In investigating life, trying to find some common denominator of knowledge, behavior and activity, it was necessary to screen quite a few principles.

Human Evaluation is borne out of the fact that if you know some of the basic fundamentals of human thought you can then predict behavior.

A lot of things have been advanced in the past few thousand years concerning what life was doing. As a matter of fact, some pretty wild ones have been put forward. None of them, however, were workable to the degree that an engineer requires workability. Possibly for the first time the principles of engineering were well enough known in a school and in a society to actually be applied to the field of the mind. A rare circumstance existed there. Man has been attacking and conquering the physical universe; he hasn’t been spending much time trying to recover all the data he could from any other level — ”if there is any other level,” man was asking himself. “Even if there is one, we’ll pay attention to it. Sure. We’ll put it in good hands for safekeeping and we’ll develop physics and chemistry, gunpowder and other useful items such as Lee-Enfield rifles.”

Somebody mentioned to me that this is the thing that people went into psychology classes in college to learn and were terribly disappointed never to have discovered. That is rather true. I have heard this complaint rather consistently about psychology, and as a matter of fact, psychology is not in very good repute in the society because of this. It gives those of us in Dianetics a difficult time sometimes because we say, “We know so-and-so and so-and-so about psychology,” and people say, “But psychology is a lot of bunk! It doesn’t work. Therefore Dianetics couldn’t work either because it is also about the human mind.” This wonderful piece of “logic” is something we run into all too often.

And the science that had been developed on forward from the days of Francis Bacon had, all this while, been quietly and unannouncedly building up data about thought. They didn’t realize that.

I have absolutely nothing against psychology. As a matter of fact, if I had half as much against psychology as psychology has against Dianetics, I would be a raving lunatic.

How does one think logically? Aristotle could sit back there and do a pretty good job in the days of the ancient Greeks, saying “Logic is . . .” and then go off and wander through the hills and far away and be very proud of himself, and it would be very beautifully written. Plato could come along and do a good job on it, and Lucretius — people all along the line. But it was a case of “anything goes,” because their logic did not have to be applied to the physical universe. And the physical universe has a very unhappy method of suddenly turning around and kicking you in the teeth if you don’t think right about it.

I am going to lay out for you the prime principles, the basic tenets, with which we are working in Human Evaluation. The whole subject of Human Evaluation, of course, derives from an understanding of human behavior, which is something human beings have been rather curious about in the last few thousand years.

An engineer goes out and starts to build a bridge across a river, and he wants to run a train across it. Just beyond that chasm is a hill; the train is going to have to go around, go over or go through that hill. It doesn’t do the engineer any good to say “Well, let me see. According to the ancient Greeks, such-and-such and so-and-so; therefore no river could possibly exist at this point, so naturally a bridge isn’t necessary.” If he were to come up with this happy solution and start out his train, it would go roaring along and crash. That would be the end of that. And if he even built the bridge but said the mountain wasn’t in existence, the train would run into the mountain.

Any time you meet a human being and become associated with him socially, it would be of some benefit to know, by looking at him and talking to him for a couple of minutes, what this individual has in store for you in his friendship with you. It would be of some small benefit to know whether or not he is going to run off with your wife or borrow your car and not come back with it, or whether or not he will be a good friend who will loan you that hundred bucks when you need it.

The physical universe puts a hard test on thought and logic. This test and trial by violence that the physical universe puts up against an engineer permits no compromises. One can’t go shilly-shallying around and saying, “Well, let me see. If I cut the prefrontal lobes out of this human being . . . Why, there was a man in Germany, and this fellow in Germany was working at the forge — he was an idiot and he was working at a forge — and the forge exploded and it blew a crowbar in one temple and out the other temple, and he lived. So therefore it’s possible to cut the prefrontal lobes out of a man. I think I will.” So he does, and he knows nothing is going to happen anyhow because nothing can be done about it anyway.

Now, in the business sphere where we have a high level of competition and contest and so on, Human Evaluation goes into two levels: one, the people with whom we do business as a business, and two, the people we employ to take care of our business.

The story I just gave you is the fundamental impetus on the prefrontal lobotomy. I have read the original releases on it, and it does not claim that the man became anything but an idiot; it didn’t change his mental state. All it announces is the fact that a crowbar could drive through the prefrontal lobe. So therefore it is legitimate to operate on him! That is not logic! The psychiatrist would have gotten nothing in return if he failed, because there is no penalty for this type of failure. Everybody says, “Crazy people are crazy and — they’re crazy. There’s nothingcan be done about it anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you do to their brains. They’re hopeless anyway.” In other words, they weren’t up against the physical universe; they were up against a bunch of stuff that they thought might or might not be logic. So it was perfectly all right to fail.

It is very important, when one is dealing consistently or means to deal consistently with somebody in business, to have some forewarning of whether this individual is going to be something less than kind in his dealings and to have some idea in advance whether or not his word is to be trusted. If you have noticed, most business failures — those that are not founded upon sheer ineptitude — come about when trust is mistakenly placed in another human being. It would be very nice to know how much you have to be on your guard with somebody when you are doing business with him.

It isn’t all right for an engineer to fail, so engineering logic has become pretty tight. It says, in so many words, you do so-and-so and so-and-so and you get a certain result. And if you omit doing one of the actions and yet do two of the others, you won’t get that result. But if you do all those things you get that result; and you don’t just get it once in a while, you don’t get it every thousand years, you don’t get it fifty percent of the time, you get it every time — if you carry out all the prescribed actions. It is an uncompromising, terrifically rigid discipline.

A banker, for instance, is subjected to a continual running fire of people saying “I want a nice little short-term note here of, we, five thousand dollars.” He has to try to select out of the mass of people coming in front of his desk, one right after the other, the person who will pay it back. The banker has been stung so often, through an inability to know, that he has had to go around Robin Hood’s barns to test this. He says, “How much collateral have you got?”

An engineer reads through the Launderings of people about human thought and he is struck immediately with a very strange thing: Nobody thought it was necessary to get a common denominator of what behavior was. Why were men behaving that way? Nobody thought it was necessary to get a common denominator. That is one of the first things that one must have if one is going to erect a pyramid of logic: he has to have a common denominator. There has to be a datum that is big enough and embracive enough to embrace all the other data. Unless he can find such a datum, he isn’t going to embrace anything. So his search would naturally be for the lowest common denominator he could find in terms of behavior.

You say, “Well, I’ve got so-and-so and so-and-so.”

What is man trying to do here on earth? You could go at it in this wise, and ask “What is he trying to do? Is he trying to shoe horses? Is he trying to be important? Is he trying to be silly, as in government, or anything like this?” What is it? What is the common denominator of behavior? I can tell you, from experience, that you can chew around on this for years without getting any answer.

And he says, “You want to borrow five thousand dollars? All right. You’ve got five thousand dollars in the bank. Now, if you will leave your five thousand dollars in the bank, we’ll loan you the five thousand dollars.”In other words, bankers become very “trusting” through an inability to forecast who is going to repay a loan. It would be very interesting to a banker to know with considerable accuracy who would and who would not repay a loan.

Darwin talked about the survival of the fittest. It really doesn’t make too much sense — the survival of the fittest. When you start to look over the whole picture of the theory of evolution, you find out it has holes in it. What is wrong with it, though, is Darwin’s theory of natural selection. An engineering approach to the theory of evolution immediately demonstrates to you that the chances against the happy and fortuitous development of the organism as postulated in the theory of natural selection are utterly impossible. The odds against the accidental formation of life, the odds against its developing any form, are fantastic! I don’t care how many billions of years you postulate or anything else. If you just started to add it up in actuarial mathematics you would find yourself up against the dead end of impossibility. It might have gotten up to that terrific complexity called the monocell, and that is a terrifically complex thing. It has a nervous system and everything; it is a mechanism which develops motion and warmth and so forth from sunlight and chemicals. It is a converter, and very complex. An engineer of today trying to build a monocell’s operating machinery would be unable to do it with our modern technology; he wouldn’t even come close to it. It is that complex.

In the matter of running a business, it becomes of the greatest interest to an employer who will be what in his business staff. He has a hard time with it.

And this all happened by accident, out of mud?

The various applications of Human Evaluation are valuable, then, wherever you have two human beings newly met and without past experience with each other. If you had a method of establishing a few years of experience with a human being in a few minutes, it would have some value — in particular, on the subject of employers and employees.

Then there is the fortuitous accident with which several monocells got together and formed an organism, and the fortuitous accident by which a spine was finally formed, and lungs, and finally man. Every time we get one of these new extra steps, we add in the factors against its happening; we say, “Let us allow that it took a billion years for this thing to get from an organism without a spine to an organism with part of a spine. Let’s allow a billion years, and now let’s figure out how many accidents had to happen in that period and what the odds were against it.” We find out they are billions to one — billions and billions and billions of billions to one. Too many other things could have happened. So this theory was not too sound. It depended too much on chance.

A few years ago my uncle, Elbert Hubbard, dashed out the article “A Message to Garcia.” It was written one night after supper in a single hour. The New York Central Railroad, after they had seen this in one of Elbert’s magazines, ordered a hundred thousand copies of it and distributed it to their employees. Then their employees evidently kept distributing this to other people, so they ordered half a million copies. By that time Andrew Carnegie and a few others had stepped in and begun to order this little pamphlet, until finally there were millions and millions of them distributed throughout America in this fashion. It demonstrates that there is a small amount of anxiety on the subject of trying to find a good man to employ. He writes:

Obviously life did not quite approximate the whole of the physical universe. There is some difference between life and the physical universe.

In all this Cuban business, there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion.

All of a sudden we realized that science and the engineer himself had gone completely slap-happy from the days of Newton, and they said, “Oh, look! The law of interaction, the law of acceleration, the law of inertia. Here we’ve got three beautiful laws. Let’s apply them to human behavior and that’s it, boys. Now it’s all solved, and we can go off and do something else.” And they never bothered to look at the result. The result was psychology.

When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba — no one knew where. No mail nor telegraf message could reach him. The President must secure his co-operation and quickly.

Actually an understanding of humanity and behavior was attempted after Newton’s developed laws. However, Newton was dealing with electricity, various energies, matter, space and time, and if you look this over you see that it fails when applied to human behavior. There is something different about life. There is something about life that is native to no other part of the physical universe, and it is so thoroughly unnative that one all of a sudden finds that he can best think about it by considering life to be something other than part of the physical universe. Let’s not parallel it anymore to electricity. Let’s look at it for its own behavior level. Let’s look at it as an energy suddenly laid down from Mars or someplace and just consider it that way and find out what it really does do. In that way, some answer can be derived from it.

What to do?

What is life trying to do? It is trying to survive. How does it survive? By the conquest of the physical universe. That is very briefly stated; it requires a tremendous amount of expansion. But that is actually the basic fundamental. What is life trying to do? It is trying to survive. And how is it surviving? What method does it have of surviving? Its method of survival is a conquest of the physical universe. And we don’t even claim this is true. We don’t even claim that this is all that life is doing; maybe in some other universe and in some other ways life is doing something else, too. But certainly, using this postulate, we can start making headway and making it swiftly. What are we trying to do? We are trying to survive.

Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia.

What is survival? What is the penalty of not surviving? It is as though, at some point back on the track somewhere, somebody said to this energy, “Survive,” and completely unlike the clerk mentioned by Elbert Hubbard in “Message to Garcia” the energy didn’t turn around and say “How?” or anything, it just went ahead and survived! And all of its combinations of survival operating into the physical universe and out of it again are apparently along that one line of action. That is a common denominator which happens to satisfy practically everything that is known about man. I have been looking at it now, off and on, for about thirteen years, and I haven’t found anything that didn’t fall into the category of survive or succumb.

How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapt it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traverst a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.

I did not realize this until a relatively short time ago, but this does not violate any of the principles of the human soul. It isn’t necessary to go what is commonly called completely materialistic in order to look over this survival level.

The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?”

People say the human soul departs. What do they say the human soul does? They say it has infinite survival — it lives forever! Life everlasting is survival; that is the ultimate of survival. So this postulate is not even in violation of the field of religious tenets.

By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing — “Carry a message to Garcia!”

Perhaps the word survival is not as completely embracive of what we are talking about as it might be; perhaps other people have a different concept of this word survival. So we had better say what we conceive it to mean.

General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias.

Survival is not a matter of bare necessity. Bare necessity does not survive. I can show you that rather rapidly.

No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man — the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant.

A farmer goes out and starts shooting dice with the universe at large, planting his corn and his wheat; he has the government on one side and the devil on the other. He starts raising wheat and he says, “I’m going to need six bushels of wheat for each month of the ensuing year.” Now, this fellow is dealing with bare necessity, and he says, “I’m going to need just that many bushels of wheat, and I can get by and feed my family and my stock all right with the other things that are around.” And so he plants that many.

You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office — six clerks are within call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio.”

Out of his six bushels of wheat, grasshoppers take one. His ineptitude in planting wheat takes one. This is Kansas, so the hail takes one. And he has forgotten that wheat has to be processed in order to make flour, and the miller takes one. He is living in the United States, so he has to pay an income tax and the government takes two. So he starves to death; that is the end of him, because he has postulated survival on bare necessity, and any time an individual does that, he is in bad shape.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes sir,” and go do the task?

Survival, the barest survival, has to be on such a tremendous level of abundance that one is rather staggered. In a lifetime the average individual makes about a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand dollars. He is paid that much, but he is living with margins and factors of safety all around him which are anywhere from five to twenty times as much as he needs. If he doesn’t have these margins, the give-and-take will absorb one of those fives, or one of those tens, and all of a sudden the individual is dead on that point. Life is not exactly a safe venture.

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

In the field of insurance, they make a bit of a gamble out of whether or not people survive. They look a person over and figure it all out and they sell him some insurance.

Who was he?

So you have to have survival in abundance. Survival in abundance will get somebody through. It will get a group through. A group has to operate, however, on the engineering principle of factor of safety. An engineer who builds a bridge to stand one hundred tons, when one hundred tons is going to be the common load of that bridge, has violated the fundamental of abundance. The bridge will wear a little bit, sag a little bit, somebody will have been a little dishonest with his material, and down will go the bridge. So he builds it to hold five hundred tons because he knows its normal load will be one hundred tons. Or sometimes they build in factors of safety; they do this in England. England wants to be known as a staunch country, and they will build twenty or twenty-five factors of safety into something: An American goes over there and tries to lighten up their railroad carriages so their trains will go somewhat faster than ten miles an hour, and they say, “I say, old boy, our reputation for solidity is at stake.”

Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia? Was I hired for that?

Anyway, when you have violated a factor of safety in living, you have violated a primary concept of survival in that an individual has to have a lot of wherewithal in order to survive any length of time. Furthermore, he has to survive through and with many things in order to guarantee his survival. Otherwise he will succumb.

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

Now, you could graph a person’s potential of survival against time. This tone scale, by the way, is the basic of the Chart of Human Evaluation. At the bottom is 0.0, death, and it goes up through various levels of existence — 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0. Up at the top is a survival potential of immortality. If we draw a vector for one organism at a point low on the scale, we find out his potential of survival measured in time is not as good as that of an organism which is high on the tone scale. In other words, we can measure this arrow as a vector and predict the length of time the individual will survive.

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it? Is he dead? Is there any hurry?

Of course, on this theory of abundance, if he is high on the tone scale all the time his potential of survival must be pretty good and he will live quite a while. If he is low on the scale his survival will be pretty bad; he is not so far from death. A very low-toned person will drag off and slide down toward death very soon; a person higher on the scale will go along for quite a ways, and a really high-toned person will last a long time without much diminishing.

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for?

How long will a person live? Where a person appears on that scale will actually pred Act his longevity. You take his age as a factor and draw where he is on this potential of survival, measured by many things, and you can find out about when this fellow is going to die. You get him down below 2.0 and the line gets pretty steep, because down below 2.0 survival is so poor and the abundance is so slight that the individual is heading toward succumb as his goal. He is not heading anymore toward survival; he is heading toward succumb. Above 2.0 he is heading toward survival. In other words, if he is low on the tone scale he has so little chance to survive that he will actually accelerate his own demise rapidly, and in doing so will accelerate the demise of people in his vicinity. If an individual just barely above 2.0 happened to meet up with this low-toned individual, the combination there would not be strong enough to do anything and both of them would dive steeply down into death. But if you have a high-toned fellow meeting one of these low-toned people, the low-toned one will probably just go on and die and the hightoned fellow will stay up there.

And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to find Garcia — and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.

When you add in all of these factors — and it doesn’t matter how many factors you add in or how many things you try to figure out on this line — it comes up against this tone scale as a conclusion.

Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Correggio is indext under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself.

When we are talking about death, of course, we are just talking about the death of the organism. The physical universe has energy which is imperishable. It doesn’t matter how many atoms you change into how many electrons; not even the atom bomb has controverted the conservation of energy. Conservation of energy is still very much with us. Strangely enough, the force of life evidently follows this same rule of conservation of energy.

And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place.

By the way, there is far more evidence in existence now in Dianetics in support of the immortality of the force of life, regardless of the mortality of the organism, than there is against an immortality.

Advertise for a stenografer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate — and do not think it necessary to.

A long time ago, science and religion did a wild severance. Some scientist tried to change a few doctrines down in Rome and they burned him. As a result, scientists got mad at religion and then religion decided that science was very wrong for being mad and they did a little bit of a parting of company. It is very strange now — without wanting to, since I haven’t any great personal interest in this field — to be watching the inevitable realignment.

Can such a one write a letter to Garcia? “You see that book-keeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory. “Yes, what about him?” “Well, he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main street, would forget what he had been sent for.” Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?

People in the Foundation for the last year have been going just a little bit mad on the subject of my daring to say anything about what has been discovered about the human soul and the evident cycle of existence and so on. We keep running into this evidence. We can put our hands on it, and we look at it and everybody says, “It’s too incredible! Shut up! Don’t tell people about this; it will invalidate Dianetics.”

We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “down-trodden denizen of the sweat-shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it all often goes many hard words for the men in power.

I don’t believe that way. I just say, “Well, look; here’s some evidence. I can’t evaluate it all, but it certainly seems to mean that life has a certain level of immortality but the organism doesn’t. And also there seems to be some data here in favor of the survival of the personal identity.”

Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-well’s to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer — but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best — those who can carry a message to Garcia....

A long time ago they were looking for this as positive proof — ”Supposing you could show it to everybody in an equation. They would say that is it, and we would have an immortality here.” But skeptics came along, and people in the Foundation have been saying, “Shhhhh, be quiet! Don’t talk about this. It’s very bad.”

Elbert was bitter. The fact of the matter is, the tremendous expense to a business in running the business as a testing crucible for employees, if added up, would probably make a lot of businessmen faint. Not only that, but the employees themselves — since there is no real division between management and labor (there is practically no such thing as “labor”; it is just management of a lot and management of a little) — the people trying to do their jobs in the plant, are also very definitely affected by using the whole business as a crucible for testing employees.

Actually, Dianetics is most of the time very calmly rather materialistic about all these things. We talk about pain: you knock out pain and a person gets more things, he does more, he has more energy and he conquers more of the physical universe. This is a very materialistic line. But lying right in back of it and going along quietly is a beautiful thread of mysticism. When you are dealing with a science, it is not like psychology. You don’t call random facts into existence or blow out of existence the random facts which show up. Just because something doesn’t fit with your frame of reference you don’t say it doesn’t exist, because it will come back up and slap you in the face and upset all of your calculations if you are really working with some power. So you can’t ignore this thing back here.

Now, the more employees you hire, the harder it is to keep a line, until you work up to that epitome — or, you might say, that climax — of all nonsense, the U.S. government. You can even get that ridiculous.

The energy of life evidently is a survival energy. It comes into an organism, forming up with the material universe. Life energy combines with the material universe to form an organism. The organism grows, becomes highly mobile, matures, creates another organism, and goes on living itself. So there is a cycle of species here; there is a cycle of generations. One generation goes along and dies, and another one branches out and it goes along and off, and there are the succeeding generations. A whole species will start up and die off, and that is a bigger cycle.

You can have all sorts of beautiful tests — civil-service tests that say “Do you have a high-school diploma? Do you have a college diploma? Have you ever been in jail? Are you married? Do you have any children?” You put all this down on a government employment record and they look it all over and say, “Yep, hire him,” or “Don’t hire him,” or something of the sort.

Life as an energy is very definitely operating behind this. This tone scale is a representation of the fact that a life form has as good a chance of surviving as it has been able to better the suppressors in its environment. In other words, it has to have been better in overcoming its environment than the environment was in overcoming it. As the environment kicks back on the organism too hard you get a line descending toward death. When it doesn’t kick back terribly hard the line moves along, surviving, and if it hasn’t kicked back at all, you get an ascending line, high-toned survival. In other words, the organism has overcome the environment.

These efforts to discover data about an individual cost a great deal of money, they cost a great deal of time and they sometimes cost a business its efficiency to a point where a business will fail which might otherwise have succeeded — all because the business itself had to be used as a testing ground.

Now, how is one of these organisms surviving? Somebody who thinks — along with a lot of strange, very materialistic philosophies — that an individual is not completely interdependent with the rest of the universe has certainly not done very much thinking about it. The individual who says “I can live alone” is very interesting. He can’t live without the lichen and the moss. They create soil so that vegetables can grow. He can’t live without a lot of odds and ends — for instance, trees to make firewood; that is a life form, and he has to be interdependent with this life form. Most important, he is interdependent with the physical universe, too, because he would sure play the devil surviving as a human organism if he didn’t have an earth to walk on. And as far as the physical universe of space and time is concerned, the earth would certainly look silly if it didn’t have any space and time to exist in.

Now, every time you bring in somebody, you might have the feeling you are hiring a pig in a poke, but you put him on the job. Three months later you happen to wonder if that fellow is doing well, so you go and look and find out the whole job has collapsed and has stopped a whole assembly line. That becomes very serious, doesn’t it? That is only one aspect of it.

So the individual lives because of cooperation with other individuals, life forms and the physical universe. This is life. He can only live if he is in cooperation with these things.

In the business of counseling, in the business of trying to help and aid one’s fellow man, it is very important to know who and what one is trying to aid. For instance, in giving understanding or philanthropy to individuals, every so often on the assembly line there is a deadbeat, a professional desirer of sympathy. Some of these people seeking aid are very, very deserving and some of them are not. How do you tell the difference?

That is very elementary. But it is a very funny thing that as an individual drops back down this tone scale he goes further and further out of cooperation with other life forms, because other life forms have suppressed him and he begins to conceive they are enemies. The second he begins to conceive he has an enemy in another life form, his suppressor gets stronger and he has less chance of surviving. Something happens there which suppresses his chance of survival. The more trouble he runs into, the more conflict he gets into and the more physical pain he suffers in his conquest of the universe, the less he is able to ally himself with the rest of the universe and the less he will ally himself with the rest of the universe. It is a sort of hideous spiral.

How do you tell when a man is telling the truth? Is there a way of knowing whether or not a man is telling the truth without subjecting him to a lie detector, which has a limited usefulness and to which he very often objects? And it is very difficult in the ordinary course of human affairs to go around carrying one of these lie detectors under your arm; it weighs several pounds. But there is a way. There is a way of telling this.

For example, take a little boy; he is everybody’s friend. He runs down the street and he trips, falls and hits his head on the curb. The curb is now nonsurvival. He goes a little bit further through life and meets another little boy and they have an argument about something or other which grows out of something strange — probably out of the first little boy’s falling on the curb — and he has a fight with this other little boy. So he is just that much estranged from this other little boy. Now he is estranged from the curb and he is a bit estranged from this other little boy, so he goes out in the woods. He is walking through the woods and the wind is blowing, and a limb falls and hits him on the back of the neck and hurts him. Now he is just that much out of cooperation and association with limbs and trees and the wind. And so it goes. The more he has to conceive danger and the more physical pain he receives from his environment, the less chance of survival he himself has as an organism. It goes in direct ratio.

The whole subject of Human Evaluation is something man has been trying to reach for a long time. In looking over the books of the ancients and the ideas that were handed down before things were written, I found that man has been interested in trying to discover this for forty-five hundred years. I am not trying to tell you that it was suddenly discovered all at one fell swoop. There was a gradual accumulation of information over those forty-five hundred years.

The dynamics mean, simply, how many forms of survival are there? How does an individual survive? By playing dogleg holes you can work this thing out that the individual survives solely because of himself and cooperates only because of selfishness. But you can also work it out that he survives only for future generations and prove it all very beautifully that way. You can work it out, as they have in Russia, that the individual survives solely for the state and is only part of an ant society, a collectivist. And so it goes, one right after the other. You can take these ways he survives and you can make each one it. But when you put it to the test, you find out that you need all of them — all of the dynamics.

Trying to find what was important in what had been accumulated was very important. Organizing that with which people had worked in the past — organizing it, evaluating it and putting it together — paid off, and it paid off in the form of Dianetics. It took a long time.

Now, the number of dynamics in existence — or, rather, counted up at this time — merely add up the number of fields or entities a man has to be in cooperation with in order to get along.

Sigmund Freud had the idea that all you had to do was clear up somebody’s libido and he would begin living. But Freud, in a rather heartbroken little memorial written about 1937, said, “Psychoanalysis: terminable or interminable and in that little monograph he stated that his hopes were dead; it had not worked.

There is the first dynamic; call that self. A man has to live as himself. In other words, he has to survive as self.

He needn’t have felt so badly about it. Naturally, he had been up against the American Medical Association and probably the American Psychiatric Association, the “Association for the Rehabilitation of Cockeyed Alienists” and the “Association for the Suppression of Associations Which Try to Advance Something to Associate About”! In short, he had been pushing a lot of opposition in front of him, and he didn’t have any tool with which to clean this up so he could keep his own enthusiasm. So by about 1937 he was dead on the subject.

Two, he has to survive through future generations. Here we have children. But the act of sex produces children, so you get, really, two second dynamics — two A and two B. So you have children and you have sex as parts of the same urge. The reason for sex is children — Freud and people in Hollywood to the contrary.

But he had contributed something enormously important: Working with Breuer, l he had found out that if you could get a fellow to remember back to his earliest times and get him to remember certain things he would get better. Freud didn’t know, and he eventually admitted he didn’t know, why a person got better. But he got better sometimes.

Now, the third dynamic is the dynamic of groups. An individual survives for the group. He can survive almost wholly for the group, as a matter of fact: the reason he is alive is for the group.

A fellow by the name of Charcot, around 1832, was experimenting with hypnotism. He found out there were some strange conditions of the mind by which you could look at somebody fixedly and they would go unconscious.

The family group, by the way, goes between the second and third dynamics. It is partly group, and it is partly sex and children. But that is a specialized group.

There were many little things like this back along the track. Assembled, those things become Dianetics.

The individual can survive through the survival of the group. For instance, he gives up his life for a company. He just crosses out dynamic one and goes on living in dynamic three.

In 1930 I knew a fellow by the name of Commander Thompson. I had known him before, actually; he was a friend of the family. He had studied under Freud in Vienna. Old Commander Thompson trained cats. He had a cat named Psycho, a black cat with a crooked tail, and he had Psycho trained to sit up and do other things. He taught me how to train cats — I have never had any luck with it, but he taught me how.

Dynamic four is survival through man as a species. Even if you had an American and a Russian, and even if they were army officers and highly antagonistic toward each other, if one of Orson Welles’ men from Mars suddenly showed up you would find those two men — and the North Koreans and the South Koreans and the U.N. and the Russians and the communists — joining hands to shoot the devil out of that foreign species, if it were considered to be a menace to man. Man actually works on the fourth dynamic. War is a breakdown on the fourth dynamic, because an individual will survive as man.

He got me very interested in the subject of the human mind. He taught me why it is that somebody starts to say one thing and says something else — but the something else the person has said is a clue to his character or what he is trying to hide — and other interesting gimmicks like this. That is just a gimmick; it has no vast importance.

The fifth dynamic is life. On the fifth dynamic, an individual survives to make life survive. In other words, he is interested in the survival of life. He raises canary birds, he raises cats and Pekingese, he raises trees, he raises ornamental shrubs — all sorts of things that apparently have nothing to do directly with his survival. But they are directly concerned with his survival because his survival lies in everything.

I never got inside a high school; I went into engineering school first off. My father had said, “You’re going to engineering school,” and I had said, “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m going to write.” So I went to engineering school! In engineering school they had an interesting little subject called atomic and molecular phenomena, and there were those of us in that class who believed that the mystic and secret forces and powers of the universe were somehow hidden in atomic and molecular phenomena. There were fellows there — wild-haired, wild-eyed radicals, these students — who believed that a few pennyweights of some mysterious element, exploded in a certain fashion, could wipe out an enormous city.

The sixth dynamic is the physical universe. The physical universe is of course just matter, energy, space and time. By the way, we just composite those words and we get MEST in Dianetics — matter, energy, space and time, the physical universe. A man doesn’t want to see the physical universe disappear.

Of course, nothing would ever come of this; naturally nothing like that could happen! Not until Hiroshima would anybody really believe it. Up until that time, the atom bomb was a science-fictioneer’s dream. Then all of a sudden the bombs were dropped on Japan. That validated the men who had struggled forward from 1930 on the track of atomic and molecular phenomena up to the atom bomb.

They had a beautiful cartoon down at CalTec a few years ago. In this cartoon, a scientist with a terrifically ecstatic look on his face is standing up in front of a group of engineers and saying, “Gentlemen, I have here the last word, the ne plus ultra of all scientific endeavor and achievement. In this small capsule I have enough explosive to destroy the entire universe!” But actually they want the physical universe to survive.

I was very radical — even more radical than they were. I said, “Atomic and molecular phenomena is very interesting. It must have something to do with the energy of life. Somewhere in here is life energy. We have described it somehow and the description is here, but we don’t know quite where. Now, it’s possible that with this new branch of nuclear physics we might be able to locate the energy of life.”

Then we have the seventh dynamic, which is the survival of life energy — an urge toward the survival of life energy as such. We get terrifically interested when we think of life energy as it is, as it survives, what it might combine with and so forth.

And people said, “Oh, heavens! Everybody knows everybody is dead. What do you mean, ‘the energy of life’?”

And then we put another one down here. Let’s put down the Creator, the Supreme Being, as the eighth dynamic. Someone pointed out an eight laid over on its side is the symbol for infinity. This would be all that lies behind and all that created all the rest.

So I went to work in the laboratory, and I found out that there was no way to store memory. Atomic and molecular phenomena did not describe an energy which would store in the neurons and act as memory.

Now, here are your various dynamics. These might be said to be a bundle, and when you draw this tone scale and you draw one vector that represents one person, you are actually drawing eight vectors, eight lines, because that individual is trying to survive, one way or the other, on all these dynamics at once. Actually, no solution is an optimum solution unless it takes into account all the dynamics influenced by it and gives each one its optimum solution. That sounds very complicated, but it means if you and Bill were in business together and you tried to do a solution that gave you all the benefit and didn’t give Bill any, you would find that it would not work out. It is a fundamental in these dynamics that every time you get a solution where the other dynamics aren’t taken into account, where their interests aren’t taken into account, you get a general failure.

The latest theory on this was a Viennese theory which was fantastic. This theory was in a very thick book — all in German, with adverbial and participial clauses appended to the genders ! — and it described how the mind thinks up a thought or sees something or feels something or hears something, and then stores it in a hole in a punched protein molecule.

So here are your eight dynamics, and you mark up a fellow on the tone scale and you say his vector goes up to 2.0. This individual will take less and less into account on these dynamics. In other words, they are all foreshortened and his view into the more distant dynamics or the more distant things is much less. He becomes unsafe to the degree that he will not take into account the right to survival of other life forms and the physical universe around him. In other words, he cuts down the survival of other things when he is that low on the tone scale. As he drifts down from 4.0 he pays less and less attention to these other dynamics. Oddly enough, he stops paying attention to dynamic one, too; he won’t pay attention to dynamic one.

Now, a protein molecule is so small you can’t see it in a microscope, but he figured out that there were ten holes in one of these molecules and that each hole took about what he called a thousand shots. In other words, a thousand memories were stored in each hole in one of these little protein molecules. That would make ten thousand per molecule, and there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons. That is a big number: if you started writing that number, it would practically cover a wall, column after column. So there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons, and these memories store at the rate of ten thousand specific memories per molecule. This Viennese had done the whole job all the way through except for one thing: he had never looked over into atomic and molecular phenomena and found out what wavelength was.

This is the potential suicide. Anybody from 2.0 down is on his way out. Somebody at 1.5 who, all of a sudden one fine day, fails to destroy some thing that he considers an enemy will kill himself instead. Somebody at 0.5 is almost a lead-pipe cinch as an eventual suicide, one way or the other.

There is no wavelength that small. If it were that minute, it would be so far above the range of ultra light that it would be unimaginable — something like how far away is an island universe? It is so microscopic that it will not register on any known instrument. Therefore the theory is suspicious.

An optimum solution of life, then, takes into account the maximum survival for everything concerned in the problem. This does not mean that one cannot destroy. It so happens that if we didn’t have destruction as one of the operating methods of existence, we would be in pretty bad shape. Do you realize that every fern tree that was growing back in the earliest ages would still be growing, and this would be in addition to every tree that had grown since? And we would have live, growing trees on the face of the earth until we would probably be walking about eight hundred feet above the soil. Death — destruction — has to come in there and clear the way for advances and improvements. And destruction, when used in that way, is very legitimate.

But accepting the theory, believing that this theory works, we figure this thing up and we find out that the human brain does not have enough storage space to store the memories of three months. And those are not the minor observations of three months, but just the major observations of three months.

For instance, you can’t build an apartment house without knocking down the tenement that stood there before. Somebody comes along and says, “Oh, that’s very bad; you’re destroying something. You’re destroying an old landmark.”

This was a mathematical job. I guess the fellow could speak very beautiful German, but he couldn’t do very good mathematics.

“We’re trying to put up an apartment house here, lady.” “Yes, but that’s a famous old landmark.”

That was the ne plus ultra of all the theories of memory storage and human energy. I took it around and showed it to Dr. William Alanson White. l He was head of St. Elizabeth’s, where they sent the naval officers after they had received their fifth contradiction from the Navy Department And old Dr. White said, “Gosh!”

“Lady, that thing is about ready to fall into the street.” “Oh, it’s very bad to destroy things.”

I said, “Well, what do you think about it?”

That is pretty aberrated, because you have to destroy something once in a while. Just think what would happen, for instance, if every piece of paper that had ever been given you in your lifetime was still in your possession and then you had to move, and it was very bad to destroy things so you had to keep on lugging all these things around with you. You can see how ridiculous it would get.

“Well, naturally, not very much is known about structure.”

There is an actual equation involved in this: One must not destroy beyond the necessity required in construction. If one starts to destroy beyond the necessity required in construction, one gets into pretty bad shape very hurriedly. One gets into the shape Nazi Germany is in today. They destroyed everything; they said, “Now Austria, now Czechoslovakia, now let’s knock apart Stalingrad!” They knocked apart Stalingrad — great! Stalingrad is an awful mess. So is Germany.

This and erstatement practically blew my stack. And I realized suddenly for the first time that I had been looking for something all this time that I thought people knew about! There was a psychology department, there were doctors — all these people certainly must know. They all acted like they did! After Dr. White gave me this blank stare and so forth and sort of a “So what?” and “This is just another puzzle on top of all these other puzzles,” I went over to the psychology department and I said, “What are you guys doing over here?”

There is an old truism, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Nothing is truer. People start looking at this and they get superstitions about it. They say, “Well, I don’t dare harm anybody else because then I would be harmed someplace or other.” This is not necessarily true. But on the overall equation of life and existence, the willful destruction of something can upset the survival of the other entities in its vicinity. It can upset and overbalance things to a point of where, for instance, we don’t have any more passenger pigeons and so forth. People didn’t stop and think, back there a hundred years ago, that one of these fine days there wouldn’t be any — obviously, there were all kinds of them all over the sky.

“Oh — ha! You see this electric plate? Well, if a rat runs along here and he hasn’t been fed for three days — pop!”

So man has had to go into a tremendous game-conservation program in order to restore the wildlife which his grandfathers wiped out. Man will do this quite instinctively. But the degree to which he does it and the degree to which he will support the other factors, the other dynamics around him, the other entities around him — the degree in which dynamic five, for instance, is active in the individual — is very apparent the second that you begin to match this person up on the tone scale. You take somebody down below 2.0 and you say, “What will this person do? Will this person support game conservation?” No. He is on his way out; why shouldn’t the game be on the way out too? The whole array has moved down, and as an organism, he will just hasten his own way out to the exit.

I said, “Gee, that’s fascinating. Now, what do you know about memory storage?” “Erk! Well, uh . . . look, this rat . . .” (Very anxiously they went back to the rat.)

From 2.0 down on this tone scale, a person actually actively seeks death and will bring death in varying degrees and in very specific ways on very specific things.

I found out in the course of about a week, actually, that I was Alice in Wonderland. I didn’t much like being Alice in Wonderland and I went on trying against all odds to believe that there was some rationale in the field of epistemology, human thought and human behavior. In spite of all contradictions, I clung to this belief.

All I am trying to give you here is just some concept of what the dynamics of existence are. This has been found to be workable. I am not giving it to you because it is true, I am giving it to you because it has a workability. An engineer never asks for anything but a workability. He has been bludgeoned down in his conquest of the physical universe to a point where he knows darn well that fifty years from now that postulate of which he is so fond, which he considers so ultimate and which he considers so beautiful will probably be moved back a step into a greater simplicity. He recognises this. If he doesn’t he is a fool, because every time one of these postulates is set up and found to be workable, life can become better and man can better control his environment. But on each one of them you just get your foot in the door a little bit further, and you hang on as long as you can until somebody else comes along and puts his foot in the door and takes the ball. That is all in the operation of cooperation.

I went out of school. Nobody was interested in this fact that nobody knew; they accepted the fact that it wasn’t well known. I went into the field of writing. My father had said, “You go to engineering school,” and I had said, “No, I want to write.” So I went to engineering school and professionally I wrote in an effort to support these researches, because I kept right on researching.

Therefore, when we look over the dynamics of existence, we find that man is surviving, that he has to survive in abundance in order to survive at all.

My wife would tear her hair out-by the handfuls when she got bills for books — a bill for $150 for “A Discourse on the Mystical and Spiritual Principles of the Magi, rare” — and she would say, “Gosh sakes!”

What does honesty have to do with this? Obviously, honesty is merely a cooperation, you might say, or a sympathy with other organisms. One would not be dishonest unless he wished to seek advantage for himself or his group at the expense of some other self or group. That is dishonesty — seeking an illegitimate advantage; you can actually define it as such. It is illegitimate just because it violates somebody’s survival too much, so the person who is honest happens to survive better.

“Well,” I would say brightly, “I wrote a novelette last week and that brought in a hundred and forty dollars.” There was a lot of my money going out along this line, accumulating this material; I kept on studying and trying to figure it out.

Old Ben Franklin advanced that one on the stage; it almost startled the merchant princes of America out of their nightcaps. That was one of the most revolutionary things that happened back there before the revolution. Ben Franklin was writing Poor Richard ‘s Almanac, and one day he came up with this thing and started to beat the drum; he said, “Honesty is the best policy.”

It took me till about 1938 to find out that the first thing one had to know was a dynamic principle of existence that one could agree on, and maybe one could take off from there and find energy.

And everybody said, “What?!” They couldn’t understand it, and as a matter of fact he had a lot of rows about it. I think that was actually where he developed his skill in argument — trying to advance this strange policy that the best policy was an honest one. It was revolutionary in its day. It seems rather ordinary here in American business. We know that a business which doesn’t treat its customers — or even its competitors — with some degree of honesty is practically doomed. But back in a day when this was not the style, a fellow was doomed if he did.

Between then and now there has been assembled quite a bit of material on the energy of thought. We know some of its behavior and some of its component parts. We can’t yet take a human being and put a hole in his arm and give him a shot and put more life into him. We can’t do it that way. That is very simple, but it hasn’t been done yet. We can’t, for instance, take a dead man and bring out a couple of cubic centimeters of life and chuck it down the gullet and have him take up his bed and walk. We can’t do that yet. It would be a very handy gimmick if we could.

So it just works out that the more honest the individual is about his goals, the better he survives. His group survives better and life as a whole is better.

But we can restore the life that he has. And we may even be putting a little more life back into him just by handling this energy seemingly the way it ought to be handled.

As far as ideals are concerned, although we have the ultimate goal of infinite survival, there are many subgoals. The most interesting of these subgoals to an individual is that goal which seems to best promote his own survival. If he examines this goal he is trying to attain carefully, he will see where he is advancing. As a matter of fact, his enthusiasm for that goal is in direct ratio to the amount of survival which it holds forth to him. This gets up into ideals. If you don’t have any ideals mixed up in these dreams, if you don’t keep up high standards along these lines, the chances of reaching these goals go pretty badly off.

Dianetics, unfortunately for its repute, immediately went into the field of mental healing. For instance, the first book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, would not be accepted by the publisher unless it had to do with mental health. That was a big psychiatric textbook house, Hermitage House. They were very interested, but only as it pertained to sanity, insanity and sickness. That was not too good, because this subject is much broader in the field of human behavior than it is in the field of illness.

Let’s take the young fellow who wants to be a musician, and he has great ideals about being a musician. So he happily and busily keeps working. But he wants to get to the head of his class, so he cuts a young fellow out of competition with him, dishonestly. He violates the ideals of musicians and so forth. Years later this thing smacks him back in the face again. He has postulated an error someplace in his past that can come back and hit him. The more of those that he plants — the more ideals he is violating, you might say — the more fragile becomes his own survival till the whole house of cards can cave in on him, because he is not building survival, he is building a house of cards.

But maybe one is being too harsh when he is talking about the illness of the individual. Why is a social order sick? Why does a business get sick? Why do groups dwindle and perish? Why does the U.S. government get like it is today? These calamities can occur only in ignorance of the fundamentals of human behavior.

You take a doctor, with the great ethical code and so forth that medicine is reputed to have — and who knows, some may have it. Take a doctor who is untrue to his Hippocratic oath. Did you ever know a doctor who had gone in for criminal practice? He was probably pretty badly off. It is pathetic to look at these people.

It is terrifically important to make people well. It is also very important to know how sick they are. You might say that Human Evaluation is sort of a diagnosis of behavior. It is possible to make a diagnosis of reaction with this rather rapidly. What we are doing is showing the manifestations of a person’s basic energy. We can actually make a test of it.

I knew a fellow one time who was dragging around; I met him as a bum on a park bench. He had started into the big money in 1930; he had become a gangsters’ doctor — a doctor to gangsters — during Prohibition. There was lots of money in it and he was going to have himself a big, beautiful home and so forth. But he was being untrue to his own code, to the codes of his profession and so forth. It was a very strange thing: He built high and mighty and heavy, all right, for about two years, and it became so he knew too much about what was going on in gangland and of course he couldn’t be trusted. He had violated his own primary codes, hadn’t he? Then how could anybody else trust him? There was this instinctive feeling about him. And what with everything else, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came along and put an end to Prohibition and the big money in gangsterism, and there, but for him, went a i doctor. He was ruined by the violation of his own ideals.

As a matter of fact, I have been trying to get some instruments in the last few months. It appears that the vibration level of a human being is in the supersonic range. I have practically no data for this; I am trying to get some instruments to measure it.

The only way you can really postulate any kind of a goal at all is imagination. If you don’t postulate high-flown goals, if you don’t hitch your wagon to a star, it is a cinch you are not going to get up to the top of the pine tree, because it takes that much to get this much. In Alice in Wonderland it says that you have to run just to keep up. You have to run twice as fast if you want to get anyplace.

Evidently the vibration level of the tone scale is just in the supersonic range. There is some data to back that.

The basic tone scale has, then, these factors of life: its urge toward survival and its necessity to cooperate with other life forms in order to survive, and its decline because it has fallen out of cooperation with other life forms. It postulates and predicts the amount of survival. Actually, with this tone scale, we are measuring an energy, we are measuring a wavelength. It is very sharply computable and it does certain things about certain things.

During the Second World War, the Japanese were going to kill off all the soldiers that confronted them by throwing deadly supersonic waves at them. They found out that this would kill bacteria and it would kill mice. (Here were mice and rats again.) And they got this thing out in the field of battle but nobody died. So after the war somebody came along and made a washing machine from this device.

I’ll answer some questions now, if any of you have them.

The way you make a washing machine out of it is to turn it up to a high supersonic vibration with a heavy volume, and it shakes the clothes in a barrel or something of the sort and shakes the dirt out of them. But of course it is vibrating so fast that it is way above the range of human hearing.

“When the bundle of vectors starts to go down, do they all go down together, or do they just selectively go down?”

When they first brought these washing machines out, a few of them were sold but the housewives would have nothing to do with them whatsoever. They wouldn’t touch them. So the company took this machine back and figured it out for a while, and then they speeded it up — gave it a little bit higher vibration — and after that the machine sold very well. You could go near one of these washing machines and you would feel so smooth and so happy and so cheerful! In other words, you could actually get a human being acting in sympathetic vibration on the supersonic range.

They seem to go down in two ways. An individual has all these urges; all these urges of life are resident in one individual. Each one of these dynamics has an extended sphere and a small sphere.

I was kidding the auditors one day and I said, “You know, Manning’s Coffee Shop up in Seattle has a coffee roaster right out in the window, and they blow a big fan across the coffee roaster out into the street. And people walk along there, smell that fresh-roasted coffee, and they go right in and have a cup of coffee. Now, the thing to do is to get several of these high-speed washing machine motors and put them across in front of the Foundation.” Actually, it would probably work.

Let’s take other people. Let’s take the people in this room, and the people in Wichita. At first, when this third dynamic is high the fellow feels affinity for all the people of Wichita. As he comes down the tone scale on some of the other dynamics, although nothing has happened between him and the people of Wichita, you will find him only sympathetic with the people in this room. In other words, the scope has closed in on him. And so it goes with each dynamic: the scope closes in on the dynamic and it foreshortens, and they all seem to do it together.

The values of Human Evaluation are very difficult to sketch in a few minutes. I think you can conceive that there is some value to this. For instance, if a fellow comes in and we can take a look at him and see certain things about him, then we know that certain other things will follow rather inevitably and we can read him across a certain level. We can predict his behavior under various circumstances. If we were doing business with him, we would know in advance what he would do. Is he honest? What is his ethic level? What is his responsibility level? What is his persistence level? Will he persist on a given course? Is he responsible concerning the things he has had given into his charge?

“You mentioned that two individuals low on the tone scale would aid each other in their downfall. If there were an individual low on the tone scale and an individual high on the tone scale, wouldn’t the lower one be raised by the higher one?”

These things, perhaps, we could answer with some considerable accuracy if we had an accurate scale of human evaluation.

The lower one quite ordinarily is. It is a truism in business that the world is carried upon the backs of a few desperate men. Those would be a few fellows who are high enough up the tone scale and have enough personal volume to carry others on their backs. As a matter of fact, as you look around you, you will find out this society is carrying the lame and the halt on every hand, and making a tremendous effort. The high-tone-scale people are just trying like the mischief to defeat the low-tone-scale people. The low-tonescale people, if you will notice, just try like the mischief to defeat the effort of the high-tone-scale people, but they still come up the line a little bit.

For instance, go down to the hospital and you may find there some girl who doesn’t eat well. She has malnutrition — that is what they call it — but it actually is a suicide. She is killing herself off by not eating. She doesn’t even figure this out; that is just the way it is operating. She stops eating and she starts dying. They can find nothing organically wrong with her or anything of the sort, and here are all the doctors and the nurses and everybody around giving her intravenous shots and persuading her to eat and doing this and that for her. She doesn’t want it; she is on her way out!

Now, if the society just took its hands off on everybody from 2.0 down, those people would just die off like flies! You would be fascinated how fast. They would not stick around. But they are being carried along on the backs of a few desperate high-tone-scale people.

“In each individual, will the sector of each dynamic be roughly the same height?”

Not necessarily. An individual’s characteristics have to do with being stronger on one dynamic than another — just natively stronger. If you have two individuals of more or less the same background, one may be very strong on groups and the other very, very strong on mankind. The first fellow becomes a nationalist or something of the sort, and the other fellow becomes an internationalist. That is just the way it rolls.