I want to give you tonight a little talk, which is a request - a talk on games. And I think that we may or may not know all there is to know about games, but I’m going at a very, very fundamental level on this particular subject and you’re going to wonder what games have to do with human behavior. And let me start the talk by telling you that human behavior is a game.

What is a game? A game is an activity engaged upon by one or more individuals in order to maintain his interest in communication in life.

Now, one can actually engage upon a game, but only by synthesizing an opponent. So one, with a synthetic opponent, can have a game. But a real game requires two. And when an individual is synthesizing an opponent, he becomes aberrated because he does not have a direct communication line. The communication line is not between A and B. The communication line is between A and "something I am pretending is somebody else but that I know is A."

Now, it’s actually true that a life form can make another life form without any difficulty and this is one of the first actions in a game. But in this case, we have a different individual created, so that we have one individual creating another individual. Just like a father would play with his son, so we have a thetan capable of making another thetan with whom to play. So we have two legitimate opponents, but only if full determinism or comparable determinism has been given to the other individual.

So thus, we get one of the first requisites in games: that there must be some parity between the players, some parity - data of comparable magnitude, this is expressed in logic - and we have to have some parity between the players. It would be no fun at all for the New York Giants to play the bush-league high school team. Nobody would come to see this game at all unless, of course, it was for charity and a big laugh. But chat would really not be a game. Everybody would know that a game was not being engaged upon.

One might say this about the Dodgers in an off-season and the bush-league high school team, but we were talking about big-time stuff. By the way, if there are any Dodger fans present, I would be very, very happy to talk about it further, but I’ve been trying co get Brooklyn to mock-up a ball team, and all Brooklyn really does, though, is keep mocking-up rhe Dodgers. Anyhow... It’s just a case of a preclear being real recalcitrant.

Well, when we look at the whole problem of games, we are looking at two opposing identities. And the problem of games can become very complex by simply adding further players of similar parity or magnitude.

We have two players. Now, we could have a very stylized game. We have the standard game where 50 percent of us are on one side and 50 percent of us on the ocher side and we are busy playing this game. Now, let’s get a little more complicated game, let’s pur a third side. And this side is playing this side and it’s also playing the other side, and each one of these sides is playing the other two sides.

Now, you say such a game is impossible. You would say also it would be impossible to have a war with three opposing sides. Three opposing sides. This would be a very, very complicated war, wouldn’t it?

Well, we had such a war right here in Arizona ar one time and it was successfully fought for a long time without any conclusion whatsoever. The Mexican Army was fighting the US, and the US was fighting the Mexican Army, and the Mexican Army was fighting the Apaches, and the Apaches were fighting the Mexican Army and the US Army, and the US Army was fighting the Apaches. And this was all raking place along about the time of the

Gadsden - just before the Gadsden Purchase occurred. It was a very interesting war. Very interesting.

Now, what if we added a fourth side? Well, we’d have a family. Now, what if we added - what if we added just at once, at one fell swoop, a hundred and fifty thousand sides? We’d have a town. And a hundred and fifty million, we’d have the United States. And it looks, life does, a little bit complicated because we need an umpire. And everybody still thinks we have an umpire, but I invite you to get involved in a suit and try to win it or lose it or do something about it after you become involved in it.

What happens is, as the experience of many of you can bear out. is "you go to court". But nobody has ever invented a clichc - "go to court," you see, just a trite phrase - nobody has ever invented a phrase which got somebody out. They talk about "settle it out of court." but that means they’ve never gone to court, you see. It means if they were in court, they got disgusted with it and although they’re still in court, they settle it out of court.

But nobody has a phrase which says, "we remove the suit from court," see. Nobody has that phrase. Because there’s not much of an umpire there. The umpire which favors one side more than another side is then not a just umpire, is it?

I invite you sometime co go down co night court and watch in - it’s a horrible example to take a city like this or to use a dirty word here in this lecture, bur in Los Angclcs - lcts go down to night court, Los Angeles, and let’s look around and discover if there is any justice going on.

No, there is not much justice, but there are an awful lot of fellows who don’t have ten dollars in their pockets who are walking down in front of the judge, and the judge says, "Guilty or not guilty? That’s thirty dollars or thirty days. Guilty or not guilty? Thirty dollars or thirty days."

Once in a while, the bailiff kicks him. you know and says, "Judge! Hey. he said not guilty."

"Oh, he did? Ninety days!"

Why? Because these men are in rags, that’s why. Because they’re hungry. They’re the misfits of the society. Thar isn’t justice.

Now, we go to another court that is run in daytime. And Miss Mink comes in. And she’s guilty of having slain her husband and firing sixteen shots - which she had to reload, see - into his body. And the jury goes out and the judge smiles and they say, "Ha. Accidental death." And Miss Mink puts her skirt below her knees and walks out of court. Oh yes, this happens.

What’s the difference? What’s the difference? She was good to look at, is one difference. Money, that’s another difference.

You can stay out of court to the degree that you can buy lawyers. You can attack anybody to the degree that you can buy lawyers. This is a fact. But it’s been a fact for a long time. So where’s the umpire?

Well, we’d better look around to the Treasury Department if we want the umpire for this game. So we can’t find a live umpire, we merely find a court - laughingly called a court of justice. If any lawyers are present or ever hear this, you understand that I’m not talking in fun.

We look around and try to find an umpire. And we elect something that we can all trust as an umpire or we have agreed to trust as an umpire - а dollar bill - that’s an umpire. Because it says in whose possession it is, is the winner. And so we can play this little game of "he’s the winner, he’s the loser, he’s the winner, he’s the loser."

But something else enters in: we have things like diamonds and Cadillacs and Fords and neckties and things like this. When the dollar bill goes thataway, then the MEST, quite often, except in the Bureau of Infernal Revenue, goes the other way. See? I mean, thcrc’s - the dollar can be changed into an object and let me give you now the next requisite to a game.

Now, the first requisite was we had to have - we had to have, for a real game, we had to have two opposing players. We could get a synthetic game and only a synthetic game when we had one individual synthesizing a player, you see, and then pretending he was playing a game without any real live opponent But a real game would require two live persons, beings, thetans, whatever you want to call it, and something for which to play. Has to be something there for which to play.

There’s a term used in Hollywood to describe the thing that everybody is after in a movie. It’s called the "weenie." Everybody is after this gimmick. Weenie - gold mine, the ranch, the girl, the this, the that, anything that represented the item of play.

In football, the gimmick would be a football - and, of course, honor and glory. But honor and glory are always hanging around games, ready to cave in somebody.

The next time somebody hangs a medal on you... By the way, about honor and glory about games, it’s very, very amusing. I had twenty - one medals and palms and I tried to hock them at the end of the war and the fellow said, "Well, that’ll be five dollars."

And, I said, "Well, fine, fake them for five dollars."

"No, no," he says.

He thought I was buying something. They weren’t worth that. So anyhow - anyhow they’re not marketable and so forth and there’s nobody interested in looking at them, particularly at the end of a war.

You don’t come around and say, "Look. Look."

The fellow says, "So what? Can you serve gas in the pump?" He’s in a different game.

So, most people, by the way, are involved in playing the game that is long over. And that’s what we call aberration. Aberration is playing a game that finished some time ago, according to other people’s agreements. If anybody really insists on fighting the War of 1812 again, today, everybody would think he was crazy. We have a girl right now who is busy fighting the French Revolution. And everybody she’s crazy, but all she’s doing is fighting the French Revolution. She thinks spies - shc thinks anybody who walks up to her. auditor, something like that - shc’ll become very disgusted if she finds out that he’s not one of her spies. You see? So the thing that a real game requires is something else - present time.

All right. So now we have the two players, the gimmick that everybody is after - the weenie - and present time.

Well, what’s present time require?

Well, it requires only this: we’ve got an agreed-upon point on the time track in which to pass the gimmick back and forth and to look after and run after this gimmick. We’ve got an agreed-upon area.

Now, somebody who’s playing a game way back in the past, or even somebody who’s playing a game way up in the future, takes the gimmick and gives it a good pass, you see, and - no players. So he hasn’t got a game, has he? Of course, he could have somebody with him way up in the future, but then he’d be starting another universe.

All right This present time - this present time affair is merely the agreed-upon moment in which we all are. And we’ve agreed that there is a moment in which we can play this game and that game is this moment called present time. So we get the other requisites of a game, which are space, energy and a playing field. "You’ve got something to stand on" is very nice, when you’re playing a game, but we can play a game with simply space. Two thetans can just take some space and play a game. All right.

If this is the case, if all we need is some space, then why a playing field? Well, that’s what the nuclear physicist is asking today. "Who wants a playing field, anyway? We know there’s no such thing as a game." They do, they kind of think about life that way.

Now, we have a hundred and fifty million people, each one of whom considers himself-when we get an "only one" society-а hundred and fifty million people, each one of whom considers himself a full team. That’s really a society of cats, isn’t it? When you come to think it over.

We have a hundred and fifty million teams on the field. And the Democratic Party is very surprised, very often, to find one of its players suddenly wearing some sort of a label, a red star or something like this, and says, "Huh? We thought he was playing on this team."

And he’s all of a sudden sold his votes and his ward out or something of the sort, you know, to the Republicans or the socialists or somebody and they say - they begin to realize, after a while, a very horrible thing: that this man is not playing on a team, he thinks he Zr a team. And that is the definition of disillusionment. You think somebody is on your team and then you find out that he is a team.

You could find out that he’s gone over to somebody cisc’s team, but it becomes obvious if he moved over to somebody clse’s team that he actually didn’t belong co your team in the first place, you see? So disillusionment merely consists of "whose team." That’s right. A person is disillusioned, he’s betrayed.

The whole idea of betrayal comes out of this. Well, how would you like to be walking down the street - here, give you a very graphic example: You’re walking down the street with this fellow and he’s got a felt hat on. And he’s talking to you about all the good things that we are going to do for Chicago. And we should throw out another bond issue for Chicago and we should do this and that for Chicago and this for Chicago and that for Chicago, and then what do you know? He happens accidentally to take off his hat and we find out he’s wearing antennae - he’s got antennae growing out of his head. We take a little closer look to him: his ears are circular, wc look at his mouth and he hasn’t got any teeth at all, he’s got metal grinder plates. We take another look at him and we find he’s only got three fingers on each hand and we’re talking to a Martian. Errp! Betrayed. Betrayed. Not your team.

Now, if we have a society of cats, there isn’t much game possible. Because just try and play a game that has five opposing sides. Play some checkers sometimes with five opposing sides. It becomes a little bit confusing, doesn’t it?

Well, instead of playing checkers with five opposing sides, let’s play it with a hundred and fifty million opposing sides and it immediately becomes nonconremplatable. I mean, it’s just too gross a figure of confusion, mostly because the hundred and fifty million are not lined up.

And now we get a war. Somebody invented this thing called war and they took it down from a game that everybody could play to a game that some generals sit around and botch up. That is the best definition I know of of war, is an area on the time track which has been botched up by generals. We no longer have to consider admirals, they sit over in the Pentagon and salute every time a general passes by.

I saw a naval officer the other day and he was wearing first lieutenant army bars on his raincoat And I saw a seaman the other day and he was wearing a first-class private’s stripes on his navy blue jacket.

And I says, "Aren’t you boys being absorbed a little bit by the army?"

And they said, "No, we think it’s fine, we think it’s fine, we think it’s fine, we think it’s fine," you know? They’ve been trained. Anyhow...

Anyhow, rhe army and the navy used co be able to fight, but they’ve got that gummed up and - nobody could find out what’s happened to the Marine Corps these days. They tried to unmock the Marine Corps and the public screamed, so they haven’t mentioned since what they have done to them but it is probably something. But anyhow. I can’t imagine the Marine Corps moving over to the Pentagon. I just can’t imagine this!

I was with some... well, there was a marine — a marine landed and took a landing area out in the Pacific, I remember one time, vaguely. And he was relieved by three army divisions - and they had ro retreat, at... [laughter]. Well, this would actually be a marine’s viewpoint on this. Actually, the army is well trained enough not to have any viewpoint of it Well, so this war - war is something in which somebody gets a big idea whereby everybody has got to hate some other nation. And they drcam up a lot of reasons and then they get the other nation to dream up a lor of reasons. And they cook up all these reasons so that nobody could find out anything, you see, so that there’s a whole opacity to the entire scenery and they get everybody raving mad about this.

I was very amused one time in a - I was in a war museum and I was looking around, and there was a great big poster there. Do you remember World War (if you’ve read the history books, you girls), the World War I posters of the German soldier with his bayonet through the stomach of a Belgian baby? You remember that one, huh? Well, there was a German war poster - а German war poster which had survived the debacle, and it showed an American soldier bayoneting a German child. I didn’t recall this happening. But it probably did - who knows? Anyway, duplicate lies, see?

The only real point of agreement two opposing sides have in a war is that they both lie like hell.

So we get everybody united and we say, " You are an American." Or "You are an Englishman." Or "You are a Frenchman, and therefore..." we’ve all decided now, about this "you are then and therefore, immediately, supposed to hate the enemy."

Now, the definition of an American, of an Englishman or anybody else, at the moment war is declared, becomes that one who hates Germans, Russians, Pole - whatever it happens to be, you see - Italian, it doesn’t matter, but that is the definition.

An American is not somebody who lives in America, it is somebody who bates and is willing to fight this other country, you see.

So we get very confused the way we have allies. You see, we have Russian allies and they’re all Americans because they hate Germans. Oh, you think this is peculiar? We were being shown pictures all during World War II or was it World War 6 or 86 — it was some war back on the track, I forget. And we were shown motion pictures demonstrating that Russians were just like Americans. There was no distinguishable difference of any kind, i These pictures were being showed to the armed forces.

And we had one picture there demonstrating conclusively and completely that Russia had never been successfully invaded and had never lost a war since 1256 A.D. There was only one difficulty with this last picture: I had as a bosun a former professor of history, and he and the captain and I sat there and pulled the picture apart as it was being run through the reels, you know, because its geographical areas and its dates of conquest were all messed up, just to prove the point.

Actually, Russia has never won a war - they just change the government when they get tired. If they have ever won one, it was a different prince that accepted the victory. Oh, this is a fact. It’s a very confused picture, because you’re looking there at what the US believes today is a team. We believe this Russian scene is a team, you see. It is not a team, not even vaguely a team.

But I forget how many different languages ... I’ve been told this every once in a while, how many different languages there are, but its always a different figure and I can only assume that it’s a large number and that Russia is relatively unexplored. People keep finding new languages. In other words, its a bunch of republics of one kind or another which were melted together, but which never amalgamated. Its a tremendous number of independent states which are called the "United States of Soviet Russia." Oh. that’s not quite right, is it? Its the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, isn’t it?

The United States of Russia, then, and the United States of America have a feeling that someday there will be a war between them; they look forward to this with great anticipation. The only hole in the thing is that there is no United States of Russia, there’s a seetion on a map. And there’s 2 percent of the population who wish they could stir up something in order to keep their own people in line because the Russian people are not a team.

So you want to know where wars come from? The only thing really wrong with a war is nobody asks your opinion or mine whether or not we should now start hating Japanese or whether we should now start hating Eskimo or whether we should now start hating Brazilians. See, nobody asks our opinion. We’re suddenly told that we have to do so and then they say, "Well, you’re now fighting."

Now, what is that? That is playing a game not of your consent. I went out and fought this last war, but I knew it was going to happen in 1936 and couldn’t get anybody to see the light of preventing it. I was in the happy and stupid frame of mind thinking that somebody minted to!

Nobody wanted to prevent that war. They were trying to push it along as fast as they could. And with this next one, they’re trying to push it along as fast as they can possibly grease the wheels. Well, it’s not a good game! It’s a bum game! That’s the only thing we find wrong with war - it’s a real bum game.

For instance, there were parts of the war that were a good game. Actual fighting is not too bad a game. Don’t let anybody get you messed up about this.

They say, "Hurry up and wait," you know? That the bum part of the game. "Hurry up and wait."

You go out and you draw your shoes and they’re too big for you, and your rifle and that’s too small.

You go running around like mad under the behest of somebody who is doing this because it’s good for you and will get you in a state of discipline, but who confuses you all the time one way or the other. When you’re beaten down into such apathy that you will sit in mud, they call you a soldier and send you away. You’re all set, see? Broken piece.

Now, instead of somebody playing a game, then, he is on a chessboard or a checkerboard and he’s being pushed around on the checkerboard. And after a while he’ll get some of his paint chipped off and they throw him over on the side of the table and you have Homo sapiens. This is, then, upstairs for Homo sapiens to become a piece on the checkerboard, for somebody to push around. And upstairs of that there’s somebody playing this checker game, and we have lots of spires which climb into the skies all over the United States that demonstrate the belief in the fact that somebody is playing a checker game. That’s not blasphemy. I don’t know what blasphemy is.

Anyway, the next - well, he’s probably a good checker player. I don’t know. I haven’t hit the king row for a long time. Lousy checker player.

Anyway, we find, then, that there are various categories that a being can be in, in one of these games. There is the category where he has played the game and is not now playing the game You see, that would be a player standing along side of the checker player sort of observing. You know, like the alumni does ar the rah-rah football game. You know, they once played the game and they pick up that wonderful moment of nostalgia when they, too, sat by the water bucket when Red Grange rushed down with a seventy-seven yard dash. You know, they were on the team. And they sit there as a spectator. Now, there’s the spectator of the game.

Now, there’s the fellow who is on the board being pushed around: the fellow who carried the message to Garcia, rhe fellow who ran three-quarters of the way across Russia and fell dead, оr - what’s his name? I don’t know. Anyway, he was a messenger - Poppinkoff or Shagnikoff or something. This fellow who went all the way across and finally delivered the message. He’s a piece, you see. He is actually a piece.

Now, we take a bunch of soldiers and we line them up. Continental Army, you take a bunch of soldiers, line them up. British Army, we take a bunch of soldiers, line them up. French Army, a bunch of soldiers, line them up, Hessian Army ... We say. "All right, on twenty-eight commands to load and fire, we present muskets. Boom! All right, we’re all set." They’re pieces. You see? They are not playing a game. They are pieces in the game.

Now, the fellow over there who has been wounded and dragged off to the side, and a little later on. the fellow who is sitting on the street comer with a wooden leg. they’re the broken pieces of the game. But at least we know what broken piece of what game. You see. we at least know what piece broke them up.

That’s not true of Man. He does not know what game he was broken up in.

Go down and ask him, "Now, when was the last time you were a player in a game?"

And he will think back to the hockey team or something in high school and get kind of confused and know chat there’s something going on. but he’s not quite sure what. You’ve probably asked him for a chapter in space opera or something of the sort where he was actually being used as a piece in a game.

And now, working in a grocery store or something like that, he feels kind of like he’s been left out. And he has this left out feeling. Well, that’s a feeling immediately below being left in. A feeling which some soldiers and which I myself have had of being left in too damn long. I remember after three years of combat service a couple of us were talking about it, and we hadn’t seen any new personnel coming up along, and everybody we ran into was somebody we had already run into in New Guinea.

You know, "Hiya Joe. I haven’t seen you since the North... What the hell are they doing with all the guys they’re recruiting? Don’t you think it’s about time somebody else played in this war?" That’s what’s known as being left in. Well, people have lost track of this and therefore they’ve lost track of how to play.

Now, the feeling of being high-toned and the feeling of being able to play, the feeling of being in a game or able to create a game are, alike, very very pleasant feelings. And as we go downstairs from those feelings, we get the various manifestations of an individual dropping our of the game. The only thing that’s necessary to keep him alive at all is a game.

But look-a-here. Docs this fellow - this fellow with a wooden leg over there, does he have a game? Yes. He has a game called "old soldier." That’s his game. He sits around with this wooden leg. What’s he doing sitting around with a wooden leg? Why doesn’t he mock-up another kg? Well, he’d lose his game and that game is caXed "old soldier. Veteran." And it has certain definite rules. He must drink up the money which is given to him to buy him a cup of coffee. It must be drunk up in Canned Heat, if possible - seldom in good liquor.

Other factors of this character associate themselves to this game. He’s actually playing a very, very pattern role. He has a definite pattern role. You see what I mean? He’s got just exactly the role to play. And you can look around and find these standard roles just by the dozens.

You can find the housewife who never gets to go out. And she will do exact, certain things. This is her role. This is the game she is playing.

You say, "Well, this is an awfully funny game to play."

Yes, because she hasn’t got a real game. She has to have some kind of a synthetic opponent. And her synthetic opponent is her environment or circumstances, and these circumstances or environment are her synthetic opponent. So she’s fighting this circumstance. See, there’s no other girl to stand up to and claw around or throw volley balls at or something like that, so she has to have a synthetic opponent, which is the place she can never go out of. But it’s a game! There we’ve dropped back to this synthetic game. It isn’t much fun to play by yourself, but yet this person is doing this. All right. There is the housewife, then. This housewife, who has no opportunity to go out.

There is this - by the way, I think practically all the girls in New York City who work in offices are busy playing this game, practically every girl is playing this game. And that is a game called "I’m going to marry a millionaire." That’s right, that’s the game.

It’s "I’m going to..."

I one time wondered what the ambition of girls were. I was going io write some stories for True Romances on a dare from a couple of my writer friends. They said I never could possibly write something like confession stories and so I curled my lip up and hung it over my car and I said that’s not true, I can write some of these things. And I did and I sold them. The pen name was Fanny Featherbrain.

All right. The girls that I interviewed in order to get some background for this sort of thing one after the other - I interviewed them by going in and asking the first steno I would see in the office, "What is your ambition in life? What would you really like to do?" And I got a just snap answer, real fast, no comm lag at all. "I’m going to meet and marry a millionaire and then everything will be wonderful".

Well, here there are millions of these girls in New York City, and the last time I looked in the Social Register - pardon me, the income tax bracket - there were no millionaires of any kind whatsoever. At least they said so in their tax returns.

So, anyhow, there’s a big scarcity of people with whom to play game. But yet it is a sort of a future game, with the environment again. But the environment in this case is a missing millionaire. How are you going to play a game - zub-zub - with a missing millionaire? Thai’s real good.

Well, looking this over further we find there are other standard roles which the person has to play. There is the schoolteacher who never has any children of her own and teaches all these children and sends them forth into the world, pretending that they are hers, you know?

Then there’s the schoolteacher who educates the "dirty little brats" according to the school board. But I forgot a game. Lucky girl. Lucky girl. When the school board isn’t looking, she can claw the hell out of them, just like they claw the hell out of her!

She’ll be in present time, she’ll be in pretty good shape as long as she keeps this job. But she keeps telling you. "No. I don’t want this job. this is a bad job." That’s just part of the game, see. "Real rough opponents - real rough opponents," she’s saying. "I’m in here pitching. I’m showing you how hard it is to fight this game and I really - it is so hard that I would get rid of this fight in any instant."

Except when you take her out of that environment she collapses, has a nervous breakdown, develops neuralgia, or develops lumbosis or something, caves in. You’ve taken her game away from her.

Don’t ever believe somebody when they tell you how hard it is to stay in there pitching. When they start telling you how hard it is to stay in there pitching and you see there’s some real live opponents, you pat them on the back and say, "You lucky dog!"

Now, by the way, as support of this, a soldier who is wounded ai the front and is retained there in a first aid station almost always recovers. But the soldier who is pulled back from the front and put in the base hospital very often dies of minor wounds. Fantastic fact for which the army, and all armies, have been trying to account for all these wars that people have been interested in wounded. There were wars, you know, when they weren’t interested in wounded. They were so high toned that somebody who was wounded would not, therefore, be a worthy opponent, so they stepped over him and went on their way. Took Florence Nightingale to soften us up to that. All right.

When we look over this problem, we see that the soldier has had his game taken away from him. It’s been demonstrated to him by removing him to the base hospital that he is no longer going to be permitted to be a piece in this game. And although he would tell you how horrible this is, how terrible this is staying in there and so forth, the argument against it is that he’ll probably die if you send him to the rear! The least he’ll have will be a nervous breakdown.

I was utterly astonished, by the way, on this particular subject during World War II. I was the first casualty brought back from the South Pacific And there was a war going on out in the South Pacific and people were still trying to declare war here in the United States. As a manor of fact. Washington and the Pentagon was completely out of communication. I remember sending them a dispatch saying. "What am I going to do with the USS Chicago?" Yeah. What would a young officer be doing with the USS Chicago in the first place? Well, I was doing with it.

Its commanding officer had come to me and he said. "Hubbard, please get in touch with Washington. This port is going to be bombed at any moment and we are all out of ammunition and food. And I can’t raise them on my radio and the Australians can’t raise them, the Dutch can’t raise them and nobody can ger in touch with Washington!"

So I tried one more time and the trans and Pacific phone line was still in, so I called the Pentagon. And I got the switchboard operator at the outer desk, until she found out it was out of Australia, she turned around and said, "Australia? к doesn’t exist," and hung up.

So the commanding officer of the USS Chicago. Captain Hood, who would bear this out if you were to meet him on the street, came down to see me again and he said. "If you will write your name on the bottom of a piece of paper saying, ’Sail,’ I am gone."

I did that with several ships. Got back into a navy yard, by the way - got back in a navy yard and in the commandant’s office was one of my orders to sail, framed on the wall. He kept it there just to show how tough it was some places in the world - Lieutenant Hubbard.

They get out of contact! There was no war out there, the Pentagon knew it It was so sure, that it knew no cables existed, no phone lines, nothing. Nothing existed. Very fantastic. But the communication lines break down when they think there’s a war going on because they know they’ve got to have a war with somebody and the Pentagon always picks its own side.

But anyhow, when I came back, I was utterly fascinated to discover that the various wards of the hospital were crammed with people from stateside who had had nervous breakdowns and combat fatigue sitting at desks. Nyaaab!

Well, when I came back, they put me in a room by myself and the next morning I woke up - I was very glad to have a sound night’s sleep. I came back in the secretary of navy’s plane. I was very glad to have a sound night’s sleep. I had gotten rid of my dispatches, everything was fine. And I woke up and here’s this cadaver standing at the foot of the bed. And he says, "How many fingers am I holding up to you?"

I did a double take. And I already knew one young girl who had kidded a psychiatrist by saying, "Six, of course, you idiot." He put her in for about six weeks.

So I said, "Two, sir." Being very careful in the face of aberration to be calm, you see, as far as he was concerned.

He said, "What time is it by the clock?"

And I looked over there, I said, "Eight o’clock."

And, "Very peculiar, very peculiar." And he went out and some other psychiatrists came in. One of them got on a chair and looked down at me, I remember that vividly.

Female voice: Oh, Lord.

And they had talks with me all that day and then they had to turn me loose. Yeah, they had to send for a medical doctor then to dress my ankle, which was in bad shape.

They patched me up, but they were so disappointed chat they put me on a North Atlantic corvette within a week.

They told me, "Everybody knows nobody can stand the stress of modern war and you, as the first casualty back from the South Pacific, could not possibly be sane."

Well, there’s a lot of people in psychiatry who have agreed with them since. [laughter] But the unfortunate pan of it is, is I keep passing their damned tests! I keep telling them they’re holding up two fingers.

Now - I’ve treated a lot of them, too. Anyway...

When we look over this thing, we had such a reverse idea of what life was all about, you know, that here they could see this tremendous fact that everybody stateside who had been forced to stay away from the game, stay away from the war, sit down there and sweat and slave, had had nervous breakdowns all over the place. These people were sick men. They were not within seven thousand miles of a shot being fired in anger after Pead Harbor and yet they were having nervous breakdowns.

And the boys who kept coming in from the South Pacific were in magnificent condition. Oh. of course, every once in a while they’d give very embarrassing performances, such as they’d step off a plane at Treasure Island and somebody would go overhead, you know, with a plane and they would of course hit the dirt, bang! you know? And then look up kind of sheepishly and see everybody else is still standing up and stand up themselves.

The reactions that were still built in were still working, but they were in wonderful condition mentally. That’s fantastic, isn’t it? And stateside they were gray-cheeked dementia praecox unclassified - actually true. And the wives that got left home, too often, went completely nutty. I ran into one of them one time, and she said, "The war is a terrible strain."

It must have been - must have got an awful flat place on one elbow, leaning on the bar all that time.

This is a fact, awful strain on them - cerrible strain.

I was once cautioned to talk very carefully, talk with extreme care to one particular officer, because he wasn’t - you know, "he’d had a hard time of it during the war."

And, I said, "What’s he been doing?" You know, I had an idea that he probably - submarine patrol, you know, eighteen trips across the Pacific and ten months in a Jap camp or something of the sort. "Oh, he was in charge of the supply department at Vallejo. Be real careful of that boy’s sanity."

Well, the upset here which is occasioned by the individual can then be summated this way with no further ado: being kept out of a game. And he will, when kept out of a game, substitute a game with a synthetic thing — usually his reactive mind, his right leg, his hearing, his eyesight. He has to play a game somewhere, so he plays the game with the first available and only opponent. And if that’s a synthetic opponent, we have aberration. And if he then loses this game, we have somebody who’s crazy. Imagine losing a game with a synthetic opponent. Well, that’s psychosis. Thar’s psychosis.

We have, in too many departments, the idea that life is work and work is work and play is play and never the twain shall get mixed up - because we’re paying you $13.22 a week.

There is nothing more disgusting to 1.5 management than discover that somebody is having some fun at his job. They almost perish at the thought of it. Almost perish at the idea that somebody is enjoying his job.

And they sit at these desks - they sit at these desks all week long, hard at work, signing their name to vouchers and checking figures. It’s real interesting, isn’t it? There’s no relationship whatsoever between work and effort, and play and effort that can be coordinated. In other words, work is not work because it has effort connected with it. Work is work and effort is effort and play is play.

Phy is not play because it has no effort connected with it. Boy, I’ve seen - oh, I’ve seen a little kid just practically kill himself lugging blocks of snow or bricks. I’ve seen a whole neighborhood full of kids working like a bunch of stevedores building a fort, just day after day. I saw two guys one time - another fellow and myself - saw two guys dam a fairly large size stream with four hundred pound sandbags. And we dammed this stream so thoroughly that we created a spillway there and so forth and we fixed it all up and there was no purpose whatsoever to damming up this stream.

It did give us a good laugh. A fellow came by a few minutes later and tried to catch some fish in the pool that we had finally created after three days’ work. He thought it must be a nice trout pool.

Understand, this was not in a sylvan creek. This was in a fairly civilized area and we were just amusing ourselves. And I understand later that some 1.5 guy came along and tore our the wrong sandbags, and in the succeeding two years, the stream, thus diverted from this play dam, ate away three acres of public property - just spilled it into a river where it went away as silt. Work. There was no work connected with that. Do you know that it was in very, very hot weather that we did that? Extremely hot weather. We must have moved eighteen or twenty cubic yards of wet sand. It was fantastic. No work.

But I remember working very hard the following week. I was just a kid and I was trying to learn elementary physics. And I spent three whole days trying to memorize some of the formulas of elementary physics. It was bard work sitting there with that book in my hands. No, there’s no coordination between work and play and effort.

The only difference between work and play is consideration. If you consider you’re working, you’re working. If you consider you’re playing, you’re playing. If everybody around you considers that what you’re doing is work, you’ll eventually start to figure it out as work too, because that’s the agreed-upon thing. H everyone around you decides that "people should work, honest people work" and you’re just playing, then you will eventually demonstrate to them, with a great deal of seam-at-brow. that what you’re doing is really work.

I remember this very, very vividly in one particular ease where an individual had demonstrated to everybody that painting was eery hard work And very shortly thereafter he stopped paincing - it was too exhausting.

I processed him and I just got him out of this and we just changed the definition of painting. And we had the awfullest time doing it. because all of his relatives kept coming up to him, although he was making a great deal of money painting, they kept walking up to him and telling him how he really played all the rime and he wasn’t serious about anything, you know? And therefore it had to be work.

We had to get all those agreements out of the road before this fellow could relax and again consider that painting was play. At which moment this individual started to paint to such a degree that I think stock in Sherwin-Williams increased a couple of points.

Now, here’s an example, then, of work and play. Therefore, you could say that something was a game or that something was an arduous, horrible, serious endeavor. You could say that this was a game or this was life, by which you might mean life is serious and a game is just play.

If you were to define, however, life as a serious endeavor, you would then have to mean, then, that life was not a game, that it was work. that it was arduous and serious and that there was something wrong with it. Well. I’ll tell you wbat is wrong with it. It is not a game anymore, it is life. You have taken this game called "game" and you have changed its name to "life." And life had to be serious. And that’s all the trick that has happened. You’ve still got a game.

Now, that game, however, depends on. really, to be a game, two living things. It’s not quite a game to be playing with a synthetic opponent. And when you play with a synthetic opponent, you’re liable to get into trouble.

I was one time quite astounded to find a little boy still in possession of his make - believe playmate. As a little boy he had lived alone, he had had no companions, and he had finally made a playmate. He had a name for this playmate and everything else that went along with a playmate. The playmate had possessions, so forth. And he had done this and nobody had ever accused this little boy of being crazy. But now this individual was still packing around this synthetic playmate. And his attention was so fixated on the synthetic playmate that even when he had a real opponent and a real game envisaged, he couldn’t play it; his attention was still on the synthetic playmate.

This fellow who broke his leg playing a game is liable to have his attention so fixed upon that broken leg that he won’t play a game again. His game has now become the broken leg. Oh, it pays lots of dividends. He doesn’t have to work if his leg is broken - so on.

If you were to process an individual so thoroughly as to take away from him all of his synthetic games without giving him an opportunity of observing that there were real and actual games to be played, you would finish your prcclcar but thoroughly. In other words, any game is better than no game, even if it is a game of having migraine headaches which are only relieved by ducking one’s head in ice water and being shot three times a day with B1. Or, of course, by seeing a Dianeticist or Scientologist. This migraine headache is a better game than no game.

Now, psychology didn’t observe very much, but what it observed - if you pick and choose and find out if it actually was observed or not - that’s one of the important things to do in studying psychology: Did they actually observe this? Because most of their data is phony data. I say that with a perfectly proper statement.

The sleep curve, for instance, that they have - the depth of sleep, it’s what hours during the night — quite curiously has been copied from a book in about 1910 or 1902 or something like that, and they’ve simply copied it, crediting the last book they got it out of. And the sleep curve was never performed as an experiment in the first place. A fellow did a Doctor in Philosophy thesis on this some years ago and traced that curve back to its inception and found out that it was an experiment which had never been concluded. And the drawing which was handed in was just a demonstration of what they were trying to demonstrate. He then made a sleep curve, showing what is the average depth of slumber on the part of the individual at various hours of the night, and found out there was no coordination.

So a lot of psychology data is in that category. But we look around and we find out they occasionally did make an observation, and one of the observations was this, "There is no reason..." You know, we’ve got to state this as they did in psychology - apathy, apathy, apathy. That’s what they use for quotes in psychology: apathy, apathy "There is nothing possibly can be done for anybody who has a psychosomatic illness because if you cure one, he will just get another once" - apathy, apathy. That’s right.

The Dianeticist, the Scientologist today doesn’t take so many games away from the individual that the individual is left without a game, or if he does, he lets him invent some games. He knows that if the prcclear just starts to get sickness after sickness after sickncss - as fast as he takes up one, the guy gets another complaint - he knows he simply shortchanged this fellow on games, so he has him invent some games. The next thing you know, the individual, in inventing games, looks around and remembers what a real opponent is - it’s somebody else that’s alive. He then discovers there’s somebody else alive in the world, somebody else to play a game with.

If we warn people about how horrible it is to get hurt, that they must be cautious, that they must not plunge into things, they mustn’t be impulsive, they have to be careful of who they associate with - in other words, standard schoolchild training, standard training in the grammar schools - we’ll fix them up so they can’t play any game. So they’ll invent a game called "juvenile delinquency."

The game situation, the games of existence, are really all based on the same laws. There is no good or evil, except by definition. They are the reasons why one fights.

He says, "The other side is evil, therefore, I have a license to fight. I have a license to play the game and fight those people over there, because they are evil."

The people over there are saying the same thing." We have a license to fight this fellow because he is evil and we are good." You see how this works out. And so people go around and they need a license to fight, so they go around and they say. "Well, so-and-so, and so-and-so. Actually, we can fight them, you know, they’re no good, because they do everything wrong, wrong, wrong."

This fellow can be fought because he is wrong or he’s doing things wrong. And they’ll start to invent wrongnesses in order to have a game. You know, give them a reason for a game - a fight, a combat.

Well, existence, when it is dull, is simply a game gone sour. Homo sapiens in a bad spot is simply nursing some game, like lumbosis, along — nursing some game along until he has a real opponent or can recognize an opponent again and then he will have a new game.

But where you have too many opponents, you have chaos. Where you have too few causes, you have no games. The thing that could be said to be wrong about Man today is the fact that he is in the serious condition of being very, very short on games. Unless somebody comes along and, to some degree, aligns Man’s efforts in some direction, instead of internally "each man is a team," unless somebody shows Man (or unless Man spontaneously shows himself) that he does have enemies that can be fought, then insanity, neurosis, criminality and boredom with life will result.

Thank you.