A public lecture given on 30 June 1960

On this sorrowful occasion ... I would like to ... that’s the first time I think I’ve ever been introduced.

The facts of the matter are tonight that we’re going to have an hour’s lecture and as usual, no notes, no ... no memorized speech, no data ... amount to anything, no hope, no place. I’m trying to match the general tone of the society at this time.

Once upon a time there was a happy man. Happy man. Did you ever hear about this happy man? Very, very rare. There was a ... an emperor, emperor of China and he had a daughter and she got very sick and nobody could cure her, and he sent for sages of all sorts, descriptions, oh, he sent for witch doctors and members of the BMA and ... and he’d have sent for anybody, see. Anybody.

And when he had sent for everybody they all agreed that there was nothing could be done for her. Course this after a usual consultation and the big fee, you see. Except one little fellow, he was a philosopher and he said, “Well, she would become perfectly well at once and immediately if she were covered by the shirt of a happy man.”

“Oh,” the emperor said, “that’s easy.” So he whistled up couriers and they went north, east, south, and west and rode at vast speed in all directions. But one by one they began to drift back and they had been all over the kingdom and they could not find a happy man. Except the last courier. Course by this time they’d practically sent for the undertaker. And the last courier came in and they said, “Did you find a happy man?”

He said, “Yes. Yes, I found a happy man.”

“Well?”

Fellow says, “But he didn’t have any shirt.”

That’s not quite factually true, Scientology-wise. Because when a person’s havingness is low he’s not always happy. But when you look at some of the havingness you get in the modern society, the newspaper, the ... I think it always says in the right-hand column, “Khrushchev for strong army and navy.” And the left-hand column says, “Eisenhower rebuffed on last visit.” And in the middle column it says, “Conference failed.” And then down at the bottom, “Scientist has brand new marvelous invention. A bomb only a quarter of an inch long will now be capable of destroying the whole world.”

Now havingness is getting very low when they start talking about broad, sweeping things like this.

But when we look at all of the modern gimmicks and inventions, and we look at all the space ships and fridges and TV with all of its American western programs, we begin to wonder what havingness really is, if this is all you can have in this society.

Because it’s very doubtful if any of us will go into space in a spaceship. Very doubtful. It’s very doubtful if any of us will even be called up to fight in the next war. We can’t even have a war now. Well, that’s ... that’s a fact.

You can just see the next war happening, you know. The next war is gonna be a very funny war.

Some American or Russian or South African or Argentinian or ... some general someplace is going to say, “Remember ... remember what happened in World War II. There were units cut off in all directions. The telephone lines were cut to central headquarters. And when they failed to act on their own initiative, they were all wiped out. And for some reason or other, I can’t reach ...” Washington, the Pentagon, Buenos Aires, it doesn’t matter where, he’s got a crossed up telephone line.

“We must be at war.”

Of course, warfare today, they have a big colorful panel, you know. It’s right in the general’s office, and it says Washington, London, Birmingham, Brighton, all the important cities. And all ... all the general has to do, you see, is just make a good guess at who we’re at war with, you know, and punch. And that’s it. Nobody sends us greetings, issues us the wrong size shoes. Nothing. We have no worries. Help in the modern society has gone so far that we don’t even have to fight another war.

Now isn’t that nice. I think that ... that’s great. They really helping us out.

Matter of fact, we don’t have to worry about the future. It’s all cared for. All taped. By the time you drag down your Social Security or your old age pension or something like that, why it probably’d buy one cigarette, the way money inflates. We have no worries. There’s no reason to worry about the future and so I really don’t know why you are really interested in Scientology because it’s ... because basically any science or philosophic development of any kind is, as everybody knows, put out only to appeal to the anxious and neurotic.

And obviously ... obviously, the tremendous interest in Scientology around the world is at variance, you see, with the fact that nobody has any real worries about the future. There isn’t any sense in worrying about the future – there probably won’t be any. But Scientology, in spite of this lack of encouragement on the part of civilization in general, does have at the present moment a larger scope around the world probably than any other movement in existence at this time.

We go further and we reach further ... well there’s one city Down Under, 10% of its population has been through a PE course. There’s a whole country where one out of every 37 people in that country is a Scientologist. We have a central organization office on every continent on earth, and these are now big central organizations.

But Scientology doesn’t gain because people are anxious. It gains because maybe for the first time in a long while there’s a road out. Or there’s a way up that isn’t booby trapped one way or the other.

But when you offer any knowledge or wisdom broadly across the world, it will appeal to one of many classes, and unfortunately for Scientology numerically, it really doesn’t have a tremendous sweeping appeal to the fellow who can’t think.

He likes to be told his facts. He ... he likes to come home all messed up from digging the ditch, you know, and that sort of thing and be told what to think. Now the most numerically superior philosophies on earth today are philosophies of that type, as you well know. They have their house organs, and some of these philosophies, if the house organ doesn’t print it just right, why the editor is shot.

Other places, if the party line isn’t followed just right, the editor is excommunicated. But ... now I didn’t mention any religion. What’re you laughing about?

Now there’s something with broad mass appeal. Now what you’ve got to do with broad mass appeal, the way ... way to figure one of these things out and put it together so that it really works is explain to everybody that the other fellow has got something, and if they belong to this movement, why they can have it. That’s ... that’s one of the ways of going about it. They say, “The other fellow has it all, is producing it all, is hogging it all, and all you gotta do is join the club here and when comes the revolution, you’ve got it all.” See?

It’s based on that very basic theory of havingness. In other words, if you join this movement you can increase your havingness, by theft, robbery, political election, some other methodology, why you’re gonna get something you ain’t got. And then they sort of understand at this point that somehow or another, you won’t ever have to work anymore, or something. Or, you’re going to get some odd and peculiar benefit that is just going to suddenly descend from the blue without any doingness on anybody’s part, you see. This enormous benefit is suddenly going to accrue, unearned but there it’ll be. A pie in the sky, get-old-quick age pensions or ...

Now, they ... they have some nebulous appeal which requires no thinkingness to achieve. And basically, these philosophies are always very sweeping, are always very current, and are incidentally of no real lasting benefit of one kind or another because you see, it isn’t true that all the havingness of the world is owned by the other fellow. And ... and it isn’t true that a person can escape from work and travail and everything else by some nebulous prestidigitation of the right way to make a cross or something like that, you see. This is ... these facts are not true.

In other words, they can never deliver. So they are transient. They ... they ... time goes on and the pie in the sky somehow or another never arrives to be cut and so on, and you get an evaporation of this sort of thing. But waves of these things have been going across the face of earth in particular for ages and ages and ages. As long as she’s old she’s had these sweeping philosophies which had a basic appeal to the person that could ... well, the person that couldn’t think. And other philosophies, which had more lasting characteristics, normally at their incept appeal to the largest ... to their largest extent appeal to the intellectual, to the person who can think, the person who can articulate his expressions, who is alert, who can observe, who likes to think things for himself and so forth.

Well, they’re always numerically smaller. Always. And they have, however, much more lasting effect. Why? Well, any philosophy that stirred up men to think or caused ‘em to inspect or examine life, or raised questions for their examination, would ... would have a chance of having a lasting future.

You see, gone are the politics of ancient Greece. Well we ... we don’t know whether the ins or the outs or the whigs and liberals and conservatives, we ... we know nothing about these philosophies... to ... hardly anything. Not even the historian tells us very much about the pro-Persian party of

Athens, you see, or the get-rich-quick pedagogery, you see, of Sparta, or ... or any one of these.

Oh, of course I ... pardon me ... I forgot Lycurgus. I forgot him. He ... he was down there in Sparta, and he got the idea that if you never had a family and you never did anything, why ... and you lived a pure life that was pure muscle, why somehow or another you ... you would all have pie in the sky.

I ... I wouldn’t mention him except the Russian has copied him totally. You want to find out the basic theory of communism, read Plutarch’s Lives. It’s Lycurgus, Sparta, nothing else. I ... I didn’t know it was that exact. I read it the other day. I was very enlightened. I said, “There’s a political philosophy that’s been going for a long time.”

But we do know the philosophies of Greece. The ... these things have invaded life to such a degree that they are practically the basic thinkingness of all of our wisdom. Only recently there was an enormous philosophic revolution, an enormous philosophic revolution. Somebody had gotten brave enough to revolt against the Aristotelian syllogism. The idea of black and white logic got revolved against. Very recently. It gives you some idea ... some idea how the thought, for instance, of Greece continued when its politics had vanished from view long since.

So are these ... there are these things of the moment, and these things which have some timeliness.

And perhaps the only thing that is peculiar about Scientology is that it has developed a people of the moment. We immediately violate the principles of a proper philosophy or science when we realize

I’m not dead yet. That’s instantly and immediately violated. We shouldn’t have any public or any audience. You get the idea? First requisite. And I’m just cussed enough not to follow it.

Now when we ... when we regard this, we must look also at the fact that the ... one of the angriest receptions any innocent philosophy ever got was accorded Dianetics, which is the mental anatomy section of Scientology. America was furious about Dianetics. They haven’t forgotten it yet. Fantastically true.

Just last Sunday, a magazine that goes with the Sunday newspapers of America called This Week, which has 13 million readers, had me in its lead story as having invented that strange psychiatric theory called Dianetics. They’ve got opinions on it and they’ve never even read it, although I will say this is a trick that newspaper reporters accomplish very well. I wish I had five cents for every time I have been quoted without having been interviewed. I would have a great deal of money.

But the basic messages that were put out in Dianetics simply were that man was basically good, that life could be understood, that there were areas of life that were knowable, that the mind was

underlaid with a reactive mind, which had hidden and unconscious impulses. That shouldn’t have been too new. Freud was talking about that for a long time. The big difference is that I’d found what it was composed of. That ... that there was some hope for it and something could be done about man’s present state. And in a very loose statement, you could say that was Dianetics.

Now is there anything in that to get mad about? No, the passions which have been elicited by a few innocent philosophic statements made in the last decade are fantastic. You have people at each other’s throats, literally. I sat a dinner party one night in Washington, attended by several very influential people whose names make news continually. And I was sitting there minding my own business and I noticed a lobbyist across from me. They’re a very low species. When they built the

Capitol and the Senate there in Washington, they put in some kind of wood that attracts termites called lobbyists. And they crawl out of the woodwork all the time. And wherever politicians or statesmen ... I ... may I amend that, wherever politicians are found, you normally find this animal.

And he says ... he says, “You were introduced as a writer,” he says to me, hostilely.

And I said, “Yes.”

Says, “Your name is Hubbard.” Says, “Your name’s L. Ron Hubbard, isn’t it?”

Somebody looked up down at the other end of the table and says, “What’s that?” I didn’t have anything to do with it. These two men fought for the next three hours. And the very remarkable part of it is neither one of them had a clue what they were fighting about. One was violently for Dianetics, one was violently against Dianetics. And neither one of them knew the first axiom of Dianetics or anything else.

And what I think is just about the time when the slavemasters had it all fixed, that we were all going to go into some kind of a numbered society – this is the way I figured it out. I had to do a lot of thinking about this. It didn’t take any thought to think up Dianetics or Scientology, but to find out what elicited such a fantastic reaction, that has taken quite a bit of thought. And I think it was just about the time everybody was all taped, they were all set to embroider numbers on our chests or something, and they had brainwashing all figured out and they had Pavlov’s good work and so on, and they could implant people with things that would then go on believing them forever. And they had man just about now convinced that he was a robot, you see.

Somebody comes along and says, “He’s a man, and he can be free and there are methods by which he can free himself of the various nets and entanglements in which he finds himself to be living.”

And I think that touched off the whole chain reaction.

And I think what makes ‘em furious is, they can’t find out what our pitch is. Obviously there must be something behind all this, you see. We must be representing somebody, someplace, you see, or we ... we ... we ... there ... there ... there must be a curve on this thing someplace, or a self-interest, you know. And so with great courage, some of these fellows come plunging into the line, you see,

well knowing you see, it’s all messy and at the bottom you know it’s all sabotaged and so on. And they get in there and they can’t find anything. Drives ‘em mad. Which of course makes ‘em far angrier.

But Scientology today has actually no business having the tremendous public that it has. Because it’s basically an advanced philosophy. It has certain demonstrable truths and so forth. But it’s basically the property of the intellectual. And sure enough today, although a lot of people flinch when they’re accused of it, I could show you definitely that it’s the top ten percent of earth that are interested in Dianetics and Scientology. I’ve had to take a survey of it to find out.

But I keep saying to myself, “Well we’ve reached our outermost limits now. We’ve got all the smart ones.” And then the next thing you know, why somebody in some country doubles his membership.

And the only reason this happens is because we can also make ‘em smart. We’re digging from the top down. And most of the people who are and have been with Scientology for a long time are the clever ones.

Well there’s several reasons for this and one of them is help. The most fundamental button man has is help. And that button which can be most easily tampered with or upset or aberrated in man is help. And you start saying to man, “help,” and man has a variety of reactions. And of course Dianetics and Scientology are nothing if not help mechanisms.

Now I heard somebody say a very short time ago that after a while in processing, IQ rises or something like that and becomes stable. This is not really true. With modern processing, IQ goes up pretty stably at the rate of one point per hour of processing, according to the various figures around.

That’s a recent survey. When we were running a certain type and series of processes, it used to do it about two years ago, three years ago, we stopped that particular series and we also stopped this IQ gain. We got other things but we weren’t getting this IQ gain.

Well, we’re back to doing it again, and when help is straightened out in an individual, his IQ goes up. Now there’s a fascinating one for anyone whether he’s philosophically inclined or technically inclined or anything else. Not only does his IQ go up but his freedom, of course, and belief and confidence in himself increase. Help is the button which can be just knocked to pieces or re-established in the individual. That’s a tremendously powerful button.

And of course, all great movements historically and on earth have worked somewhere in the vicinity of this button. This one factor of help. Priests, the witch doctor, the medical doctor, the scientist, no matter what cult, even nuclear physics, goes along ... has something to do with this help. The basic turmoil in nuclear physics and why they get such conflicting advices in government agencies is that nuclear physics is divided into two distinct camps. There are those nuclear physicists who believe that science was basically and originally designed to aid and assist man. And then there’s the other camp who don’t give a damn. And these two camps go, “Brrr.”

But the horrible part of it is, not even the nuclear physicist knows what he’s fighting about. But

basically, the basic mission and goal of a scientist, as he is trained or was trained yesteryear, was that science is for the aid and assistance of man. And of course, using scientific developments for man’s total destruction and obliteration is such a violation of this principle that a man either stays with it in apathy, you see, or fights somehow against it. Now I’m not saying whether they’re bad, good, right or wrong, I’m just showing you that their breakdown is basically on that one point of help.

Now, we see many times a healing group here on earth rise up, assist people, and then deteriorate and begin to live off their past reputation, charging large fees, working themselves into the legal structure of the society, doing all sorts of things in this particular direction, who actually are no longer helping man. Now I needn’t make any pertinent remarks, because I’m not mad at anybody, just now.

And ... but something happens to this button called help. Something happens to this one factor in life. A person basically intends to help. The beginning of any difficulty he’s in right now is an effort to help. And also, the only reason he’s alive and happy right now is help. This is a two-edged thing.

This is a double-sided coin.

If you think of somebody you hate, you can probably remember a time when you tried to help him, or a man like him. Your hatred actually is based on the fact that you flopped. You failed you and you failed him. When you were a little kid so high you wanted to help Momma and Daddy. Fine, you wanted to help ‘em, you wanted to get a big job. You wanted ... after a while you started getting unreal and exaggerated. You no longer brought Mommy the dishcloth and so forth, you started to get exaggerated. You’d say, “How could I make 800 billion pounds and buy them limousines?” You see, you’re getting desperate by that time. Possibly any of you could remember such a ... such a response toward your parents.

And then after a while you decided you couldn’t do a thing about it. And that is the basis of teenage negation of family. The child has decided he can do nothing about it. Now if that child also decides that he cannot help society or any section of it, you have a delinquent on your hands, if the child decides that. He has to know that he can help. And as long as he knows that he can help, he’ll stay in communication and stay right. But when feels he can no longer help, he starts blowing up. There goes his life.

A mans follows a profession for some years, and then suddenly and inexplicably changes his profession. He still wants to do that somewhat, but he feels he shouldn’t or he can’t. And if we trace it down, we will find out somewhere along this line he decided that this profession helped nobody.

Now when he found out it didn’t help anybody, he knocked it off. He said, “That’s it.”

The fantastic fact of some writer. He ... he writes a novel, something like this. And the novel is read, and then he never writes another novel. Well, obviously he can write a novel, because he wrote one.

Why didn’t he write another one? Well he found out the first one didn’t help anybody. He read his own critics or something. Something no writer should ever do.

Now here’s ... here’s this factor then that as far as one goes in life, is determined apparently by the degree that he feels his activity helps one or another sections of life. And when that poor fellow comes on down to the last dregs of nowhere, he can’t help anybody in the whole world including himself. And he’s a goner. He’s a goner. He’s a dead ‘un by that time. I don’t care if he’s still breathing. This man’s dead. It’s all a fella has to realize totally.

Now this makes a great oddity, that there is a single button that can be this thoroughly aberrated.

The limiting factor in the dissemination of Scientology was therefore not actually, we were running out of smart people, ‘cause we can make smart people, but we were running out of people who believed help was possible. That was the absolutely necessary condition to interest in Dianetics and

Scientology.

Now of course, the materials of Dianetics and Scientology have been around the world several times. Ideas of this character go rather rapidly. That was no ... no effort on my part. As a matter of fact, I ... I remember the ... the first time it was imparted to me that all of the books on the subject were carefully libraried in Moscow.

A fellow came up to me, total stranger, and he said, “Well Ron,” he said, “you’ll be glad to know that I was able to get your books into the hands of the communist party up in Toronto and got them all exported to Moscow.”

And I said, “Thank you very much.” Sure wish somebody over there could read English. Matter of fact we had a project going one time where we were going to translate them into German so the

Russians could steal them.

No, we had a limiting factor here. Apparently there weren’t too many people in western civilizations who still believed help was possible. Now this can very easily be put to test. You going out saying, “I heard an interesting lecture last night, a fellow by the name of Hubbard and he was talking about Dianetics, Scientology and so forth, and it was a very interesting subject, and you can increase somebody’s IQ or you can make ‘em happier or healthier or something like that.”

I’ll let you in on something. A certain percentage, altogether too large a percentage of people you make that statement to will say to you, “Ahh, it’s probably a lot of rff rrr rww.” You’ve stepped on their cat’s tail. You’ve said to them, “There is the slightest hint in the air that something has been thought up which possibly might help somebody.” And that’s just like stamping on the tail of a tomcat. “Meeoooow.”

Under no circumstances can anything like this exist. You’ve hit their help button. And if they’ve got a help button which is turned totally in reverse, they’re not gonna buy anything that has anything to do with it. Here’s the oddity. If they say, “Well that’s a lotta bunk and couldn’t possibly have any bearing on that, and we couldn’t possibly use it,” something like that. If the person makes this statement or has this reaction, ask ‘em how they feel about medicine, psychiatry, reading, warm baths, sitting in the sun.

You won’t get a uniform reaction on these buttons but it’ll be close. They don’t believe, really believe, help is possible. Now once in a while, some little ... little piece of hope is left not included in the overall condemnation of help. They think maybe it would help if people sat down quietly someplace and said nothing. That might help. They’ll have some little idea that some help might possibly be possible. But there’s no generalism about it. No generality.

And as far as helping their fellow man, if you want to best demonstrate to you, there’s this ... there are a tremendous number of technical terms in Dianetics and Scientology. They’re very difficult.

Very, very difficult. They’re very hard to learn. Want to be very careful of it. They’re mostly American slang.

There’s a technical phrase known as comm lag. Course that’s a communication lag. And that’s the length of time it takes between your asking a question and receiving an exact answer to that question. Many of these comm lags go unobserved. You say to somebody, “How are you today?” and he says, “I’ve been fishing.” See, well the comm lag actually goes from there to infinity, because he never did answer the question. You have to ask him several times. And he finally says, “How am I today? Today, today, today, today, today, today, today, today, today, today, t’day, t’day, t’day. Oh boy, that’s hard to say. That’s hard to say.”

Now that length of time between the asking of the question and the answer to the question is that comm lag. And if you want to get a good example of a comm lag, say to somebody, very fast – this person’s been married a long time and they’ve been having a rough time and so forth, say ... you meet the wife, you say, “How could you help your husband?”

I know that’s one of the silly answers. But that’s what life is. It’s silly. I can’t help it if it’s that silly.

Very often people look at me accusatively as though I invented this thing, you know. Maybe I did, but I don’t remember it.

So anyway, this help button is as dead as the person’s dead you see. You can tell how dead the person is by how little they can help. And it ... it’s actually a direct coordination. It’s one of the wildest things you ever wanted to study in your life. It’s too stupidly simple for any great philosopher ever to notice, you see. That’s how come I can come along and think of it. It’s just too silly.

Fella says, “What is the reason for life?” Oddly enough, the apparent ... apparent answer to the thing, the apparent answer to the thing if he wants a very finite, basic reason is to help people.

That’s apparently a fundamental reason for existence. And it’s too silly. But people ... people actually run on this basis. And when they can no longer help people, they’re dead.

You take somebody who is on the verge of committing suicide. He keeps talking all the time about suicide, suicide. “Ah, Morpheus, where is thy bows and arrows,” you know. Suicide. And he says ... and you say, “What’s the matter, Bub? Can’t you help anybody?” You’re liable to hit right into the middle of it. Yeah, he’s liable to say, “That’s right.”

Such a person one time was a terrible alcoholic. And I did this quite by accident. And I never knew what I did. It was a long time ago, and this person was ... was sobbing and upset and so forth, and said, “I never bring anything but bad luck to anybody.”

And I said, “Well, isn’t there anybody you’ve ever brought good luck to?”

They left without answering and at three o’clock in the morning, rang me up. And said, “Yes.” And that was the end of an alcoholism, and I could never figure it out. I had this as a case record, case history, and there it stayed. Well modern research is, you take all of the data which doesn’t fit your theories and you throw it away. That’s ... that’s the way modern research is done.

Of course, it’s gone one further step in some countries, which is to say that ... they take any data that doesn’t fit their theory or the political philosophy they’re operating under, and throw it away. Have to be two things that the datum agrees with before it can be accepted.

Well, we’re fortunate in this ... we’re fortunate in this, because I frankly don’t have the political acumen of a mustang. That is to say, as far as political philosophy is concerned, I ... I ... I used to be able to sit down and talk with communists and just have a wonderful time talking about communism, and talk to royalists and have a wonderful time talking about royalism, talk to anarchists and have a wonderful time talking about anarchy. And then afterwards, gotten all muddled up because the anarchists thought I was an anarchist, and the royalists thought I was a royalist. Well I wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t know they believed it.

Well, wherever you get an isolated datum sitting out like this, you get a miraculous cure. Well one of the fashionable ways to explain it is just to say, “Well, my personal magnetism is so great that the alcoholic just realized that they were really up against something,” and of course I really don’t wear this halo very straight, but that’s the right way to explain it.

But I’m stupid, I figure out there’s probably ... probably a better explanation. And it drifted along for years before I have finally fathomed what ... what that was all about. There are other isolated instances of this character, you know. But they fitted together and it simply meant that help was a very easily adjusted button, although it was a deeply aberrated button. See, a person could be quite mad on the subject of help but it was very easily shaken up and adjusted.

Now this is quite interesting. Now earlier I found out very definitely that it was very, very, very difficult for a person to stay crazy. This takes some doing. I tell you, you haven’t any idea ... you haven’t any idea how ... how hard it is to keep a sore chest or a neurosis or something like this.

Course it’s very difficult to keep a neurosis around a Scientologist because they get itchy fingered, you know. They say, “Couldn’t I audit you? What are you doing Sunday?” you know.

But the truth of the matter is, it’s very, very hard to maintain an aberrated condition, apparently.

Because anytime you hit anywhere near the button of the aberrated condition, it blows up very

rapidly. If you haven’t seen one blow up, you haven’t hit near its button. An e-meter or something like that could swing in closer to it.

But you take somebody who has a horror of snakes or something like that. What is that, herpophobia, isn’t it? I knew it had a Latin name. I knew I’d get a technical term into this lecture if I worked at it.

Or is that a hair disease? If you take a person with a fear of snakes, they’re on a line where there isn’t any help possible. Snakes don’t help them, they don’t help snakes, you get the idea? And they say, “Zneeooow.”

Well, if you just discuss with them, or try to discuss with them helping snakes, you’re gonna see some fireworks. See, it’s right on the button. Supposing this person is just a policeman. Course I know cops have their shortcomings. But this person, every time he sees a cop he goes rigid and turns blue. Get the idea, you know? There he goes, you see. And if you just say to this person, “How would you help a policeman?”

You ... you have practically taken a rocket and thrown it into his pocket. It’s the most explosive sort of a thing. It ... it produces real reactions. You’re just entering it as a subject of polite conversation.

You always have the safe point to retreat to of saying, “But I just brought it up as a polite subject of conversation. I don’t know why you’re so excited.” Course that makes a liar out of you.

But if you can get him discussing how he could help policemen, not how policemen could help him, you see. The person is at cause always. You see people are themselves, and if anything’s gonna happen around ‘em, I’m afraid they’re gonna do it. That’s not a popular theory. That costs us more people.

Some fellow walks in and says, “My mother, my wife, they stabbed me, I was hanged. They put me in the bottom of a barrel, and I ... I’ve just lost my insurance policy. The government canceled out.”

All of this, of that.

And you say, “Well, what did you do?” And you know, they just don’t like that. They never did anything. They’re guiltless and blameless, I mean. Now this fellow, just in an ordinary discussion of how he could help policemen, will blow this rigidity. It takes some fireworks. You have to keep him at it, you know. You have to get him, “Well, all right,” you say, “you could help him that way.

Now, any other way you could help a policeman?” you know.

The fellow goes, “Roww. Rrrrr. Are the walls going in and out here. Your face is getting large and small at intervals. What’re you doing to me?” You can just be an innocent bystander. Now if you’ve made up your mind that you know what’s wrong with him and you’re wrong and you try to discuss help with him on that subject, you’re not gonna get any fireworks. You have to actually – something

I wish some medical profession and other people would find out – you have to find out from the patient what’s wrong. You see, it’s not what you make up your mind what’s wrong ... it’s what’s wrong with ... you can only cure what’s wrong with the patient. Until you start giving ‘em penicillin, and then you’ll have lots of things to cure.

Anyway, here we have a button which fits into social conversation. Help is the most acceptable subject you ever discussed with anybody. And a person who starts to fulminate and doesn’t believe that help is possible has simply slipped. Help has redefined him, and you’ll find this out in discussing it with him. And it’ll stand your hair a bit on end, but there are people around who believe that help is betrayal. The only way you can help anybody is to betray ‘em.

I won’t bother to work that out for you, but look it over. It’s very interesting. Help has become betrayal. How do you help somebody? “Well, you lure ‘em into a back alley and shove a knife into ‘em.” And the person straightforwardly believes this. He has lost his judgment and criteria on the subject of help. And it’s the wildest thing to watch or listen to you ever heard.

If you’re ever talking to a known criminal, you know, somebody that’s been out in Dartmoor Scrubs or someplace for a long time, if you ... if you ask him what help is, you will get some of the wildest answers you ever heard. It’s incredible, but that’s what help is. He knows how to help people. You sell ‘em bad stock and that teaches ‘em better than to buy it.

You ... you start picking up the synapses and neurons in this fellow’s mind and looking in at the thetan, and you’ll find some of the most remarkable misdefinitions for the subject of help which you’ve ever heard. They’re incredible. Well naturally, you know what help is, don’t you? So it’d never occur to you to find out from somebody what they thought help was. It’s a marvelous thing, absolutely marvelous. The tax people believe they help. They do, or they wouldn’t be tax people.

Trouble with help is, it gets one-sided. You see, the fellow gets over on this side, pro-this helps that.

Or, he gets into this kind of a situation. The best way to help the Gumpwump clan is to kill off the whole of the Killibump clan. That’s the best way to help them. Well he’s so involved in helping the clan, you see, that eventually he’ll get a misdefinition. How do you help? Well, you kill off

Gilliwumps. Now all you have to do is just drop Gilliwumps and you have: How do you help? Well, you kill people, that’s how you help.

Now you go up to this fellow and you say, “Well, help me.”

So he says, “OK.” Bang. It sure gives life variety.

But the pitiful part of it is, that many cures that have been used down through the ages and so forth, in spite of all evidence that they didn’t help anybody, were consistently and continually used. And do you know that the people who were using these cures believed implicitly that they were helping people. Maybe they never had a case of success in their whole career, but they still believe they’re helping somebody.

Now the wrong way to handle them is show them definitely that they aren’t helping anybody.

That’s the wrong way to handle such a thing. The right way to handle it is have a talk with ‘em as to how they could help people. You’ll find out that the button will realign very rapidly.

Now I’m sure that you have people in your immediate vicinity that you have tried to help and have failed to help. But I wonder if you’ve ever looked at this: Was it possible for that person to accept any help? To that person, did help mean pull out a knife and stab a person in the back? Naturally he doesn’t want to be helped. What did help mean to that person?

That person ... well, you tried to help that person. The person was having trouble and so forth. You tried to help the person, yet the person apparently couldn’t be helped and would turn around and betray you. And your ... your whole feeling for the person was one of friendship and all of a sudden the person betrays you. That’s how he helped you. Help is betrayal. He helped you in return.

No, this subject is not a subject which forms so much a philosophic topic for discussion as it forms an experiential subject. This one is one that you can talk to people about. This one is one that you can notice going on in your vicinity. Now you just pick a person that you’ve tried to help at some time in the past that’s still in your environment and get a discussion going on the subject of help.

And I’ll guarantee that if you had a bad time trying to help that person, you’re gonna enter into one of the wilder discussions that you have been in for some time. It’s gonna be a wild discussion. It’s gonna be a strange discussion.

See, you know what help is. Help is to assist. But these people who make you fail don’t have that definition. They don’t have any such definition of help. And to that degree, we ourselves are betrayed in an effort in the world. Well, apparently the violence that greets any honest endeavor to help one’s fellow man is based on the fact that, “No, no, we mustn’t have one’s fellow man helped because that means to kill everybody.”

See, if ... if help kills everybody, therefore we mustn’t help any fellow men. “Please, please don’t help anybody because we’d all be dead.” Some such thing, you know. Some complete disassociation. Because this, believe me, is the button on which we have total disassociation. It occurs very rapidly.

But if you found a person with a very bad leg, do you know that enough discussion from you and getting enough answers from that person on the subject of how he could help legs would do something for the bad leg? Probably do more for it than all the clinics in the world. And for the person that won’t listen to you when you say you have a very interesting subject you’ve heard about and so and so, and he goes, “Reow, reow, reow,” don’t bother to discuss it with him. Say, “What is help?

What is help anyway?”

Oh, you’re liable to get one of the wilder discussions, or you’ll get a total silence. Or you’ll get no answer at all. But you’ll get no more “reow, reow, reow.” And maybe it’s worthwhile just to be able to shut that off.

Well, I’ve given you a dreadful weapon and I hope you’ll be here again. And if you come again, why don’t ... don’t come without having at least talked over the subject of help with somebody, will you?

It’s a very interesting world. If we live to help, why all we’re doing in Dianetics and Scientology is trying to do it with the least possible liability and the greatest possible effectiveness. That’s all we’re trying to do. It doesn’t seem very much to object to, but we have our good knock-down, drag-out fights on the subject. We also have our tremendous successes. And one of the successes was all you nice people coming here tonight to hear a lecture. So thank you very much for being here.

Next Thursday night, I believe we have a different lecture hall. Could you give me the address of said lecture hall? I’ll tell these good people where it is at. Aha. It’s the Empire Rooms, Tottenham Court Road, next door to the Quality Inn. That’s a free commercial. And the dates will be Thursday 7th of July, Thursday 14th of July, and Thursday 21st of July. All at 7:30 p.m.

There is by the way a congress the 6th and 7th of August, and there’s an ACC the 8th to the 16th (8th of August to the 16th of September). I, by the way, will be teaching that ACC because I figure auditors have got a lot to learn. The ... well I hope to see you again here. The hall holds a little more.

We’ve already run out of space here. And I hope to see you then, maybe up at the Empire Room next Thursday night.

Thank you very much for coming tonight. Good night.