Thank you.

Now, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about

& something sensible. Might I? I've not talked about anything very sensible the whole distance of this congress, you know. I - but I would like to say something sensible now about the future of Scientology and the future of Western civilization.

Seems, perhaps, a little bit presumptuous of me to say these two things in the same breath, but let me ask you this burning question: Do you know of anything else that is working in the direction of salvage of Western civilization? Do you?

Audience: No.

Working effectively in that direction, actually doing something that is effective day after day? Yes, we know of organizations that are hopeful. We know of organizations that are enthusiastic. We know of organizations that are pressing their point home with what rigor.

We even know of organizations which are detesting and resenting war like mad. There's nothing wrong with this because who wouldn't? Wars are a bore. You sit and wait for something to fall on your head or blow up, and it's the waiting that gets you. Wars are dull. That's what I have against war. But, of course, war is simply a government method of more rapidly destroying private property. You realize that. They fail to do it with taxation, so they do it with war. And it's a government symptom of failure in this direction. Anybody hearing that, that's just a sarcastic remark. That's a wisecrack. Is it?

Now, the point - the point is, however, that's the only point I can find in war. But let me assure you, that fighting war, as such, involves one in war. There's no surer guarantee of getting into a confusion than resisting one

& and saying, „Oh, that confusion is terribly bad!“

Now, I talked a little bit earlier today about confusion, and I said you keep putting order into it and it works out.

[Here the Personal Achievement version has pieces of LCC-5 spliced in.]

The only reason existing Western civilization police systems today do not bring about law and order consistent with public safety - why criminals still go adrift - is because they introduce confusion as well as order. In the United States, for instance, they permit these chaps to pack guns, which is interesting. It's a very interesting fact.

You give somebody a gun - after a while he gets the idea he ought to fire it. Guns have nothing to do with law and order. They create explosions and chaos. A far better system is that employed by the metropolitan police of London. These boys are the best, I just wish a few of them would go over and teach some US force what to do about law and order. I wish they'd do that. That's not just because I'm standing here,. at this moment, in England, talking to you. Because I tell them the same thing in the US, „Why don't you get a couple of bobbies over here, hm?“ They'd bring more law and order in a minute in New York City than all the cops they got. Policing something with violence is not to police it. Processing a preclear with a club is not to process him. Isn't that right?

Audience. Yep. Yes.

Well, then, bow could you think that anybody could process a society into law and order by threat and violence? There are better methods. There are more effective methods. And if you fight war, you are fighting violence. You are not bringing order into the world. That's quite something else, you see?

& Now I don't say we're „only ones.“ I say there are an awful lot of good people around who are trying to get a show on the road.

But the thing that stands in man's road today is individual aberration. You have to take a society one by one. There is no such thing as a mass. I don't care what laws have been passed lately in the Kremlin, there still is no such thing as a mass - a mass of people, the masses. There really aren't such things as groups; there are collections of individuals.

And these collections of individuals then seem to cooperate or not cooperate but - or act as an entity. But you try to process that entity, as such, without any attention to the individual and the whole thing becomes defeated. Doesn't it? This idea of saying, „Well, we work for the benefit of the many and, therefore, we're kicking you in the teeth.“ That doesn't work because what is „the many“ but a collection of „you“?

& I read something one time, I think it was The Case of Sergeant Grischa, a novel which started out with the interesting premise that when a government wrongs one individual, it is then doomed to fail. All it has to do is wrong one individual and it's had it. And I don't know how much philosophy was in that novel to back it up, but that thought struck me as peculiarly apt - to wrong one person is to wrong one too many. Right?

& Audience: Um-hm.

& Well, where are you going to find anybody in the world today that can take this one individual and discharge from him the violence and the confusion that he has been subjected to over all his many, many, infinitely many millennia?

& It isn't that psychoanalysis and other nineteenth-century practices are bad; they are not bad. The people practicing those things are quite sincere. Their effort to understand their fellow man is a dedicated thing. But after seven years, what do you have? You still have a patient. It's the effectiveness that we're talking about now. We're not being critical of somebody because he's trying and not winning. That wouldn't be very cricket, would it? Hm?

& Now, once in a while - once In a while somebody runs across this in - in the HASI or this - these broadly flung Scientology organizations. They run across this in me and they think I'm being quite unreasonable, but I stick by this point. I utterly refuse to discount the willingness of people. And they say, „This fellow fouled up here and wrecked this and ruined that and he's chopping everything to bits. And he has everybody, including ITV or somebody, on the back of our neck, you know. Everybody is chopping us to pieces from his quarter and he's a very bad fellow, and here, Ron, is a machine gun. Start firing!“

& And it isn't that I won't fight. As a matter of fact, engaged solely as sport, I think fighting is fun. Just as a sport. But as a dedicated effort, it's silly! It's just silly. It never solves anything. Meeting violence with violence to solve a problem never solves anything. And I tell these people, I say, „Look, that person is trying! That person is willing! That person is trying to get a show on the road and you're going to knock his head off! No! Take the machine gun out, melt it down and make some mimeograph machines out of it.“

& Because as far, as police work is concerned, you cannot follow this extraordinary medical idea, that the removal by surgery of a rebellious cell solves forevermore the patient's problems, that the removal of an arm or a leg solves the problem of the difficulty. It doesn't. This society is totally hepped - if you'll pardon the colloquialism - on somebody surviving. I try to tell auditors every now and then, „So your preclear’s trying to die. So what? Who are you, God? That you insist he survive? The only thing you're supposed to do is return to him his power of choice, and after you've returned to him his power of choice as to whether or not he's going to abandon that mock-up or not, I'm afraid you have nothing to do with it. Unless, of course, you're sitting on a little pink cloud being God. And if I refuse to sit on the cloud, you'd better not!“

Now, the handling of the individual has been the problem which has confronted man now for so many eons that he's forgotten it's the problem. And he takes refuge in the handling of broad masses of people because he knows that it's no good to confront one man. „Let's confront many.“

Every now and then you hear a lecturer who is interesting, and every now and then you hear a lecturer who is dull. What's the difference between these two people? He's interesting to the degree that he is capable of confronting one person in his audience and talking to him. But if he is talking to a mass because he cannot confront one, you will find him very dull. That's merely the secret of being a lecturer. It isn't your glibness. It isn't really what you have to say. Its no mystic aura that you throw over an audience. It is simply: Are you capable of confronting one individual in that group? Are you capable of confronting a person in that audience? Well, if you are, then you can lecture to an audience But if you can't, boy, you better not be talking to anybody because you will wind up talking to nobody. Do you see? It's a simple thing? Well, I can use that - whether I do it well or not, that's beside the point.

The point I'm making here is that when we try to address the vast multitude with arbitrary laws and restrictions, in an effort to heal their social ills, we do it because man has forgotten how to confront one man. And in his avoidance of confronting that one man, he then misses everybody. It's quite an interesting thing.

You'll see a ship sometime - I speak of ships a great deal because I've had experience with them - or an organization. You'll see this - a rule go up on the board: „No time at any time will anybody ever leave open the front door and if he doth leave open the front door he shalt suffer being fired from guns!“

They address this to the whole organization? Well, who found the door open? Some executive. Who left the door open? One person or two people or three people. So, now we're going to punish the whole staff! And I'm afraid this is how the - the king's regulations and the United States Navy regulations and any other set of regulations that punish, punish, punish, chop, chop, chop are born. Instead of going and finding who left the door open, and saying. „Son, thou hast sinned,“ we can confront this nebulous thing called „crew“ and threaten dire stress if the door is ever left open again. And it doesn't work!

Now, I'm not saying that man's laws are unworkable or that society should be turned to ribbons. Just as you should always improve a preclear and not tear him down, so you should be able to improve a society and not tear it down. You cannot remove from this society its existing structure of laws and shove another one in place, just like that. And that's what a great many reformers would love to do. They say, „All the laws there are are bad; therefore, we will throw all these laws away and we will put in these ideal laws like the Code of Hammurabi.“

That was one time the - the thing used by reformers. They said, „We're going to make the society a good society and the way we're going to do that is to extract an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That'll learn 'em.“

Now these broad things, these broad, sweeping arbitraries and mandates, do not carry with them an eventual goal of peace. They don't carry with them greater decency because they have the liability of injuring the one (quote) for the benefit of the many (unquote).

And all of us sense this and so, to some degree, all of us become outlaws. Why is it that the public at large is always so willing to deify Robin Hood? Why does he always get a big hand whenever he walks on world stage? That's because he personifies the rebel in all of us.

But just as a bird dog or a rabbit dog that won't kill chickens is no good - you know, that's the test of a good bird dog or rabbit dog: if he'll still kill chickens, he's some good - so a citizen who will not rebel against the unjust is no good. He's just no good anymore. He's not good to anybody and that doesn't necessarily deify the rebel. All of us have within us the germs of rebellion. Against what? Against the arbitrary, the unreal. Against forces which seek by oppression to accomplish some goal they know not what of.

& And now, in setting up organizations of Scientology, we're going to go on this same pattern? Oh, no! No.

& It's a very funny thing. My main job is research and writing but I also have to do a great deal of administration, and part of that administration has to do with justice. And boy, if you don't think its tough to administer justice. It's not administrable. Processing is!

& So, when somebody goes wrong, only thing we can do is condemn him to getting well. And when we do that, we mustn't forget to consult his power of choice. Is he trying to go up the spout or down the drain or is he trying to do better? Fortunately, a person whose goals are straightened out usually elects to survive. There's nothing sillier, however, than a preclear sitting there trying to die in the preclear's chair and an auditor sitting there trying to make him well, trying to make him well, trying to make him well.

& „Now, how do you feel now?“

& „I feel worse.“

& Why does he feel worse? Well, the auditor and the preclear are not in agreement with each other, that's all. They just haven't any agreement with one another at all. One's trying to die, the other's trying to get him to live. Well, I've never given people processes to sort this thing out so they never hit it head-on, but the 5th London ACC has a process that knocks this apart. Just knocks it apart with a process so that it doesn't require any delicate insight to find out if a PC is really one-oneing his way through to a quick demise at your expense.

& Only a very few times have I received a broken-hearted letter from an auditor saying, „Well, I processed her and I made her much better and she was much happier and about three days after I finished the intensive, she told all her family goodbye and they didn't know what she was talking about and she went to bed that night and she never woke up. She's gone and she's dead. Now, Ron, what did I do wrong?“

& Well, if you were trying to make her live, I will say in such a case - these are very rare - you did wrong in processing somebody whose mock-up was so far gone, they recognized it was at a point of no return and who, unfortunately, had an - the address of the nearest maternity ward.

& There is a mechanism. After a person is trying to die, after he's had so much force and violence and duress thrown at him that he no longer finds it possible to go on living - he cannot conceive that there is any worthwhileness in life - when he's trying to back right straight on out, he does some interesting things and amongst them is: elect an executioner. There is no such thing as described by Schopenhauer as the death wish in 'The Will and an Idea'. There isn't a death wish. That's a sort of an apathetic effort to die or something of the sort. Man doesn't always have this thing called a death wish, but man can try to die! And one of the things he will do is elect an executioner. And if his auditor refuses to occupy the role and if an Association Secretary or somebody in authority in a Scientology organization refuses to occupy the role, guess who he elects as an executioner? He starts cuffing at you about that point.

& Understood this so well - the last time it happened not too long ago - some person had not had unsuccessful auditing - it wasn't a problem in auditing, it was the fact this person had decided that if he could be exteriorized, why, he was to be exteriorized, but being exteriorized was doing a bunk and going to the nearest maternity ward and carrying on from there, you see?

& So the person was still a little bit queasy as to whether or not somebody would nicely exteriorize him and let him go through this cycle, so he decided to elect an executioner, and guess who? And he walked in my office - for some reason, other people are nice to me. I don't know why. Even people when they're mad at me are nice to me. That's - I thank them for it because I have a lot to do, you know. But he walked in and he said very nicely - said very nicely that he had to have another auditor and he wished I would tell him some auditor in the field and so on. He was going through all this sort of thing and I said, „Well, why should I do this?“

& Well, he wasn't making much progress, and so on, and be went along the line and this sort of thing. And I eventually said to him, „Well, if you want to kick the bucket that bad, sit down in the chair. I'll exteriorize you.“

& And he said, „What?“ And he thought it over and he says, „By George, Ron, you're right.“

& I said, „I'm not trying to evaluate your case, I just have a lot of work to do and I don't have very much time. Sit down.“

& He went back to his original auditor and they got it all straightened out and he's in good shape today But he saw at once, I wasn't in the confusion of trying to get him to live while he was trying to die, We were in perfect, immediate agreement.

& A few days later he made the rather cryptic remark to me - he said, „Ron, I wish I could attain your levels of reality.“ I don't know why - what this was all about, but it must have been that he sensed that this was the truth and that was the way it was. And he was haunted by the very strong belief that if he had sat down in the chair, he'd be on his way.

Now, here's - here's our problem as a society. Individuals in this society are being subjected to violence of great magnitude in terms of great humanity, and every individual that's pushed a little bit further off the line with violence, degrades the society just that much more. People's willingness to help and to live is cut down - it's reduced. And what is a society's will to survive but the collective or aggregate will of the individual to live? That's all it is. It's as simple as that.

Oh yes, there is such a thing as a „collective will.“ There is such a thing a „group spirit.“ These things are quite easily manifested and quite easily seen but the component parts of the society and the component parts of the group are individuals - thee and thou and me. And when we get together, we hit a new agreement level which is more or less a composite of our own agreement levels, and we're liable to put together a strong enough reality that we sort of leave a new artificial thetan hanging in the air, which is quite an interesting thing to observe.

It's quite interesting that you can straighten up a group by taking one of its members and bringing about such an improvement in that member and such an ability to tolerate the problems of that group, that the whole group tends to clear. There's this phenomenon too, and that isn't because everybody's got a telephone in everybody else's ear and that isn't because we're all one.

& I don't know that we aren't all one. I just know that's improbable because the more I process people, the more „them“ they become, you see, but not the more „other people“ they become.

& This is one of the great unsolved questions, by the way, in Scientology. Are we all bits of one? Everybody's got an incident that says we are, but all of the data you collect points quite the other way. That has never been totally resolved. I'll tackle that someday when I have a weekend I'm not giving a congress. Okay.

& You can do this strange thing. You can take a husband and run persons of comparable magnitude to his wife and then run problems of comparable magnitude to his wife and get him to confront this thing thoroughly and get it all unraveled and squared around. And even though his wife was the one who was causing the trouble in the group, it is not unusual to have his wife suddenly start walking the straight and narrow. Very interesting, very interesting. We've observed it many times.

& We have a project that is still running on atomic bombs - problems of comparable magnitude to atomic bombs. The first time it was run was when the first „no test“ things came out and we were working on it then. We haven't completed this project yet. We got to get it good and flat. We estimate that it'll take about 100 people to have this one run flat for atomic bombs to cease to go boom. Wouldn't it be very funny if they no longer exploded?

Yet, the apparency of this group, you see, the apparency of the group is the actuality of the individuals. And although you can enormously influence and observe and look at groups and group tone and all the rest of it, the individual still influences this group. The individual is the living thing, not the group And if you never address an individual and always address the group, of course you fail totally! You've had it.

And that’s why I say the future of Scientology and, perhaps the survival of Western civilization, may be more synonymous than we think. I don't claim they are synonyms mostly because that would be cheeky of us to assume that much. But I do say that I know of no other group that is successfully or effectively confronting the individual. No other group is doing it with sweeping success.

The nearest - the nearest run to it is a project that is going on in the Middle East, which is very fascinating. They are trying to civilize wild tribesmen by putting them into disciplined units. It's evidently being successful in its own way, but it's limited because they're putting them into military units.

& Therefore - therefore, there is this possibility: that if we never collected another member, if only those amongst us were those that were processed, we alone, in directly confronting individuals and in directly confronting problems as individuals, might sweepingly „as-is“ many of the ills which beset the group at large. Do you see this interesting equation?

& It probably is not necessary to clear every living soul on Earth or to hold up and interrupt the degradation of every person who is being beaten at this moment in this society. Maybe you don't have to be that far out, but I can tell you how you'll get that far out whether you like it or not - is just address the individual you have your hands on at this moment and straighten out those problems there and, sweepingly, you'll get that further out.

Very few people understand very well what we mean by organization and so forth. Even people in the organization often are hazy about it. But all an organization is is a collection of individuals associated with a common purpose. And all the pattern of organization is is that pattern or communication lines which permits them to accomplish their purposes. That's all there is to an organization. But it sure requires people.

& And the more people you handle, the more people you have to have. And one of the indexes which is watched in the HASI is the financial index, not so much because money is vital or something of the sort.

& As a matter of fact, I think our research is done for a figure that nobody would believe. Ford Foundation over in the US spends more for ashtrays and does nothing, than we do - than we spend. They do, they spend more for ashtrays; I looked up the item. Of course, there's - they have to replace their desks every now and then because of the wear and tear of heels on them. Of course, they have to replace their desks in the War Department more frequently than at the Ford foundation because everybody wears spurs - well, anyhow.

& A non sequitur introduction - that's to wake a couple people up back there.

& Anyway, here's our - here's our scheme of things. People in the HASI, increase of, increase of income and disbursement in the HASI, give us an accurate index of how much we are doing. Because, believe me, if we stop doing it, we need less people and there's less income. So we must be doing a job, because that's about the steepest curve I would care to look at.

Now, production has been numbed in the society very badly. Production has been stepped all over, obviously, because we have an inflationary spiral going on at this particular period of 1958. And all inflation is is too much money and too little produce. That's all it is. All a depression is is too much produce and too little money to buy it. I mean these are the elementary looks, and it's really all you need to know about economics, but the government never seems to find it out. Production - when production drops, when there isn't enough being produced that is desired by the people - you know, there's that, too.

You know, the garment industry can always cut its own throat and although it's producing lots of sack dresses, you see, can lay a terrific egg on the market because they're not producing a desirable. But that desirable comes after the fact of production. If all that was available was sack dresses, women would wear them. That's fairly certain. The ministers would certainly make sure of that. And if people produced ugly enough dresses, you'd have a government regulation out that only those would be worn. I can assure you of that, too. Cynical remark.

Now, what - what is this thing that while business is getting worse all over the world, all over the world the activity and solvency of Scientology organizations is getting better? Well, this is a silly looking picture, isn't it? It isn't necessarily related, saying that when things get worse people get worried and they turn around to people like us. That is not true, necessarily, but it happens that we're going on this tremendously steep curve of an advance, month by month, while the general business curve of the world is on a decline. What's this all about? Well, it means that if the general business world was all on the increase too, our speed of advance and curve would probably be like that - much steeper!

You have a right to know things like that. It sounds very dull talking about balance sheets and that sort of thing. They are very dull except as an index of effectiveness, and by golly, some of us must be being awfully effective here and there. Thank you.

Now, very often in the world which measures its futures in terms of immediate, present time collisions, which measures its effect by the amount of debris lying around in the streets and the blood on the sidewalk, an orderly, advancing pressure into the society does not seem to be progress. And yet what is our progress? It is a progress of orderliness.

& In any six months, such an organization as HASI London is internally more orderly than it was six months before. Oh yes, you who've been around can tell that. And you at large, corresponding with such an organization, I think you will tell me that the service is a little bit better. You can remember times when you sent in a bit of money and waited in vain for your book and forever you waited, and then you wrote in and you said, „Where is either the money or the book,“ and you got a reply, „What money?“ Well, do you know that was an advance over no reply at all. There's no doubt about it, we're making progress.

Very funny part of it is: we had to know more about organization - we had to know more about organization than anybody else in the world just to handle the traffic flow because we could not afford to handle the amount of traffic that we handle if we didn't have it organized as well as we have it organized. And it's a very interesting tribute to people in Scientology that it gets handled. The dickens with how. It does get handled. But internally in these organizations it is being handled more and more orderly. There is less and less an emergency complexion to every step and move you have to take. There are times during the day when a staff member can breathe, actually. There's at least one day a week now when a staff member can drink a cup of tea here and have time to swallow it.

If you were in the middle of this, as staff members are, you would really know what I was talking about. And you talk about the amount of traffic handled, the amount of processing given, the number of hours of administered therapy, the number of hours of instruction of students, the numbers of pieces of mail handled by my HCO and compare it to some vast, important organization that requires field glasses to see across the desk to see if anybody has come to work, you know, and you'll find out that we've got them whipped. It's pretty hard to believe it because we're always trying to make it better, We're a bunch of perfection-happy people. But you see I've got a long memory, very long memory.

& I remember vividly, six years ago, when Mary Sue and I landed over here as guests of some British Dianeticists. I had my first class of about twenty people and I taught it all by myself. And this was after the boom and crash and smash of things going on in the US and the tremendous zooms and booms and collapses and so forth.

& That was not a time track we were running in Dianetics in the United States. That was not a time track. That was a stock market graph.

& When I came over here, Mary Sue had little Diana about a week after her arrival. And little Diana was - became thereby British and still tells people so. She says, „I am an American girl and a British citizen.“ And we were down at 30 Marlborough Place. The original offices of the organization occupied somebody else's flat and our front room. The original HCO was laid out on a dining room table. And the traffic we were handling at that time was fantastic.

& First book published over here was run by Mary Sue working all night, every night, on a big Gestetner machine. She did it herself - the original copies of Scientology 8-8008. She had them strewn all over the living room and the dining room and nobody dared breath or walk, and what little domestic staff we had thought everything had gone totally potty by that time. They couldn't - weren't permitted to touch anything because they might get pages out of sequence. And the warmness and the amount of help of the British people at that time, their enthusiasm, working toward the things they worked toward, putting things together and building it up... And for a while it was simply in a holding action one way or the other just trying to hold it still while we kept the United States from kicking it over from afar. The United States was still going up and down. Finally we had the United States pretty well smoothed out and we could come back to what we considered a major job. That was right here in London. It never could have been done without you. That is for sure. You made it possible. You also did most of the work

& But there was a time in the HASI when one frantic typist and one harassed Instructor and one ink-smudged wife and one rather tired American comprised the entirety of the HASI. It doesn't look like that now, does it? This country has been not just very kind. Actually, I'd rather be here than in America.

& I have gotten more research done with the cooperation of British Scientologists than I have in America. I get more books written here than there. If anybody thinks Scientology is imported, they just don't know its time track. It's not imported. It's native, strictly. Strictly native, thanks to you.

& Now, it's all right to look over that vista, perhaps. There's hardly anyone here who hasn't to some degree contributed to the organization known as the HASI. As hard as you curse it sometimes, you still support it. Thank you. I know it requires, on occasion, a lot of forbearance to go on supporting it, doesn't it?

& Audience: Yes.

& But thank you for doing so If you knew how the staff felt about it, you wouldn't get that „me“ and „them“ idea concerning it, because they try like the mischief. They try like everything to do all they can, and it's too big a job.

We're in the happy circumstance of having a job that is too big for me and too big for the staff and really too big for you. And how the hell did we ever get into this? It's because an awful lot of people must have been laying on their oars and not doing their jobs. And the optimum solution is, of course, the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics. Isn't it?

Audience: Yes.

Well, if that's the case, we might as well go ahead and do the job whether it's boring or interesting or something that we do with enthusiasm or something we sort of drag ourselves through anyhow. Somebody's got to do this job and I can tell you, we'd better not turn our backs on it.

It never goes over very popularly to tell you that you're a red, thin line of blooming heroes. That's not a popular line because too many men got killed proving it in the Victorian period. But it's true! But it's true.

[Here the Personal Achievement version has another segment of LCC-5 inserted]

& You're manning the ramparts and you don't realize it. I'd just as soon you didn't realize it, just go on manning the ramparts, but I hate to see people in a state of unknowingness about what they're doing! Look at yourself the next time you look yourself in the mirror „Me - manning ramparts? Boy, he sure keyed in a couple of past lives!“

No, holding the fort for a civilization is never easy and building a new one when the old one is shattered is impossible! It's never been done before but it's got to be done now, if anything is going forward along this line. And I'm not being dramatic. I'm actually making the most fantastic understatements I think I have ever made on a platform. I'm not noted for understatements, and yet that is an understatement.

If you don't, who is? And when you've satisfactorily answered that question, let me hear from you again on the subject, will you?

& Now, it's all very well to walk off the ramparts and go down and sit in the middle of the compound, but if you do, don't be surprised when somebody comes up and takes off your head, because that was what would happen.

This world is not in a civilized state. It only looks so. It's not in a good state of culture. It had a good culture, a pretty good culture. The culture of the nineteenth century was pretty good. Of course, a lot of people suffered in it, but there was some kind of a culture - you'd say; a pattern of action. Now that pattern of action may or may not be better or worse, but it is certainly more dispersed and less orderly.

& There are other factors introduced into this thing and I'm not talking now about America particularly or even about England. Of course, I've had an idea that we had a culture over here ever since I left Oxford in 1814 - cut that off the tape.

But what happens when this one's gone, huh? Do you realize there could be such a thing as being mechanically wonderful, mechanically perfect, of having machines that go whir and wheels that go whiz, and steam jackhammers that go clump, clump, clump and still not have a culture? Do you know that could be? That’s possible. Possible, isn't it?

& Did you ever see a preclear who had a complete set of machinery and yet wasn't there at all and couldn't get anything done and didn't contribute anything? And his machinery just went on whir, whir; whir, whir, whir and he never paid any attention to it and there was nobody to run it? And after a while there's nobody to appreciate it, and after a while there's nobody to oil it up. And all of a sudden there is a wheezing thud and this one closes down. And there's a sort of a moaning sigh of escaping steam as that one closes down and chimneys that were spouting smoke now spout an occasional bat. Everybody looks around and says, „What happened?“

& Well, it's just there was nobody there anymore. Simple thing.

& And the whole situation is something that is rather improbable and we don't have very much to do with, and we say, „Well, there's nobody around who is crazy enough to push a button and destroy the whole Western civilization with a thud.“

& Yet, what have they talked about in the UN lately except that? I think it's some kind of a contest - is who gets to push the button; I think it's gone that far.

Yes, we are being very mechanically apt. Electricity we've put to many uses, such as electric chairs. Atomic fission that could light every light in every home in the whole world and light up homes that were never before lighted very nicely is being stored up to blow somebody's home to pieces. It doesn't get serious to you unless it gets to you sometimes, but I asked a fellow about what he thought of destruction of Earth.

I asked a fellow what he thought about the destruction of Earth. He was a salesman. He unfortunately came to my door. And he said, „Well, somebody's got it under control and nothing like that ever happens. It's very silly, and nothing to it. It doesn't seem anything....“

And I finally combed it down and I named various parts of his possessions and so forth. Did he know that an atom bomb might...? Only I wasn't selling the dangers and horrors of atom bombs. I was trying just to see where this man's reality was. And the atom bomb would probably wipe away his car, and it'd do this and it'd do that and how about that and so forth.

And he - „Oh well,“ he says, „yes, it's so. So what, so what, so what?“

And I said, „Do you realize that it will take that social security card you have in your wallet and finish it off so that it's just totally illegible?“

He said, „My social security card?“

And he took it out and he looked at it. He says, „By golly, you know, I ought to buy some rations and store them up in the hills someplace.“

That's the first time this situation had gotten real to him at all, and I just laughed to myself about the whole thing.

It's always going along so nicely till you're the one that goes over the edge of the cliff and you say. „Why the ... didn't somebody put up a sign?“

Well, who was there but you? And it's hard to put them up as you go over the edge. It requires too much athletic prestidigitation. But, that's what people usually try to do.

No, I'm afraid that we have - I'm afraid whether we like it or not that we have a desperately close look at the whole thing, and if anybody's going to confront it, we are. And that's a sad thing to find out. I guess that army companies sometimes recognizes this when they look over on their flanks, you know, and they find out there's nobody come up in support of them. It's awfully lonely - awfully lonely when you realize this.

Well, a lot of you have felt lonesome. You have said „Scientology“ - and you've talked to people about Scientology, and you're (quote) „out there“ and talking to people and so forth and then you don't talk to them so much and you feel sort of lonely and you wonder if there's something weird about you that you can't get more people into communication with you or something like this on the subject.

Actually, what you're experiencing is an army company out in the middle of an open field with both flanks uncovered. You feel lonesome. You wouldn't be talking about it if you didn't feel there was some reason to. If you didn't feel that you had a bit of a mission in pushing it on out. You see you wouldn't be saying a word about it if you didn't feel that. So you must feel that you are in some sort of an advanced state or you wouldn't feel lonesome about it. Well, you can stop feeling lonesome. You will pick up the very best around you. These you will pick up for sure. And later on, with a broom, we'll pick up the others. But I'm afraid the future of Scientology could have been a good, quiet, unemotional sort of game that didn't amount to very much but was a lot of fun and on which nothing depended if it had come up in any other age. Unfortunately, it came up in this one and, therefore, it finds itself embattled in the front ranks as the only organization which can effectively change the course of life of the individual. And if the individual can be changed, then this thing called Scientology, and you working with it can change the course of this civilization and, therefore, Earth. And I'm sure I haven't overstated the case. Do you think I have?

Audience: No.

& All right, so much for a congress, so much for a congress. And right now, I'd like to thank you very much on the part of the staff and on my part for coming to this congress and for being patient and for laughing in the right places and for being decent and for being you.

Thank you very much.

Good night.

Male voice: Thank you.