Well now, some people may believe that there is a game in going around and shooting, arresting, fighting, drawing people up in battalions and firing by volley, or playing catch with atom bombs between one agency in Washington and another agency in Russia, but there aren't very many participants to this game, are there? There's no slightest chance for the average citizen to participate in a game called atomic warfare — no slightest chance. They haven't even got a good civil defense outfit that you could join, you know? You couldn't even wear a tin hat — whatever good a tin hat would be.

But here we have the common denominator of what we could call civilization. Civilization would be, of course, a gradient term. But we could say a good civilization would be that civilization in which the individuals of which it was composed could play a game and knew they could play a game and were playing a game called culture. And if that attitude could exist, you would immediately, of course, have human rights, respect for one's fellows — all these things would fall into line. These are symptoms of how well the game is going.

And when human rights are being thrown aside, ignored, well, there's no game in progress, that's all — in spite of the childhood bible, the comic strip. It believes that only when you're permitted to murder, kill, rob and burn can a game be in progress. That is the message carried to us by the Sunday papers. And that is the message which every child erroneously learns.

They think of the Western badmen. It's a lot of fun, by the way, fooling around the West — it used to be a lot of fun. There was very, very little connected with hauling out one's six-gun and shooting somebody else. I mean, there were always a few bad apples around someplace or another, but they killed each other off and the rest of the guys had a good time. That was really what the West was all about.

Any primitive culture, any frontier, has a characteristic which is not mirrored in our Western stories, which is not mirrored in our Western movies and that great authority on everything — driven home with its gamma rays — the television set.

Now, these great authorities all agree that a frontier was a place where everybody shot at everybody. Do you think people who would shoot at you could handle your machinery well? They wouldn't. They wouldn't.

The actuality of conduct on a frontier is quite different. And having lived, been raised, on a Western frontier in Montana before it got very civilized, I know very well what I'm talking about. And having seen one later in Alaska, I also know what I'm talking about — that isn't civilized up there yet worth a nickel — and other parts of the world which are frontiers. And everywhere I have gone where men were few, men were valuable, and they ran good 8-C on each other.

Up in Alaska you go back of the — well, go back in the muskeg someplace, and you see a cabin sitting there. It's unlatched; there's no lock on the door. There's firewood stacked there, there's a frying pan, there's some bacon, there's some flour. All you're expected to do is at least leave as much firewood as you found. If you've got a few more supplies than you can usually use, you could leave those too and you probably would.

Here is the level of hospitality and friendship which would be unknown. Wonder how long it's been since somebody in Washington left his front door unlocked so that anybody could walk in and cook himself a steak?

So here we're presented with a lying picture of a frontier, and our children are led to believe that the finest thing in the world that you could do is go out and kill everybody.

Well, why does the kid believe this? And we get to the root of the trouble immediately: because he can't have a game as a kid! He can't even have a game with his fellow children because they're insufficiently well respected, one person to another, by the adults. No respect given them to amount to anything. There isn't any game to play; they can't participate.

They come in and they try to — you watch a little kid about a year and a half, two years old, he's liable to come in and grab a dishcloth while you're washing dishes and try to wipe the dishes. And if you're indoctrinated thoroughly in this Western-hemisphere civilization — heh! — you'll take the dish away from him and put it back up where it won't get broken.

And after you've done this from two years of age to seven years of age, you have somebody who has been thoroughly trained that he can't work. And then when he's thirteen or fourteen and fifteen, that's the time to sit around and hold your head because he's never going to be any good.

Where'd he get no good? Two to seven. That's an interesting thing. Because he might break the dish. Well, for God's sakes let him break the dish, but don't break the kid!

Now, wherever we look, we find this bad 8-C going on, which is simply a protest by the individual: "I'd better not have anybody else run my machinery because he'll wreck the whole works. And I'm convinced of this, because on every corner, where he's not needed, there's a cop. I'm convinced of this because there are terrific, terrific numbers of books written about the — what you can and can't do: people have to be restrained." And all of this stems out of the fact that we'd better not associate with our fellows or we'll get in an awful lot of trouble. That's kind of it, you know? It's kind of a lesson driven home.

Well, if that is an existing sort of state of affairs where people — where a half a hundred people can live in an apartment house, as they do in the East, for fifteen years and never even know their next-door neighbor's name — if this sort of thing can happen, they must have fallen apart rather badly, rather widely.

Well, if they've fallen apart it becomes an interesting problem to hook some communication lines back up. Because the only way they'll ever be happy is with some lines hooked up. You can sure count on that.

It's a very easy process. All you have to do is hook some communication lines up and the rest more or less starts taking place. Because it's just a failure of communication, and these people learn by communicating that their machinery and their beingness and possessions aren't necessarily going to be ruined simply because somebody else tells them something or gives them something or they go out somewhere. You see? They'll learn this on a kind of a gradient scale.

But let me assure you of this: that if everybody in such a society were to believe that nothing could be done about it at all — let's say they weren't particularly in apathy about it, but they'd simply been taught this as an educative datum, that there is no remedy for antisocial actions — if they all believed this, then you have a guarantee that the situation will deteriorate.

So that's our primary barrier. That's the primary thing we have to overcome with Scientology: Something can be done about it. Not what can be done about it — see, that's up there too high. It is possible for something to occur that would put a person into better relations with life and his fellows. The society doesn't know that, has no inkling of it.

You go to some fellow and you say, "Well now, things are pretty bad and so forth, I know, but have you had anything done about it?"

And he'll say, "Oh, I went to this one and I went to that one — there's nothing can be done about it."

There's, by the way, an organization in this country which calls itself the "Better Gyp Bureau." And the Better Gyp Bureau is heavily endowed by anyone who wants to pull a fast curve on the society. This organization, with an office everyplace in the United States, writes continually this message: "Anybody who says he can cure anything is a quack. If somebody tells you that something can be done about it or a condition can be bettered, you should immediately call the Better Gyp Bureau so that we can tell you that the man is a fake."

Oh, it's fantastic! But that is the truth; I'm not exaggerating it. "Anybody in the country who says he can even start research in any direction toward doing anything about cancer should be immediately shot." And it says continually there that people coming in, saying they can do things for illnesses "which have already been found impossible to heal by competent authority ..." What competent authority is there on the face of this earth that can tell you that there will be no progress in the field of healing? I would say that anybody that said that was an incompetent authority and ought to be asylumed. And yet — yet this is the propaganda we face: "Nothing can be done about it."

Do you think it's right for the highways of this country to have strewn upon them more dead and wounded than occurred in the US forces in World War I, every single year? Do you think that's a good, sensible sort of a society? Or does that sort of put people on their nervous edge when they take that wheel? Anybody who can think at all, who can look around him as he drives, is liable to some of the sillier antics. I know I've seen some interesting things occur. I haven't had any accidents myself but one, and I hardly would call it an accident. A woman suddenly — her name was Wanda; she was a psychic reader. She all of a sudden — I was traveling at about twenty miles an hour and all of a sudden she came from the fourth lane over of a four-pass highway. There wasn't even any corner to turn there — car went out of control and suddenly ran into the side of my car, just like that. Didn't hurt me or the car any to amount to anything. I made sure of that — picked the car up and moved it over quickly. But I looked at this girl — she was going hyu-hyu-hyu-hyu-hyu-hyu. She had a driver's license! She couldn't talk for twenty minutes. No two-way communication possible, much less "What accident has occurred?"

I thought, "That's an interesting thing," drove on down the road myself, skipped the whole thing. Few days later I was threatened with having my driver's license revoked for not having written a certain paper in to the driving bureau. You know, you had to make a certain responsibility statement of some kind or another, and not having made out the piece of paper within the twenty-four hours or something that was allowed — not knowing it was necessary, not being guilty of the accident — I find out all of a sudden I'm going to have my license revoked. So I call up and I say, "Now, by the way, I don't want to be facetious or anything like that, but are you revoking the other driver's license?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"She hasn't done anything."

No, all she did was run into a car. I failed to make out a piece of paper!

Now, that's a gorgeous state of affairs, isn't it? Yet if you walked into the state police or the licensing bureau or the drivers' license bureau of any of these local governments and you said, "Well now, I am a Doctor of Scientology and we could probably do considerable to decrease the accidents which you have in your state by giving a ten-minute examination to each person who applies for a driver's license. And now we could give them this little examination and then we'll carry it against the records for six months. And at the end of the six months we will have marked everybody who will have had an accident by that time. And then if you agree that this is what happened, then we can institute it as a regular affair, and this isn't going to cost you a thing. We'll even provide the person to stand here and give the thing while the people are taking the other examination."

Place after place this has been offered. But it's being offered to people who know nothing else, but they do know that nothing can be done about it.

Yet there's a great oddity about this little examination. It was to determine the accident-proneness of the individual. And we tested it for quite a while and made a very reliable little test out of it. And it's just two sides of one piece of paper. And it actually does — it actually does coordinate beautifully. You can tell, practically by the grade of the person, how long he's going to drive until his next accident, or whether he's going to have one or not.

And we found something very interesting when we started to coordinate this accident-prone test with tone tests and psychometrics — standard psychometric batteries. We found out that they coordinated one for one. They were right straight across the boards. In other words, we weren't testing anything peculiar when we were testing accident-proneness. We were testing just the same things that were being tested over here with personality

In other words, this little accident test, which was designed to clean up a few highways, operated as efficiently in telling the capabilities of a person as very elaborate tests over here did. So there isn't very much trouble involved and it's quite an accurate thing to do. It isn't even hard to dream up. But it's being offered to people who know nothing can be done about it at all. Now, you'd think it'd be a very worthy endeavor.

We coordinated the grades of this test against the ability — because it was given to a lot of students, too — against the ability of the person to run 8-C upon his fellow students. Exact coordination.

In other words, we were selecting out of the society the people that nobody ought to let run their machinery until they had some processing and knew what to do with a machine.

Now, here again we have the interlock of interpersonal relations; and this interlock is a very easy thing to look at, to plot, because it's simply how well can a person give a command and see it through to its end of cycle before giving another command? Or how well can a person receive a command and carry it through to its end of cycle before taking another command?

This is a great oddity, but this give-and-take is civilization. And when people can receive and give commands with ease, when they can control each other to this degree on a give-and-take basis and with certainty, we have a very positive and dynamic culture.

If everybody is simply walking around saying, "Well, they're all responsible and we're just — everybody's going to be responsible and there's no reason for me to give anybody orders and so on," we have everything falling apart. That's an oddity, isn't it? Well, we found out that a person who shouldn't be at the wheels of somebody else's body also shouldn't be at the wheels of a car.

And so it's a very interesting thing that with the greatest of ease you could pick out of the society those people who would cause the accidents. They evidently amount to about 10 percent. All you'd have to do is knock out their driver's licenses until they had enough Group Processing till they could run 8-C and tolerate a few orders.

How can a person possibly drive according to the law if he cannot receive the content of the traffic law? What else will he do but speed if he can't even assimilate the speeding signs? You see? Now that's a command, isn't it? It says "Thirty miles per hour this zone." This person can't receive any orders. Sixty! Ninety! And believe me, if he's in that condition, he doesn't know whether he's got ahold of a steering wheel or a baby bottle. Usually the car is driving him!

I said to one of these new cars, I said, "How are you driving your people lately?" You know, it didn't answer? You know, the thing was out of communication? It was crazy!

Well, all right. Here we have across the boards, then, the anatomy of a culture. And the anatomy of a culture is the willingness and ability of the people in that culture to play the game with one another, to give orders and complete cycles of action, to receive orders and complete cycles of action, to cooperate. And to form up teams and sides and argue about it. Not necessarily, you know, go out and kill everybody, according to the TV — it's not necessary to fight to have a game.

When you are playing an interesting game of chess with somebody, are you fighting with that person? No. When you're playing football, unless everybody on the other team is mad or everybody on your team is mad, it doesn't generate into a fight. It's a game. It's only when things get very gameless that we have to have a fight; and that convinces everybody, you know, that a game is in progress.

Now let's take a look at somebody who is unable to receive an acknowledgment. Do you know there are a lot of people around who are unable to receive an acknowledgment? An auditor in Phoenix the other day did a very interesting thing. I told you all about this: Got in front of the lady and said, "Good!" You know, received an acknowledgment.

The actual thing about it is, never in her life had she ever received anybody's acknowledgment. She had said yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, and they'd said yes, but she never heard the yes. She just went on yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. And they would — people would say, "Yes, Gertrude." And it never got through. Stuck telephone line, you know? It's one way only. Such a person requires an impact before they know they've been acknowledged.

I had a fellow one time; he was quite drunk on board ship. He came roaring aboard ship at about 2:30 in the morning. There wasn't hardly anybody around. We'd just come in; everybody was dog-tired. The boy on the gangway was standing his watch without an officer of the deck. And this guy, who had just been assigned to us in a draft, slips off the ship and comes back roaring drunk, going to bust everything up. I peeled off the bunk and went out to see what all this commotion was.

He'd thrown the quartermaster's notebook and a spyglass and so forth — he'd thrown these overboard. And I said something to him — just said it straightaway — told him to snap out of it. He didn't receive any acknowledgment. There was no statement made to him; he didn't receive a communication at all. He received no acknowledgment for what he'd been doing. I told him he shouldn't do that — that was an acknowledgment of what he'd been doing. There wasn't any communication there at all.

He went on roaring around, practically walked through me and so on. So, took him by his tie and ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock, ptock!

He said, "Oh, hello, Skipper."

All right. There's a certain percentage of people like that in a society and they kind of spoil it for the rest of us. What's their idea of an acknowledgment? Let you run into them, of course. Crash, crunch — "(sigh) Somebody else is in the world, too."

When they've finally badgered you and hounded you and so forth .. . There's the lighter variety — they've badgered you and hounded you and talked to you and said the same thing over and over and over and over and you've kept saying, "Yes. Yes. All right. We'll do it. Okay," and so forth, they just keep right on, keep right on — you finally say, "Damn it, shut up!"

"(sigh) Somebody spoke to me." They found it out right then.

Well, you know, my machinery — I don't know about yours — is delicate. And when people tell me that sort of thing and so forth, I generally short-circuit a couple of antennas and things like that.

But gee-whiz, it's hard to have a civilization where you've got these terrifically base levels of contact — where it's only an impact that can communicate, you know? Because these people go around and find impacts so they'll know they're in communication. They're not the kind of people you want running your machinery. And so we get a society falling apart.

We run into one of these people, we'll run into ninety-nine good people. We run into one of these people — we're hit hard enough, we say, "What do you know, ninety-nine other people are just like this, that makes a hundred." We say, "Well, that's life. That's society."

And here we are, a vast number of people who are good, decent people, going around, looking at life, not having too bad a time with it, successful in our own way, able to talk to our fellows very well — making, really, two errors. One: that it's — there's any liability at all in talking to anybody. There is no liability at all in talking to anybody. We make an error when we suppose there is. There isn't even any liability in talking to a cop.

Of course, I'm not going to say what you have to say to a cop to get an acknowledgment through. I ran into one cop one day; I had to ask him, "Where did you learn to drive?" This was non sequitur enough so that he kind of blinked on this. "How do you know what good driving is?" I mean, I wasn't the guy who was arrested, by the way. He was pestering somebody on the sidewalk, so I merely went over and horned in. None of my business at all.

So I asked the cop where he learned how to drive, where he thought he was going, what kind of a car he was driving, if he was married. Why was I doing this? I asked him for his license and his identification card. By the time I reached into my pocket and pulled out a notebook, he got in his car and drove off.

It was none of my business. Or maybe a society is everybody's business. If you're playing a good game at it, believe me, it is everybody's business.

Now, the other mistake that we make is that nothing can be done about it. Yeah, an awful lot of things can be done about it. We see somebody sitting there and they look thuuh, you know? We ask them, "What's the matter with you?"

You know, that person would have to be practically psycho in- order to give you any kind of a growl or be offended or anything else. They usually answer you, and they tell you and so forth.

We bump into somebody in a streetcar or on a bus, in a hall, so forth, we don't say anything to them at all. Why not? Somebody talks to us huffily, snaps and snarls a little bit. What I usually do to them is say, "Gee, what did you have for lunch?" Anything to snap them into another communication line.

But there isn't any reason for either ourselves or the society to go on making these errors. Auditing is basically communication. We have the vast, vast advantage today of knowing the formula of communication and knowing what communication can do and how to use communication.

There's one point I would like to make now, is that a lot of auditors penalize themselves on communication by being auditors. Therefore this group, or the group of Scientology, could penalize itself. Because it knows so darn much about communication, it then feels totally responsible at all times for using it in its most optimum state. And this is a rather sorry state of mind, believe me.

This fellow walks all over your toes, you know, and bumps into you and knocks the package out from underneath your arm and so forth, and you want to say to them, "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

Instead of that, because you're a good auditor, you figure the guy is pretty badly out of communication and you pat him on the shoulder or something like that. You either don't talk to him or you give him some auditing or something, you know? Liable to do the most remarkable things. Well, this is a kind of a slavery in itself, isn't it? Hm?

Well, let me tell something real funny about this. Although you know optimum communication, even if you know optimum communication — or because you do — not one person present could be sloppy enough in the use of communication to deteriorate this society in any way. Because you know what communication is, you have at once some responsibility for the way you communicate, and to communicate perfectly when you have to. But you also need not assume the total responsibility of always communicating perfectly. This would be irrational, wouldn't it? It'd be . . . (applause)

Now, I want to tell you a little process, just to wind up this lecture — little process. Very germane to this. Very remarkable. You sit down and ask a preclear who is worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry — you just ask him over and over, "Well, what can be done about it?"

And he'll give you the social response: "Nothing."

Ask him again, "What can be done about it? What can be done about it?"

Now, somebody rushes in to you — maybe you're running an office or something of the sort — and they rush in and they say to you, "And the mail all got ruddy-rodded and we didn't put any stamps on it and it went in the mailbox and — ooh!"

And you look at them and you say, "Well . . ." You know that you're perfectly at liberty to say, "Well, you damned fool! Next time I catch you doing anything like that I'm going to fry both of your ears." You're perfectly at liberty to say that.

As a matter of fact, people feel better and that's usually more acceptable when they've pulled a boo-boo than anything else. I know I practically made somebody well one time: I just started — sat down and started insulting him. Found out his level of communication acceptance; it was insults. I said, "You're one of the dirtiest louses I ever met in my life. What a dog."

And the fellow — "(sigh) At last you understand me."

Well, you could just ask this person, "Well, what can be done about it?" or "What can you do about it?"

If you wanted real smart help around you, you'd never solve their problems for them. You'd go on solving the problems on an executive level, but you'd just keep asking them, "Well, what can be done about it? What can you do about it?" Person after a while will sit down and consciously lay out a half a dozen solutions, one right after the other — bang, bang, bang, bang, bang — instead of no solution or just one solution, you know? They could lay out a half a dozen solutions. "What can be done about it?" You've rehabilitated their ability to independently arrive at a solution to a situation, no matter how bad it is.

In the first place, they believe that doing nothing is a solution. And I can tell you from our researches that the one thing that you must not do about things is nothing. No matter what you do, no matter how wrong you are, don't do nothing. That's the most fatal course. Sounds odd, but it's true. To do nothing is fatal.

You know why? It'll even turn off your memory. It pulls you right straight out of the responsibility level and drops you down into ownership and then hide. See? You say, "Well, I can't do anything about it. That's the end of that." And you know, you'll feel terrible, right away.

You run this process on a preclear — ask him things that he doesn't have to change. Now that sounds like a good process, doesn't it? Things he doesn't have to change, he doesn't have to control, he doesn't have to work with, something like this — and he'll just get sadder and sadder and sadder and sadder.

The things wrong with a person who is very hectically worrying about all the things he has to do, is because he doesn't have enough to do. That's all. It's just a scarcity of doingness. That's what's wrong with him.

Well, a scarcity of communicatingness is usually what's wrong with communication. So, when in doubt, communicate.

Now, we used to have in Dianetics a great deal of understanding, and we still do have, of what can be done with words to an unconscious person. Here's this fellow lying there, he's unconscious and we start talking. Nyyaah!

Do you know what's wrong? It's the scarcity of the words in the vast absence of words. We put a few words in this complete vacuum of words and they stick. Do you see that? They become so valuable, he cherishes them so much, that he pulls them straight in with total command value. Doesn't question them at all. And that's how an engram phrase becomes aberrative. There are too few of them, and so each one, to an unconscious person, is a pearl or a diamond, and they hold it — you know communication is real scarce right there.

What he hopes is that he'll get enough communication to run it out. And if you stood there and you said yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, on and on and on and on and on, and quoted the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta and the Volstead Act, you know the person would finally wake up? "Phew!" And if you added a few more and got him out of that state there wouldn't be one phrase you uttered to him that would be aberrative! Give him enough communication and you run it out. Give him a little communication and he'll hold it pressed preciously to his bosom. Now, that's something to know. That's something to know.

So you could say to an auditor who has done a lot of auditing the following process with considerable result, and that's "What could you say to an unconscious person?" He's liable to comm lag on this quite a bit, because he doesn't feel free to talk to people under certain conditions.

Well, a person ought to feel free to talk enough to run anything out and that's how free you ought to feel. Don't inhibit your communication; enlarge it. Don't be upset because somebody's liable to say you are obsessively communicating. Tell them they're obsessively inhibiting!

Just because you know a lot of these things puts a responsibility on you, but just because you know Scientology is no reason or license to stop living. You should be able to live much more fully. But you feel very free to use or not use exactly what you know, to use it as you think it ought to be used, to create the effect you want to create or just to create a random effect. That's a wide license, isn't it? The material is yours. Go ahead and take it.

Thank you.