How are you?

Audience: Fine. Fine.

Okay. There were several things I could talk about and had more or less thought of talking about tonight. And I think I’ll just compromise and talk about all of them. [laughter] That’s very, very unconsecutive, you know, and so forth to lecture on a number of subjects simultaneously, so to speak, but I do that best.

We had scheduled to run tonight - we had scheduled the ads in the paper for this lecture to say, “Curing the Alcoholic? But it would have stacked the place full and I thought, “Oh, ho-hum. It’s so much more work, you see, to talk to two or three hundred people than a hundred.” [laughter] And so I said, “Well, we won’t do it.”

Actually, the main reason we didn’t do that is because the policy of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists is making the able more able. We are not too fixedly interested in a social problem like the alcoholic, even though we could solve it.

Now, when I say that we could solve it, I am not talking lightly. That is*Oral Roberts over here probably would say, well, he could solve all the alcoholism that ever existed at any time — probably could cure everybody of alcoholism clear back to 1000 B.C. with the greatest of ease, simply by being the man he is. But we're not quite that good. We are conservative.

Alcoholism became a very, very prominent problem here during last week in Phoenix with the very regretted death of Ira Hayes, who - part of the group who planted the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi-was scheduled for a better fate. The man drank a great deal and in this drinking, neglected to keep himself warm and died of exposure. That was just last week. And the state legislature, now in session, is sponsoring legislation of one kind and another to give aid and assistance to alcoholics. If Ira Hayes has made it possible for the state actively to rake interest in alcoholism, then again, he didn't die in vain, as did none of those young men who died on Iwo Jima.

But the main thing about alcoholism and legislation is that we have already learned as a nation, with Lord knows what ardure just a few decades ago, that you cannot legislate alcoholism out of existence. We learned that. And we got instead of alcoholism-pcrhaps we did lower the incidence of aJcoholism and perhaps not - but we certainly did bring into existence the Al Capones and other peoples who made our lives much more interesting during the late twenties until FDR came along and won an election by repealing the works.

Alcoholism cannot be legislated out of existence. And the Arizona State Legislature at this moment is contemplating legislation to the effect that it is going to appoint a committee on alcoholism. And this is a very good move, there is nothing wrong with appointing a committee. But the purpose is to get something done about aJcoholism and that does not necessarily entail the appointment of a committee.

The fact of the matter is that the program to help or release or straighten up all the alcoholics in Arizona is not going to be accomplished by the appointment of a committee, because you would have to have, pan and parcel of that committee, the technology necessary to do something about the alcoholic. I think that's a rather obvious thing, isn't it? We could appoint thousands of men on a committee, but if they couldn't do anything about alcoholism, then we might as well have stayed home and not come down and written bills. That's the more interesting fact.

It was against alcoholism that the original Volstead Act was leveled and alcoholism never had a better time than during Prohibition. There were more alcoholics and more serious results by reason of ovcrindulgence in spirits than in any time in the nations history.

So, it was all right to pass a law. But not to have the technologies necessary to take care of alcoholism along with that law, made the law a very laughable thing. Therefore a law passed today to appoint a committee to regulate alcoholism is again an interesting attempt, such as the Volstead Act.

The problem of alcoholism was a problem even to us in the HDRF and HASl as shore time ago as 1952 and was a definite problem. The problems of the human mind have been under study in Dianetics and Scientology with the definite goal of doing something about them (may I please point out that strange and peculiar difference from past researches), although all due respect, I honor my fellow co-workers, if I had any.

The point is that we have been studying for years now toward the direct goal of actively doing something about various social ills and raising the level of ability of the community. And because we have been going directly in the direction of doing something, we have accomplished something on that line. It is very, very hard for an individual or a group to actively pursue a study with that exact goal in mind, without achieving some result because of that study.

Now, why do I stress this point? That’s because nineteenth-century psychology had no such goal and that's the bitter, horrible truth of the matter.

I have time after time tried to communicate with psychologists along this line of research. It's difficult to do because these men are not educated in scientific methodology or in science. But we’ve tried to communicate with them, we've tried to work with them and so on and they keep telling us nothing can be done.

Then, may I ask you what are they doing with these millions and millions of dollars which are expended in psychological research if they continue to insist that nothing can be done about these social problems? And if I speak a little vehemently about it, it s because it is with me a bitter point.

A small group here in the United States and in England have been carrying forward the financing of research and investigation into social problems now for about four years.

We have been entirely self-supported and we have made very, very definite gains. We have made these gains because we intended to make them and because we would not settle for less than an advance and we had no slightest qualms about adventuring into the field of the unknown and making that advance. But we never told anybody, “Nothing can be done about it." Never told a single soul anyplace. We said instead, “We're doing alive can about it?

And maybe our sights are too high and maybe we are too optimistic. But, one, we are not trying to make millions of dollars; two, we are not trying to secure a nice, sinecure post amongst some ivory towers. All we are trying to do is go along and get something done in the field of the humanities so Man can live more happily with Man. And that’s all we’re trying to do.

And somehow or another we have financed it Somehow or another we've carried forward these investigations and we've used, in these investigations, something that was never employed before in the field of the human mind - and that was the techniques of atomic and molecular phenomena which you know as nuclear physics.

And because this know-how had become available and because one was not afraid co use this know-how and because one was not afraid to go ahead and actually set a goal and try to meet it, we have made advances. And these advances are today to be found in many parts of the community.

The knowledge which we have accumulated has a habit of going away - no title on it, no tag on it, suddenly winding up somewhere in some magazine article. The Reader s Digest is the journal of rhe American Medical Association, I think, and you sometimes-you sometimes read them in the Readerr Digest and so forth.

Big arguments have ensued about prenatal engrams. We discovered prenatal engrams here a few years ago. We don’t pay any attention to them anymore — that’s just something-it's bric-a-brac phenomena. It's quite interesting and today we have big discussions in several magazines about prenatal influences and so forth. We weren’t talking about prenatal influence. We said there were energy pictures a person made while he was yet unborn. And it was an interesting thing, an interesting gimmick Incredible. Incredible! But they had been found, so we said they'd been found.

And now, just the other day, I received one of the more interesting pieces of literature: a long and learned article on the subject has come back to us from the East on the subject of the influence of the conduct and diet of the mother upon the child and particularly upon the mental qualities and abilities of the child. And a great study has been made of this, according to this article.

Yes, indeed, a great study has been made of this. Years have been invested in studying the human mind and these energy pictures and patterns. So, we are making some progress. What do we care whether there's a title on this or not? Somebody is alerting and finding out a little bit more about Man. That's one of our goals.

Now, if we were to sit down and try co monopolize every piece of information which we ever collected and if we were to take this information and carefully say, "Now. look. This piece of information is absolutely sacred and it's not to be distributed to anybody and it’s not to be given to anybody and only those people who have a pink cross on the right shoulder will be able to read this information," we would go into a sort of a mysterious sort of a cult and that would be the end of that piece of information.

That’s normally what happens to research information - it isn’t circulated. But part of our goals is a distribution of this information, we do not care how or along what channels. And what information are we distributing? Simply research and investigation which has been discovered about human mind and behavior.

This was the original goal of psychology by Professor Wundt. I think in Germany in about 1867, something like that, he set this up: a scientific method of studying the human mind. And that was the basis and beginning of psychology. They went away from it. They have not done it.

But the point is, because scientific methodology today in the physical sciences is metbodology - believe me, it hasn't anything to do with. "Let’s turn a couple of rats loose and see whether or not they jump the electric circuit." It has to do with looking at what you’re studying, which is a human being. And that is what we have been doing and we have been studying human beings.

Now, the group of Dianetics and the group of Scientology are actually more or less the same group. And these people have been working out amongst the community, many of them without much credit, a great many of them working without pay. And they have been doing what good they could do, throughout the community, with what they knew.

And we discover here that we have accumulated more technology than we can readily distribute. It takes quite a little while to make what we call an auditor - a Scientologist, Dianeticist, a person who can use these processes easily and well, who understands these things well.

Why does it take quite a time? Well, this material has been thirty - oh, it's less than that - about twenty-two years in accumulation. And you have to take a good look at all the material and then having looked at it. you know something about it So it becomes rather difficult suddenly to say, "Well. Dianetics, this is so-and-so and that's that and you're now an auditor and you can go ahead and do something about it." So, we do have actually a profession growing up of people who know this material and who can use it easily.

The material, oddly enough, works best in the hands of people who know it. That’s an oddity. One might as well say, "Babies are born best when delivered by people who know how to get babies born.”

In spite of the fact that we have this specialization, we have this as well right along with it is, we’re not at all chary about putting out a piece of information. So it gets abused, so somebody takes this piece of information and uses it wrongly - I'd rather he would use it that way than not know anything about humanity.

And so this group, which we are. has gone forward, doing what we could do in the communities in which we exist. And those communities now stem from Phoenix, but they are in the five continents of Earth - are now well represented in Dianetics and Scientology. We do what we can do in our own communities. We spread what information we can spread around and the funny part of it is, that we can solve today a lot of social problems which were a mystery just four years ago - worse than that, which were a mystery two years ago. So we have been making progress and we are very interested and alert in that progtess.

Actually, we're making tremendous progress right in our own group. Somebody was sitting behind the business office about six, eight months ago - I don't know, longer wasn't that - about a year. And he said, "You know," he said, "people in Dianetics and Scientology are the worst-dressed, worst-kept people I ever saw in my life."

Same individual, forgot completely that he had said anything like this, was sitting in the same place the other day and said, "You know, it's a wonderful thing what bright, shiny, clean people Dianeticists and Scientologists are!" [laughter]

Now, we’re not quite sure who changed, but we do have the feeling there’s probably a little bit of each has occurred. Because as we understand more, we become more, of course.

The last thing in the world we would want to do would be to suppress or throw behind any actual science, any actual body of knowledge which made life better for Man. We would not do this. In return, we expect not to be suppressed.

We expect that what we learn should be freely available to Man. The only thing which prevents us from making it more freely available is simply the matter of finance and printing presses, that’s all. We would make it much more generally available. We would put books on the bookstand for the little kids to read in school if we had a printing press that would simply run those books. Not to make any pennies off of the schoolkid. but just so maybe he could handle Mama a little better or handle Papa a little better.

And we haven’t any starry-eyed goal that one day-опе day Earth is going to be a complete golden age from coast to coast, pole to pole, line to line, that everything is going to be sweetness and light throughout Earth. Because there’s only one way that could happen, knowing the nature of Man, and that would be for everybody to be dead. And this - this is not desirable.

I had an argument recently with a person who is working for the Atomic Energy Commission. He told me this was desirable. And I said it wasn’t desirable and we were out of communication because we just couldn’t agree on this.

But the goal of the physicist in one direction was to-oh. I’ll just tell you. There’s a cartoon over at California Institute of Technology, which is the cutest cartoon. Sweet. It shows exactly the sublime sentiments and so forth which are felt in some of the halls of learning on some of these subjects. And here is a cartoon of this scientist and he has come up to the front of a class and he is saying, "Gentlemen, at last science has achieved its greatest goal. In this capsule I have an explosive sufficient to blow up the universe." [laughter]

When I read about this newer and better bomb, I think, "Progress, we have inverted." When Man is in very, very good shape, he is willing to let other men live. When he's only mediumly in good shape, why, he's willing to kill everybody off.

And here we have in the field of science, today, a great many advances which are real and tremendous advances. And it would be very strange if a study of humanity engaged upon straight out of the sciences which are advancing-not stagnant sciences, but sciences which are advancing, which are developing methodology, mathematics and so forth - if a greater study of humanity itself did not evolve, I would feel, then, chat there was no hope for Man at all. If in the vicinity of all he now knows about space and energy, all he now knows concerning the various aspects of mathematics, if he didn't at the same time come into an understanding of himself which was better than he had had, why, there would be no hope for him at all. And the happy part of it is, he has come into a better understanding of that. He has, right with Dianetics and Scientology.

You see, Dianetics and Scientology aren't anything strange or peculiar which just arrived from Mars. They were developed by Earthmen out of processes and technologies which are known here on Earth. But they come out of a different field than that which previously furnished information about Man. They actually do not come out of the field of philosophy or out of the field of what they used to call the humanities. They come very precisely and direcdy from the field of the exact sciences. And everything which we know in Dianetics and Scientology is subjected to that same regimen which somebody would use on some new kind of fuel, you know?

You can compromise a great deal with philosophy. A great many old men can sit around and talk about it for a long time.

But if you have a lump of fuel, it either bums properly or it doesn't burn properly, you see? There's no argument with this. You either have something that works there in that lump of fuel or something that you simply discard and get another lump, better lump of fuel. And the way we're working in Dianetics and Scientology is a little bit hard to understand from the standpoint of philosophy.

People try to philosophize about this and so forth and they cry to do other things with it, but the oddity is that it either works or it doesn't work, there's no other argument.

Now, we could either today take a person who is incapable of restraining himself from drinking himself to death and we could take that person and we either make him so he’s capable of social drinking or leaving it alone, or we don’t. And that’s all, you see? We’re not even concerned with the morals or mores or morality of alcoholism, we're merely concerned with one alcoholic.

Now, with what we know in Dianetics and Scientology, can we face him this way into better conditions of existence? Or if we work on him, as he quite often does I am sorry to say, in the field of psychoanalysis, do we send him that way and make him worse or does he simply remain as he is?

And is it the pcrsonality-is it the personality of the person who is auditing him, who is treating him, who is practicing on him? Does this have any influence on it? It has a little bit, not very much today.

A person simply is competent. Some auditors are more imaginative, much more personable than others and they of course get better results. But we just take an auditor, a Scientologist, Diancticist and we show him to this alcoholic and we say, “All right Now, Process 82QST That’s the one you're going to run. All right."

Now, does it make him well or does it kill him? And all right, we simply watch the auditing in progress and then we take the result. But the funny part of it is, we will accept the result, we won’t color it. We may be dissatisfied and say, "Look, we've got to do something better for the alcoholic. We've got to do something much better for him, because 82QST, it just, pshew, cross that one off. Throw that away."

Now, we've got to do something better for him because the person is right there where he was before and every time he sees a bottle he goes, "ZMb-zuz-zzzb." So therefore it didn't work.

All right. So let’s dream up 96285-ST. Take the same auditor, same alcoholic. Okay. Did it work? Oh, fellow can drink now, without compulsively drinking. He can leave it alone and he even starts to support the wife that he thought he had lost about fifteen years ago. All right. That's fine.

So we put that down and we say, "That’s all." Okay. Now, let’s not get happy about this. Let’s not get overenthusiastic, Let’s find another alcoholic and another auditor, and give them - "You see that? Okay, sic ’em!" [laughter]

And now this alcoholic, you see, this alcoholic gets better. "Oh," we say, "All right. Let’s find another alcoholic, another auditor-9626..." Okay. He gets better.

And we say, "Now we’re getting someplace." All right. Another alcoholic, another auditor and the alcoholic... We say, "Well, the devil with that. Cross that one off and dream up something better."

Well, we’re at a state today where we can say, with considerable confidence, that 80 or 90 percent of the confirmed alcoholics that we have lying around today in the better and worse bars could be turned into social drinking. Now, we wouldn’t say such a thing if we couldn’t do it.

It’s a very silly thing, you know. A fellow goes out and he says, “You see that boulder? See that big boulder?" Maybe we caK this boulder “alcoholism," see. He says, "See that boulder? I could pick that boulder up, throw it over my shoulder and walk away with it!"

And you would say, "Okay, do it!"

He didn’t expect that. He'd be a fool. He would immediately have a tendency to drop in your estimation. He's somebody who isn't able to do what he says he can do. And so it’s a very foolish thing to say you can do something when you can’t do it.

Well, Dianetics could today-with Man being as he is, in his political scene and the difficulties of gening an alcoholic to sit quietly for any length of time and so forth-you could probably take care of 65, 70 percent of the alcoholics that there are in the United Stares today, much less Arizona, given a little appropriation on the line, just to fix it so the auditor who was doing the work didn’t die entirely, so he merely became kind of thin, [laughter]

And you could probably do something like this. Just a tremendous bang-up job. Just a-oh, a tremendous job. You know, all polished, and win about 65 percent of the alcoholics. And you’d have about 65 percent of these people back in, earning money, taking eaxe of their families and so forth at about two hundred dollars an alcoholic. That's a curious thing, about two hundred dollars an alcoholic. You'd have to do that on an individual basis.

All right. We drop below this line now. We drop below this line of two hundred dollars, what else could we do? Well, we could probably make them less difficult to live with for maybe fifteen or twenty dollars apiece by treating them in groups. But it wouldn't be anywhere near as effective, we'd maybe only get 45, 50 percent of them, something like that. Your percentage would quite markedly fall, but we'd still be able to do something like that.

So there is today a technology by which this social problem can be handled.

Well. I'm not talking now, saying that, "Well, we ought to immediately take a couple of Scientologists and go to work on alcoholism and so forth and ought to dedicate our lives co that." I'm just celling you it is there. We’d be very happy to train anybody that walked in, how he could do this and square this around.

But there are many other social problems which I'm afraid are far more important than alcoholism. There are many other social problems.

There is the social problem today of the security of the individual An individuals security is a much more important thing to the country as a whole than this handful of alcoholics.

You see, here’s a small group of people who are bad off and it would be a very good thing to remedy this and so forth. But if we paid no attention whatsoever to the bulk of the population of the country - if we paid them no attention whatsoever, why. and we only treated people like alcoholics and we only went around handling people who were - oh, well, let’s take another class: people who saw bugs on the wall or people who thought they were being poisoned, something like this, one small group. And we just concentrated on that small group and we left the rest of Man completely alone, you see that we would make no advance.

Why would we make no advance? Well, it's because these small groups are not the groups that are advancing Mankind toward a higher level of survival. The alcoholic - if you restored ail the alcoholics in the country, you'd probably only create a little bit of unemployment. You see that?

And if you just took a few of these small groups and you - of various types of illnesses and we simply made those people good, why, maybe if we took all these groups, then we really would create unemployment. No. What about this problem? If you possess, today, technology by which to raise the capability of the individual man and make his security better, the worst thing in the world you could do would be to specialize completely and utterly upon one minor disease or foible. Because you’d actually be turning your back on the thing that keeps the country running.

Who’s that? That’s the working stiff. The guy who goes to work every morning, you know? It’s all very well for the alcoholic to be sitting over there in the sanitarium or lying dead drunk in the gutter and so fbrth - he’ll be in the sanitarium and be dead drunk in the gutter for an awful long time without altering the economic status of the United States one iota!

No, it’s that fellow who is sitting at the desk, that fellow who is down there with a pipe wrench, fixing up those pipes. It’s the fellow who is running that - bucking that riveting hammer on the bridges. That is the guy who is going to make this country better, if anybody is. And that is the able person.

Well how able is he? Well, you talk about an elastic word-able. Give you some idea of how clastic it’d be. You know what the requisite for active service in the United States Army was in 1870? They had officers and men on duty who only had one arm, who were dying of tuberculosis, who only had one leg. These men were perfectly capable - one eye. These people were perfectly capable in the eyes of the US Army.

US Army finally decided that these people were a liability to the movement of troops. And so, as the years went by, we began to get regulation as to how healthy you had to be to get shot at. [laughter] The army found out it was costly. Now, you take a captain, he only had one eye and he’s got tuberculosis and you tell his company to move up and so forth. And he feels tired at that time or he’s a bit out of communication and he doesn't move. And the battle has a tendency to go awry.

So the US Army, however, in 1870. considered a complete cripple, you would say, to be a perfectly able soldier. He’s an able-bodied soldier.

And today, well it kind of slumped again. But they, today, now that the war is over, why, they have an entirely different view.

During the war, by the way, during the war you’d come in from combat service during the early years of the last war, come in from combat service and they’d say, “Name, age, serial number - breathing. Fit for combat!" [laughter] Every time.

And 1944, they had awful lot of people in the armed services and they didn't have quite the personnel problems that they had before. So they'd come up and, "Blemish on his left check. No, hospitalize him." Differences of ability.

Well now, I wonder, today, is it possible-is it possible that we might have an idea that people were able when they weren’t?

Now, let's look at that The US Army can change that much. How about the fellow who's working today. How about this fellow who is holding down the desk and twisting the pipe wrench and bucking the riveter? Is this man really able? I’d say no. Mostly because his accident level is too high. The number of accidents on a construction job such as Grand Coulee Dam finally even came to the attention of the government. And anything that can attract its attention, you know, must be pretty high!

The people who work at those jobs, normally, in this society at this time, they quit at night and, boy, they're tired. And they drag themselves out in the morning one way or the other and throw a greasy doughnut and a cup of coffee into their stomachs and they're back bucking the riveting hammer and so forth and they’re tired. They're not alert as they might be.

And one day, why, somebody is working the crane or turning the valve or shooting letters around in the wrong direction and suddenly they’re taken completely by surprise. They're unmanned by something. Their level of alertness is so low that they do not respond to an emergency with sufficient speed to counteract it. And that is the anatomy of an accident. An accident is something which occurs amongst men who are insufficiently alert io have predicted it. And that is an accident.

If you will look back at any time that you yourself have had a - oh, car accident or you’ve hurt yourself with a hammer and so forth, you really examined the conditions around there, you'd find out, well, you were - you were cither excited or you were in a hurry or you were tired or you didn't look sufficiently in your environment. And even though the other fellow was really in the wrong and so forth, why, if you'd just been a little bit more, as they say, on the ball, why, nothing would have happened. You would have stopped that much quicker, you would have altered the situation.

Well, how able then, should an able man be? Well, it happens to be almost an infinity of ability. I mean, you can keep on moving this right on up the line. How able can a fellow get?

Well, let’s look how unable he can get. Let’s look at this alcoholic. Why is he an alcoholic? He’s an alcoholic mainly because he has no confidence of any kind in himself or his future. The only organization in the country which heretofore has done anything for this alcoholic has been a very fine organization. Alcoholics Anonymous. And they have been the single potent factor. If the legislature over here were going to pass a bill authorizing and subsidizing Alcoholics Anonymous in the State of California to take full charge of alcoholism, believe me. I would tell you tonight-and tell anybody I had any influence with at all-for heaven’s sakes, vote for that bill! Because they are the people who do have a good grip on this situation.

All right. Alcoholics Anonymous has learned that the alcoholic has to be keyed down to a point where he doesn’t have to look further than about twenty-four hours ahead. Just get him down to a point where he doesn't have to look at that future and then let’s find some kind of job he really can do. No matter how it’s - very light it is. Some kind of a job. Because these two factors combine.

This man has no security about the future. He feels that the future at any moment can eave in on him and, therefore, he’s so afraid of it that he tries to back off it and drug himself with alcohol. And the other one is, he can’t work, anyhow. There’s his two most basic difficulties. There are many other difficulties. There’s the mechanical thing, that he’s always trying to get a fuM glass in front of him.

He knew he felt all right, by the way, before he emptied that glass. And he feels that if he can just get a full glass in front of him again, he’ll be all right. And so here he goes, see?

That’s why he keeps drinking obsessively-to get that full glass. This actually is the truth. You can. in Dianetics and Scientology, you can process a man in the direction of getting a full glass in front of him until he can finally achieve it in mock-up or energy image pictures and he’ll be almost cured of alcoholism.

Anyway, we have on our scale here of abilities, we have this fellow who has no real security in the future. He knows if he did get a job, he'd just get fired. He knows if he inherited a million dollars, why, it’d all be taken away from him before nightfall. He knows that any good luck which meets him is going to turn into bad luck before it goes any distance.

He knows that he just hasn't got any future. He knows that this girl who says that she is true to him, she is faithful to him, she does want to take care of him and so forth, he knows that she's double-timing him and is no good and two months ahead in the future will leave him. So therefore he doesn’t even dare accept her advances in any way.

This fellow is in this kind of state of mind, you see. He just can’t live, because if he did live, then something horrible would happen. So he makes something horrible happen all the time by keeping drunk. And this is the way you escape it - or do you? All right.

Now, his ability is very poor. Back of him and on a lower level, you have the insane. The insane is so incapable of facing life that they are nondircctional about anything they do. They not only can’t work, they have no concept of work, and present time is terror. It's just terror. And it’s not now the future, you see, that's bad - it's right now. Anything they fear in the future is happening right this moment. Well, there’s that persons ability. Well, that person's ability has no security, you see, no ability to work at all.

Here’s the alcoholic. He has very, very little tiny of amount of security. He knows that if he sat down alongside of a table, probably - probably, but not entirely, that the table and chair would remain there for a short time. Security.

And we come up from there and we take the fellow who is doing light work, who's doing real light work and is kind of sad about it. you know. And he's not making very much money and has lots of - oh, he has neuralgia and psychosomatic problems and other things like this.

And we come on up now to what we would consider today to be the normal workman. He works all day. By the time the middle of the afternoon comes, he’s dog-tired. At that moment, he has gotten into (he same condition — as far as his security is concerned — as the alcoholic AU the time he's tired he hasn’t any real feeling about his security. He’s just worn out. His energy level is far too low for him to be optimistic or hopeful or something of the sort.

And he leaves the job-say he’s been bucking rivets all day. Well, he was doing all right, right up to about 3:30 and then, you know, he’d keep missing them. And he’d finally, after he almost drops the bucket on his helper and so forth, why. he finally goes home. And now he's all set, you see. This individual is all set. now, he’s done his day's work. And he just wants to be quiet. He wants to have a little something to cat, you know, and he d like to be kind of quiet.

Of course, he’s walked back into an American home. [laughter] Now, of course, he doesn't get a chance to be quiet. So after he’s fought with the kids and done this and done that and looked at the TV for a sort of an hypnotized length of time and so on, and he finally goes to bed. And generally it’s a link bit late and he has to gee up at five o'clock anyhow and five o’clock comes. He's not had six hours sleep and there he is back on the job, but he still feds all right. He's doing okay. He's bucking these rivets and he's doing just fine right up to about 3:20. And he starts missing the rivets and so forth and he feds bad the rest of the day. That’s not able.

What contest do you think the US Government has in trying to find people to fly these jet planes today? That's a good index of ability. You know, a few years ago you could take almost any kid and you’ll find his reaction time-I say a few years ago, maybe a quarter of a century ago - almost any kid’s reaction time was good enough to have handled two jet planes at once. His reaction time isn’t that good today. I don’t know any particular reason for this. There isn’t any particular reason for this, except the reaction time of youth is simply very bad, if you only consider this one factor-juvenile ddinqucncy.

They are involved in too many accidents today. Well, now, no kid is willingly going out and getting into an accident. He's liable to steer close to an accident, but he ought to be fast enough on his reaction time so that after he got close to it and saw how it was, he could pull out of it.

But they don’t do that. They go ahead today and have the accidents. Curious. The reaction time factor of the country is dropping, just on this basis alone. The recruiting sergeant of the army, in spite of the fact that he's not being very critical, has a little bit of a rough time today to find able-bodied young men.

Well, of course, what standard is he working from? He’s working simply from the standard the fellow ought to be sound in wind and limb, and be able to go through the hours of drill and hikes and so on necessary co make what they call a soldier. And he knows that below a certain level, this fellow is going to drop. And so he doesn’t want people that are going to drop. He'd rather have his army on its feet. And so, what is, however, his finding in this? Well, actually it's better today than it was in 1938, but it's worse today than it was in 1946. What was the matter in 1938? Well, that's because the families of America had been on relief.

Do you remember the Depression? Does anybody remember the Depression - think that far back? You'll remember that the government had people on a sort of a relief-type of ration, which was very interesting. And it was about as much as the government's life was worth trying co find an army in 1941, *42, simply because the young men who had grown up, had been raised during that Depression, were in rrry. eery bad health. Very bad health.

They could not pass an army physical examination. And so the army was settling continually for a lot less than what they wanted. And we entered the war in that unhappy state of existence, which is directly traceable to the insecurity, to the inability to work, to the inability to carry on a decent life, which was the lot of the bulk of American workmen between the years of 1930 and 1935.

That nice span in there. That was the “chew the fingernails" span. One didn't know when he left his job, whether or not the factory would still be open tomorrow when he came back. It was an interesting period. Very. And that period reflected directly in the general ability of the populace as a whole, as nicely scored up by the US Army in trying to recruit somebody to fight an actual war.

This “play-soldier” stuff that they go into in peacetime-they've got to fill so many blank files and so forth, they get very choosy about those. But in wartime they've got to fill them. And believe me, in many respects, they had to fill them.

They sent fellows - they... I don't know whether you were there or not, maybe you were, but you would walk up to somebody in a combat zone and he'd be all shot up and out on his feet and so forth. And you’d say. “Ah! One of the boys that's being replaced!" No, you were talking to the top sergeant of the unit that had been assigned to stay there! He was in better shape than the rest of it. It was a pitiful thing.

Well, when we get down to the problem of ability, then we had this big variable. And how able people can get will, to the end of lime, probably remain a question. But I can tell you this; that an individual ought to be able to complete a day’s work with no slightest weariness at all and certainly with no lessening of his reaction time, so that he would cause an accident

You want to know what an accident-prone is? A person who gets too damned tired! That’s what an accident-prone is and that's all he is. He’s a person who has an exhaustion threshold which is right there. And you all of a sudden make him push too hard on a barrel or you give him too much of an emotional shock or something of the sort and he's so tired, all of a sudden, he just doesn’t pay attention and boom! You've got an accident on your hands. It’s a wonder they don’t have more of them. No, an able workman or an able businessman or an executive or a janitor or anybody else would be a person who could complete his days work without showing the marks of that toil. That’s a simple one, isn't it?

He should be able to complete a day's work without gening tired out as a result thereof. He ought to be able to go home, fight with the kids and win! (laughter] He ought to be able at least to talk back to the TV set. And he ought to be able to get along on six hours' sleep and get up nice and fresh in the morning and be able to fight with the foreman.

This, you would say, would be a pretty able boy. Yeah, but that boy is not terribly numerous in our ranks today. No, you look over industry and you say, “How many people do you have here who have been without an absence from their job for the last year?” And they just look at you blank.

“What are you talking about? You’re talking about the plant. They've been absent. This fdlow has been absent three days, and that guy has ... this is the champion: he's only been absent three days, from sickness, this last year."

Well, you should have a perfectly decent attendance and you ought to have work done while on the job. How about the executive? How about the executive? What’s his ability? What's the ability of this man, sits down at a desk. This is a rough deal anyway. He sits down at a desk and people start chucking pieces of paper at him - particularly the nastier pieces of paper, you know?

I can see his secretary now, going through the list, trying to find out the ornericr letters. You know? She finally finds one that’s really cussing him out and says that’s all there was in the mail today. [laughter]

Well, he sits there humped over his desk, day in and day out, and he keeps wishing he'd get out for some recreation, get a little exercise and so forth — hammer, pound, hammer, pound.

And this is just routine. He’s just going through the routine upsets and miscommunications of modern business. And then one fine day, why, there's a terrific emergency. Glutz and Company is about ready to merge with so-and-so and unless he prevents this, then his own company is going to be swallowed up and it’s a big emergency — only that day he’s tired. He’s not there. He hasn’t got the amount of throttle left to make the right decision, just like that. And his decision factor depends again upon his exhaustion factor. How tired is he? Well, that’s how bright he is. That's how alert he is.

Well now. brightness and alertness depend upon confidence, more than anything else, in one's own ability and future. His ability to get along, his ability to handle energy, his ability to handle effort. If one is fairly confident that he’ll survive, he'll live, he’ll go up the time track, he'll get into old age one way or the other-and if he doesn’t, so what?

This is a hard man to beat. Because he hasn’t yet defined for himself how he can be defeated. When he has defined it thoroughly, he's easy to defeat because he can agree with defeat. But the individual who goes along and he knows the future is okay and if it isn't okay, he'll handle it at the time. And hc'H do his job now and he'll carry on one way or another. And he can work and if there isn’t work to do, he’ll create some work to do. This individual would be quite a startling fellow to most manufacturers and most companies today.

And yet, this individual must have been fairly routine in the past in some ages and times of the country, because the country at one time or another has done some tremendous things in the field of human endeavor and it has done them with great enthusiasm and speed. All right.

If we were co attack the social problems of the country today, all we would really have to do is look at, you know, the average guy, the fellow that’s doing his job and carrying along, and try to figure out how we could give him a few less headaches and a little less exhaustion, a little more enthusiasm for existence. And what do you think would happen to a country if you did that?

Its whole belief in its security, in itself, its confidence and its general ability to make decisions would markedly improve-if you concentrated on who? On this average guy.

On the guy that is now keeping the wheels of rhe country running. And that's the fellow who needs legislation. That’s the man who needs some legislation. Not to make things easier for him. Not to make him toe the line any better, but at least take a little more cognizance of the bright world around him. But how would legislation do it if they didn't have some technology to do it with? It would be impossible, wouldn't it? You could legislate and you could say, “Now. all men who have jobs, over the age of twenty-two, will become more able." Simple. All you had to do was pass the law and put it in the statute books and then arrest anybody who isn't more able.

A fellow by the name of Christophe built a citadel one time by the simple expedient-he’d take a hundred men and he had a big block of stone. And he'd tell these men, “All right, now carry that stone up the cliff.” And the hundred men would try to lift it and they couldn’t.

And he'd tell his soldiers, “Kill every tenth man? They would. And he’d tell the ninety remaining men, "Pick up the stone and carry it up.” They quite often would. But the funny part of it is. when it got down to ten or twelve men, they couldn’t, so they got killed, too. You just wouldn’t win with law enforcement and laws about being more able - you’d have to have a technology.

Well now, Dianetics and Scientology are not some drcam up of, you know, just... "Well-got the goal, you know, and we’ll have everybody better. We’ll legislate that we're all going to be more able now. And then we'll kind of let somebody or other, who knows about it, pick up the rear guard and straighten it all out for us.” No, we recognize very dearly the technology to make an able man more able was utterly missing. It was completely missing in the society.

Yes, you could pull his teeth, you could make him drink sulfur water, you could give him B) shots, but look, by the time you were doing this, this man was already sick! You're not dealing with able men when you're dealing with sick men. You see that?

I am quite justified in saying there just wasn’t anything to make him more able, unless of course it was the morale programs that are sometimes carried on in military units, and in industry by chaplains. You know, morale programs: they get baseball teams and, you know, get people more interested in things. Well, but that’s not a positive working technology either. It's not entirdy positive. It’s very spotty Here's this fellow: he does a good job, but he doesn’t like baseball and the morale program calls for baseball. We've missed him, haven't we? Just like that.

All right. So, we were musing in this department. Missing in the department of making able men more able. We couldpick up the people who were sick. We did know how to do something about that we could give them penicillin and give them a rest cure and operate and do other things one way or the other. But remember, these were sick men and we’re not treating the able when we're treating sick men. And these men are not able the moment that they're consistently tired at 3:30. They're no longer really able enough to do their job.

So, we had to have something that would take an individual who was just working away and getting along and supporting his family and fighting the kids every night and so forth and we had to figure it out somehow or another so chat we could do something for and with this person, so as to get him over the hump of 330. And, actually, although that seems to be the easiest thing in the world at all. in the final analysis, the technologies of Dianetics and Scientology have reached their highest peak when they’re able to do something for that guy. When they're able actually to do something for him.

You see, there's nothing big. glaringly wrong about him. He hasn’t got a leg off, you know, that's an obvious thing. He hasn't got tuberculosis. We can do things for him with those obvious ones, but how about this: He just gets tired, you know? And he sometimes gets worried about the future. And sometimes he doesn't win when he fights the kids, you know? And he doesn’t have really enough energy to go our to a dance at night after he’s worked all day. What do you do for this guy?

Well, if Dianetics and Scientology have won in any particular direction at all. they have won right there. We can do something for chat guy. And the funny part of it is. he doesn't know anything has to be done for him. You see this interesting impasse, right there?

Gradually, here and there, he recognizes that he could be more able. He recognizes that some better ability could be his. And when he does, he’s liable to come around and say, *Hcy! What can you do for me?" And he’s been perfectly able up to this time. He’s been holding down a job. He has been getting tired at 3:30. but he’s been in two or three accidents. Life hasn’t run entirely smooth for him. And then we start working with him, either in a group or as an individual. And the next thing you know, he doesn't get tired at 3:30 and he doesn't have accidents any more. And things seem to be going remarkably calmly at home and a lot of things seem to be going better in his immediate vicinity. And his lawn gets mowed now and he washes the car Sundays. And he bought another car and he’s made himself, just in our frame of reference, better equipped to handle the future.

Well, that fellow we can really help today. And the funny part of it is, is that is the fellow chat it's worthwhile helping. Because if you did something for this guy who is at the same time working for you-and you know, it doesn't matter what bridge he is building out through the length and breadth of this country, he’s working for you. If we could do somethingjfer this fellow, why, then we have done something that’s never been done before.

So, we can do something for the alcoholic. I daresay Sigmund Freud, so forth, could have done something for the alcoholic - maybe not with the same precision that we can do it. But we can do something for the neurotic, we can do something for the insane. We work in those directions when we have to and we’re very pleased to help out aK we can in those particular directions. But what's really important is we can do something for this able guy, for this fellow who gets tired at 3:30.

Funny part of it is, he's such а-you know, he’s on the go all the time, he doesn't really recognize that he gets tired at 3:30. He just thinks, you know, that he ought to be just a little bit better. If he, you know, if he was just a little bit better, he could get through rhe day a link bit better and he doesn't quite recognize that he's not getting through the day. This is the fellow we want to have communication with.

When, very recently, one of our people contacted some sales firms here in town, he found that the sales managers and people in the organizations contacted would be quite interested to have the amount of sales and the ability of their particular salesmen increased. And two or three little programs have been started right here, in Phoenix, to do something like that.

But much more important-they haven’t really gotten under way yet-much more important, things like this have been done in other parts of the country. And you raise the ability of this sales force. Well, that certainly doesn't mean too much for the society as a whole, or does it?

Here we have a firm, by the way, back in the Middle West-is one case history we do have in this direction, it's quite interesting. This firm had an auditor work with all of its salesmen for a period of a couple of weeks and. at the end of that time, kept a very accurate sales record and their percentage went up 500 percent. Thar was very interesting.

Actually that company, today, has actually come to grief because these salesmen are all so good. Everybody got very interested in the tremendous affluence of this company and bought it. But a big joke: The people who bought it had never heard of Scientology, which their former manager had, and when the former manager went out of the company, you see, because it had been bought, these other fellows said, "Scientology. This stuff you’re talking about must go." I have to give you a little bit of a guess as to where the sales and action of that corporation will be a year from now. Yes, Scientology must go. That was what was making the company go. He wasn’t advised of this.

But making the able more able would be a very worthwhile undertaking. It’s hard for people, feeling sympathetic toward the ill and so forth, to recognize that there are others in the country who need help. And the people who really need that help very often don’t even realize that they could be helped. But if we've made any goal at all. it would be in the direction of helping those who are already helping us.

Thank you very much.