[Start of Lecture]

Okay. I'd like to talk to you now about something I don't know anything about.

The difference between me talking about something I don't know anything about and somebody else talking about something he doesn't know anything about, is the fact that I'll tell you so.

I want to talk to you about testing. Don't know anything about it, see. As a matter of fact, this is factually true. Don't know anything about testing and so it's a very, very good subject for a lecture.

Now, testing was invented sometime, I don't know when, see. I don't know when it was invented. I don't know who invented it. I could hazard some guesses. I could say it developed originally out of the cave days. One caveman would get out and he'd pull a woman by the hair for a quarter of a mile, and he'd say, "I'm feeling weak today, I guess. Only made it for a quarter of a mile," or something like that.

It might have developed then. It might have developed some other time, but I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know. I never read a book on the subject, either.

The whole subject of testing is probably, though, a very great subject. I've met an awful lot of people who knew an awful lot about testing, and so on, but I never had the benefit of listening to them say very much. They're sort of reticent about the thing. So I'm quite sure that there is a huge subject known as testing. I'm sure of it! In other words, I am convinced.

But the facts of the case are that it has never been proven to me. See, I'm convinced that there is such a subject as testing. But it has never been proven to me – it's never been proven to me conclusively – that up till the days of Dianetics and Scientology, it had any value at all. Because what was the good of knowing somebody's existing state – what was the good of knowing it – if you couldn't do anything about it?

Oh, well, maybe it merely convinced him he was in bad condition. I know, but what do you want to convince him he's in bad condition for if you can't do anything about it? Got the idea? Factually?

So all the tests that we have and are using – most of them – are based on just one premise and one premise only: that Homo sapiens is in an existing state, and their textbooks say that it can't be altered. So all testing was designed to prove, evidently, before 1950, is that man couldn't change.

Now, it's interesting that we have found an area where man can't change. It is very, very difficult to change a man downward. Very difficult to change a man downward. The things you have to do to him to change him downward made very good newspaper reading throughout the end of the Korean War – brainwashing.

But even a psychologist who only knew these methods couldn't change people downward with any consistency. And as a consequence he assumed people couldn't change.

But what would a group that assumed people couldn't change – what could it have been trying to do?

Now, a man can be changed upward with such ease that it's fantastic that nobody ever found this out. I mean, if I could think up something anybody could think it up, see. I mean, it's easy. How come he never found this out?

Now look, you think I'm trying to lay at the door of psychology and psychiatry a criminal intent, don't you? Well, that's absolutely correct.

The discovery that man could not change could only have followed an effort to degrade him. And for the first time, we are trying to scale him upwards, and we find that the most elementary things can change a test upwards. Very elementary things can change a test upwards.

If you, for instance, were to sit and smile pleasantly at a preclear for twenty-five hours, he'd probably get better. If you just said, "Yes, is that so?" you know, "What do you know!"

If any psychoanalyst had ever contented himself with sitting and listening to some patient rattle on, I'm sure that some patient not deficient in havingness – which the comm would have cut down – but not terribly deficient of havingness, would have improved so considerably and so markedly that we would now have libraries full of books on this one case. That's a "series" in psychoanalysis – one case.

The only series on schizophrenia in psychiatry, for instance, that I know of, that is real schizophrenia, is a series of one: one girl who assumed five personalities. And although it's been banned in Boston as pornography, it has made good reading for everybody else for a long time. And that's a series of one and that is total information concerning. That's a book by Morton Prince. You, by the way, would just have a ball reading that book because he gives you all the dope. He gives you all the clues necessary to solve the case, and minimizes every one of the clues and maximizes all the things that are completely unimportant about the whole thing.

Now, I am not trying to indict psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis or phrenology, or – I don't know, what are some of those others? There's one there that had to do with transmutation of gold into lead or lead into gold or something like that. Yeah. Alchemy. Oh, yes, yes, modern chemistry.

And I'm not trying to degrade these, because they don't need it. It's sort of pouring mud in a mudhole, you know.

But when you look over this astonishing fact that today our testing programs... I don't know a thing about testing, but our testing programs demonstrate that we can change people and change them upward at a great rate – very fast. I mean, it's not difficult to change people upward – it's not very difficult.

If a person is on the bottom, sometimes you get some suction trying to pry him off, but once you get him rising a little bit, why, he generally goes on up, as long as the auditor will sit still and listen.

But where do we have any use for testing? You should ask the question, "Why don't I know anything about testing?" It should have occurred to you there that there might be some hooker in the statement, because I don't go around saying, "I don't know," you know, except when I'm being honest.

But there is really a hooker in the subject. I want to know if there's anything to know. See, I don't know anything about it. I've read some books on the subject, and I've done some testing, and so forth. Is there anything to know about it at all?

Well, the actual fact of testing – no. There is very, very little to know about that. The actual fact of existing state is such a mystery that there's nothing you could know about that. You see, because it would simply be comparable data. "This person compares to a twelve-year-old schoolchild." That's a statement, that is! In what school, which teaches what curriculum, in what part of the world? See, they don't ever say.

They don't ever say "Jefferson High School, Lincoln, Missouri," or something like that, you know. They say a twelve-year-old schoolchild has the intelligent equivalent of..." I suspect statements like this. They're not specific, they're not exact, they have no location, they're floating in space.

So what about this? Well, I do know something about the change of tests or recorded change. That I know something about. And if they were more honest, and if they'd ever changed anybody, I guess that's all a psychologist would know, would be alteration of condition. Because you can compare one condition to another condition, but when you say a person has a test like this... What is the proper curve? Is it up here? Is it down here? Is it over here? Does it have lace pants on it? What is this? What's the proper test? What's the proper curve?

Somebody says, "This is the curve of Joe Jones. Joe Jones's curve is just like that." Everybody stands around and says, "Yeah. What do you know. That's pretty good. Mm-hm." Or "That's pretty bad, isn't it?" Compared to what?

Well, it's compared to something called the hidden ideal, the false ideal, the understood ideal, the suspected ideal or the represented ideal. Do you understand what the word would be? It would be an ideal which doesn't exist. But everybody knows it exists, and we have testing dramatizing this more than any other single human activity.

It is a hidden fact behind all criticism – whether of plays or a person or cats, kings, coal heavers or bats or pigs with wings – that there is an ideal, there is a perfection "That I know about, but you wouldn't," which is never spoken. And we should call this the pretended ideal.

There is evidently an ideal state in Mother's mind when she says we are bad children. There is evidently an ideal state in the sergeant's mind when he says we are poor soldiers. There is evidently some ideal of some kind or another in the priest's mind when he says we are sinful.

But they damn seldom say anything about what it is! They say we don't measure up in comparison to it. What?

We read in the papers, "This is a poor play." See, some critic, he's sounding off, "It's a poor play." Well, you could say, "Who said so?" That's easy – the critic. But by whose standards of playwrighting? Now, this thing did appear on Broadway, and I'm sure compared to Bill Smith's play – Billy Smith being only in the third grade – that it shined. See? So that would make it an excellent play, wouldn't it, huh?

But compared to one of those little things Shakespeare dashed off between sonnets, the thing might not be quite so good. But then I am sure that people walked up to Shakespeare and said, "Well, Bill. Ah, well. This thing – this – this thing you've done tonight – what was its, name? Uh... uh... Hamlet. Hamlet? Was that it? Uh... Bill, uh... I don't think it'll go. It won't go, Bill. It's a poor play." Compared to what? The one that the critic said was a poor play, or Billy Smith in the third grade said was a poor play, or compared to the Passion Play as done at Oberammergau, or a poor play compared to Bill's last effort. Well, possibly, you could get a comparison there, couldn't you?

So we've moved into about the only standard that could exist, "Is the fellow being bad or good compared to himself?" And that is what testing is in Scientology. Is he being bad or good compared to him? Is he being better or worse than him?

Well, unfortunately for the guy, we happen to know how good he can get. So we can measure him up against this standard. So, being honest, we can say a change is attainable in existing state and we are interested in the change, we are not interested in either existing state, don't you see.

But there are certain existing states necessary to the performance of auditing – we say to auditors – so, therefore we know that auditors that fall below this existing state, fall below it. This we know for sure. They fall below being able to audit. They crack up somewhere along the line. They say to the preclear, just about the twenty-fifth time, "Now, go over to the book. That's right. Look at it. What color is it?" And they all of a sudden say, "Heh-uu-hu-hm-hm, let's go out for a Coke." The preclear at this moment has somatics; he's about ready to drop his eyeballs on the floor. "Let's' knock off the, session. I can't stand it anymore."

And we know that they will do certain things below that state. But we, then, do have some kind of an idea about the state auditors should be in. And if we're certifying an auditor, we want to know if he's in some comparable state, but that again is against a known standard. It's a known standard.

Well, who's it known to? Well, boy, if you were this guy's preclear, you'd know it. See, it'd be known to you too. The fellow has to be able to persist, duplicate, communicate, acknowledge communications. He has to be able to get in there and pitch. He has to be smart enough to be able to figure out where the preclear won't go and make him go or knock his head in. He has to be able to do certain things, see. And we can test what sort of a condition a fellow has to be in, in order to make somebody do those things. That's very easy. It's very easy. But it is a standard. It's a known standard, not a hidden standard. It's very important.

This pretended standard, this hidden ideal, this thing which lurks in the back of people's minds when they say "We aren't smart enough. We aren't good enough. We aren't quick enough," is actually the basis of all criticism to which we object. Because we essentially are not objecting to their statement that we aren't good enough. We're objecting to the fact that they never say in comparison with what. They never say what we are supposed to be as good as, what we are supposed to be as fast as.

Therefore, we rather favor physical tests, things like that. Can we broad-jump five feet? Anybody in order to join this team has to broad-jump five feet, see. We know what we're doing then. We can broad-jump five feet, therefore we have passed the test. But it's only a standard that is set down, and somebody has found out that an athlete or a soldier or somebody has to be able to go through certain actions, since athletes and soldiers go through these actions.

Therefore, the only sincere and honest test that you possibly could lay down, really, in actuality, would be a test against observable performance – observable performance.

Now, to show you how thin this bad and good thing is, a soldier goes out, sets up a machine gun, fires at a mad rate and misses completely his target. He doesn't kill a single human being. Bad soldier. He goes back into civilization, runs down the street, doesn't even knock over a human being, hits a cop, and we say he's a bad citizen. The common denominator of these two remarks is that people are critical.

Now, testing had its origin, I am sure – this is my suspicion, since I really know nothing about the subject – had its origin in the early days of brainwashing. It was an effort to make people self-critical, which is a keynote of brainwashing. If you would test somebody long enough and often enough, you'd drive him daffy if you never told him what he was being tested for, or against what standard. You'd have to have a standard against which he was being tested so that he could achieve, himself, a comparison of result.

Therefore, I would say that all those tests which simply evaluate by the observer...

I tell you, here's a test that – we have a technical expression which is a condemnatory expression in Scientology – "It's for the birds!"

This thing is called a Rorschach. A Rorschach is probably called a Rorschach uhm... It's a Rorschach. Anyway.

You go four years to a university to learn how to interpret one. Boy, there sure must be an awful lot there to know how to interpret. There sure is. I'm sure there's more significance racked up in less time – wow! Four years to learn how to interpret one of these things.

You know what people do with these things? They're inkblot tests. Kids back in about 1820 used to take some ink, spill it on a piece of paper, fold the piece of paper over and open it and they have a pattern, you know.

Well, some psychiatrist got stuck in this period, got the measles and died back in 1820 or something. And he died when he was doing this and it's a dramatization, you see, or something like this. There's an explanation to its origination I know.

Anyway. He shows this to people, he shows this test to people, and he looks at them and he says, "What do you see? What do you see?"

And people say, "Ohhh, I see a fox or a bat or a kangaroo or, uh... it's a flying carpet," or something or other. Each time they say one of these things, they say, "Well, I think it's a fox."

"Ahhhhh," he says. "Patient thinks it's a fox." "What else do you see?"

"A bearskin!"

"Patient thinks it's a bearskin. Patient thought it was fox, then bearskin. F-B. F-B."

Well, they have about five or fifty of these plates and people are supposed to read them and so forth.

And it was a source of great embarrassment when one of them showed me one of these tests. They used to test everybody during the war. They didn't have anything else to do. And you get shipped in. They'd run out of clinics to send you to, you know. Go get your teeth fixed, go get this fixed, go get that fixed. Nobody would let you out of the joint, you see. You were there awaiting receipt of orders or something of the sort, you know, and so they would keep sending you to clinics, here and there.

So, of course, they'd send you to a testing clinic. They'd send you to the psychological clinic. They'd send you to the psychiatric clinic. They'd just send you around. You go around and people would spend an hour or so looking you over, and that sort of thing.

I almost got scared out of my wits! It just – it frightened me. I was very timid in those days. And I sat down and... I was supposed to go to the psychiatric clinic, the eye clinic, and so forth.

The eye clinic didn't know what was the matter with me. I couldn't see. I kept telling them that was what was the matter with me – they didn't believe me. And anyhow, I went in the psychiatric clinic, and I sat down. And all of a sudden he says, "Ahhh!" he says, "Ahhh!" And it was a very, very learned "Ahhh!" I will say.

And he shoved a Rorschach test at me. He didn't have anything else to do, or I was the wrong patient or something. He was confused maybe. And he shoved this test at me, and he says, "What's that?"

And I said, "It is a piece of paper with some ink on it! What do you suppose it is!"

Four days later he was still looking in his manuals.

I don't know to this day whether I'm supposed to be sane or insane, you see. Because there's nothing in any Rorschach manual that tells you what this response means. It frightened me all right, and he turned sort of pale and he jumped up on the table and took off his glasses. He started to chitter, you know.

So I took the test and I showed it to him! I said, "All right, you don't like that answer! What's it mean to you?" So he got back in his chair and sat there, and when I left he was still staring at it. Anyway...

We didn't have much respect for people in those days.

Well, anyway, having been given a Rorschach from beginning to end, of course, I'm wise enough to know I don't know all there is to know about Rorschachs. But this isn't the case with most people. When they've been given a Rorschach, you see, they become experts on Rorschach. And I'm smart enough to know that I have my limitations. Definitely have my limitations. I couldn't even read anything into it. And that's pretty good for a science-fiction writer. Anyway... I should have at least told him there was a spaceship there.

Anyway, looking over the whole subject of testing, one learns that there could be tests which simply measured against a standard necessary for performance, see. You had to be able to do something. Well, where did they come in relationship to that so they could do that? Well, you see, there'd be a role there for testing, definitely a valuable one.

Now, that's fine. But they don't call that psychological testing, usually. There is some sort of testing in psychology that goes in that direction, but usually that's done out on the athletic field, or it's done somewhere else. "Can you drive this car around the block?"

"Yeah."

"Well, if you drive well, you can have the job. Well, get in the car and drive it around the block." He does, he drives it around the block, and he says, "Okay, you've passed." See, now that is a type of testing which is against a standard. A person to be able to drive a car must be able to sit in the car, must be able to operate the throttle, the brake, and wiggle the steering wheel. That's all that is required in the District, anyway.

Here then is testing. When we reduce it into a tremendous additional significance, we are liable to get into more trouble than we care to get into, unless we wish to measure a state of case against a state of case. We take a state of case this week, and a state of case next week. We take these two states of case and find the difference between them.

Well, in view of the fact that nobody has ever been able to make states of case vary like this, it would really amuse you how stable these profiles are. I saw one the other day which would utterly knock your hat off.

This fellow was given a profile – a type of profile which we have had in use in the organization. And he was given this profile before he went in the army. And in the army they used him for a guinea pig or something of the sort, and he had a nervous breakdown and had a lot of psychiatric treatment and so forth. And at the end of this time he had varied about fifteen degrees on "Nervous," and the rest of the profile was all the same.

In other words, here's this tremendous career, all this treatment, this hammer and pound, and the only variation on the test was about fifteen percentile in "Nervous." He was a little more nervous. It took them years to manage that.

Well, that's an existing state. But as long as it's not against anything, as long as all states measured are the states measured, we really don't know anything about this thing called sanity, because nobody ever found anybody that everybody agreed was sane. See, so there is no agreed standard for sanity. So a test never could tell you whether you were batty or walking down the chalk line. No test really could factually tell you this.

There is an oblique way of using a test that way which will amuse you, and that is if the person can't and won't take it, why, you can assume something wrong – either in your offering it to him or his acceptance of it. And that's pretty positive evidence – we don't know for what, but it's pretty good.

But these tests when given are stable. They are very stable. In Scientology, we push the guy upscale – a direction nobody ever went before – and they just move upscale just like that. Bzzzzz. Really, really fabulous. I mean, we change the existing state, and then we can measure how much it's changed by the new state. Interesting that we have now a comparison of states.

And in view of the fact that we have some standard required for a fellow to audit, and knowing this is more arduous than living, why, we can say the fellow has to be in this kind of a condition with this profile to get along fairly well in life, and we can do something about it. But we still don't know anything about testing.

We really don't know anything about testing. We know about a comparison with a comparison. We compare his new profile with the profiles that we know are necessary to auditors in order to audit, and we compare this profile with his old profile. And the only starting ground it has is auditors have often folded up when they weren't fairly high in tone on certain points. And when they are high in tone in these points, they couldn't care less. I mean, they can get chewed up like mad and they're not chewed up. You get the idea? But it's by comparison.

Now, nobody, then, would ever be able to give you a test, get any answers off of it and be able to say that you were peculiarly sane or peculiarly insane. Nobody would be able to give you a test and say this, just bluntly, bang, without comparison to something. It'd have to be "saner than what?" see? "More insane than whom?" You'd have to have some sort of a standard.

Well, in view of the fact most tests are developed from some standard or another, we then have some concept of their accuracy.

I'll give you some idea of how tests are developed as to standard. It's an interesting way to get a standard. We take 259 Safeway store managers and have them grade their stockmen. We take the 259 managers, and we say whether their stockmen are bad or good, happy or unhappy, efficient or inefficient, you see. And then we test the stockmen, and then we assign the value of the Safeway manager, and we've got the leading – huh! – leading efficiency test of the country.

Now, listen, I've known some Safeway managers, and they were good men. Nothing wrong with that, but they weren't ever noted for their human charity. In other words, what have we got, finally, as the standard? We've got the opinions of 259 Safeway managers, not coordinated against each other at all, but each one assigned to his particular stockmen. And this is a standard? That's why I don't know anything about testing. Get the idea?

It also says the scores were weighted. I don't know why they were weighted though. In other words, we test the efficiency of people against the opinion of Safeway managers, and I'm not working in a Safeway so the test couldn't possibly work on me, don't you see.

But we could take any test, no matter how arbitrary, and get a curve on quite a few people, and then process them for a while, and then get a new curve. And we could say then this process on these people gets us this change. You got it? And in view of the fact that nothing else has ever been able to change this test, we must have been changing the test. Not even Russian brainwashing or sergeant brainwashing could alter this profile, thus an auditor must be doing something.

Now, we observe the fellow in life, and we find out that he no longer – well, he's dropped a lot of his nastier habits. He's dropped a lot of his nastier habits. For instance, he no longer sits silent while his mother-in-law is talking. See, that's dropped a nasty habit. He hasn't permitted himself to be arrested for just months, see. I mean the guy's getting in better shape.

For instance, he used to read all the time the Wall Street Journal. Although he didn't buy stocks or anything else, he used to – you know, he had nasty habits. And he'd never read the "Ball Street Journal." (That's another paper entirely.) And now he only reads the "Ball Street Journal," see. In other words, he changed, his conduct in life changed.

It used to be that he let the other fellow keep the job for him, and now he can even work. See, something has happened here. Performance has shifted.

So, we in Scientology come straight back to performance. What is our standard? The standard is "Can an auditor who gets this curve on this test audit?" Our findings have been, yes. So that's a satisfactory curve. He's able to stand up to a lot of clawing. All right. Therefore, his auditing performance is acceptable. To whom? To us! We're not reticent!

Well, if it's acceptable to us, why, it's probably acceptable to preclears because that's what's acceptable to us. We're honest. And it's true enough it does. It is acceptable then to preclears. And the fellow leads a successful life. He even has a successful auditing career. He's able to do things with Scientology and auditing, don't you see. But that's a performance test, isn't it?

And can he hold his own in his environment – domestic environment and so forth? Yes. All right. Therefore, that's a performance, an observable performance, isn't it.

Well, now, the reason I don't know anything about testing at all is because testing itself is an esoteric subject. It is a very deep subject, and the reason I don't know anything about it is its standards are all hidden

Original psychological testing was designed to tell us that people were bad or not quite bad or worse. And it was designed against these lines and so on. I'm sure I'm maligning them. There are many psychologists that have gone out and made a sincere effort to test, actually, four or five living beings before they released a test which was standard sanity for everybody in the United States. I'm sure they've done this. I'm sure they have, before they released it and said, "We have tested a thousand people." I'm sure they did test a couple, maybe the wife.

But the main thing that I'm getting at is that we have found – we're very tolerant – we have found that these tests were useful, very useful, extremely useful. For the first time we found a use for them. And I should be standing here sounding off about psychologists, when they worked, for I don't know how many hundred years they worked. It was since 1879 on physiological psychology, and a lot longer earlier than that on a noncommunist line of approach. And they worked for all of these decades. They worked, they slaved, they amassed figures, papers, they tested people, they thought of things, they filed things, they unfiled things, they published books, they plagiarized each others' stuff; just all these years and years and years and years and years, just so that we could come along and find, for the first time, a use for their activity. And so I should malign them. I shouldn't at all. They undoubtedly have done us a very great service.

Well, they've done us a tremendous service as a matter of fact. Tremendous. I've known just exactly what to throw away here in the last week or so that I've been working on a new test battery for us. Yes, I have. I mean, they've given me all the things you don't do. A tremendous number of things, tremendous assistance.

You look down the thing, and you say, "Well, that couldn't possibly tell you anything. Therefore we won't write that kind of a test. This test over here is highly uninformative. It wouldn't be of any use to anybody. A total verbalization. Might test somebody's verbs, but we're not interested in verbs, so we can push that one aside."

They've done this tremendous amount of work and it has been extremely useful. It's been extremely useful, and I've been able to lay it aside. I haven't been able to learn anything about it particularly – I don't know anything about it yet, as a matter of fact. But I do know that it isn't against a performance, and where it isn't regularly and routinely against a performance, of what use is it?

Now, if somebody had gone out and tested a thousand racing drivers or a hundred race drivers and said, "This test on a thousand (or a hundred) race drivers got this curve" – wow! Boy, would I have riches. Boy, that would be riches. If somebody went out and said, "We routinely took right on down the block in Des Moines, Iowa" – see, I'd be able to grade that, for sure – "right down the block, Des Moines, Iowa. And we tested each housewife in succession down the block in the year 1927, and we got this final result." I could even find some use for that. I'd know that wasn't the curve for all housewives in the country.

If they'd said, "We've taken a great many schoolteachers teaching elementary school, and we've given them this test and we've gotten this result." If these factual things on which we could really count were actually listed, what riches we'd have. But we actually start from scratch in Scientology.

All we can do is take a series of questions – almost random questions – plot them on some kind of a random curve and say, "This is a good Scientologist because we know he can audit" – by experience. See, we know he's all right.

And we take and run it again, and we say, "Well... not this guy." And then we know something else. We know, with processing, we can take this low curve and we can put it up higher and put him into a bracket where he can perform. See, we know these things. That's all we know. We don't know anything about testing.

In the first place, there is no such thing as standard performance. Your behavior today was undoubtedly the best possible behavior that anybody could have behaved in this society at this time. But if you had behaved as you behaved today in the middle of the African jungle, there wouldn't be a one of you alive tonight. Do you see the slight difference? Now, that's an extreme example.

Therefore, who could say what is a survival test? – unless it would be a survival test against an environment. In other words, the test must always be against conditions which exist in an environment. It must always be a test of performance. You follow that?

It's important, because for years people have been telling you that you were dumb or mediumly bright or something, see. They have been telling you that you were bright and dumb or telling you that you could be smarter or something of the sort, and they've never told you against what standard. What's the standard? Brighter than whom? Dumber than which?

I know I had a teacher used to tell me I was awfully dumb all the time. She used to say, "You are the stupidest child I ever had!" She used to say this just routinely. "You're the stupidest child I ever had." She'd just would keep this up. Every day, you know, I'd try to read something or do something – "You're the stupidest child I ever had."

Finally found out what was wrong with her. I went into consultation with a couple of other kids and I says, "What is the matter with the old babe?" you know. "What's the matter with her?"

And they said, "You know, there's times when you're diplomatic."

And I said, "What – what do you mean diplomatic?"

"You take her an apple."

So I said, "Hey, what do you know!" You know, I was a kid out on the Western range most of the time, and I learned fast, you know, quick. And so next time I rode by a neighbor's of ours orchard , why, I took her a saddlebag full of apples. Smartest child she had. Always afterwards the smartest child she had.

So I figured out the standard of performance there was a bag of apples. So I know when I'm stupider than a bag of apples and smarter than a bag of apples. I hope you've had the similar good fortune to know what you're stupider than and smarter than.

They give you university examinations, give you high-school examinations and they give you a grade. The grade says "A," but they never say "a" what? They say "B," but they never tell you what to be. They say "C," and send you out of the place stone blind on any subject you've been studying. Now, that's an awful pun, a bad series of puns, but bad in comparison to whose?

You just remember that, will you, on tests. It is true that today we have tailored up a test which tells us that somebody will cause us trouble. In other words, his performance in our hands will be deplorable. Maybe the guy's a good marksman. Maybe he'd be excellent as a shrimp fisherman, down in Mexico shooting Mexicans. The guy might be... might be – you know, he might be anything, you know. But according to our demands on his performance, such as to sit still and answer pleasantly, he's a bad character, don't you see.

And when he gets to be a good character, we know that he's capable of certain performances. We know he's capable of certain persistences. We know that his ability to handle people, his ability to live, his ability to do, communicate in general, will be very good.

But again (and I give you this very factually), from our viewpoint – from our viewpoint. He will be able to talk to people; he will be able to make people better; he will be able to have the world happy that he's around. But that's only our narrow-minded viewpoint. He'll be of some value in any community, since he will produce. He will be missed when he's gone. But remember, that is only our viewpoint.

And, please observe this, it very well may be true that it is a terribly incorrect viewpoint. Maybe it's completely too narrow; maybe it's a worthless viewpoint entirely, you see. Maybe the actuality is that a fellow who is in a rage all the time, who stamps his feet, who makes everybody miserable, that kicks dogs when they've been hit by cars and spanks kids who have just sat on hot stoves – maybe these people are the salt of the earth. But it just happens they're not, from our viewpoint. But it's our idiotically narrow-minded viewpoint that objects to this. You understand that? I mean, it may not be true that these are bad people. They're bad from our viewpoint.

It may require people like this to aberrate people so that we can process them. You see, there's always this sort of thing to think of. There's always something to think about like that.

It may be that standards of performance vary. Now, you take Tarzan's standard of performance. I was a great student of Tarzan's. I used to read Edgar Rice Burroughs quite regularly when I could... The librarian ordinarily wouldn't let me have books. I kept them too long, and so forth, and read them too arduously: read right straight back through their covers and things like that, and very bad habits. And I'd never have money enough to pay the fines of the books I already had kept out too long and which I'd forgotten to return or hadn't finished yet or something of the sort. We were always having a feud. Fortunately, there was a small window at the back of the library, so I checked my own books in and out. Anyway...

Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories of Tarzan were very encouraging to the youth of America in that day. They were very, very encouraging. They were a fine, upstanding example of a man acting like an ape. And I very often used to feel constrained by these books from highly civilized conduct and that sort of thing. But I was tremendously intrigued by this since that was a standard of performance to all young America. See?

If you acted like Tarzan, boy, you were in. Man, who wouldn't be willing to swing from tree to tree. I done broke my neck more than once. The dull crash, some old frayed rope strung up one way or the other, tarzaning from tree to tree, you know. They never tell you that the arc circumscribed by a rope is the length of the rope.

But this was still a standard of performance. Now, not modernly, but just yesterday, I told the two chaps that invented Superman... I knew them rather well up in New York, and they were looking for a good idea. And I told them that I thought they were overdoing it a bit. Seems like I was right: they were overdoing it from my viewpoint. They got more popular than anything I was writing. Well anyhow, these boys and Superman, you know.

Now, actually your wearing two identities and being schizophrenic, from the standpoint of a psychiatrist, would be extremely questionable – extremely questionable. I mean, supposing you met somebody that jumped in behind doors and peeled off all of his clothes in a public hall and threw on some dyed underwear and then leaped out of windows, never used doors. From a psychiatric viewpoint that standard of performance is nuts.

But from young America of a decade ago that was quite acceptable conduct. Someday you'll have a preclear. These young men are still growing up, I call to your attention; you do not yet have them as preclears. And one of these days you will find that you have a preclear whose only foible is stepping behind doors... and running around in dyed underwear. The only difference is when you try to cure him of this, he probably will be able to fly.

Well, although I don't know anything at all about testing, I can tell you that, finally, standards of performance have to some degree unwound. There's hardly one of us who hasn't asked himself the question, "Isn't it better to be mean?" Almost every one of us has had the feeling that we were a bit soft. We didn't like flying into the teeth of some human being and making him feel bad or making her feel bad. We've told ourselves, "We ought to be tougher. We ought to put up a better front; we ought to be... You know, know when to snarl, know when to show the sharpened tooth." And I'm sure that we have walked away occasionally after we've loaned somebody five dollars or something of the sort and said, "When am I going to learn to be tough? When am I going to learn to be tough? When am I going to learn to be hardboiled and just stand right up to that little kid and say 'No!' When am I going to learn this?"

And the motto behind this is "Isn't it better to be mean occasionally? It's only from being kind and a sucker" – synonym: being kind, being a sucker – "being an easy mark, so on. When am I going to stop being all of these bad, soft things and be a hard, forthright, capable-of-saying-no person? When am I going to be able to do that? Isn't it better to be mean? I would be a much better manager. I would be a much better person if I knew when to come down with a slight slam. If I could just know, occasionally, when I should be mean, and if I just was willing to be mean, wouldn't that be right. Isn't it true that I should be more mean than I am? Isn't it true that I should be harder, more forthright, much more positive. I should be able to just take the people out there and just sweep them aside? And isn't there some rightness in being tough? Isn't there?"

And I used to ask myself this question. I used to ask myself this question. Everybody does. And I used to ask myself, "Isn't there a time when I will finally get rough enough, mean enough, ornery enough, that people will flinch?" You know. "Something wrong with me that I don't want to be mean. Something wrong with me."

And I used to think about this occasionally, and as the years went along I could spot times when I should've been tougher – you know, I knew it; sure of it – and very recently, very recently, ran a series of processes which were highly informative. Very informative. That person that's willing to confront other things doesn't ever have to say no, he doesn't ever have to be mean, he doesn't ever have to be tough at all. As a matter of fact, it's a silly thing to do; it's a silly thing to be. It is perfectly all right to be nice to people. It isn't a weakness at all; nothing weak about being nice. And a matter of fact, if you aren't, you're in the soup.

You could say that the only times for which you are suffering are those times when you weren't nice enough, when you weren't kind enough and when you weren't unmean enough, and those are the only times from which you're really suffering.

It is not true that being mean gets anybody ahead anyplace. That's really factual, really factual. Because being mean is going out of ARC with. And a careful analysis of games conditions and the processing of preclears demonstrates that if you were to run the process "Go out of communication with, go out of communication with, go out of communication with, go out of communication with," he goes to pieces. Fascinating little test, isn't it.

"I should be mean. I should say no. I should say I don't want to communicate with you. I should say I don't want to have anything more to do with you. I should be able to say, 'You do so-and-so regardless of the consequences.'" Willingness to mess somebody else up, you know, being hard about the whole thing.

Well, if you run it on a preclear, you will just run out a few of his incidents of his doing that, but it's a cut communication the whole way.

When you deny your fellow man, the only thing which you can deny is to deny him communication. I don't care how solid the particle is or how light and airy the particle is. You say "no"; you say "be mean," you say "be very positive," do this and do that; the truth of the matter is that you are denying him communication, one way or the other – being tough.

The only thing you should ever be tough about is insist that the other fellow ought to stand on his own feet, too. And the only way you will ever communicate that to him is to communicate it to him in a very nice way. Then he's liable to receive it.

Being mean is simply going out of communication with things. And that's always – always will be and always has been – very aberrative.

So I've got the question answered and have a standard for conduct at least from a standpoint of aberration. The individual who is kind, who is decent and who does communicate and who is nice and who isn't averse to conversation and saying this and doing that, who is tolerant, and so on, we find gets along beautifully. We find the things that he runs into in life run out. They don't pile up on him and swamp him.

But the fellow who's mean and who's ornery and who's cutting comms all the way along the line, and so on, we find he's in the soup.

Now, I don't know anything about testing, but all testing must be conducted against a hidden ideal or a known ideal. But if it's hidden, somebody must know it. Somebody would have to know this ideal.

You could test a fellow against a hidden ideal where you knew the answers to the test and he didn't, but you had better know the answers to the test.

Therefore, I can tell you tonight that a test which is measured on the basis of human kindness as a high and human meanness as a low is a standard of human optimum performance. That sounds very silly, and that's a very obvious sort of a thing to discover, but nevertheless it's a discovery.

I don't know anything about testing, but now I think I know how to make one. I think I know how a decent fellow would grade and how a bad one would grade because I know the answer at last to whether I should have been mean all those times or whether I should have been more kind. And I know I should have been more kind.

Thank you.