
ORGANIZATION SERIES - PART 16 OF 20

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



A POSTULATE OUT OF A GOLDEN AGE

A lecture given on 6 December 1956

[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

I want to talk to you now about something else that is very
vague, but something that might be of some interest and is
certainly in the field of total speculation. Total speculation
is, of course, seldom obtainable, but in this case it is. And
that is the future. This we can say is in the realm of
speculation.

Now, a person who is apt to be challenged by his peers or
"infeers" is very apt to fly into the future for his very solid
utterances. The only trouble with that is, although he can never
be challenged at the time, the future has a habit of catching up
with one. And you could describe the future as a discarder of
discredited prophets, which becomes the past. So we then have a
definition for the past: The past is an area which is entirely
full of discredited prophets.

But when we speak of the future we normally think of ourselves,
our family, a particular group. How about the future of society?
Very seldom has a man ever walked forward and seriously discussed
the future of any given culture. He has hoped for it. He has
worked for it. He has speculated about it. But to make any sound
pronunciamentos, on a cultural level, concerning any given
society, is not usually done.

But when it is done -- no matter if it is badly done -- it is
quite often fantastically successful. Why? It's because everybody
is too timid to put down a postulate for an entire culture. Most
people are too timid to do that. They're too afraid of becoming a
discarded prophet.

But perhaps it is better in the minds of some men to be right
only for ten days or a year, and to have made a postulate which
did at least become right for some period of time, than never to
have prophesied at all.

Now, there have been chaps on the track who did prophesy; fellows
of very ill repute indeed. We have fellows like Hitler. His
prophesies were not the prophesies for a culture. They were
prophesies for an insatiable ambition.

There have been other fellows on the track who have made
prophesies for an entire culture -- men like Hitler. And they
have produced disaster, because they, again, were not really
prophesying for an entire culture. They were prophesying because
of ambition, and ambition alone. And so the ambition of an
individual is crammed down the throats of an entire multitude,
and necessarily then this becomes chaos. Wreckage is strewn in
the wake of such an action.

Only in the field of -- well I hate to say religion -- in the
field of philosophy has a prophesy of the future (laying down a
postulate as to what the future would be like) ever been vaguely
successful. And in this field we find the society going forward
and not particularly disintegrating because of. And we find that
from the field of philosophy we have achieved what future the
culture does have.

It's an interesting thing to look back and isolate the source,
usually, of any given era or period or political entity. We look
back into Greece and we can actually spot the exact people and
the exact statements which became Greece. We look at such chaps
as Pericles. Pericles was just a politician, but we know him best
because in his age Greek freedom and Greek art came toward the
ultimate, and actually were never as good afterwards and had
never been as good before.

But this chap had some interesting ideas, and he was not totally
and only a politician. As a matter of fact, it's rather
interesting to look over his record and discover he was a rather
bad politician. So we must say he was a better prophet for his
own culture than he was a politician for himself.

But he was a pretty good prophet. And he postulated the future,
not only of Athens, but for other Greek states, for the Roman
Republic (getting pretty wide), for France, for England and for
the United States of America. Because he laid down a singular
principle, and that principle was that the citizen should know
more about government and should participate in it to the fullest
extent. And this, carried forward -- as he carried it forward in
his own government -- became the Age of Pericles. There was no
higher level of Greek culture than this one age. "Everyone may
participate. Every man's voice should be heard." And this was a
wonderful thing, and so far as I know, had not been said before
politically.

And so we have one man giving forth a postulate, since he just
didn't say this should be, he said this will be. And he bent his
own political efforts in the direction of making this come about.
And even though he himself was not a successful politician, he
put his postulate on the next 2300 years. He put his postulate on
the world we live in much more solidly than another chap who used
to give lectures by the Sea of Galilee. That's for sure. Because
the great nations of the world which have since arisen, have
arisen, actually, because they wished to emulate and follow in
the path of free Greece.

The scholars of 150 years ago in this country were known as
scholars simply because they knew about the Age of Pericles. If a
man knew enough about that period he was learned, he was
educated. If he could speak Greek as well, well, on a Sunday you
might be able to touch him on the sleeve if you were lucky.

The learned men of the society studied these things. The Founding
Fathers of the United States were themselves very educated along
this line and practically no other. George Washington's aides
were the glibbest chaps you ever saw in your life on the subject
of what Greek general had done what, when. But they couldn't for
the life of them have told you anything at all about what some
American frontiersman had done fifty or a hundred years earlier.
They were not educated in that. They were only educated in the
classic tradition.

This very word classic tradition at one time meant only the Age
of Pericles. Classic. What made it classic? Just that one thing:
"Every man may have a voice and may express his opinion in his
government and the actions of his culture. Men are entitled to
that voice. And the culture itself should contribute to them the
availability of information so that they can know what the
culture consists of."

In other words, it was the duty of the culture to educate men
into the existence of the culture. It was the duty of the
individual, knowing these things, to contribute his own knowledge
and his contribution to his own culture.

This was something new, and man had never learned this... had
this before the Age of Pericles. Therefore, the great nations of
earth since, which have sought to rise under the mantle of
tyrants, have perished. They are dead. There isn't one alive
today anywhere within the sphere of learning which we know as
classical Greek history.

Now, we might point to Persia and say this wasn't the case in
Persia. And I can point out to you that Greek history was never
taught in Persia, any more than we now teach German history in
our schools. They were enemies. The Oriental world was not taught
any of this until recent times, and you'll find the entire
Oriental world in foment. You find it bursting its bonds and
leaping at the throat of every tyrant who raises his head. You
find these people ungovernable. You find [the] entirety of Asia
in a state of revolution today. Why? They just got through
reading Greek history.

We read it 170, 180 years ago. Our learned men, our own leaders,
the men who were to become captains and majors and generals, who
were to become the fellows who wrote such things as the Articles
of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution -- these men were learned only if they knew Greek
history. And the very learning of it was really more than they
could take, because they did not conceive within the compass of
their own training that England was following through classic
tradition.

Taxation without representation was not described as a sound
principle in the Age of Pericles. Plato frowned upon it.
Aristotle might have subscribed to it in a loose and drunken
moment at a banquet of Alexander's, but never amongst his own
friends. And so they frowned upon it. Across a bridge of two
thousand years these men were taught to revolt against tyranny,
and they did. And that is what the Age of Pericles did, and the
postulate it laid on the future.

A fabulous thing to observe: We think "Love thy neighbor" has
been the civilizing influence. It has not been. "Be free" has
been.

The religious world may have dominated, at one time or another,
the Middle Ages, but the religious world consisted in itself of a
tyranny and was itself antipathetic to this very thing called
freedom. Where we could have the word of one man saying, "All
must now believe; all must now worship; you must keep your hand
in your upper breast pocket while quoting Psalm 66 and in no
other place," we did not have freedom. We had slavery.

And we also never taught very much about Greece until the day of
the Scholastic. And it was an unhappy day that they reached into
the tombs below the Vatican where they have kept all the books
which were salvaged from the old Greek and Roman libraries, and
brought out and gave to the world, like a little tidbit, the
works of Aristotle as a scientific work, and formed the basis of
what we called Scholasticism. And people read a little bit
further and they found the rest of them. They found people like
Plato. They found this fellow Socrates. They found these other
chaps who had a lot to say. And all these chaps were talking
about was freedom and there went the church. Boom!

You can recognize the truth of this. There was no stronger force
on the face of earth, in 1400 and something, when Cesare Borgia
was letting his sister poison some fellows so his uncle the pope
could sell a few more seats in a few more monasteries. This was a
tight, capitalistic, highly profitable tyranny, and it blew up in
their faces. And it did an awful lot of very violent blowing up
before we begin to hear about anything like freedom. Things
started to blow up in sections, and they blew up in the face of
religion.

We had such oddities as the entirety of Holland in revolt against
tyranny. We had the oddity of Philip of Spain coming up to
Holland and burning people in the streets for heresy. We had the
people of Holland being butchered and run into the dikes, and we
had them fighting down to the last man. With their preachers,
they considered their first freedom, freedom of religion. And
their preachers went about in the fields on a Sunday reading from
a forbidden book called the Bible. And because Philip ran out of
troops before Holland ran out of population, the yoke was
overthrown. And that was the end of that particular regime.

And from there we had blowups the length and width of Europe.
They were first striking for freedom for religion and out of that
crew came the Puritan Fathers. It's very interesting, very
interesting to trace it back, not as something speculative and
not as something that you or I would then guess about, but to
trace it back with such heavy-heeled strides straight back to the
Age of Pericles.

Religion became free. And when it became entirely free, it
itself, as a last tyranny, began to blow up. Freedom of religion
destroyed religion.

Now, where did the United States ever believe that it could at
any given time set up a regime upon the backs of people who were
taught to be free? This would be one of the most adventurous
actions ever taken by a man: to throw the United States under a
tyrannical yoke. Oh, he might get away with it for five years. He
might get away with it for ten years -- if he had enough troops,
maybe twenty-five years. But during that twenty-five years
there'd be an awful lot of troops dead. And certainly at the end
of that time man would have reasserted his birthright.

It would not really be possible to enslave the population of the
United States. It would be possible to permit them to forget, or
to teach them so much that was otherwise "very important" that
the data would become swamped. You could over-educate them, swamp
and drown these lessons of freedom, and gradually ban all the
books that mention the Age of Pericles, the classic Greek, the
history of Rome. You could throw these data away if you did it
very carefully, but with what care it would have to be
undertaken.

Chaps like me would have to be shut up first. That takes some
doing.

Now, it's an interesting thing to look at a stable datum and
discover that that stable datum has been the resulting cultures
for some twenty-three hundred years. And that stable datum was,
"I have a right to know about my government, to voice my opinions
concerning it, to contribute to and participate in the political
and economic activities of my age, time and people." Man believed
that. Somebody told him he could. And that was back in the days
of the classic Greek. And nobody's been able to stamp it out or
handle it since. Wasn't that a terrible thing to do?

Think, think, think of what an awful thing this was to do. Think
how mighty some of these rulers might have been. Think how
overwhelmingly huge and beautifully carven their thrones might
have been. Think of the architecture we've missed in their
palaces and shrines of worship which were never built. Think of
these poor chaps that dedicated to an enslavement of man, without
any capabilities and no man to enslave. Awful. You can just see
these fellows now. The uniforms they would have worn, never
manufactured. The gallows they would have erected, never built.
The prisons they would have filled, never even planned. I think
it's a dirty trick on these fellows, don't you? What ambition has
gone to waste here, because they've never managed it.

We have just gone through a considerable cataclysm that none of
us really understand for what it was. The cataclysm was World War
II. Why do we pay attention to World War II and not pay much of
attention to the Korean War? Well, you could say one was fought
by the United Nations and the other was fought by the United
States. Yes. Yes, yes, that's true, except we lost all the troops
in the Korean War.

No, the Korean War was not for any outright principle that we
ourselves could define as part and parcel to our own beingness,
so we had very little in common with the Korean War beyond the
boo-boos of a few politicians who are since demised. These chaps
are not politically active today. One of them tried to advise his
own party about something just a few months ago and they laughed
themselves sick.

Well, no, there was a difference between these two wars. They
were quite similar in casualties. You may not realize that the
Korean War lost three hundred thousand young Americans, but it
did. It was a big war. We certainly didn't pay much attention to
it. That's because it wasn't on the line of our own principles.
But World War II was. We thought that that war was right down our
alley and had to be fought when we really got busy fighting it.
Everybody was insulted that he wasn't permitted to personally end
the war. That was an interesting war.

Why? Because it was a war against tyranny. Because once more
somebody had risen up within reach of our culture, and had dared
to say "A tyranny shall exist. Men may not speak. Religion may
not be free. No one has a right to either understand, participate
in or contribute to his own government save as he is told to do
so." And boy, we fought that one with enthusiasm. And boy, did he
get killed! Wow! He got killed so hard his people doubted he's
dead! He went into an inverted kill!

This guy Hitler had done something that was an anachronism. It
was out of time and place. He thought he was living back in 450
B.C. He got stuck on the time track, and he set up a tyranny. And
the next thing you know, everybody started shooting at it. Why?
Because Hitler was a bad man? No, I dare say he was quite a
clever fellow. Probably very nice to meet socially. You needn't
have put out your best rugs, but probably got along all right
socially. Chewed the rug, of course, and raved a bit, but he
probably wasn't too bad. This fellow became -- well, to put it
very mildly -- non persona grata. He was...

It's interesting that long before he became unpopular with
Chamberlain over in England, that two or three hunters from
England had already gone over to Germany and conducted still
hunts on Hitler. Why this strange enthusiasm? Why Hitler? Well,
he was handy and he had certainly set himself up as a target.

And thus you have the definition of it. A man who perpetrates a
tyranny does not set himself up, if you please, anymore, as a
tyrant. He sets himself up only as a target. Big difference. Once
he set himself up to be invulnerable. Now he sets himself up to
be vulnerable, and shot.

Look at the way this culture is educated. The die is cast and
there it sits motionless in time. It says, "Man is destined and
dedicated to freedom. He's destined for a long future span of
self-rule, and that span shall not end until the knowledge itself
of man has ended."

Now, today, just as in any other time, we do have amongst us men
who believe it is possible to become tyrants without becoming
targets. There are always psychotics and fools in any society,
and they do set themselves up, and they do try to conduct
themselves in this fashion. Whether they conduct themselves this
way as a little Napoleon in some capitalistic level of a factory,
or whether they conduct themselves as the manager of some cell
down in the West End, or whether they conduct themselves in some
tyrannical fashion even in their own home, they still set
themselves up and they still get knocked down. In fact, I don't
know what we'll ever do for tenpins if such men cease to set
themselves up. It has become an unpopular action, no matter
whether it's conducted on the second, third, fourth, fifth,
sixth, seventh or eighth dynamic. It's unpopular.

I imagine if you were to describe God in a popular fashion today,
I'm afraid you would have to describe him as a fellow who let you
make up your mind. I'm sure that would restore some of the
popularity of this. Because he's not popular today. The
government down here says that it was founded under God, but it
doesn't believe it. The Senate opens itself in every session with
a chaplain. They have an awful time keeping the senators quiet.
It's an interesting world we're living in, They're still paying
lip service to something, but they're not following it through.

Everywhere we have these small efforts to tyranny, and everywhere
we see them fail. Do you know once upon a time it was entirely
different than this? A man was only an important man in his
village, he was only an important man in his area, if he was a
tyrant, if he knew how to act like a tyrant. That was the way one
had to know how to act. One had to know how to act like a tyrant.

How does a ruler act? Well, "Off with their heads. Nobody must
think. Everybody must bow down." Oh yes, he was a good ruler.
Every time he walked down Main Street, why, everybody knelt and
bowed his head to the ground as he passed. That was a twenty-
five-hundred-year-ago description of a good ruler. He was very
well liked by his people. Nobody tried to assassinate him during
his entire reign. Do you see this? In other words, a man that was
a good ruler or a good family man or a good something or other
was tyrannically good. He oppressed everything. He smashed down
anything that came in his path. He was totally dominant where
anything in his surroundings was concerned. And that was a man
before Pericles.

He's not a man today. He's a target. And wherever he lifts his
head: "Knock him off! Kill him! Shoot him! Drown him! Arrest him!
He's crazy!" Oh, but this was once the socially acceptable thing
to be and do -- tyrannical, completely unreasonable, utterly
didactic, completely conscienceless, without mercy -- that was
the way one acted. But not today.

Well, how do you suppose a society operated in those dark days?
How do you suppose men really acted in those dark days? How did a
society respond or not respond back in the days when every ruler
had the right to cut off the head of every citizen without
further protest of any kind whatsoever? Did man prosper? Nope. He
prospered so badly, to tell you the truth, that he seldom wrote
records about it. Now that's below writingness.

Every once in a while we read on a pyramid the saga of King
Hamaradahugabunga, and it's all about King Hamaradahugabunga, but
it's not about any subjects. It doesn't tell you, "Thirty-five
thousand six hundred and ninety-two point three peasants were
killed building this pyramid." Doesn't tell you that. It says,
"Hamaradahugabungy built this pyramid as a toast to his own
regime." Big guy. Big guy. When he walked through the streets he
had people who walked before him with long whips and beat the
populace out of the road. Great man. Quite a boy. He's awful
dusty now. They dig up his mummies now and then, and dust them
off and say, "This is Hamaramahugabunga." Put him in a museum for
the little kids to sit and look at and suck lollipops and say,
"Huh." They say, "Look Mummy: mummy."

Now, did they fare well? Yup. Society ran on an entirely
different stable datum. Stable datum was this: that a society
consisted of a number of slaves who work for a ruler. See?
Simple. That's all you had. That's all there was to it. And some
of the fellows who work for him are a little more in-team than
others. They can wear hats. Otherwise, it's total oppression.

Well, did these societies succeed? No! Hamaramahugabunga
succeeded, and maybe some of his guards succeeded, and maybe some
of his torturers got good practice, but the society as a whole
never did.

Those societies rose and fell with remarkable rapidity. They
seldom became populous. They were engaged in petty wars and
warfares which decimated them. They overran each other madly in
all directions and wiped each other out. Why? Well,
Hamaramahugabunga's army couldn't have cared less, to tell you
the truth. And life didn't mean anything to them so they might as
well chew up and slaughter any town they went through. Who cared?
They didn't. Nobody cared about them, why should they care about
anything else? And you had in action a society of criminals
without responsibility or decency, and their arts have not
endured.

Now, you could say, "Well, somebody dug up a bunch of stuff down
on an island in the Mediterranean and it was great stuff. And it
showed the Cretan society and the Minoan and the bull and all
kinds of things, and they had nice palaces. And look at this
beautiful society, because here we've just uncovered this
beautiful palace. And it had eighty-nine rooms and, golly, it
must have been quite a society." You bet it was quite a society!
What did they dig up? They dug up the palace of
Hamaragahugabunga. Sure. You bet it's a good society! From his
viewpoint. Naturally it was a big palace. Where did the slaves
live? Well, there are no real remains of those. You can
occasionally find the remains of the officers' quarters.

Well, what happened to the people at large? Well, they didn't
last, and these other people didn't last either. And their reigns
rose and their reigns fell.

Well, what's amazing is the very few arts which they developed
per century -- the few arts which were developed per century.
You'll find one art hanging on, rather badly done. Listen, you
can talk a lot about the fancy cloth they used to have but you
wouldn't wear it in a sports jacket. Nah. Leather is nice, but
not for stockings. You wouldn't have put up with it. You would've
considered it a hardship.

And yet they'd use that cloth and wear that cloth. You take the
dye that used to come out of Tyre all the time, this indigo. They
had a bunch of bugs there under the sea and they'd squash them
and they got indigo dye. Now, that's the truth. That's why Tyre
was so popular. And this purple, as absolute requisite for a
Roman emperor and for other people, that all came out of this
town called Tyre. And you know it wasn't sunfast? I hate to tell
this on them. But it sure was popular for about a thousand years.
For a thousand years? A sunfast color might have been popular for
a thousand years but certainly not one that wasn't. That doesn't
show very high progress, does it?

Well, I'll tell you how they did it. They had a boss, you see,
and he was grabbed off by the King of Tyre, and this boss had a
bunch of slaves, and they walked around and walked on the bugs
and squashed them into the dye vats and that was the stuff. And
then they sold that produce, and that was that. And that was the
way they produced it and...

Well, you talk about tyranny of production. There was no self-
determinism used in squashing those bugs with your feet at all.
Somebody would say, "I'm only going to use my left foot today."
Huh-unhhh, that didn't go. Somebody would say, "You know, I don't
like purple feet."

They'd say, "Get in there, bum."

That was the dye industry of Tyre. And it went on that way for
about twelve hundred years, I think -- that I know about
personally. Of course I don't know what the history books say. I
never do. I don't read them. I either invent my history out of
whole cloth or remember it. Because I find most historians are
liars.

For instance, I'll tell you all I know about self-determinism and
so forth taught in an academy. We had an academy that was up the
street. It was about three blocks above Plato's old place. It was
kind of fallen into disrepute at the time. And if you missed a
question during the interrogation period you were given full
power of choice. You were permitted to fight, with staves, the
toughest boy in the school. You didn't miss many questions but
you became a pretty good soldier.

They taught self-determinism. They say it was the biggest crime
in the world not to make up your own mind on a question. It was
an interesting thing. It was an interesting thing. It was an
academy, a walking academy. Academy means a place where you walk
around and talk about it.

I'm not to be quoted as an authority for history, because my
memory gets spotty. But I can tell you this, I can tell you this
for sure: that Tyre didn't change its manufactures, quality of
production, and didn't much change its quantity for twelve
centuries. Its revenues from this were very high, but never
adequate to the feeding of the people of Tyre and no other
industry was invented.

This is a culture? This is a forward-looking, active, producing
culture?

Somebody walked into Tyre one day, and he said, "You know, I have
some political opinions" -- about 1000 B.C. -- "political
opinions." People didn't know what the word politics was, so they
assumed that he was selling something, so they wanted to know
where he kept the opinions and so forth. And he just got more
wound up and more wound up, and the next doggone thing you know,
they hanged him. The population hanged him. Why? Well, they
couldn't understand him.

But after fifteen or twenty fellows like him had walked into
Tyre, somebody got the idea one day. And he said, "What do you
mean, political opinions? You got political opinions. You mean a
person could have opinions on government? I get it! I get it. You
could have an opinion about government. I'll get this in a
minute. Now, a government -- let's see, an opinion -- a
government could be good or bad, and I could say my opinion is
the government could be good or bad."

Oooh! This is pretty revolutionary. Made him awful nervous. It
was actually during the reign of that great democrat (heh-heh),
Alexander the Great (who finished off, actually, the Age of
Pericles), that Tyre fell. First use of the submarine. Alexander
put some fellows in buckets and made them go around and saw down
the piling on which some of the walls of the city stood, and that
was the end of Tyre.

To show you how apathetic the joint was, by the way (it was very
apathetic), Alexander, when he came by, gave some sacrifices out
on the plain to the gods of the city, and the priests in the city
nailed their own images -- gods -- to the altar and maligned them
for wanting to betray the city to Alexander. See? I mean real
high toned. You know? Lot of savvy. You know, smart.

And the population, seeing the priests do this to the idols, then
knew it was all sunk anyhow and you couldn't get the walls
manned. That was the end of Tyre. I mean, a good high state of
enthusiasm, you know? Get in there and punch, you know?

Well, today you don't find too many of these bogholes, but that
was a boghole. Nothing invented, nothing produced, nothing
changed, no opinions, nothing to talk about, no-game condition,
straightforward. You uncomfortably lay out under the sun and
fried, and that was about the end of that culture. And I don't
think any of you would say this was a good culture.

It was a culture without ice-cream sodas. But worse than that it
was a culture that had no desire for ice-cream sodas even when
they're extended. And that's pretty low down as a culture. I've
even taken a Chinese culture in the lower villages of China, and
so forth, and got them slap-happy on the subject of ice cream. I
mean, ice cream you can pick up anybody on.

What and where does such a culture as that which grows under a
tyranny -- what and where does it do? Go? What happens to it? It
never goes anyplace. It doesn't invent anything. It has no
future. It's only future is represented by the many tombs of the
tyrants which you see planted nakedly upon the plains where once-
great cities stood. The tombs of the tyrants; that's about all
that remains of those cultures.

But, by golly, you wouldn't say that this is all that remains of
Greece. Do you know that very recently there was no archaeology
outside of the Age of Pericles? Do you know that within the last
seventy-five years a school had to rise and say, "There were
civilizations before and after the civilizations of classic
Greek. Why don't we study them?"

Everybody said, "Ho-hum. That's not archaeology." Archaeology was
totally and completely anchored in only one spot -- the high peak
of Greek culture and the little period before and after it. And
that was archaeology. That was the definition. It was the study
of Greece. There was just nothing else.

And when this Mycenaean culture was finally discovered here at
about the turn of the century, nobody would confess that it was
an archaeological discovery because it wasn't related immediately
to ancient Greece. And that famous businessman that dug it all up
down there, this chap (this was right at the turn of the century)
actually had to invent a bunch of fairy tales and get Achilles
and the Trojan Wars and so forth all tied up with some of the
Mycenaean discoveries to get anybody interested in them at all.
Total thing was a total fabrication of fairy tale. He had to
relate it to Greece before anybody would believe that it was
archaeology that he was studying. Do you follow me?

Well, you can't say that that society that taught us to be free,
at any time along the line, is only a collection of ruins.
They're still shooting down there. The commies are fighting with
other people and so forth. They're still shooting things up.
They're still messed up one way or the other. After World War II,
no great peace has descended, but those are not really the same
people who lived in that period. But it is not a bunch of ruins.
It is a bunch of ideas. It is a tremendous society.

The ideas in the Age of Pericles extended out to an entirety of
the known world, and are here, and are around us today -- this is
a rather fabulous thing -- to such a degree that I don't think
anybody could set up a tyranny no matter how hard he tried.
Hitler tried. Thirty million dead men later, he's failed. That
took an awful lot of shooting, didn't it?

Well, all right. If you're going to set up a group, if you're
going to set up a practice, if you're going to become active in
any political sphere, then you'd better remember what succeeded.
You'd better remember what has succeeded. The basic data of the
last twenty-three centuries is still the basic data of a culture,
and it is that basic data which will determine the future of this
culture.

If the future is to be turbulent and upset it will be because
some tyrant has become overly ambitious and his tyranny fails
because of revolt against it. In other words, the turbulence of
the future will be determined on the basis of whether or not
somebody tries to upset this tradition or not. And if somebody
tries to upset this tradition, then this culture is going to
collapse, to the degree that it revolts.

Now, the only way you could get a total lose was for everybody to
be dead, but there won't be any tyrant who will be able to impose
his will upon any of the modern cultures to this degree now. Such
a thing is all but impossible.

So you can predict that the future may have some wiggles and
wobbles, and the future may have some wars, and the future may
have some manning the barricades and shooting in the streets. But
short of obliterating mankind with one bomb (the ambition of the
AEC)... No, I beg your pardon, that's a confidential remark I
made there. I miss these things. You're not supposed to mention
the AEC. Let's see. What's something that can't fight back?
Atomic science is one bomb that wipes out everybody at once.
That's their ambition. Or one fallout that cripples everybody at
a longer period. Now, that's their ambition.

All right. Now, that of course does vary the future. If that is
continued in existence, and if that motto and hope for
everybody's demise is permitted to continue, then it will have
wiped out all parts of the game, and that will be that. And we
won't have to worry about the future at all. And we won't have to
worry about the trends of the culture and which way it's going
and which way it's not going.

Well, I can tell you that there's one thing that would wipe it
out as a threat, and that would be the same postulate as began in
the Age of Pericles. Men have a right to political opinions on
any subject, and they have a right to express those opinions
freely in any place to anybody.

Now, given that, let's take a look at the AEC -- excuse me, I
keep mentioning that word. These bastards down here on the other
end of this -- these fellows actually are less information, less
freedom of expression, confidential, secret, top secret, super-
frantic-hysterical secret, don't even let yourself know when you
read it. These chaps are going in the direction of a tradition
which was dead twenty-three hundred years ago. Do you think
they'll succeed? No. No.

They're trying to use "science," the new religion of this
century, as a means by which to impose a tyranny upon the world -
- but it is just another tyranny. That's all it is. It's just
another tyranny. I don't care what kind of clothes it's wearing,
it is just another effort to do more or less the same thing --
deny people their right to speak to whom they wish about what
they want to speak about. It's just another action.

You get a bunch of atomic scientists together, you'd find they
were almost human. They'd talk amongst themselves. They'd
exchange opinions. They wouldn't care whether it was Russian or
British or French or American or anything else. You throw them in
a room together and they'd yackle-yackle and get across the
language barriers -- probably talk with sine waves or something,
you know. They wouldn't care less.

But people can make political capital of these boys. They can
say, "You have something that's very secret. It is so secret that
it appears nowhere except in every textbook in every library on
the subject of atomic physics, in every library in the world.
It's very secret. It would take a moron with an idiotic case of
amnesia, days to figure out your most secret formulas. So
therefore, you boys being possessed of this secret, mustn't talk.
So that we (some unnameable we) can then impose our will on the
communication lines of the world." Which is a tyranny.

"Now, if we could create a depression at the same time, then
people would be willing..." (Ha. You see? See how the reasoning
goes?) "...then people would be willing, you see, to accept a
little further yoke, you know, a little government handout here
and there and we could tell them where they are supposed to work
and how they were supposed to work, and we'd give them money if
we wanted to and if we didn't want to..." Real nice.

And they expect this beautiful, idyllic society to grow on the
beauties of that new postulate. "We have secret weapons and
secret sciences and people pretty soon will be in want so they
will have to accept the mandates that are handed to them."

Yeah. The people will accept them. Did you ever hear little
Johnny imitating gangsters and machine guns? Yeah. People will
accept them. Um-hm. As a matter of fact, people never fight until
they're desperate. Things have to go pretty wrong. It has to be
pretty obvious. There have to be a couple of citizens hung on a
lamppost. There has to be darn little bread in the locker. There
have to be a lot of things present before people really look up.

And when they do look up and when they do notice, at last... The
French Revolution's typical of this. They said, "You know, I
wonder..." (along about days before the Bastille; years before
the Bastille fell), you know, they sit around and they say, "Do
you suppose that fellow that lives up in that big house that
calls himself Sieur de Montaigne, do you suppose he has anything
to do with the... with us not feeling exactly relaxed?" And
finally some guys came along and they dug up the Age of Pericles
in the textbooks and got them reprinted into "peasant." And they
sold them under the counter and the next doggone thing you know,
why, the French Revolution started when people stopped wondering,
"Do you suppose there's any effort around here to suppress us?"
It was how you defined suppression at the time, you see?

And one day they said, "You know, I'm sure there is. I'm sure. I
could swear it. And Joe, Jacques, Jean! What do you know? You
know I bet somebody's trying to keep us from speaking our right
mind!" And boom! No Bastille. Boom! No monarchy.

And they got in the habit. And for just years, anything that put
its head up that -- somebody came up and wanted to sell you some
crackers, all you had to do was point at him and say, "Tyranny --
guillotine." Madame Guillotine made another widow. It was a most
amazing reaction. All Europe was upset.

England was upset at the time, too. England was saying, "What do
you know? That canaille has roused up and is killing our sacred
brothers and we don't do a thing about it." They didn't, either.
They quickly liberalized their laws. Very, very significant
change. There was practically... By 1804, why, people were
treading very cautiously politically in England, and by 1834,
why, newly arisen King William quickly signed the Reform Bill,
which restored freedom to everybody in all directions, fast. I
think there was one riot. I think he was hit by one piece of mud.
He signed that bill quick. In other words, tyranny had been
educated to fall fast. And so it did.

Well, the soil in which a tyranny is sown, of course, is not when
everybody is in want. That is the soil in which revolution grows.
Tyranny is sown in times of plenty, when people exchange their
rights for some material gain -- they think. Tyrannies are sown
at times when nobody is very watchful; where everybody has a full
stomach; where everything is calm; nothing much appears on the
surface, and then tyrannies show up and become very obvious when
individuals, growing a little hungrier, a little less possessed
of production, suddenly notice that there is somebody saying they
mustn't talk, somebody saying they mustn't have opinions. And
when people notice this they begin to get very restless. And if
after that they get very hungry, there is a total fatality as far
as the tyranny is concerned. That total fatality will ensue.

Now, it may take years for people to find these things out. But
we're in such a period today -- a period artificially imposed. I
don't suppose there's any individual anyplace who wants actively
to impose a tyranny on the United States (except a bunch of sons
of bitches I've ran against recently).

Ah, these boys who do this today merely want gain for themselves.
They say, "It'd be very nice and I would be very safe if," you
know, "if I could suppress certain opinions being spoken. If I
could do this." They nibble away just a little bit, you see. And
then one fine day you look up and find a whole sphere of
knowledge partitioned off for some good, adequate, reasonable
reason.

What is this sphere of knowledge? Well, it's science. You say,
"But we're supposed to have science. That's progress."

All of a sudden they see an electronics engineer and they say,
"You know, you're supposed to be over there in that uh... behind
that barbed wire over there." Well, the electronic engineers of
the country have not yet noticed that they're inside barbed wire
-- they are -- that they go backwards and forwards past armed
guards to get to and from work.

I wouldn't work under these conditions. A fellow offered me a job
one time. He said, "All you have to do is walk in here, leave
your gun at the gate, walk in here and you're supposed to walk
around for eight hours a day, and do so-and-so and so-and-so."

And I said, "In where?"

He said, "In that enclosure there."

And I said, "What's the difference between that and a prison
camp?"

"Oh," he says, "you're nonsense. You get paid in there."

That was the first and only time the government offered me a post
as a nuclear physicist. That was the end of that. The government
offered me that post. They tried to kidnap me on another one, by
the way.

They said, "You know you're still in the reserves and we can call
you back to active duty on research in the field of the mind."

"You're still in the service," this admiral said. "Ha-ha. You
change your mind any time, you know, about coming in. You can
volunteer. Of course, I can put you back on active duty at any
time, so you'd better volunteer. You'd probably feel better in
there making seventy-five hundred dollars a year" -- rather than
whatever officers get these days -- twenty-five cents an hour or
something.

And I said, "Well," I said, "if you put it that way," I said,
"I'm overwhelmed." I said, "There's nothing much I can do."

Here is actually a proposition of a person being seized because
of his own knowledge, just the way you might seize a fellow who
carved ivory well, back in the Dark Ages. He carved ivory well so
he was seized. He was taken away and put into a position that he
couldn't object to and he was made to work at a trade that he was
good at but didn't particularly like. What's the difference?
What's the difference?

Not very much. Except maybe I walk with faster feet sometimes. Of
course, it was impossible at that time to resign from the
service. A reserve officer had to continue as a reserve officer
from there on out. But I was down to the Potomac River Naval
Command, and I was through Bureau of Naval Personnel. It was
Monday when he came to see me, and he was going to come back and
see me Thursday. And when he came back and saw me Thursday he
said, "Well," he said, "you've decided to come into the service
as a civilian?"

And I said, "No, I haven't. I decided not to."

And he said, "Well," he said, "I'll have to call you back to
active duty."

And I says, "Try and do it," and handed him my resignation,
accepted. He was crushed.

But do you know that immediately predated, by one week, the
opening of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of Elizabeth,
New Jersey. There would have been no Dianetics, there would have
been no Scientology, and there would have been no publications on
the subject anywhere had this succeeded. Interesting, isn't it?

They didn't want to prevent Dianetics. They didn't want to
prevent Scientology, the publications of books. All they wanted
to do was get a piece of research done which they in their
tyrannical fashion had decided was far more important than any
other research that could be done. They wanted me to work on a
project to make men more suggestible. Can you imagine me working
on such a project? You can imagine me working on admirals to make
them more suggestible, but not on people.

No, even in myself or any other scientist, in any engineer today,
there is this background, there is this tradition: That man has a
right to his own opinions, has a right to study them, has a right
to know his government and his duties as a citizen, and to
exercise himself in performing those duties. And he has a right
to contribute to the society. And this we've known for twenty-
three hundred years, and so today call ourselves a civilized
race.

But in only the last six years have we known why. Only in the
last six years have we actually directly contributed to this
stable datum to make it more stable. Only in the last six years
have we found the methods and modus operandi by which to make
this future culture come true; the future culture in which men
are actually all permitted to do this.

Men can become so depressed that they are not themselves capable
of exerting their own self-determinism, because it doesn't exist.
We can give it back to them. We can give them that thing which
twenty-three hundred years ago, it was stated they must have in
order to continue to be free. Therefore, we have a stake in the
game, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

[End of Lecture]
