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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

And this all happened by accident, out of mud?

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

“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?”

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.