that pain. Yeah, I was on that sleigh ride and I was kissing the girl, and just at that moment we fell off the back of the sleigh, and I've never been the same since" – something like that; an interrupted kiss or something. Anyway, he says, "That's why I've got this bad leg, here. That's easy." And all of a sudden it goes away.

And I said, "What – what do you mean diplomatic?"

A condition, to exist, must be uncaused. And so if we say the organization did it, it's uncaused. You see that? If we say the great god Throgmagog caused it (only he doesn't exist: he's everywhere at once; he's in all drinking water), the condition can never be erased. Nobody can ever reach it, and they go frantic. They get very upset with it because they can never penetrate to the causation, and never being able to penetrate to causation, they cannot of course eradicate the condition, so the condition goes on forever.

"You take her an apple."

How do you make something go on forever? You say it was never caused. Nobody, nothing ever caused this. It is a condition which is natural, which exists, which is psychological. Well, all right.

So I said, "Hey, what do you know!" You know, I was a kid out on the Western range most of the time, and I learned fast, you know, quick. And so next time I rode by a neighbor's of ours orchard , why, I took her a saddlebag full of apples. Smartest child she had. Always afterwards the smartest child she had.

Therefore, the statement that General Electric does this and General Electric does that, and General Motors does this, and the government does that are all uncaused actions which will then float forward till the end of time. And it's no wonder that whereas an organization might have been able to have built a submarine in 1954, to find that they're not able to build a submarine in 1956. They're just hitting the dwindling spiral, aren't they? In other words, this "company" built a submarine. The devil it did! It never did! I didn't see a single company sign down there pounding rivets. There wasn't a single sign, and none of the tape at all came around to polish the windows or the ports or anything. There was nothing. Nothing happened there as far as that's concerned. But there were some men there. And there were some men that did drawings on drawing boards, and there were some girls that copied them off. And there were some riveters and some welders there. And there were some atomic-energy men there, and there were some other people there. But they were all people. And they all lived and breathed. And they are reachable, and they can be contacted, and they can be talked to. And these people exist; they are. And their actions are traceable to them.

So I figured out the standard of performance there was a bag of apples. So I know when I'm stupider than a bag of apples and smarter than a bag of apples. I hope you've had the similar good fortune to know what you're stupider than and smarter than.

I'm afraid what I'm giving you is terribly destructive. If this was uttered tonight in Hungary or in Poland, we would probably all be shot before dawn. Fortunately, our present government has not yet snapped terminals to the degree that it would accomplish this if it found out about it. We are protected by the fact that our government almost never finds out anything. If it finds it out and if it believes it thoroughly, count on it; it's wrong.

They give you university examinations, give you high-school examinations and they give you a grade. The grade says "A," but they never say "a" what? They say "B," but they never tell you what to be. They say "C," and send you out of the place stone blind on any subject you've been studying. Now, that's an awful pun, a bad series of puns, but bad in comparison to whose?

Why would this be revolutionary? Because the complete, solid understanding that an organization is composed of individuals and is not itself a thing is primary cause on organization. And if you realize that thoroughly – not just lip service to it – if you really looked it over, if you yourself could find that in your own experience and in your own observation, then the organizations which you have looked at for so long (governments and other things) would be seen by you for what they are: collections of individuals. And those individuals are individual individuals. There is nothing mystic or esoteric about any one of them. They exist, they live, they breathe.

You just remember that, will you, on tests. It is true that today we have tailored up a test which tells us that somebody will cause us trouble. In other words, his performance in our hands will be deplorable. Maybe the guy's a good marksman. Maybe he'd be excellent as a shrimp fisherman, down in Mexico shooting Mexicans. The guy might be... might be – you know, he might be anything, you know. But according to our demands on his performance, such as to sit still and answer pleasantly, he's a bad character, don't you see.

And to realize that about a great government is to realize, almost, the end of that government. Do you see that clearly? Because all you would have to do is to put out this law: You would have to say, "Government officials hereinafter must be human," or "They must be processed," or they must be anything'd. And there would go (up or down) the organization. All you'd have to do is recognize the individual nature of each person in that organization and realize that they were people, and you would never again be afraid of a police force.

And when he gets to be a good character, we know that he's capable of certain performances. We know he's capable of certain persistences. We know that his ability to handle people, his ability to live, his ability to do, communicate in general, will be very good.

Policemen are robots, you know; somebody else always sent them. Definition of a robot: a robot is a machine that somebody else runs. You never contact the operator of robots, you contact the robot. Well, police are peculiarly this. Nevertheless, there was somebody who sent them.

But again (and I give you this very factually), from our viewpoint – from our viewpoint. He will be able to talk to people; he will be able to make people better; he will be able to have the world happy that he's around. But that's only our narrow-minded viewpoint. He'll be of some value in any community, since he will produce. He will be missed when he's gone. But remember, that is only our viewpoint.

The organization of police is never against one. The organization of government cannot possibly be against one. The organization of an army cannot be against one. But individuals can be nasty on occasion. But remember this: individuals can be handled even when they have rocket pistols in their hands. I know. I speak by experience.

And, please observe this, it very well may be true that it is a terribly incorrect viewpoint. Maybe it's completely too narrow; maybe it's a worthless viewpoint entirely, you see. Maybe the actuality is that a fellow who is in a rage all the time, who stamps his feet, who makes everybody miserable, that kicks dogs when they've been hit by cars and spanks kids who have just sat on hot stoves – maybe these people are the salt of the earth. But it just happens they're not, from our viewpoint. But it's our idiotically narrow-minded viewpoint that objects to this. You understand that? I mean, it may not be true that these are bad people. They're bad from our viewpoint.

Thank you.

It may require people like this to aberrate people so that we can process them. You see, there's always this sort of thing to think of. There's always something to think about like that.

Thank you.

It may be that standards of performance vary. Now, you take Tarzan's standard of performance. I was a great student of Tarzan's. I used to read Edgar Rice Burroughs quite regularly when I could... The librarian ordinarily wouldn't let me have books. I kept them too long, and so forth, and read them too arduously: read right straight back through their covers and things like that, and very bad habits. And I'd never have money enough to pay the fines of the books I already had kept out too long and which I'd forgotten to return or hadn't finished yet or something of the sort. We were always having a feud. Fortunately, there was a small window at the back of the library, so I checked my own books in and out. Anyway...

Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories of Tarzan were very encouraging to the youth of America in that day. They were very, very encouraging. They were a fine, upstanding example of a man acting like an ape. And I very often used to feel constrained by these books from highly civilized conduct and that sort of thing. But I was tremendously intrigued by this since that was a standard of performance to all young America. See?

If you acted like Tarzan, boy, you were in. Man, who wouldn't be willing to swing from tree to tree. I done broke my neck more than once. The dull crash, some old frayed rope strung up one way or the other, tarzaning from tree to tree, you know. They never tell you that the arc circumscribed by a rope is the length of the rope.

But this was still a standard of performance. Now, not modernly, but just yesterday, I told the two chaps that invented Superman... I knew them rather well up in New York, and they were looking for a good idea. And I told them that I thought they were overdoing it a bit. Seems like I was right: they were overdoing it from my viewpoint. They got more popular than anything I was writing. Well anyhow, these boys and Superman, you know.

Now, actually your wearing two identities and being schizophrenic, from the standpoint of a psychiatrist, would be extremely questionable – extremely questionable. I mean, supposing you met somebody that jumped in behind doors and peeled off all of his clothes in a public hall and threw on some dyed underwear and then leaped out of windows, never used doors. From a psychiatric viewpoint that standard of performance is nuts.

But from young America of a decade ago that was quite acceptable conduct. Someday you'll have a preclear. These young men are still growing up, I call to your attention; you do not yet have them as preclears. And one of these days you will find that you have a preclear whose only foible is stepping behind doors... and running around in dyed underwear. The only difference is when you try to cure him of this, he probably will be able to fly.

Well, although I don't know anything at all about testing, I can tell you that, finally, standards of performance have to some degree unwound. There's hardly one of us who hasn't asked himself the question, "Isn't it better to be mean?" Almost every one of us has had the feeling that we were a bit soft. We didn't like flying into the teeth of some human being and making him feel bad or making her feel bad. We've told ourselves, "We ought to be tougher. We ought to put up a better front; we ought to be... You know, know when to snarl, know when to show the sharpened tooth." And I'm sure that we have walked away occasionally after we've loaned somebody five dollars or something of the sort and said, "When am I going to learn to be tough? When am I going to learn to be tough? When am I going to learn to be hardboiled and just stand right up to that little kid and say 'No!' When am I going to learn this?"

And the motto behind this is "Isn't it better to be mean occasionally? It's only from being kind and a sucker" – synonym: being kind, being a sucker – "being an easy mark, so on. When am I going to stop being all of these bad, soft things and be a hard, forthright, capable-of-saying-no person? When am I going to be able to do that? Isn't it better to be mean? I would be a much better manager. I would be a much better person if I knew when to come down with a slight slam. If I could just know, occasionally, when I should be mean, and if I just was willing to be mean, wouldn't that be right. Isn't it true that I should be more mean than I am? Isn't it true that I should be harder, more forthright, much more positive. I should be able to just take the people out there and just sweep them aside? And isn't there some rightness in being tough? Isn't there?"

And I used to ask myself this question. I used to ask myself this question. Everybody does. And I used to ask myself, "Isn't there a time when I will finally get rough enough, mean enough, ornery enough, that people will flinch?" You know. "Something wrong with me that I don't want to be mean. Something wrong with me."

And I used to think about this occasionally, and as the years went along I could spot times when I should've been tougher – you know, I knew it; sure of it – and very recently, very recently, ran a series of processes which were highly informative. Very informative. That person that's willing to confront other things doesn't ever have to say no, he doesn't ever have to be mean, he doesn't ever have to be tough at all. As a matter of fact, it's a silly thing to do; it's a silly thing to be. It is perfectly all right to be nice to people. It isn't a weakness at all; nothing weak about being nice. And a matter of fact, if you aren't, you're in the soup.

You could say that the only times for which you are suffering are those times when you weren't nice enough, when you weren't kind enough and when you weren't unmean enough, and those are the only times from which you're really suffering.

It is not true that being mean gets anybody ahead anyplace. That's really factual, really factual. Because being mean is going out of ARC with. And a careful analysis of games conditions and the processing of preclears demonstrates that if you were to run the process "Go out of communication with, go out of communication with, go out of communication with, go out of communication with," he goes to pieces. Fascinating little test, isn't it.

"I should be mean. I should say no. I should say I don't want to communicate with you. I should say I don't want to have anything more to do with you. I should be able to say, 'You do so-and-so regardless of the consequences.'" Willingness to mess somebody else up, you know, being hard about the whole thing.

Well, if you run it on a preclear, you will just run out a few of his incidents of his doing that, but it's a cut communication the whole way.

When you deny your fellow man, the only thing which you can deny is to deny him communication. I don't care how solid the particle is or how light and airy the particle is. You say "no"; you say "be mean," you say "be very positive," do this and do that; the truth of the matter is that you are denying him communication, one way or the other – being tough.

The only thing you should ever be tough about is insist that the other fellow ought to stand on his own feet, too. And the only way you will ever communicate that to him is to communicate it to him in a very nice way. Then he's liable to receive it.

Being mean is simply going out of communication with things. And that's always – always will be and always has been – very aberrative.

So I've got the question answered and have a standard for conduct at least from a standpoint of aberration. The individual who is kind, who is decent and who does communicate and who is nice and who isn't averse to conversation and saying this and doing that, who is tolerant, and so on, we find gets along beautifully. We find the things that he runs into in life run out. They don't pile up on him and swamp him.

But the fellow who's mean and who's ornery and who's cutting comms all the way along the line, and so on, we find he's in the soup.

Now, I don't know anything about testing, but all testing must be conducted against a hidden ideal or a known ideal. But if it's hidden, somebody must know it. Somebody would have to know this ideal.

You could test a fellow against a hidden ideal where you knew the answers to the test and he didn't, but you had better know the answers to the test.

Therefore, I can tell you tonight that a test which is measured on the basis of human kindness as a high and human meanness as a low is a standard of human optimum performance. That sounds very silly, and that's a very obvious sort of a thing to discover, but nevertheless it's a discovery.

I don't know anything about testing, but now I think I know how to make one. I think I know how a decent fellow would grade and how a bad one would grade because I know the answer at last to whether I should have been mean all those times or whether I should have been more kind. And I know I should have been more kind.

Thank you.