The Code of a Scientologist is part of our material, part of our know-how and it is not something offhand that you simply concur with because Ron or the Association or somebody thought it was a good idea and so on.

Actually the Code of a Scientologist was evolved to make a life a bit easier for auditors. That was its primary purpose. And if adhered to, it will be discovered that auditors don't get into too much trouble. But when not adhered to, why, they can get into lots of trouble.

Now, auditors who are very short of games and so forth now have a formula for creating more randomity and more games. All you do is take any clause of the Code of a Scientologist and break it and you'll have more game at once. Not because the Association will do anything to you particularly; the Association seldom does.

You hear every now and then of somebody getting his certificate cancelled. You hear about it but it doesn't happen. That's very funny, you know? There have only been a very few people across the boards in the last many, many years who have actually had certificates cancelled. And it was only after these people had actively avowed that their reason for being in Dianetics or Scientology was exactly to end and stop Dianetics and Scientology by any means whatsoever.

Now, that's pretty extreme, but there are subversive groups in the world. I'm not — you know, one of these — one of these groups that fancies itself as subversive is known as the Communist Party of America and Communist Party of the world and all that sort of thing, who think they're subversive but you have to be doing something to subvert something.

But they have insanity classified as a person who believes the Communist Party are against them. That's their definition of insanity.

And in view of the fact many psychiatrists are members of this party this, of course, is given a great deal of credence. So they actually define paranoia. And one of the manifestations of paranoia in psychiatric classification is to believe somebody is against you and to believe particularly that the Communist Party is against you. That is an actual definition; it's in psychiatric textbooks.

I think it's very, very cute because there can be two things which are psychotic — the environment or the individual. Never forget that. Because everyone now and then — you, a Scientologist, will be faced with somebody being in a terrific amount of agitation who is living in a psychotic environment and trying to stay sane in it. And he sounds like he's nuts. He describes the environment, don't you see?

You take somebody living in Ireland — living in Ireland, which has about seventeen political parties going full blast right this moment. Everybody has started gunning around this and that and you have one party chewing up another party and everybody is chewing everybody. And the only great man they ever had over there was De Valera. I mean, he was a great man. There's no doubt about it. He was practically the father of that country. But one day he said, "The Roman Catholic Church is bad for the Irish." And that was the end of him, you see?

Well, does that mean that he is wrong? You know, he could be right. He just could be right. And yet, he dug his political grave with just that statement.

Well, now, let's take the Scientologist. The Scientologist looks around and with a superior ability to reason sees in his vicinity many things which could be remedied for the better. To him, the environment looks just a little bit batty. You follow me? It doesn't look quite sane.

He goes into the bank and he finds a 1.5 manager who is trying to stop all motion. Well, now, this is fascinating, this is fascinating. A 1.5 manager? That bank isn't going to do any business; it isn't going to succeed even. Well, what are they doing hiring him? It's probably because he's impressive. Probably because it's the way he wears his clothes or something like this. But all the clerks are unhappy under him and so forth.

You go around to the head of all the banks and you're going to tell him, "Why don't you get on the ball and hire a manager down at that bank that can handle the business of that bank," and you find that you're talking to another 1.5. In other words, the environment looks just a trifle daffy to you.

Now, the question is are you crazy or is the environment crazy? You follow that?

Now, a Scientologist facing this fact, at war with some of the major problems — of course it's perfectly all right, you know, for you to have a little child run across the street there and somebody come down the street at eighty miles an hour and run over the child and splatter it all over the street and so forth. That's perfectly all right, evidently — according to the environment.

Why? Because they never give anybody a psychometric test before they hand them a driver's license. And 10 percent of the drivers that they enfranchise shouldn't be let near a perambulator, much less an automobile.

Well, now, there is an active remedy which does influence you, your friends and other people. It isn't something you should simply fall back from and say,

'Well, I have no responsibility for this," the way public authorities do.

It isn't something you say, 'Well, I'm all in apathy about it." You, a

Scientologist, you go around and you say, "Why don't you test these drivers?" And they say, "Huh?"

And you say, "Well, you see, you'd cut down your automobile accidents."

They say, "Cut down the automobiles — this is the driver's license division. The accident division is down the hall." In other words, they have no responsibility for it.

Now, very often — very often in this world you will discover people walking around saying, "Somebody ought to do something about it. Somebody ought to do something about it. Some organization ought to do something about it. Some government department, some agency ought to do something about it." But do you know, the only person who can do anything about it, the only organization that can do anything about it at all is you.

Now, you get into a big company. It's sprawling all over 195 acres and it all has wheels and wheels and wheels that turn wheels that spin other wheels. And you go in there and you're in the — a department and you keep getting forms to fill out which you know nobody ever reads. And you keep filling out these forms.

And one day you decide to find out where this form goes, so you follow it down the hall on its mail line and you find out that there's a file case there. And the fellow who held your job before, his forms and all of your forms are in the file case. Nobody else has ever noticed them. In other words, here's a funny dead end. And yet, all the information which has been assembled in these forms is quite important to the company. You found a dead end.

You decide you're going to tell somebody about this and they say, "The board knows" or "The organization knows" or "The department head knows and therefore you should keep your nose out of this."

That is simply a mechanism by which people get disenfranchised. And if you get disenfranchised enough from the game of life, you don't have any game. That's the way you lose games. The only person that can do anything about that is you. But that's an awful thing to realize. It isn't up to Joe or Bill or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Street Cleaners — it's you.

Now, it's completely aside from the point is the environment daffy or are you daffy? Why ever answer the question? Look down the games conditions* and you discover that all games conditions are a lie. The truth is over there in "be dead." It's impossible to live the truth. You'd have to exteriorize and go up and sit on an asteroid for the next ten thousand years to be totally true.

So, if you're going to play the game at all, play it as a game and play it well. Realize fully that if you go into action, you'll go into trouble and go ahead and play the game. And don't worry about whether you're crazy or the environment is crazy, be perfectly willing to be crazy. In other words, be willing to be crazy as far as the environment is concerned. And that way you'll get something done.

An extension of this, by the way: people usually follow people who are crazy. That's quite interesting. It's a phenomenon that we call, technically, "the shaman's call."

The shaman of — well, let's say the medicine man of the Goldi people up in Manchuria on the Amur River, for instance, let somebody wander around and he isn't quite bright or he seems strange or something, they don't bother him any.

And one day he comes rushing in from the wilderness to say that he's been visited by a spirit or something of the sort, and the spirit told him to do so-and-so and so-and-so.

And they say, "Well, we have a new shaman." Give him his gourd rattle and take his advice implicitly from there on out.

That is the shaman's call. You will even see that exercised among civilized peoples. Quite interesting, isn't it? It's actually a technical phenomenon.

I've seen an entire group of people with a beautiful program laid out in front of them follow somebody who had nothing in mind whatsoever but group suicide. They are all following the shaman's call. They're in such a compulsive game condition they follow any motion of any kind. And the motion which you ordinarily see around in the society at large, up to these times, was pretty batty.

Somebody is organizing a society to prevent all British from drinking tea.

"Why?" (Well, it's a very affluent society.) "Why?"

"Because tea rots the brain."

And they trace — they trace that the downfall of the British Empire took place immediately after the first importations of tea.

They have no other data to support this at all and, yet, this is a very fine, upstanding, affluent society.

Just put it under this basis — don't go boggling at it and being upset by it, just understand it: Any game is better than no game. You got that?

Don't go combating the other fellow's game; add to it. Put in more problems. Put more pieces of paper on the government line — you'll be promoted to be admiral in no time. That's all you have to do. Any game is better than no game.

Now you, as you look around in this society and find a great many psycho games being played then — like 1.5 bank managers who are appointed by 1.5 bank presidents — you look around and you see these goofy games with tremendous amount of randomity in them. Don't walk out and buy a Mauser for administration to yourself to end it all; just understand the whole thing. Don't go down to the apothecary and shop for cyanide. There's no point in it at all. Because any game is better than no game at all. The remedy for it is for you to furnish a better game. Got that clearly? You. Not the board or somebody else.

Now, a lot of you together, furnishing a better game, can be very successful. But if your purpose is simply to end all existing games, you'll fail. You follow that? You'll just get more and more involved. You won't know after a while whether you're playing your game or their game or whether there's any game or how far it is to Arcturus, you won't know anything. No. What you do is mock up and play a better game.

Now, some Scientologists are so short on games that they can only have opponents in other Scientologists. After all, this is easy. They both speak the same language; you can easily root out their errors and mistakes. Don't you see? They're easy to understand and very easy to have as opponents.

Well, all right. If you yourself are willing to generate a new game in your society or community, that game need only have more action, more appeal and more problems to beat out every other game being played in the community. And if that's a sane game, you'll then have a sane community. You follow me? If you simply fight the psychotic games going on in the community, nothing will happen except that you will get enturbulated.

You would be amazed what happens to messages that come across my desk telling about the boo-boos of auditors over thataway. Auditors write me and tell me about how horrible auditors are over thataway. The auditors over thataway are meantime writing me and telling me how horrible they are over thisaway, and it's very remarkable.

Every once in a while somebody on an administrative line will do something peculiar. They will mock up some kind of a message direct for me to clobber some group; they'll do all sorts of things. Occasionally, just to add to the randomity, I'll all of a sudden write up a message, you know, saying, "Shoot everybody in northern Australia," something like that, you know.

But when I mock them up along that line, they are usually not really in the direction toward a solution, they're in the direction of showing them a better target than each other. And the hallmark, you might say, of my communication line on subjects that have to do with enturbulences amongst associations and auditors is that I always point out a rougher game than they're trying to play. Then, fact is, the game can be played.

Now, if you yourself, all by yourself, could actually change the world — and don't think you couldn't — there are people all over the place who tell you that you can't, but that's because you can.

It should be very, very frightening to you to realize that if people have to work this hard to convince you you can't change everything around, it must be that you have some danger in doing so, see?

You must be slightly dangerous. If everybody worked this hard to convince you you mustn't do anything and you mustn't take responsibility for anything, then it follows that there must be some menace from your quarter. You can feel very, very proud if everybody has been jumping on you with both feet most of your life. You must be a dinger!

A man picks up as much aberration as he's started commotion. But if he knows he's starting commotion, it isn't apt that he'll pick up much aberration from having started it, don't you see?

So if you all by yourself could start a better game than "let's run down all the children" and then have another department over here to educate all the children to dodge and then have another department over here that licenses everybody who has that as a penchant and then another department to protect the rights of drivers so that they can all have permits — you see how this game is adding up? It's a cinch you have to invent a better game for the Motor Vehicle Department and all the rest of them.

So what you want to invent is some very expensive, complicated, difficult examination that has to be undergone, probably medical. And you have to invent driving tests which require that the fellow pays a fee to drive a car quite different from that which he's going to drive in the street, you see? And write up this program that's going to just cost billions, see. And it's just going to absorb the attention and energies of just thousands and thousands of people and will never be figured out by the police. Everybody will buy this game. Everybody will buy that one, see?

And then you just smoothly insert in small type here or there "In view of the fact that we have so many more, better problems now, we can knock out the 10 percent of the drivers who cause accidents." You know, that just goes unnoticed. "We can do without that one now," they'll say.

Now, that's the way things run. You think you rush into the society with a better solution and get anywhere with it, you're very badly mistaken. You've got to rush into the society with better problems.

An old philosopher once said, "The whole world will beat a path to the door of the man who builds a better mousetrap."

Well, it's very funny, you know, it's very remarkable that he used the word "mousetrap." And it's — would be much, much better for our purposes had he said, "The whole world will beat a path to the door of the man who can mock up a better problem." Do you follow me there?

If you want to get rid of some problems in a psychotic environment, then rig out some more problems so that their attention comes off the other problem. Your problems can be sane problems. All you have to do is dream up the bigger problem.

Now, the bigger problem to the Scientologist is the conquest of his environment and bringing into the environment enough activity, potentiality, good sense and communication that the team of man can function. That he doesn't go mad periodically and go chasing off into France from Germany to steal some French cows and have vast millions of men being poured in to kill vast millions of men or sit in some ivory laboratory over in the US or in the steppes of Russia to push a button to obliterate something because somebody gave them the wrong change at one time or another down at Oxford Circus, you know? That's about how much sense these things have to them.

There is no bigger problem today in the public ken than those problems which exist in the public ken, but actually there are bigger problems than that. See, there are much bigger problems than anybody thinks there are.

A Scientologist is very clever who points out to the preclear that he's really in trouble. He just thinks he's been in trouble with these little nonsensical things that he's dabbling with but, gosh, the huge problem that's hanging over his head. You follow me? You get the mechanism?

Well, it's quite interesting that this has an enormous workability. The Code of the Scientologist was written in the belief that there were bigger problems than Scientologists handling Scientologists. And therefore it was written to eradicate this problem of Scientologists associating with Scientologists or difficulties arising in between the Scientologist and the public. This would leave the Scientologist free to find bigger problems and play bigger games. If you understand that thoroughly, you will see why the code is necessary.

If you knew with what amusement many Scientologists who are in the know greet complaints about other auditors and what they immediately think, you wouldn't do it.

You would simply go over to the other auditor and you would say, "Uh — I have a little piece of news for you. At eight o'clock tonight, I will be over to give you a session." You wouldn't be writing anybody about it. But this would only obtain if an individual had enough outer-perimeter problems.

A body of people fight amongst itself only when the environment is caving it in. When they are caving in the environment, they stand united. So the solution to all interrelationships in Scientology do consist of Scientologists operating as a united body to cave in the environment. And that solves all problems and even obviates a code. If they were doing that, they would dream up a code and go ahead with it and never write it down. But there is the Code of a Scientologist. It's been in existence for some time, and I'll give you a rapid summary of it.

To hear or speak no word of disparagement to the press, public or preclears concerning any of my fellow Scientologists, our professional organization or those whose names are closely connected to this science.

That's in a Scientologist's own protection. Do you know the public stays away in droves from the fellow who does that? They just stay away in droves. He just cuts his practice and activity to pieces.

Many people think they accumulate a practice by violating that; they don't. Experience over six years has demonstrated they all go broke.

To use the best I know of Scientology to the best of my ability to better my preclears, groups and the world.

It's an interesting thing. It's a little mild statement, but it has a tremendous impact. It sets forth an intention.

To refuse to accept for processing and to refuse to accept money from any preclear or group I feel I cannot honestly help.

That's not there for you. You wouldn't do that anyhow. That is there as a direct sock in the teeth to the medical profession; it's nothing but. So you can hang that on the wall and you can show it to your preclears and someday we will force that on medicine. Horrible thing for us to do, isn't it? That's quite a game then, isn't it?

Why should we force it on medicine? That's because medicine makes us pay a toll, you see? We're not the enemies of medicine, but we'll have to convince them that if they get better, they can be an enemy of ours.

To punish to the fullest extent of my power anyone misusing or degrading Scientology to harmful ends.

This has always created a storm amongst auditors. The old-time auditor couldn't stand the word punish and actually deter was substituted there for punish.

To deter to the fullest extent of my power anyone misusing or degrading Scientology to harmful ends.

Well, I'm in a higher action condition — I punish them. I usually punish them by auditing them upscale and they all of a sudden look and see what a fool they've been. That's punishment. It makes him better; it doesn't leave any bits and pieces lying around. I love a war where the battlefields are all swept clean afterwards.

To prevent the use of Scientology in advertisements of other products.

That also, by the way, is the American Medical Association and so forth. They're always using doctors' names and that sort of thing in advertising. It's quite direct.

To discourage the abuse of Scientology in the press.

That doesn't mean you can't publish in the press, but it means you better bring a reporter in who misquoted you and throw him into birth. (laughter)

To employ Scientology to the greatest good of the greatest number of dynamics.

Honest, that's no part of a code, that's just good sense. That, by the way, is the definition of an optimum solution. An optimum solution is the greatest good to the greatest number of dynamics.

To render good processing, sound training and good discipline to those students or peoples entrusted to my care.

The only place Scientologists ever break down is under discipline. As they come uptone, they get tougher. People don't like unrestricted things, by the way. They like a sharply scheduled class. They don't like a sloppily scheduled one.

To refuse to impart the personal secrets of my preclears.

And that is just there as a sop to the preclear. But preclears have secrets and you can show them this in the code and they're happy. Of course you don't disclose them; who'd be interested?

To engage in no unseemly disputes with the uninformed on the subject of my profession.

And there's where most Scientologists fall down most often: they argue with people and so on. What this is, is a deadly weapon. You're sitting in a crowd of people, they want to know about Scientology. Some guy starts to dispute with you — he's in some allied group, something of the sort, and you just refuse to talk to him. Drives him nuts! He has to go get a book and read it. You just refuse to talk to him. It's a deadly way to handle the situation and you'll find out is the successful way — is the successful way. The wrong way is to give him some processing in front of all of them or some other nonsensical thing.

Well, that is the Code of a Scientologist. It's there for use, it's there so that we can all prosper and work well and so the world can prosper because we have lived. And that is why it is there and I hope that you can see fit to fit it into your rationale and abide by it.