In this lecture I am first going to give you the relatively rudimentary data that we have on groups, and then we will go into the application of this material. I will use the Foundation, just as a group which many of you have observed and know something about rather than for any other reason, to show you what happens in groups.

I could of course continue to use governments. In the past nearly everyone who has been interested in the subject of groups has immediately looked at governments. I don’t know just why this is; governments are not that important. The groups in which man is primarily interested are small groups where he is in relatively intimate contact with his fellow man. It is here that the group works best.

We could treat a group in terms of its evolution or we could treat a group in an almost mystical sense, and we would arrive more or less at the same place. I am going to treat it for you from both quarters.

In evolutionary terms it has been considered that man developed and evolved to what he is now by varying stages out of a principle known as natural selection, and in this development, which is entirely regulated by survival, he evolved certain definite methods of getting along. Every species evolved certain protective and attacking mechanisms.

Now, one of the things that man might be considered to have evolved is the pack, the basic unit of groups. Man might be considered to have been a hunting pack. Man did not walk alone. (By the way, neither do cats.) Man, as a hunting pack, found out that he could achieve more victories more often by being in a group, the combined strength of which would overcome his enemies, and that he could eat better and get along better in general. It is obvious that if a member of the pack falls by the wayside, the rest of the pack can pick him up and carry him along until he is in better shape. There is an interdependency. The group operates, of course, in a very, very close liaison. Actually, up to a certain point, man’s survival value rises in ratio to the solidity and interdependence of the group. There is, then, an actual survival value in groups.

There are many points here which one could touch upon along the way, such as “the law of tooth and claw” being considered as the basic law of nature. I assure you that if “tooth and claw” and self-preservation of the individual were the basic laws, we wouldn’t have any people on the face of the earth today.

The next animal in order of intelligence below man happens to be an elephant, which is a very, very smart animal. The elephant also goes in groups. The elephant, by the way, has quite a good-sized set of prefrontal lobes. He is apparently quite an analytical animal, and you find elephants in groups responding in a very remarkable way. Hunters in Africa are very often completely bemused when one elephant is wounded and two elephants come alongside of him, one on either side, and prop him up and carry him off the scene. That is a pack reaction.

A great many things have been written and noted about groups of this character, but interdependence of individuals is the point of greatest stress.

Immanuel Kant sought to give innate moral sense to man, but then in his next book he stated that man was paid very highly for having this innate moral sense because, actually, it was just an outgrowth of his own selfishness. I don’t like Immanuel Kant, by the way, because he was so confoundedly, resoundingly abstruse that nobody could follow him, and nobody dared goup against the resounding character of his German articles and verbs. He codified the whole field of philosophy and it rather stayed that way. He completely stultified philosophy for about 162 years.

As a matter of fact, Dianetics is the first major breakthrough of philosophy for 162 years — an interesting fact. One of philosophy’s main points of action is epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, and Dianetics is a study of epistemology. Dianetics is actually a study of knowl- edge and almost incidentally has to address the vessel and the computation point of knowledge, which is the human mind. What you are studying in terms of processing and so forth is a little bunch-up on the track on Dianetics. It is terrifically important material, but way before you get there and way after you have gotten there are the basic tenets of Dianetics. Dianetics may or may not be great or true or anything like that, but it at least turns around and upsets the tenets laid down about 162 years ago.

Man has been thinking along these rather stultified and awfully stupid lines that the group consisted of a number of individuals who for their own self-preservation and for no other reason somehow or other associated with each other, and that any pack was mutually self-supporting just so the individuals in the pack could go on living. The egocentricity of the philosopher who dreamed that one up is second only to the personal aggrandizement thirst of a dictator.

You can’t look at a mental processing using the principle that only self exists and is important and have it work. That is why there has formerly been no mental processing; dynamic one was considered exclusively.

Now, I want to single out to you a point on this evolutionary scheme: Regardless of the individuality of each member of the group as individuals, the more analytical the beast, the more cooperative his group seems to be. The accomplishments and so forth of these groups advance in ratio to the active fact that the individuals are amalgamated into a group.

We come up the line and look at animals. We get to elephants and get up to man, and now we look at the various stages of man’s development. We find out that man’s society has come up to a point, now and then, where he has had a golden age. And we find out that his golden ages, very interestingly, are at a certain point where the self and the group and the future all have relatively equal stress, and man is man. There is relatively equal stress along these factors just before these golden ages take place. This balance more or less comes into being, and then the other factors of food, climate and the rest of it enter in and man will proceed then to have a golden age of one sort or another. Then, through too much collision with matter, too many wars and so on, a force will gradually introduce itself into the society; and from running on dynamics one, two and three very nicely, man gets to a point where all of a sudden maybe dynamic two will fold off, and he starts into a decline. Of course, if dynamic three were to fold up, the group dynamic itself, you would have the same sort of a situation; he would go into a decline.

Each one of these dynamics becomes blunted by the amount of force which is entered against it, the amount of suppressor entered, or the amount of confusion and entanglement that it gets into with the material universe. Once it starts to become blunted it is liable to fold up all the way down.

This happened to the old Roman pagan society with their gods and so forth, just before the onslaught of Christianity. Christianity came in and the whole pagan religious group folded up and dived out of sight.

There is a society down in the South Pacific where the second dynamic, the future, more or less folded up, where infanticide became a ruling passion. It developed quite logically and naturally because they were living on a set of islands which had a limited food supply, and of course they wanted to keep down their birth rate. They started to keep it down with abortion, and where that didn’t succeed they murdered the babies after they were born without much selection or anything else. The second dynamic collapsed and this group almost disappeared. There are very few members of it now.

There is another group that folded up as a group, and did that rather consistently. This was the early Christian church. There is practically nothing in existence, historically, about these people as a group. There are a lot of words written on pieces of paper, but they are neither particularly informative nor innocent of having been altered one way or the other down through the years. I don’t want to step on any toes on this, because there is a complete difference between talking about Christ and the philosophy of Buddha and so forth and talking about an aberrated group. The fact that aberrated groups have attached themselves to some of these causes doesn’t modify the causes.

The early Christian church went in at a mad rate in a sort of overall effort against the Roman group, and the Roman courts and so forth tried to include these people into the laws and then tried to exclude them out. It was a very, very bad proposition.

What happened in Rome was one group attacked another group without setting up in its place any kind of an actual group. Part of the reason for this was they were running on a strange kind of a first dynamic. It was the first dynamic computation of “MEST is no good.” They had turned around and completely retreated from the idea that their mission was to take over the material universe. They had gone out of balance to that degree, and promptly everybody started to negate on the first dynamic. These groups folded up with great rapidity.

Actually, the history of Christianity is a history of upstart groups which peel off and die as other upstart groups come on. It is tremendously cyclic, and that is fascinating; there must have been something wrong with the general group. The main church that has carried along through this field does not operate that way, and they were able to persevere by including in the groups various peoples as they came along. In other words, various modifications occurred in this group all the way along the line. They have had a very stormy time of it for about two thousand years in various places. You have to look at this thing bluntly as a cultural aspect.

The main thing is that the initial shock that Christianity received at the hands of the Roman nation and that the Roman nation received at the hands of Christianity formed a basic engram there.

This gives you an idea of the magnitude of an engram in a group. The killing of martyrs by the Roman nation reacted in such a way. The people who had been drawn to the colors to a large measure had a great deal against the Roman nation — lots of them were slaves, people who had been very badly abused — and there was a great shock of impact against pantheism and the Roman government.

People have a tendency, because of a Disorientation, to regard the Christians as a people who came in from someplace and attacked the Roman Empire, but this is not true. These were the citizens of the Roman Empire who were attacking from the inside. We are dealing strictly with a group within a group — a group of Romans — and these people attacked the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire attacked them, and an engram was laid in.

The thought was certainly reactive in that engram.

People in the Roman Empire lived rather luxuriously as far as food, clothing and shelter were concerned, in Rome. Rome was a very large capitalism and stayed remarkably so, practically to the end of her days.

But here was this tremendous impact. The Romans bathed, so to revolutionize this group it was necessary to eschew bathing. The Romans practiced athletic skills and 90 forth, so to revolt against this group it was necessary to completely negate against any of such skills. One had to deny the body completely and take no care of the body, nor use oils to preserve the skin and so on. So that was knocked out, as well as the type of government — which after all was a government that was good enough to rule the world for a long time, up to the time it really went into a terrific decline and into a highly reactive state itself. It had killed too many foreign armies and it had been itself too often swept over, and MEST had entered in there a great deal, so they were pretty reactive already. But what was left of the Roman culture was not particularly bad: good food, baths, games, recreation, enormous and prosperous cities complete with their arts and so on.

When the revolution took place against Rome, anything which had been good in that group was negated against — complete reactive thought: Romans are painful = Romans eat = we don’t eat; Romans are painful = Romans bathe = we don’t bathe; Romans have codified laws, courts and governments, therefore we don’t have these codified laws, courts and governments.

One can measure the violence of what took place about two thousand years ago in the terms of how it was negated against. It’s all very well for somebody today to say there weren’t any Christian martyrs, but there must have been to have caused this much pain in a society, whereby everything that was good in that society would just be completely moved aside. And out of this, the one thing we have left is spiritual significance. That was the one thing that survived all this.

But dynamics three, two and one had folded up in the process, and the Roman Empire was gone. Good heavens, any barbarian with a tin sword in his hand could come down over the borders and mop up any town! No armies were put into the field, the internal government fell to pieces, and the most weird and horrible governmental practices came into being. The entire coast of North Africa right up to the fifth century had been a great granary, with orchards and a beautiful countryside, but the agricultural pursuits there were pretty well abandoned because of armies going back and forth over it and then the general upsets. It is nothing but a raving desert now! By AD. 550 the total population of Rome consisted of two wolves wandering in the Forum. By the year 1000 there wasn’t a civilized body of people in the Western world. It rather gives you an idea of an internal convulsion.

I am showing you a group which destroyed itself from within with another group and failed to create a true group. And by failing to create a true group to replace what it had abandoned or overthrown, it had to be supported in the most shaky fashion as a group. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Christianity itself continued to progress, but I point out that Christianity was picking up the sway over new groups which were coming into this area. Christianity would fire these new groups, they would come in, and they would fold up — a cycle one right after the other.

Not for a long time did the Church itself decide, along about the time of Cesare Borgia, that it had to be a good government, that it had to be good management, and that it had to have a group that would run ably and well. And when the Catholic church started to be a government, Europe pulled out of her Dark Ages. They started to really handle it as a group. We get the aspect of a king walking barefooted across the Alps to ask the pardon of the actual head of the governments of the Western world. It is interesting that the world pulled together as soon as the tenets were refined to include the fact that the Church had to be a government.

Nothing I say should be construed as criticism of Christian tenets or Roman tenets; it is just an impartial survey of this field. We know there were dark ages, we know that these various things existed, and I have taken a little time in the past to look them over. When I started into an active study of groups recently, all this data showed up again. It is very important that a group went along just fine so long as it was running on dynamics one, two and three. But any one of them, knocked out, would cause a decay of the group, and it could decay from the moment one of these was knocked out.

We look that over from an evolutionary point of view, and we find out that man has succeeded in direct ratio to the amount of rationale and rationality within this group about what the group was doing, how the group existed and what it consisted of. Man progressed, his society progressed, he progressed as an individual.

But the idea of the group is very prone to shifts. We have again entered a cycle where one of these dynamics is being knocked out; not much attention is being paid to it. In the past few decades the stress has come off the individual — the worth of the individual, the value of the individual.

Dianetics is a breakthrough along that line. It talks about the value of the individual. Actually the individual, the group, the future, mankind — all these things — are almost equally important. But because Dianetics was introduced into a society where the value of a human being had been discounted somewhat and was on the decline, that particular individuality was punched up.

The collective state is the big goal right now. The collective state is the thing to have. How long will that last? That is really going to be a steep dive when it dives. Just looking over these tenets and predicting, one would say that when we knocked out dynamic three as a group and everybody became individuals, any society in the past went to pieces. When we knocked out dynamic two, any society went to pieces. Now we knock out one — and neither pay much attention to two nor negate against it — and say it’s all state, it’s all group and the individual doesn’t amount to anything.

Do you know how bad that has gotten even in our own society? It is being said that the points of advance of man in history have nothing to do with individuals and that it just happens that the group at a particular moment was ripe for something to happen, and for instance, a fellow like Alexander the Great happened to be there and so more or less the whole situation opportunely resolved around Alexander and it went on from there. That’s the philosophy of history, in 1950, in the United States of America, which up to just a few years ago was ruggedly individual to a point where the password was “I’m just as good as you are!”

Thomas Jefferson said every man is created with equal rights under the eyes of the law. That has been narrowed down to “every man is created equal.” This was meant to be a right to their own individuality, but some clever propagandist with more propaganda skill than brains came along and said, “All men are born equal. That means we’re a collective state, you see?” So of course the first dynamic is no good; it is not here.

History was made by these groups which just sort of evolved up to a point where somebody came along and made the history. Read over accounts of Napoleon — it “just happened” that things were that way.

Examine Alexander the Great as a man and you find that there have been darn few men like him. Not that he was a man who was terrifically advantageous to the society to have, but let’s just talk in terms of personal courage and brains. We find him doing such tricks as going out to fight with a body of companion cavalry, going right straight through the enemy ranks, finding the enemy leader and putting him to flight or killing him. Of course at that moment the enemy army would fold up. Alexander won all these battles.

You find him facing a great walled city, clear over on the boundaries of the world as far as he is concerned, and two or three days have passed and they are unable to do anything to the walls of this city because nobody can get in and open a door. Alexander himself and two other men insist that they get thrown over the wall into the midst of the enemy troops, where they cut these people to pieces, cut their way to the gate, open the gate and let the army in.

Was this group just opportunely set up, and could anybody have stood in this man’s boots? Oh, no! I don’t think so.

Take Napoleon for an example: as crazy as he was, he was at the same time an individual whose impact on the society was enormous.

By underestimating the value of the individual in the society, some mighty silly answers are going to be turned up and some mighty silly predictions are going to be made about the future of the various groups of the world today. For instance, Stalin is one of the smartest party secretaries and propagandists imaginable. This man is sitting on top of and holding in line hundreds of races that don’t even speak the same language. Whether he is bad or good, or whether it is bad or good for Russia, is beside the point. This man, by personal force, is knocking into shape an empire.

People sit around and say, “Well, communism is just a collective state, they don’t believe in individuals, therefore Stalin is not really that sort of a proposition.” They get into a terrible confusion about all this, because they don’t look at the fact that here is a man who is knocking together an empire. He has found the ideal way of fixing one up. He says, “There’s only one number one in this empire and that’s me! And all the rest of you people are a collective state.” Of course they are much easier to rule if there’s only one number one. And that is one of the methods of government.

Now, these are individuals who suddenly surge up into the society from some quarter or other with military aims and great governmental greed’s and ambitions, kicking at the third dynamic and the first dynamic, and these dynamics get badly mixed up. But it could happen a lot more often than it does, because we have a third dynamic there which resists this sort of thing. In other words, it picks up as itself. The group as itself is something. It doesn’t exist as just a group of number ones. It is itself a something, and it resists this sort of thing. Without that resistance the third dynamic would go out more suddenly and more often than it does. Or the second dynamic could go out. In other words, these things depend for their stability on all three being in pretty good shape: the individual, the future and the group itself. There is a balance there.

Number ones coming in, all of a sudden, will take number three and blunt it, whip it into shape and do something with it. It is a funny thing, but some of that has to be done. However, when it is done too much and number three is just staggered, the instant that number one dies, there goes the whole group. The empire of Alexander the Great down in Asia Minor did not last twenty-four hours after he died. His generals immediately got together over the table and said, “This is yours; this is yours; this is yours; this is yours,” and got on their horses and rode off in nine different directions, and that was the end of the empire.

It wasn’t a group. It was a first dynamic. One man had imposed himself so thoroughly upon the civilized world that the civilized world caved in the second he disappeared. So that is not a stable state to be in. That is not survival. Yet here is this collective state, and its basic law could be summed up in the idea “The individual is not important; what is important is the mass.”

Labor is a beautiful word. I never saw a management yet that didn’t work like dogs. I never saw labor yet that didn’t do a lot of management. But we have got “labor” here, and we’ve got the “people,” and out of this we get a very interesting fact that if we followed that tenet down to its reductio ad absurdum, we would get this theorem: Five morons make a genius! So this is not good survival.

In the first place, a group is more or less carried on the backs, somebody has said, of a few desperate men. There are enormously varied abilities in people, and a group has to look around for its leaders. The fact that it finds them all too often through their military prowess or some other thing just bespeaks the fact that the group is rather hard put all the time to find leaders — able individuals who will carry on the affairs of the group. That is a very tough one!

So we have interplay’s of these three dynamics. We can watch this in evolution back down through history and can find out that, according to history, it is evidently correct to say that there has to be an adequate balance between the worth of the individual in the society, the value of sex, the family and the future in society, and the value of a group as such. It is not just a happy compromise. Each one of these things are fully developable to a high optimum. If we pay attention to these things, as we look on this as the evolutionary picture, we find that that society would best survive which paid close attention to the fact that each one of these was important. And we find that a society will succumb as soon as it begins to neglect one of these as unimportant.

That is a cursory sketch of what you can learn by studying the history books. But there are many other ways to approach this problem. There is the way of sitting down and beating your skull in and just remembering everything you possibly could have picked up, plus everything that you have learned in Dianetics and a few things like that, for a month or so, and then trying to put together what you have weeded out. Then you take the rest of the tenets and amalgamate them and try to set the thing up one way or the other, and you get something that looks like Group Dianetics. The odd part of it was that this effort produced some results which predict a lot of things.

I hadn’t recognized that Political Dianetics was a completely neglected subject up to about six weeks ago.

I looked around and saw that the world situation was whipping up to a point of acceleration; something had to be done about that. I looked at the Foundation itself and found out that there must be something wrong, there must be a missing datum or two, there must be a missing viewpoint; somewhere here something needs to be rearranged, and particularly, something needs to be learned. It is obvious that we can’t have settled much in the line of Political Dianetics if we don’t know the odds and ends of laws that make up a group. We should be able to just suddenly pick up one of these laws, look at it and say, “Well, that’s being violated here,” and look over here and say, “Well, this is how you put that into effect,” and all of a sudden have a smoothly running organization.

This sort of thought action is very interesting. Go up into the abstract, up into the last end of nowhere, and look around and try to find some datum, and be very careful not to get stuck up there, and then get back and look at the real world and look at people and so on, and try to get into the swim of it and compare this datum back and forth, back and forth, till you have something.

The mystical background, the philosophic background, which goes behind this material runs somewhat on these lines: The first thing that actually comes in here as a tenet is that the group exists with a life of its own. We look at groups just as though there wasn’t a single individual anywhere in the group. First, look at it just as a collective body and examine it as such. We find that as a collective body it does have a life of its own. Oddly enough, the group does not depend for its sanity to any enormously marked degree upon the sanity of the people who compose it. Isn’t that interesting?

It means immediately that we don’t have to clear all the individuals in the world to have cleared groups. That is heartening because when one looks it over he finds that it would probably be possible within a year or two to clear up the major groups of the world by using various tenets. That is a highly ambitious project. I would not tackle it personally, all by myself. Maybe you will help me.

Here is actually an entity. It does not smoothly compare with an organism composed of cells. That is not an apt analogy for a group. If we consider it a living entity with its own analytical level and with its own reason for being, immediately the problem starts to resolve for us. The group does not exist necessarily for the individual, and the individual does not necessarily exist for the group. Consider the group a special entity.

When I was a brash young man I used to be fond of saying that a government had no blood or body, it was not something which could be attacked, and that the individuals were the only thing that mattered in it, and so on. Not so. The point is that this thing does obviously have a life of its own. When we start looking at it as having a life of its own the problem of groups begins to resolve, and a lot of problems about men, that I hadn’t known hadn’t been resolved, all of a sudden show up and get solved.

One of the things that led into this was done a long time ago in Dianetics; it was one of the first things postulated. A lot of these things dropped out of sight because the people with whom I was constantly in contact over the last eighteen months weren’t so much interested in groups, and in order to simplify things and explain what I was calling at that time “Abnormal Dianetics,” which only addressed the mind, I dropped out three of these elements. Therefore we have talked about the four dynamics. There are seven dynamics, not four.

That just goes to prove that a fellow shouldn’t listen too much, in spite of what the society has to say about he who keeps absolutely quiet and listens all the time becoming a very wise man. I fail to see what happens with this wisdom which he has accumulated if he never says anything about it.

We have seven dynamics. We have the first as self; the second dynamic as sex and future; the third dynamic as groups; the fourth as man, mankind; the fifth dynamic as life — life, no matter where you find it. If you find it in dogs or cats or jaguars or giraffes or any of these other things, it is life. Life in a blade of grass, life in a tree — these things are all life, and life has a great deal more affinity for living objects than it has for MEST as such, inanimate objects.

The sixth dynamic we will call — as I called it in the early days — theta. What do you call this thing? There is a dynamic toward the preservation of, or the existence of, or the being of, bodies of energy. Call it God, call it anything you want to, but it is there. Man has striven toward it. We cannot equate a balanced equation about any society or man unless we really look this thing over and say “Well, there it is,” and then not make the mistake of getting into an argument about it, but just postulate it there on the basis that man has always more or less thought and researched about this. And in this direction — he has more or less sensed this — there is a certain faith that he becomes imbued with and which makes it possible for him to do things that he never would have dreamed of doing before. It’s very interesting that we have to take this into account; science has, of course, practically ruled it out. Science goes into the line and says, “Well, God is probably an exploding atom.” I am sure that to a boy whose life is all wrapped up in electronics and who is sitting by a cyclotron, God is a cyclotron. To an author, God might be a book. And to a mechanic, unthinkingly, God might seem to be a very fine racing car. But that would be a rather shortsighted view for each individual. So we have to take into account the sixth dynamic.

The seventh dynamic is MEST — the material universe.

The second we begin to look over this array of dynamics the problem simplifies, rather than becoming more complex because we have entered some new factors into it. Now we begin to see that man has some other things in which he is interested. We have talked a lot — too much perhaps — about processing the individual. We have talked of this to the point where we forgot that probably our main goal was processing the group, if we wanted to pick mankind up and keep him from falling on his face as he seems on the verge of doing.

Now, on the seventh dynamic, man has an affinity for MEST. MEST kicks him back and he gets into terrible turmoil’s about it and it can be very brutal on him, but he does have a certain regard for MEST. It may be only the regard of a bulldog who is standing over a bone, and on the other hand it may be an actual affinity for an energy form. Whatever it is, he does have an affinity for it. He gets out and looks at the stars, at light and all these various things which compose the material universe. Of course, he is attacking the material universe; he is interested in it — we postulate that — and naturally he would be interested in these things. But we find out that an aesthetic enters into this — an affinity.

Aesthetics are very close on this line of affinity here someplace. I have really been looking over aesthetics and trying to find out what made them “aesthete.” I haven’t had much luck, but they are in this problem someplace. They are a piece over on the edge of the board that we haven’t quite got yet.

Let’s look at the idea of MEST. The wind, rain, snow, blue skies, space, time and so on — all of these things are MEST, and we live on the stuff. One of the first things that folds up in the aberree seems to be his attraction for all of these things. The real world (using that in a very qualified sense) becomes less pleasant to him.

Do you remember when you were a little kid, and you got up in the morning and there was dew on the rose bushes, and the wind blew and all of the world looked so good? Everything was so blue and so red and so green, the sun was so bright and warm. All of these things were very, very swiftly sensed by the individual and were appreciated. There was a definite reaching out and an affinity with the world. Then this dynamic began to be blunted by collisions with MEST, and MEST became less and less one’s friend. Finally one gets to be twenty-five years old and married, and when he gets up in the morning there’s dew on the rose bushes but it’s just something that gets his shirt wet.

The definition of a dynamic is something that we have which seeks the survival of something. In other words, we have something, each one of Us, which seeks for the survival of groups. We have something that seeks for the survival of mankind as mankind, and also for life, theta and MEST. If you don’t believe that, think of the horrible state we would be in right here at the present moment if there was no world to stand on! Man very much needs the material universe.

We certainly have felt this sudden quiver of sharpness sometimes when some character comes along like one who wrote in Argosy magazine recently that all of a sudden the ice was going to form on the pole and overbalance the world. Always in the past, he figured out, the ice had formed on the poles and then suddenly by overbalancing gyroscopic action, the gyroscope would switch ends and the poles would be where the equator is. He had all kinds of facts and data. He had every datum except one: he hadn’t compared his theory to the real universe. But that article, that the world might suddenly come to an end, caused a considerable commotion through the readers of that magazine.

And then we find Velikovsky publishing Worlds in Collision. That, by the way, is the oldest and corniest science fiction title in the world. We have been writing about worlds in collision for fifty years that I know about. It has gotten to a point where, in science Action, if an author sends in a story that has to do with the end of the world, the editor just picks it up and puts it in the envelope and sends it back to him again.

But this fellow writing about the sudden reversal of the poles of the earth had neglected one fact. It is getting warmer, not colder, and it is getting warmer to the degree that the South Pole has been melting for some time at such a rate that there is actually a possibility that the seas of the world are going to rise a little bit here in the very near future.

Anyway, people who had heard about the world going “loose ends” like that got awfully upset that it was going to swap ends. Nobody bothered to look over the general situation and find out that it is far from happening — that the ice is not stacking up at the South Pole but is actually melting off. It’s getting in better shape, in regard to that theory. And yet such a thing could still be published and it would still get interest.

Now, man is very interested in the material universe. At the same time, he is very interested in God. We go into India and find out about nirvana. Maybe some of you have seen a similarity between theta and nirvana. Certainly I have been exposed to nirvana, and a few times when I’ve gotten some bad rejection slips I have sought its beauties! All one does is sort of merge with nirvana and lose his own identity, and that is the end of it.

Groups have approximated this nirvana — the merging of the individual with God. “Let’s merge the individual with the group so completely that we won’t be able to find him anymore!” Individuals cause some governmental officials a lot of trouble. I imagine they would be happy if the individual did merge and disappear and leave them with nothing but an easily run, manageable state.

If we are going to deal with the overall philosophic echelon of Dianetics, we have to look over these seven dynamics and consider them in their proper places.

Now, the second we start looking here at theta, and we look at the past regard of man for it, we find that there is an enormous amount of data around about this that he thinks he has found. Scientific proof is not the only kind of proof there is as far as man is concerned. He figures that if he feels something strongly enough and everybody has gotten enough agreement on the subject, by golly, that’s the way it is. That kind of proof walks along with him through the generations. And for every race under the face of the sun, over as many years and in as many climes as I have ever been able to look, man has postulated this as part of the things which go to make up the All, and he has not only postulated it but he has gone to considerable trouble about it.

I was told that one time there was a crusade and a lot of people in Europe went down and fought a lot of people in Asia Minor, to what end I never quite could figure out. A crass and probably highly cynical individual came along and said it was because the crusaders wanted the wealth of Asia Minor that they had heard about. Well, the truth is probably in between the cynical and the altruistic explanations. Certainly somebody was excited about the sixth dynamic.

But there seems to be a life outside of the individual. We consider a thought a force, and we can consider an energy that we call theta as something which is detachable and individualizable in greater and greater chunks. As soon as we postulate something like this, groups become not only easier to understand but easier to handle, and that is important. In other words, if we use this just as a postulate and grant it that much reality, suddenly we can handle individuals and groups sufficiently so that theta can go on and attack the material universe far more successfully. I think the main trouble with this is people have been too strenuous about it, and they have sought to use the sixth dynamic too often.

But haven’t they sought to use the individual too often, too? The individual is practically negated and dominated out of existence in some of these societies today. They have tried to use the individual to control the future. They have said, “What’s important is the present generation; you don’t want all these future generations.” They have tried to use the second generation: “You don’t want all these future generations; what’s important is the individual.” They have used the group to smash out self. And the groups right now are trying to knock out man.

There is interplay in this solution. The optimum solution would be that solution which did the maximum construction or creation along the maximum number of dynamics pertinent to the problem. In other words, if you got a solution which put all of these things forward simultaneously, and benefited each one of them all the way along, that would be the best solution you could possibly get for anything. You can postulate an absolute but absolutes don’t exist.

The test of anything is its workability. Look this thing over and you find out when any solution has included more destruction for one of these dynamics than was absolutely necessary, the overall problem did not work out. But because of the complexities of problems, there is a natural, not a reactive, interplay of these interests. The individual says, “Well, what am I going to get out of this?” He has the right to ask the question if he is involved with a group. “What does this group mean to me as an individual?” But a real group has the right to ask him, “What do we get out of you, an individual, for the group?” So these solutions are interactive. As long as they are maintained in equilibrium they are in pretty good shape. The solutions of thought and life, and so forth, are contained in an adjudication of these things.

Now, theta is in violent conflict with MEST. And as a matter of fact, dynamics six and seven, when they are working as an interplay, seem to resolve a lot of our goals. If that interplay can be done harmonically, without intradestruction or turmoil, there is a successful amalgamation. We get an optimum solution. But when theta goes in against MEST with a smash, and MEST comes back against theta with a smash, the two of them will get into areas of turmoil. That is basically what an engram is. It is where theta (life force), God (life force), has smashed against matter.

The whole problem in groups, then, can be much more easily resolved if we say that on the first dynamic we have a little bit of theta chopped off and individualized, and that on the second dynamic there is a trust of the future, individualized, and that on the group, there is another piece of theta individualized. Theta can’t be nailed down in one place unless there is MEST; MEST is absolutely necessary to one of these things being in place. On the fourth dynamic is a larger piece of theta, which is mankind, and on the fifth, a much larger piece which is life itself.

Now, actually, if you reversed the sixth and seventh dynamics to place MEST on the sixth dynamic, you would say, “Well, here’s a much larger piece,” and then all of a sudden say, “Well, there’s theta.” But this unfortunately doesn’t provide the factors and an arrangement of factors which resolve the problem. People have been trying to resolve this problem with a reversal of the sixth and seventh dynamics for thousands of years and it hasn’t yielded any solution. We reverse it and put theta on the sixth. We do not include MEST in the activities of theta. Maybe there is an “overall” that includes material universes every place, but he has obviously got an executive officer, and that executive officer is theta, that we are considering here.

Now, we could mark down these dynamics in a line, six of them plus MEST. But MEST would actually be — if you included this super echelon — a different kind of theta, a sort of a capital-T Theta, which would include the material universe. The individual is a little tiny piece of theta, and the future generations are there as a piece of theta in trust; then there is the group which is a bigger piece; man, an even bigger piece; life, a still bigger piece; then theta itself that we are dealing with, and then big theta, and this would be the overall thing. This will resolve problems.

We ask of a group, does it have a life, an entity, an individuality, and so forth? It has all of these things. It is not an organism which is composed of the bodies of man, any more than a man is just, happily or accidentally, a collection of bits of rock and chemicals which just happens to have life. If you look at a group and say “It’s just a collection of individuals,” that’s a bad mistake. The group is actually, actively, an entity.

That entity has to have within it certain factors. Certain things are demanded of the individuals by that group, and the individual has a right to demand certain things of the group. For instance, a group will start to fall apart if it cannot demand, of the people within it, contributions of effort to its life. Strangely enough, the individuals in a group have the right to be able to contribute to that group. To refuse an individual the right to contribute to the group is to push him back.

As an example, take a church where everybody is passing the collection box. A child drops his dime in the collection box, and the person who is doing the collection reaches in, picks up the dime and hands it back to him, but takes the dollar and all the rest from the other people along the line.

The right to make a contribution to the group must not be denied to the individuals of that group. The only right the group has with regard to modification of that contribution is the right of coordinating it so that it doesn’t overbalance the purposes of the group. We have got to have an interplay and an interaction between dynamics one and three.

Now, the group must enhance the survival value of the first and second dynamics. The forecast of its survival can be made in these terms: The group has a potentiality of survival more or less in ratio to the amount it assists the individual, the future, man, life, theta and MEST. In other words, the group itself, as an entity, stays unblunted — it can thrive and survive — if it enhances the survival of all the other dynamics. It is true of any dynamic that it will survive so long as it enhances the survival of all the rest of the other dynamics. Therefore a group which considerably inhibits the survival of mankind will of course not in itself have survival value or be tolerated by the rest of mankind over a long period of time. It will be tolerated only to the point when the fourth dynamic is able to finally knock that group flat. And the fourth dynamic will try to knock that group flat. The group, then, has to enhance the survival of the individual and guarantee futures, not only for the individual but for children and the rest of it. A true group would include, in some degree, all the rest of the dynamics. If it included all the rest of them, it would be the most solid group imaginable.

The family, as a small group, is a pretty stable unit. A city-state is a more stable unit within itself than a nation, inherently, except for the fact that it can’t protect itself so well from other larger groups. So it has a weakness. The compromise, but possibly not the best solution at all, is a nation. The nation provides at optimum for dynamic one, for families, for children of the future, for groups within itself — great clusters of groups — but it has a life of its own, and that nation, if it provides for the future survival of all mankind, cannot perish from the earth. That nation which threatens the survival of any section of mankind will perish and inevitably has perished from the face of the earth.

When the United States dropped an atom bomb at Hiroshima, it forfeited its rights as a group on the fourth dynamic. It actually committed national suicide in 1945, if we want to work it out philosophically. When we start working this thing out from the inevitability of that action, we find out that it threatened the survival of mankind. Other men were working on this, and other nations, but they didn’t drop the atom bomb. The United States did, so it has made a bigger thrust in the minds of other groups toward the cessation of survival of mankind than any organization ever has in the past, including Genghis Khan, Hitler, Napoleon or anyone else. In other words, the United States made a deeper stab into the fourth dynamic with that atom bomb, in the minds of the people of the groups of the world, than any other group or organization ever has. They are thinking “It can be us!”

The reason for this is it demonstrates immediately that the sovereignty of nations ceases at this moment. On what depends the sovereignty of a nation? The right and ability to protect, to govern, to rule and to control its populace. In international law a government is one so long as it has its government in action over a small number of people. By definition, for instance, Chiang Kai-shek’s government in 1950 in Formosa is not a government, because it doesn’t occupy any of its terrain or any of its people or, so far as I have been able to learn, even any of the minds of its own people. It is like somebody standing outside the house saying “That’s my house” but being unable to get in, and nobody will let him in, and he has no deed of title.

What does an atom bomb do? There is no single defensive weapon right now which can resist or face an atom bomb. I don’t care how calm the U.S. Government has been about this business of the atom bomb in its efforts to calm panic where it doesn’t exist, saying you can live through an atomic war, and things like that. What happens to the sovereignty of a nation when it cannot protect itself against those things which might close in upon its borders? The United States Government today, in the face of the Russian possession of atom bombs, would not be able to protect any community in the country. You can’t intercept a guided missile going three thousand miles an hour. There are no radar screens. Jet planes don’t go this fast. You can’t pick up these things, spot them, cut them off. Force screens that would bounce them off are just a happy dream on the part of science fiction writers.

Defense and offense depend upon fifty percent offensive strength and fifty percent defensive strength. A balanced army contains that, a balanced force of a nation contains that.

Once before in the history of man, between 1500 and 1300 B.C., a guided missile — that is, an unlimited missile weapon — came in upon mankind. He had no defense for it. All of a sudden here was one hundred percent offensive strength and zero percent defensive strength. He couldn’t defend himself against this weapon, and all Europe was in chaos for two hundred years. The nations that existed there, whatever they were, were so thoroughly mixed up that we have virtually no records for the period to amount to anything. It will rather amaze you when I tell you what the weapon was against which there was no defense. It was a man on a horse with a sword.

There were no walls or walled towns that were able to stand up. Cavalry’s unlimited offensive action was of such an impact value that foot troops standing around with a few crude knives or something like that couldn’t stop them. So, the cavalry came in off the steppes, horse and sword, and practically wiped things out. There was chaos and there was no government possible.

The United States has now, with this guided missile weapon, worked itself up to a point where the second anybody starts really throwing around atom bombs, no government will be possible on a national scale. The groups will have to fall back to very small units. It’s an interesting philosophic observation that here we have a violation of the fourth dynamic to this degree by a third dynamic with a guided missile weapon.

The point I am making here is that it requires a balance of all seven dynamics, actually, to work easily and well. Now, when we regard hard facts such as an unlimited missile weapon, and that a nation, a group on the face of the earth, has threatened all mankind, we cannot blind ourselves completely to the fact that the rest of the dynamics are going to sort of cave in, particularly on that nation.

So what must a group do? This is the only reason I discuss this. It must have within it the potentialities of supporting and assisting the other six dynamics. It must help the individual. It must help the future. It must help groups (because there are always groups within groups). It must help man, who is not just another group. Man is not organized as a group, he is a species — an entirely separate thing. It must go into the remaining three dynamics too. That group must assist life. Going out and planting corn, planting trees and planting rose bushes is assisting life. It must be in concordance with theta and the dynamic toward theta. And on the seventh dynamic it should have as one of its functions the assisting of. That happens to be the utilization of in a harmonic fashion, rather than the destruction of. It must create with.

Let’s look over the problem now and see what we have gone over here. Any time you want to find out what is lacking in a group, inspect the group carefully and patiently from the standpoint, one by one, of the dynamics. What does it offer the individual? Does it permit the individual to offer anything to it? Does it offer anything to the future? Does it permit the future to offer anything to it? In other words, is it providing for children to be able to contribute to it? Does it offer anything to groups or does it merely seek to destroy groups within itself? Does it offer anything to the groups surrounding it? Is it permitting those groups to contribute to it, and is it contributing to those groups? We are talking now of one group sitting in the midst of many other groups not allied to it. It must have an interchange with these other groups. It must have a possibility of interchange in them, and then it must also have an interchange with the groups which are within it as a group. It must be able to contribute to and receive contributions from those groups within it.

The only way you could really knock a big group apart would be to set up a number of small groups within it and then fix it so the small groups couldn’t contribute to the big group, and then fix it so the big group wouldn’t contribute to the small groups. Because the essence of a group is thought, it is fairly easy to interrupt this sort of thing.

All this hocus-pocus about minority rights, the minority individual, the crushed minority and so forth, is actually one of the cruder operations. First one convinces a minority that it is a minority and then one convinces it that it isn’t permitted to contribute to the big group, then one convinces both it and the big group that the big group cannot contribute to it — and the big group of course is destroyed from within. A small group which is not permitted to contribute to the big group will, as its reverse action, turn against the big group and destroy it. It is acting on dynamics, and the dynamics interact regardless of direction; the dynamics will interact. And in order to keep the thing balanced this interaction had better be a creative one, because if there isn’t a creative interaction, then there is going to be a destructive interaction. There is no question of there being a null — a complete, utter null. That is like the highly theoretical, hair-thin point of zero on the scale between right and wrong.

The group could be estimated as to what it intends. It could be estimated as to its future and as to its size. Things could be estimated about a group by examining its relationships with the other dynamics. Does it assist them? How much does it assist them? How much does it destroy them? Of course, one must not overlook the fact that it is impossible to construct and create without at the same time to some slight degree destroying, because one has to convert. The conversion is a destruction of something.

Any group’s future could be estimated. That means that the Elks Club could be estimated, as could be the Polynesian nation or a Boy Scout troop. You can estimate the survival potentials of that group and its growth, because — and this is true of all of the dynamics, all of them — as it contributes to the survival of the other groups it is granted more theta. Groups might be said to be on an allocation basis. A small group that starts to contribute constructively, the interplay being excellent on all the other dynamics, gets more and more and more things going into alignment and there’s more and more theta present until, all of a sudden, nothing could possibly interrupt this group’s progress — nothing. It is as inevitable as bulldozers.

One just looks over the problem to see what this group has to contribute and what permits the group to be contributed to, and he looks and sees how much it complements the other dynamics, and that group can be estimated. If it does all of these things very well, it grows, bigger and bigger and bigger. Actually, at the final end, unless something again reverted against it and the cycle of life changed — the cycle of all these dynamics changed — it would embrace pretty well all of mankind.

The only reason why groups in the past have not reached out and embraced mankind was because they violated very flagrantly several of these dynamics. Every one of them did. If one were to look over these dynamics he would find that the plane of interaction is such that if a group were to support the dynamics creatively in just a halfway fashion, that group would still go out and embrace all of mankind. It would get the whole universe into it after a while.

There is the interesting point. A group is thought. You might say a group has a soul. A group is its own soul. It is a thought, and it has a body. The body is its perpetuating or perpetuated ideas, its ethic, customs, precedents — all of these various things — and its understanding of its own goals (ideas again). That is the body of the group.

Now, the heartbeats of the group are the ideas on which it runs from day to day, the interplay’s as it resolves the major ideas and problems and thoughts. The heartbeats are the small ideas that go along in the midst of it. A group has a survival potential, then, which is theoretically infinite.

The group’s size has to do with the size of its idea. This is not that it has got a big idea that it is going to do something or other; we are talking now about the fact that the idea is good, that the goals of this group are good. If the ideas which perpetuate those goals are good and it is following along the line set up on these seven dynamics, that group is a body. It is a thought which has taken on an actual body. It exists as such to a theoretical point where you could, for instance, strip half of the individuals out of it or put ten times as many individuals into it and it would carry on.

The finest groups in terms of morale, esprit, ideas, goals and futures have been made in the past out of criminals, psychotics and aberrees beyond aberrees! The individual aberration state is only a minor influence upon the group, actually, because there is such a small part in each one. But the group influence upon the individual is tremendous. Man is so thoroughly evolved, he is so constructed and he exists to such a degree as a group person that he is lost and doesn’t exist actually at all unless he is part of that body of ideas. Exile from a group is actually tantamount to death to an individual. Exile from all groups would be the most hideous thing that could happen to an individual.

We see this when we go down to any prison. What is the worst curse we throw against these people? We say they are antisocial. We could say they are against the third dynamic. They are individuals that the third dynamic has kicked out. They are not permitted to contribute and the third dynamic doesn’t contribute to them — they are out, they are dead, and they act like it, too.

There you have the picture of groups. These are axioms on a philosophic echelon. I would not even begin to tell you that this whole subject has been thoroughly worked out, but these are evidently the basic tenets — for this reason only: When one uses them and uses this viewpoint, he sees so many things which he did not see before, he can predict so much information, and when he looks for it the information is found to be there.

In this discussion of the basic laws, the basic fundamentals and postulates of the group, I have given you a new basic and a new background for the evaluation of any dynamic of the seven.

That god which does not contribute to the society and to which the society does not contribute is very soon off his pedestal. Have you ever noticed that? Take, then, thought: you can consider any thought as a godlet, you might say, or as a small devil. You can consider thought — pieces of thought — as ideas, actually, in their interaction. The Greeks deified these thoughts. Venus was love, the thoughts of love, everything that had to do with love. They fixed up an anthropomorphic thing and set it on a pedestal, and that was Venus, a godlet. And then we say afterwards they were pagans and heathens to do such a thing, but I don’t think they were. I don’t mean that it was right to set up a statue and worship that, but they were absolutely right in their analogy that a thought and a body of ideas is, to some slight degree, an immortal entity and is an entity. And the overall immortal entity, of course, has been worshipped by man as one entity for a very long time.

Now, if you look at the problem, not from a religious standpoint, but just from this philosophic standpoint, I think you can look around and spot the bad, non-survival points in any number of groups of which you know. You can find out why these groups do bad things or good things to individuals, and what the individual is worth to the group. We can get a sentient estimate, then, of the survival value and the force of a group in the society.

The fact that communism is spreading all the way over Eurasia and into the rest of the world merely states that it is a body of perpetuating and perpetuated ideas which happen to be superior to any of those which have been advanced to those people in those places.

The United States fell back by a lack of, you might say, “God power.” It didn’t throw into the breach its own tenets or contribute itself to those people to the extent the other group did. We measure this up and find out that the United States had a principle known as isolationism between 1938 and 1941. And then all of a sudden it was engaged in a great and awful war. And in 1950 the United States is trying belatedly to contribute something to these people that it “liberated.” But it is not permitting them to contribute anything back. There are tariffs and all sorts of reasons why they can’t contribute anything to this country — their books, music, their languages. In the United States there are very few people who speak even one European language. They are taught in the high schools, but I shudder to think of what a high-school student does with the Spanish language, which is right next door to him in Mexico, not to mention what he does to French and German. Other countries have not been permitted to contribute very much. Yet American arts, sciences and all the rest of it originate massively from these countries. We can look at any society and see the enormous interchange that exists with it. We have taken things from China, Japan, and many other countries as well.

Groups are mutually interchanging all the time. When that interchange is interrupted, watch out! And when any group suddenly rears back and out of some mistaken philosophy says “Now we are in a position to smash all of another dynamic,” it is inevitable that that group will perish, or mankind itself will perish. So the die is cast, right now, between the United States and the rest of mankind.

The United States has been taught to think of itself as a benefactor of mankind. There are a lot of agents that are undoing that teaching in the world. Actually, Americans know what they consist of in the United States, but do other people know? No, I’m afraid they don’t. And we wonder why there is unrest and turmoil, why our taxes are going up, why things aren’t running quite right, why programs aren’t going right.

I knew basically what could be done and that something could be done about this, but I had never until recently crystallized that into a recognition of the fact that a group is a segment of theta. As soon as one recognizes that, he finds that where any group offends against the higher echelon of theta, theta is going to twist over and come back upon that group.

Now, it is an odd thing that picking engrams out of groups is not terribly hard. One only has to expose them to view. But that is true of every engram, isn’t it? It just comes to view. And it is easy to treat thought and bring a hidden thought to view. It is hard to get thought out of, but it is easy to get and expose a thought within a body of thought. All one has to do is pick up the curtain slightly and show people what it was. There is nothing easier than “de-engramifying” a group. It depends upon very fast, excellent communication within a group. Groups can be big in exact ratio to the amount and speed of communication and transportation existing.

So, to actually go back and look over a group and knock out the society’s aberrations and heal scars that have passed before, it is only necessary to pick up the curtain. One can clear a group but that is not enough, because a group consists of ideas. The group must be given more theta. The ideas have got to be better. The group must understand more closely what it is as a group. One sees that the interplay between theta and the group is very close.

Here sits a nation, the United States, which has an atom bomb. But this nation happens to have within its borders the majority of communication technicians and communication facilities of mankind, and yet it sits and talks about an iron curtain!

The breaking up of the engram and the clearing of engrams from the social order would have to be accomplished by, at the same time, offering the rest of the groups a greater contribution than has been given to them in the past. This is not in terms of. One doesn’t contribute in terms of. One contributes in terms of ideas, thought and life.

The solution is actually very, very simple. One just gives the rest of the groups a far better idea than they have, and believe me, that is very easy. A bunch of boys over at one of the big advertising agencies could sit down for a single morning and whip up a better idea than communism or democracy, were it not that people aren’t permitted to think about these things.

Democracy is an organizational plan. Communism is an ideological set of ideas. And here is an organizational plan that is trying to face a set of ideas. When that bit of nonsense is pointed out, all of a sudden we realize that we need an ideology. We have got to have a body of ideas, and they have got to be good ideas. Imagine, the best salesmen on earth stumped for an idea. Oh, nonsense!

All the United States has to have is much better ideas than are being sold to the rest of the world, and to communicate them faster. With all its communication equipment it could consolidate the thing and make sure that there is an inter-contribution to the rest of the dynamics on the whole subject, and actually the world picture would collapse in terms of all of this provoked war. One of the first things the United States would have to do, however, is to get rid of the hot potato which it picked up at Los Alamos — give it to the United Nations — and then build another Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would not take long to do that.

Nothing travels with the instantaneousness of thought. It is very, very fast. The velocity of a thought is directly proportional to its ability to assist the dynamics. If it has a large value to the survival of all the dynamics it has a terrific velocity.

People have an idea that there is a social inertia. There is no such thing as social inertia. A body of people is not hard to move in any particular direction. That is one of the things by which people have sought to keep their groups stable. Recognize that as an idea with which groups were trying to hold themselves stable when they didn’t have anything else to offer. They said,

“Groups are very hard to move.” Newton’s laws of interaction definitely state that a body tends to remain in a state of inaction or persist in a state of constant motion unless influenced by outside forces. That is inertia. And they said, “The inertia of the people is such that they could not possibly accept anything like this.”

That is a survival mechanism and a sort of a little engram, and the second we pick up the corner of it and expose it, it is gone. It is just an idea. There isn’t a nation or a body on the face of the earth that in the face of good ideas and fast communication couldn’t be changed overnight. We are playing with ideas; we are playing with thin air. But the second that bigger and better ideas are entered into the picture, then the ideas which have to overcome them or face them have to be bigger and better.

Communism came along and offered to the world a bigger and better idea than the world had up to that time. The only thing that could possibly have been done about that was to offer a still bigger and better idea.

What does a nation of individuals ordinarily do when it confronts an idea — a revolutionary idea — springing up in its midst? It goes out and worries in terms of. It thinks in terms of, not in terms of theta. It says, “Shoot ‘em!” It says, “Send ‘em to Siberia,” which is a space preventer. It says this, it says that, but not in terms of theta.

Now, the second we get the ideas combated by ideas, then we are all right. The only possible way, evidently, that communism could have been swept away was for some nation or some group to have given the world a much better idea than communism, much more workable, that assisted the seven dynamics better. And the second it gave a better idea than communism, there would not have had to have been anybody shot. Communism would have folded up.

Advertising campaigns are continually trying to build up these ideas.

They do it in various ways, but all an advertising campaign needs to go is a better idea. When we are talking in terms of ideas we are talking about the product.

What we are talking about is the interchange through the society of these ideas. People start to get killed over something that can be changed practically overnight if you have the communication. So it is a very silly thing to fight a war, because all the war will do to the idea is confirm it by injuring enough people for that idea to get mixed up so thoroughly with that kicks back and forces the idea, and it becomes an aberration. But as long as it is kept in a fluid line, as long as it isn’t attacked particularly but just a better idea is furnished for it, the dangerous idea will go away and a better idea will come forward.