

ORGANIZATION SERIES - PART 12 OF 20

[New name: How To Present Scientology To The World]



THE DETERIORATION OF LIBERTY

A lecture given on 22 November 1956

[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

I usually come fully prepared to lectures. Occasionally, though,
I don't. And this particular instance is one of those occasions.
I did want to round off for you these talks on organizations --
pushing home the idea, which is extremely valuable to all of us,
that organizations are composed of individuals.

An organization itself is simply a series of communication lines
and communication terminals with a common goal, and you use
organizations to get things done. You assume the post of a
terminal, you see, and you use the terminal and so on, and it
assists you in getting things done. But the organization itself
is nothing. I wish you could get a full appreciation of that.

You sometimes talk about the HASI, and so forth, does this and
does that. HASI never does anything. People in the HASI do this
and do that, and some of them are fair, and some of them are good
and some of them are real good. And some of them are on easy
posts, and some of them are on mediumly difficult posts and some
of them are on completely impossible posts.

But here we have an example of it. Certification is good or
certification is terrible. You mean the person who is doing
certification is good just now; the person who is doing
certification is poor just now.

Well, because people think of an organization as a continuing
thing, they begin to believe that it itself has great command
power because it outlives them. It never does! The semantics may
outlive something, but that's about all.

The semantics are quite interesting. We talk today about freedom.
We talk about freedom. That's a very important thing. Wow! You
couldn't overstate the importance of freedom. Couldn't. But
freedom 1776 reads a lot different than freedom 1956. It's a
different word. And we get one of the fundamental tricks of the
agent saboteur, which is change the meaning of the word: Don't
change the word; define it differently.

You could take a whole people and bankrupt them of any freedom or
civil liberty simply by changing the definitions. Don't change
the words.

Now, a president we had, President Frankie, used to talk about
"freedom from." That isn't the way it was defined in 1776.

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? That is a
fascinating document. And with what fascination I read the other
day the Supreme Court's opinion of the Declaration of
Independence. You didn't know that it had an opinion, but it
does. "This Declaration of Independence has never been used to
clarify decisions presented to the Court," it says, "because it
is not considered a legal or fundamental document of the United
States of America."

Audience: What?

That's what they said. It is not a legal document. It is not that
thing upon which American liberty is founded. American liberty is
founded on the Constitution of the United States, which is
founded, of course, on the most recent civil-rights bill. Oh,
this is fascinating.

You couldn't put a case before the Supreme Court on the grounds
that the Declaration of Independence said so-and-so and so-and-
so. You couldn't. The Supreme Court would not accept it as an
argument because they would tell you that the Declaration of
Independence is not a legal or fundamental document in our
government. But they take it out and wave it in front of you all
the time in school and say, "See, see, see. This is what you are.
This is what citizenship means."

As a matter of fact, it's left to persons like myself to complete
these cycles of action like Declaration 1776. Not just the way
you thought here. If you notice here, wearing a little coin --
this tiepin here. Saw this in a shop over in London and realized
that a cycle of action had never been completed. One of our great
revolutionary heroes said that he was going to finish the
revolution by bringing home the head of George III.

Well, anyway, this head of George III which I'm wearing here I
did bring home, which shows you... Actually that's a third of a
sovereign. It's no sovereign at all now, you know, none at all.

But the Declaration of Independence says certain things. It says
something about in-unalieni-a-e -- excuse me, unalienable... That
-- I -- I got it out! Unalienable -- that means no aliens must
have these rights. Rights to freedom and the pursuit of happiness
and things and stuff, you know.

Well, actually, what they really meant was that the politician
has the right to say what he pleases when making campaign
promises. That's actually what that all means. It means the
pursuit of happiness is an office of the government. See how you
could explain this all upside down?

In 1776, these better-minded men had no reservations on what they
meant for the people of the country. They didn't have a lot of
reservations. But the Constitutional Convention got together.
They closed the doors, and having closed them with a dull snick,
they did not even permit scraps of paper to be kept from session
to session. The chamber was entirely cleaned out. It was in
complete secrecy. No one was admitted to the convention.

And the only roster or notes which were ever kept were those of
James Monroe which were published almost -- correct me if I have
the length of years wrong -- almost fifty years after the fact. I
don't know exactly when they were but I think James Monroe was
either dead or almost so. And the country had been going for an
awful long time at the time they finally published his incomplete
notes of the convention.

We have then created a mystery. What was meant by our Founding
Fathers? Now that is usurped by the Supreme Court as their
mission to tell us what was meant by the men who wrote that
convention document -- the Constitution of the United States.
Otherwise, it's a total mystery.

No minutes of their meeting, no opinions, no expressions of
reservation are alive today for the use of anyone for their
interpretation. It's an interesting thing. Why would they so
cripple and abet a future redefinition of terms?

Freedom to them meant freedom. It didn't mean freedom from. It
didn't mean the freedom to tax. It didn't mean the freedom to
exercise our police duties without restraint. It didn't mean some
people will be citizens of the country and some won't be. In
matter of fact, it says in the Constitution of the United States
that all persons in the United States shall be citizens. And a
citizen is somebody who has the right to vote, and he's somebody
who has this right and that right. And because right after the
Constitution was published and adopted people were still cloudy
about some of these things, they tacked on ten clauses which we
call the Bill of Rights. Ten amendments, just to classify and
clarify what these rights were. And there we had a pretty good
definition of what a citizenship meant.

What was a citizen entitled to? He was entitled to these first
ten amendments. And with what glee does the government thereafter
reinterpret, redefine these various phrases and words.

If you were to take freedom and redefine it, if you were to take
democracy and redefine it, if you were to take taxation and
redefine it, as the right to seize the body, if you were to take
legislation and define it as that action taken by an executive of
a nation...

They do this in Brazil, you know. You know how they do this in
Brazil? It's very interesting. It used to be this way. I don't
know, they've had a revolution or two since. But all they had to
do was publish a law in the newspaper. The executive of the
country dashed it off in a moment of pique or something like this
and he just published it in one obscure newspaper up in Sao Paulo
or something like that, and it became the law of the land. Nobody
ever had to know what it was. They could be arrested, tried and
hanged on that, and they never would have heard of it. That you
could define as legislation.

You could take each and every name or word in the Constitution
and redefine it or you could take these common catch phrases that
are used by the politicians -- I'm sure most of them believe
these things are simply catch phrases -- and define them quite
adequately and arduously, and you could have yourself a complete
slave dictatorship with the greatest of ease.

And yet people could be so reasonable with you. They say, "Well,
you say you're a citizen. You know what a citizen is? A citizen
is somebody who is employed on public works without pay."

Now, you take involuntary servitude. You know what involuntary
servitude is. It means the employer has no right to change the
government pay rates. You'd say it means involuntary. Well,
involuntary -- that means unchanged.

Now, anybody who commands police and armed forces can define
anything any way he pleases.

At once upon a time the citizens of the United States were armed.
A man who didn't have a couple of spare horse pistols was not
considered a gentleman.

You know, I knew a fellow once that was snubbed, absolutely
snubbed, in Charleston. His dueling pistols were old, very out of
date -- matchlock. Not the new flintlock. The matchlock, of
course, had the interesting mechanism, you see, of going off for
a long time before it fired, and you could duck. And the fellow
was actually considered a coward because he maintained that these
were good enough for his father, they were good enough for him.

Squirrel rifles, muskets, shotguns were very, very much around.
Powder was very easy to come by. Lead was very easy to come by.
People made their own bullets, had their own bullet molds. You
didn't go down and buy a bunch of "catridges" at the general
store the way they did a few decades afterwards.

When this country was founded, everybody had his bullet mold, and
he used to go down and get a couple of pounds of lead, and if
nobody gave him a couple of pounds of lead, and if he couldn't
get a couple of pounds of lead, well, there was always that
little figure outside the Peaceful Arms Inn that he could
suddenly knock off and put in his pocket and go his way. There
was lead around. And he could always melt up the wife's pewter.
There were numerous things he could do. And there were parts of
the country where the lead mines had not been sufficiently
developed, but what you couldn't pull off the dumps, some rocks,
and put them in the oven and have lead.

Furthermore, it may seem incredible at this time of high
development of arms, but all powder consists of is the niter
which accumulates underneath a pile of manure and some charcoal
and a bit of sulfur. You can always get sulfur for somebody's
cough, and there was sure plenty of uh... of um -- certainly was
-- lots of charcoal. You could make gunpowder.

Today, as close as you can get to making gunpowder is taking a
new deck of cards, scraping it carefully with a razor into little
shavings, and you'll have gunpowder. That's right, the plastic on
those cards shaved thin enough is an explosive. It's
nitrocellulose -- or some such chemical compound. Maybe playing-
card companies have been restrained from doing that however.

But at one time we had a considerable number of arms.
Furthermore, the military was armed exclusively with government
issue, and it didn't care whether it fired or not. It couldn't
have cared less. Somebody handed me something once that was made
in 1835 at Springfield Armory and asked me to fire it, and I did
a double take on the thing. I was perfectly willing to fire an
old pistol. But I said, "Where did you say it was... Oh look!
U.S. Heh! Dragoon pistol. Well, very interesting, very
interesting piece. Why don't you put it up above your fireplace
someplace. How are we going to draw the ball out of this thing
quietly?" What was it going to do?

But the very best arms were simply comparable to the public arms.
In other words, an armed uprising was a real danger. The city of
Washington, DC, at this moment is built and planned to keep
people from pouring down the streets and hitting the White House
unannounced. Each one of the circles with their radiant streets
is actually a field gun emplacement, and a field gun placed at
those junctures, and crammed with a whiff of grape, would do a
great deal to discourage petitioning of the government.

Now, they've gotten some holes dug under some of them --
underpasses of one kind or another. They must feel a little bit
defeated about the whole thing, or maybe they feel terribly safe.
Maybe the government feels awfully safe. What would justify it in
feeling safe?

The public at large, under the Sullivan Law and other laws, is
not really permitted to own arms. The government itself is armed
with subcaliber machine guns and all kinds of other anticivilian
weapons. They're called antipersonnel in the war, and in peace
they're called anticivilian.

Large armies are maintained, not to restrain aggressors, but to
keep populaces in place. That is the real reason armies are
maintained, although they are usually pointed outwards with a
State Department creating enough commotion on the outside of the
borders of the country to make it seem reasonable.

But armies of large size have as their first mission the
restraint of armed uprisings amongst the population. And if it
was only foreign aggression that worried governments at large,
there would seldom be armies because they're expensive. They cut
down the amount of pork you can take out of the barrel. You
could, of course, go on manufacturing tanks, weapons, guns, and
parking them in fields and keeping a militia, but a standing army
does have as a primary use and mission the restraint of
populations.

But what kind of a population is it today that one would have to
restrain? It's not a population that's any longer equipped with
pistols and weapons, swords, and so on. And any sporting rifle
that you happen to have is unfortunately very inadequate against
a Garand or other types of weapons which fire a rather fast,
heavy slug. Submachine guns are very discouraging. I admit that
you can fire a .45 with greater accuracy and almost as fast as a
sub-Thompson machine gun. I've done so, but at the same time it
is a particular skill, and there aren't even very many .45s
around.

So we see that the arms are no longer held by the public and are
held by the government. In other words, a difference of armament
has come into being whereas you have a heavily armed government
and an unarmed public. In such situations, you get a
deterioration of the pride of the individual citizen. That is all
that deteriorates, by the way: his own pride. He recognizes "I
can have no effect upon. I can be shot at. I cannot shoot back.
There is no threat from me, no threat whatsoever. I am unarmed. I
have no voice that can spit fire." And, as such, he then goes
into apathy. He permits his liberties to be redefined for him. He
pays his taxes without protest. He does not any longer raise a
large voice of outrage.

The idea that an armed uprising could win today without exterior
help in armament or without a large part of the army itself
defecting to the public cause would be just folly. You would have
to have a very different strata, a very different parity, or lack
of it, in order to have liberty. Nobody is restraining the
government from putting FBI offices all over the country which
are armed with tear gas bombs, submachine guns, automatic
shotguns, and other weapons which aren't even good anticivilian
weapons. These FBI offices look like arsenals. What are they
afraid of? -- which is really all I'm talking about. Of what are
they afraid?

They must be scared or they wouldn't be so prepared to shoot.
There must be somebody around hunting them. The politician must
feel uneasy. Is it in his conscience? Is that what's uneasy?

I myself have gone the length and breadth of this world amongst
the most savage people you ever cared to sit down and gnaw a
human thighbone with. And nobody's ever laid a hand on me in
anger -- outside the United States. But in the United States I
have actually had to calm down, on about three different
occasions, police officers. They were nervous! I had to give them
a talk at once, straight out of their own manuals about the care
and use of firearms.

I remember one silly cop down in Los Angeles who made me sit
sideways from the seat of my automobile. I was parked at the
curb, and he made me sit away from the seat clear at the extreme
side of the right-hand side of the car so that he could reach in
the window and pick my keys real carefully out of the lock and
get back out of the road.

And I said, "What's the matter with you, boy?" I said, "I don't
bite."

And he said, "Well, we'll see about that."

And he went stalking back to his own car, and he put in a radio
message straight to headquarters. I wasn't doing anything. There
was no reason for all this. He put a radio message back into
police headquarters, Los Angeles City, and of course he got back,
"Officer, United States Naval Intelligence, Special Officer Los
Angeles Police, Lafayette R. Hubbard."

And he came back and he said, "Here's your keys, sonny. Whatya
doin' sittin' here parked?"

And I said, "Well, is it illegal to park here?"

And he said, "No."

I said, "I was wondering whether I should go and get an ice-cream
soda or not."

But what was he scared of? Of what was this man possibly afraid?

Another one which I've commented on before: A Federal marshal
grabbed me off a lecture platform. There are some people right
here I think right this minute who were present on that occasion.
There was a hell of an uproar going on this because they wouldn't
present their credentials. But up in the office he was waving
around a pistol with the most wild abandon. He didn't know what
to do with it.

You don't draw pistols against unarmed men, not unless you're
scared. You'd have to be real scared though to draw a .38, and
then real dumb to put it in the belly of somebody who has been
trained in judo. You don't stand, you know, two feet back from a
guy with a muzzle of a pistol in his stomach, not in this modern
age. Civil populaces have become educated enough in some
countries of the world to realize what you do with pistols that
are held two feet away from a man's body by him. You eat him up.
In the first place, you can move before he can pull the trigger.
He's completely helpless. I put his pistol back in his holster. I
told him to be good. But what was he scared of?

One day a man walked up to me, and grabbed me by the shoulder and
told me I was under arrest. I said, "For what?"

He said, "Never mind that. You're under arrest."

I said, "For what?"

And he started to get real mad and real upset, and I finally made
him tell me for what I was under arrest. It was the wrong man.
But, boy, that fellow was uneasy. He was nervous.

Noting this condition many years ago in studying the subject of
Dianetics, Scientology -- putting them together, working with
them -- I thought it might be an awfully good thing to become a
member of a police force for a little while to find out what they
were scared of. And I did -- became a Special Officer in the Los
Angeles Police, as I just mentioned. I wanted to find where these
vicious criminals were that were making them so frightened.

I had a beat down on South Main Street. They didn't know who I
was. I was careful to talk colloquially -- like I do in lectures.
And they were very friendly with me because I was something they
could understand -- a policeman.

But down on South Main Street amongst the gyps, grifts, and the
dopes, the hopheads, the tea eaters and the rest of them -- the
lowest strata of humanity that comes across from the lowest
strata of Mexico to mingle with the lowest strata of Los
Angeles... And boy, that's low! Los Angeles is the only city in
the world that deserves psychiatrists.

Amongst these people I thought I would find my answer. I was in
bars and dens and things where I didn't know man could go that
far south. I only had one fellow ever give me any real trouble,
and that was a Mexican who was awfully drunk after having been
high on marijuana. And he kept coming alongside of me and
grabbing my gun out of its holster because he wanted to shoot his
best friend.

In view of the fact that the gun was unloaded (never bothered
with a loaded gun -- the cartridges are heavy), I kept taking it
away from him and putting it back in the holster and snapping it
down -- explaining to him that that wasn't what you did with
friends. But he couldn't understand this, and I finally sat him
down over in the corner of the cafe. He grabbed once too often,
when I had my back to him after he hadn't bothered me for half an
hour, and I gave him a push, and he knocked down a couple of
tables.

And I apologized to the proprietor, and took him over and sat him
down back of a table and poured him a glass of warm water filled
with salt. And I told him that was the best Scotch and soda he
ever drank, and it was on me. Well, after he had gotten rid of
it...

He came around, my next time past that place, and he told me that
he had decided something. And I asked him what he had decided,
and he said he had decided that one should not shoot his friends.
This was a wonderful thing.

Now, Los Angeles has the lowest strata there is. That was the
only man that ever gave me trouble, and he actually didn't have
any real malice in his heart at all. It was just sort of a sport
he was engaged in.

Now, I've been down amongst one of the finest bodies of police
you have ever cared to meet -- the Federales. They're pretty
tough, and they occasionally do take more away from you than
seems quite just. They patrol the northern border there --
they're to be found a little bit into Mexico -- and when they go
off the payroll they have to get their pay where they can find it
as they have done in a revolution or two of past days. But these
are fine men. And yet the criminals which they handle are really
pretty easy to handle. Those men are real tough, and they really
never have to be tough.

Where are all these tough human beings?

I admit that some man occasionally will become afraid and will
become totally gripped by the belief that there is menace in
every fellow man. I admit that a human being can become so
aberrated as to constitute a menace to the bulk of the society,
and that in such a case it is necessary to reacquaint him with
society. But I will not admit that there is a naturally bad, evil
man on earth.

It's a very amazing thing that the only men I have found in this
society or any society who were dangerous were cops. And they
have uniformly been afraid -- they're nervous.

There are good cops. There are many, many good cops. There are
cops who are not afraid. There are cops who are taking life
easily. But I haven't met very many of them. The percentage I
have met were by and large fellows who sat around and worried
about what weight of brass knuckle they should sew into their new
pair of brass-mounted gloves; cops who were upset because a
recent regulation made it possible that the lead in their billy
would be detected. I've seen cops who were nervous and cops who
were afraid, and I've seen people who governed cops and handled
cops and ordered cops around who were afraid. But I don't meet
many anyplace else, even amongst criminals and cannibals.

A fellow comes out of a jail. He'll always tell, "You know, I
don't understand why any of those men are in jail. That's the
finest crowd of men in that jail you ever met. Swear by any one
of 'em. Give 'em my last dollar, and I know I'd get it back."

I was with a bunch of criminals one time as a ranger, a ranger up
in Montana when I was a kid. Rangers have to take over crews of
tramps and so forth, sometimes, in order to fight forest fires.
You suddenly find yourself with numerous fellows who have
recently left Joliet without being properly discharged. You find
yourself with fires occasionally set by tramps who need a job.
You find all sorts of interesting complications, but very little
viciousness. And there was a fellow there who kept telling me
that he was on the run because he had taken a knife to a fellow
and stabbed him in the belly. He kept telling me that this was
why he was on the run. And he told me often enough until I
finally realized that he was real worried about it. He wasn't
running because he was wanted. He was running because he'd hurt
somebody.

Now, these criminals and bums did a pretty good job fighting
fire. Criminals can't work. That's mainly what's wrong with them,
and you have to work real hard with criminals to get them to do
work at all. However, one of them got his boots practically
burned off his feet, so I loaned him a pair of boots that I had,
an extra pair of boots. He was on another crew by the time I left
the area, and I went back to Helena. And when I got back to
Helena, I said to myself, "Well, I'll never see those boots
again." This fellow stole a car and drove two hundred miles, and
he returned me my boots. And then he drove the car back and left
it parked and went his way. They have strange ways of transacting
business in life, but they are seldom scared.

They are scared of police, however. Just look that over for a
minute. Here you have a bunch of people who are scared, so they
go and get themselves a job and then talk their superior into
believing that they have to be armed to the teeth, with steel
teeth. And then you have a bunch of fellows who are scared of
authority and orders -- get that, they're only really scared of
orders. They're really only afraid because they can't take
orders. Because orders have gotten them into too much trouble,
and they fly back from them. And you get these two elements
opposed, and you get newspaper stories, you get crime, you get
all of the histories that you read in the FBI files, and you get
this problem called criminality.

I don't know what would happen if you suddenly removed all the
police. I don't know really what would happen. I don't know what
would happen to police if you suddenly removed all the criminals,
but I can guess. They would start, as they are doing today,
attacking the common citizen. They evidently rarely arrest the
criminal today. They will arrest, however, the honest citizen.

If you read of some honest citizen being shot, you'll read in the
next paragraph how the police are investigating him. "Minister
shot, the police are investigating his past." Not a word said
about where the fellow went that shot him or whether the police
were onto them or not.

Watch that, because it is a symptom of police closing terminals
with the criminals. It's the deterioration of the game called
cops and robbers. Television is televising it out of sight. When
the cops and robber game is gone, then there will be no other
plot that anybody can film for television. They've already worn
out the cowboy in the white hat and the cowboy in the black hat.
That's gone. I mean nobody will look at that anymore. They just
say, "Well, I know how that's going to turn out. The fellow in
the white hat's gonna win." They've been conditioned to believing
this, so it's a no-game condition. It's against the law to have
the fellow in the black hat win in those cowboy pictures, and
they've ruined the game.

All right. It's against the law to have the criminal win in the
crime pictures, and so, of course, that game will go by the
boards too -- even though the criminal has won out in the
society.

The criminal might be walking around tomorrow, wearing a gun, in
control of all those submachine guns, tear-gas bombs, automatic
shotguns, calling himself a cop. And who would know the
difference if all the words had been carefully redefined as to
what was liberty, what was freedom, what were civil rights.

Cops and criminals have a tendency to swap valences, close
terminals. When they do that thoroughly, you have the beginnings
of a slave state.

A state caves in along the bridge that connects it with its lower
elements. That bridge is police. The police close terminals with
the criminals and then turn on the citizen. And only the police
or people who are so turning would be interested in redefining
the words of the Constitution of the United States. Only those
people would be interested in redefining those words, because the
rest of the people wouldn't be that afraid.

When you have to reduce liberty, it means you must be scared.
When a man is afraid, he doesn't perceive, so it almost always
happens that that of which one is afraid doesn't exist.

Definition: Fear is a state of imperception; fear is an
unwillingness to confront.

If one cannot confront, he cannot become aware of. So, if one is
unwilling to confront, then he doesn't know what he is
confronting, and he doesn't see what is in front of him, and he
can dream up this mirage called "the viciousness of man." He can
dream up this big production about "the government must be all-
powerful so as to keep these people in their place." He even goes
as far as to make emplacements and wide streets so that populaces
petitioning the government with some velocity can be whiffed a
bit by grape. Do you see that?

Those are symptoms of terror. It is true that a mob can be talked
to by a man who is afraid and can be talked into believing that
there's something awfully bad over there, that they have no
havingness of, and can be momentarily turned in that direction
and made to run amok. But I don't notice many sheriffs standing
there very long with shotguns to stop them. Occasionally we hear
of heroic stands where lynchings have been prevented, or some
such thing, by a lone lawman. But usually it's been my experience
that he was out having a drink while it all went on and the jail
was knocked down and the lynching was done. While the riot was in
progress, there never could have been less police.

Of course, it's usually unfortunate that the police do get there,
usually unfortunate that they do -- in the first place, when they
arrested the guy. What have they got him in a cage for? Are men
supposed to be kept in cages? Well, evidently police think so.

Well, they must be very imperceptive, because if they go down to
the zoo and look, they won't find any men in cages down at the
zoo, and yet they think men should be kept in cages. They think
that's what you're supposed to do with men. And I think that's
rather dull. I don't think anybody's ever taught them any
different. Nobody's ever walked up to them and said, "Hey, do you
know something? You keep wild animals in cages, and you don't put
men in cages. They don't belong in cages."

And I bet an awful lot of cops would look at you and say, "We
don't put men in cages. We put 'em in jail. It's different."

I don't know how this would be different, however, since I have
never known a criminal to be bettered by being put in jail, and I
have known many to be worsened. They drop down below apathy by
being put in jail, and their criminal tendencies are then totally
in control of them.

There hardly exists such a thing as a one-time prisoner. They're
repeaters -- that is, in the ranks of criminals.

So the society at large could be said to exist in pretty good
shape, going its way, doing the best that it can, floundering
along into this rut hole and out of that one, helping their
fellow man and being helped -- except for two or three odd
elements in it.

One of those elements is the insane. We can do so much about this
particular one that there's hardly any use to talk about it. What
we lack is facilities. If you were to process people who were
insane in the society -- if you were to take them -- you would
find it was absolutely vital that you sever their immediate
connections with the society for a period of time, because the
society is what is bothering them. The society is bothering them.
You must keep them unbothered for a little while, and in addition
to that, you must keep them in a state where they cannot injure
themselves for a while until you can set them up straight.

And then you must be able to take your own sweet time about
processing them, because their span of attention is so
instantaneous, so momentary, that to grip it for three or four
minutes at a brace is rather -- it's rather big; that's rather
something. To get an insane person to give you his undivided
attention for thirty seconds is not rare, but for him to give you
sane attention for about four minutes -- well, it's practically
impossible. And yet an auditor auditing them in any other place
than a proper institution would discover that he was spending
four hours of the five hours of processing doing nothing but
trying to keep the guy quiet so the neighbors wouldn't be
bothered, and that doesn't have anything to do with processing
him at all.

You could do various things with a criminal. One of the things is
to give him some rest. Give him some rest, give him some food,
let him walk around, cut him away from the things that are
worrying him a little bit. And a great many people with that
treatment all by themselves would recover. Others would recover
if you simply walked them into exhaustion so they could then
sleep. Others would recover if you simply had an area that was
very quiet, that they could go and sit down in.

It's quite amazing. If you didn't bother them with interviews and
didn't bother them with this, that and the other thing, how many
would snap back to battery -- completely apart from any
processing.

People, for instance, with electric shocks get out of
institutions three weeks later than people who are [not] given
electric shocks, on an average throughout the country. In other
words, his incarceration is increased by three weeks by reason of
having been given an electric shock. That is what you read into
that figure. In other words, an electric shock deters his getting
well.

All right. There are other things you can do, tremendous numbers
of things you can do. If you had a motionless object floating in
the air in some room, the criminal could go in and look at it for
while. You'd find something odd happening. He'd just look at the
stillness until he could accept that piece of stillness, and by
the time he could actually go in that room and stay in that room
quietly for a while, he would be well on his way.

In other words, there are ways of treating insanity which don't
even require an auditor, but require an auditor's careful
supervision: An auditor who knows enough not to get as desperate
as they are. An auditor who knows that it is exactly the opposite
-- the insaner they get, why, the quieter and easier you get. Not
the more frantic you get.

But this problem is not actually a tremendous problem in the
society. It's being sold as one for the benefit of appropriation.
I don't know how much an insane person is worth to the medicos
and the rest of them that fatten on this particular line, but
it's a real nice sum of money. That's why they give them electric
shocks and extend them I guess.

But the amount of money one insane person costs in terms of
appropriation -- state, county, city and Federal -- is not
available but... I wouldn't even be able to guess at what the
thing is, but it's a very high figure. It'd astonish you. You'd
say, "If I had that much, I could take it easy and drive nothing
but a Cadillac."

So, where do we have much of a problem? Well, we have a problem
in a group of people who are redefining insanity. Insanity is
becoming a new thing all the time. Insanity is a new group of
words. There's schizophrenicmelancholia. And that's a new
condition. It means a man who doesn't like to sit at a desk, or
something.

You watch psychiatric classification and you'll find that
insanity is apparently increasing all over the country, until you
examine the increase of symptom classification. And when you go
and look at this new list of symptoms and classifications of
insanity, you'll find that this huge array is growing and getting
huger continually.

And so the village idiot who used to be able to sit quietly on
the curb and whittle or something; the fellow who would go into a
sort of a trance every fall and go around throwing leaves on his
head and playing like they were gay nymphs out in the forest or
something; the fellow in the spring gets out on the desert in a
full moon and dances like a rabbit, something like that (hardly
anybody hasn't, see) -- but these now become insane
classifications.

And people can say to the wife, you know, "You know uh... have
you ever taken this up with George? Uh... have you ever watched
that? You know it's very, very unusual. You mean he actually does
come home and he isn't cross with the children? That's very
abnormal." That's called "non-crossis with the kinder." It's...
So they get him a psychiatrist and an institutionalization. This
is the way they do it.

The number of insane in the country are continually increasing,
then, according to the statistics. But the statistics are, of
course, totally obedient to the number of classifications and
this opinion: What is insane? What is insane?

Now, I read the other day a psychiatrist testified in court. If a
psychiatrist has a patient, you know, he can now give whatever
the patient told him as testimony in court to get the patient
convicted. Did you know that?

Audience: No.

Yes, that was passed recently as a Federal law -- that the court
can use as evidence anything that has been told to a psychiatrist
in confidence by a patient. So they convict them this way.

And a young fellow who was quite mad was trying to get off of a
criminal charge by pleading insanity, the psychiatrist said,
because the patient had admitted to him that he was feigning
insanity. It's the most interesting case I've read in a very long
time, since I wouldn't put any stock in anybody's statement who
was in the condition this person was in.

So this person wasn't insane merely because it suited the court,
but he really was insane. He sat in the witness box batting a
baseball all the time -- was still wound up in a baseball game
someplace, even when he was convicted.

But the psychiatrist had had him as a patient, came into court,
testified that the patient had once said that, and that of course
put him on a criminal count. That was very interesting.

Conversely, they say uniformly, down here in the District, that
the only mad people that appear at the sanity hearings are the
psychiatrists. The psychiatrists always look and act crazier than
the patients. You hear jurors say this. I mean this is their
considered opinion. And the psychiatrist has become almost
uniformly a legal entity, under recent legislation and custom. He
is a legal entity. You do not find him today very far separated
from the courts and law. You find very few psychiatrists in
attendance in institutions, very few.

They're always trying to train some psychiatrists, and then the
psychiatrist will take over as the county psychiatrist, which is
a legal entity.

The psychiatrist is closing terminals very rapidly with the
police. So we have that problem as a problem which is next door
to the criminal problem, and even its legal practitioner is, of
course, sort of a cop today.

All right. Now we take, then, these two classes -- the criminal
and the insane -- and we have compared with those, then, the
psychiatrist and the police.

And the psychiatrist is very nervous about insane people. There
was a fellow one time...

It would amuse you, by the way: there's a huge organization in
this country that watches our programs and everything like a
hawk. And they even get out their literature, and so forth, now
in exact format, but very fancy. They must pay thousands of
dollars to get print jobs that we pay hundreds for. They fancy it
up, you know. They assign exactly the right type and so forth.
For instance, they now call their meetings "congresses," and they
have "first day," "second day," "third day" and "fourth day."
They have "group seminars." Yes, fantastic business.

And now they've even gone so far as to hire a group
psychotherapist to take over the sick companies, and so forth.
They can't have what we really have, you understand. They can
only have as much of what we have as they can understand, which
is a program form.

This is a... It's quite amazing. The speed with which they send
us all their literature, too, is quite amusing to us. It's almost
as if they're asking us for our approval. Two or three times I
have been tempted to write on one of these programs or releases
which they put out -- they're a tremendous organization; they're
knee-deep in Wall Street -- and I have been tempted to write on
them, "That's fine. Ron."

But this organization falls off in the direction of trying to get
it all down to being crazier, trying to get it all down to being
a little nuttier, trying to get the "Now businesses go crazy."
This is the new idea they've got. And they're getting
psychiatrists for businesses. Don't you see?

This is quite amazing. It's a trend of the society that we see
here, an amazing trend. But it is actually being put off on the
average person that the performance of the policeman and the
psychiatrist versus the criminal and the insane, form human
behavior. And each one of these is so peculiar and particular in
itself as a behavior pattern, that these games -- which are
becoming really just one game now: the criminal against the
honest citizen.

You see, you could get all four of these -- the police, the
psychiatrist, the insane and the criminal -- you could say,
"Well, that's fine, they're all wound up." And now they convince
the legislator that this is the behavior of the average citizen,
and you would then get, really, the criminal -- which would now
include the legislator too -- and this group against the honest
and general public, you see.

Here we've taken a peculiar set of manifestations -- insane
manifestations, criminal manifestations, hate, fear;
manifestations which cannot perceive. They cannot look at their
fellow man. They cannot tell what their fellow man is like. And
we're taking their opinion as the opinion of the human race and
advertising it as such. And they are men who are afraid, and they
are men who cannot see, and we notice that under their rule the
problems of insanity and criminality increase continually. We're
getting greater and greater problem here. We're getting more and
more. So obviously, the sickness in the society, this bit of a
cancer that is developing, is not getting less, it is getting
greater. And it's getting greater, obviously, only because nobody
out there has an answer to it.

This is mirrored in the newspapers. We see this crime, and the
insane rape attacks and insane attacks by police on some honest
citizen which resulted in a fight, or something of the sort, then
represented as a terrible gun battle or something.

I remember right down here one time on 16th Street, a military
officer's son was told to stop by the police. And it was a rainy
night. He evidently didn't want to put on his brakes very fast,
and the cops just grabbed a gun, shot him in the back and killed
him dead. And his car then slithered over and ran into a lamppost
with a dead body in it. And there was no criminal activity of any
kind. But I happened to be on newspapers here in Washington at
the time; I know what happened there.

And they turned in a report of a two-mile chase. And the
witnesses were quite to the contrary, but nobody would listen to
them, rather hurriedly, because this was a criminal action on the
part of police. They had shot and killed an honest citizen.

We never hear of them doing that, do we? We always hear of them
shooting and killing, or shooting and arresting criminals, don't
we? And yet by the law of averages, they must, very often, pick
on an honest citizen; very often. Well, we never hear of this, so
we can assume, then, that it is carefully never advertised.

What is the state of crime? What is the state of insanity? What
is the state of the society as a whole? The average citizen would
not be able to answer these questions. And more and more, through
what he is taught in the newspapers and on television and so
forth, his opinion of his fellow man has deteriorated.

His fellow man, according to Freud, is a sexual pervert. If the
fellow is artistic, it's because he's had continual sexual
relations with his mother or something. That's the obvious
consequence to being artistic, you see. It's just a downgrade --
a downgrade of the society as a whole -- advertised by people
who, through their fear alone, advertise that they cannot
perceive. So they wouldn't know what the society is like. They
wouldn't understand the society because they'd have to look at it
first. And they don't look at the society, and so they believe
that criminality and insanity bring about the absolute necessity
to create a police state to redefine liberties to keep the
ordinary citizen under careful wraps, because he's liable to
explode at any moment and tear them to pieces.

Now, the average citizen, finally learning this may someday do so
-- but only when he has totally become criminal and totally
insane. And that isn't likely to happen, because we're here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]
