DEALING WITH ATTACKS ON SCIENTOLOGY A lecture given on 26 June 1961 Thank you. You know, give her the applause. She’s the one that’s doing all the work. It’s very funny. It’s very funny. She never takes over as D of P anyplace but what they don’t stack up pcs in all directions, you know. And all the cases crack brrrrrrrrr and so forth. We haven’t told people out in the field their cases would be personally supervised by Mary Sue in the running or we wouldn’t be able to hold the course. That’s . . that’s the truth. I’m not... She’s just depreciating now because. . . She’s running . . I think the level she’s running at the moment is “Failed Depreciated.” What is this? Twenty-sixth of June 1961 and AD 11. Okay. I want to say a word here at first about tactics and strategy with regard to anti-Scientological activities. It might be of some benefit to you to know this. After all, I’ve been fighting this war now for eleven years, very often without very much help. Every once in a while Scientologists tell me how reasonable it all is that somebody has a casus belli or something of the sort. It isn’t true. Our people are trying their best and they’re doing their best and I’m very proud of them. If we had anything at all to hide, we long since would have been blown out of the water with various salvos. All we had to do is have a few Achilles’ heels and we would have had it. Well, we don’t have Achilles’ heels, so recently the Better Business Bureau of Washington, DC wrote a letter, which is the most backwards letter anybody ever heard. Although many government agencies have tried to get something on this organization, none of them have ever been able to turn anything up and . . can you imagine somebody writing something like this, you see? And as for Lafayette R. Hubbard who is a principal in this particular organization, well you can look him up in Dun and Bradstreet. And they just dismissed the whole thing Well, they used to run an entirely different line of approach. They used to say, “Oh, they shoot people and kill babies. And they’ve been well known to throw people off top of St. Paul’s Cathedral. That is their specialty.” Anything ridiculous or stupid. The British . . that medical association, by the way, has written letters to its doctors urging them to tell patients how bad we w-ere and so forth. We’ve not had whispering campaigns; we’ve had loudspeaker campaigns going. But that type of backfire is inevitable. I call your attention to an essay on the circulation of the blood by a fellow by the name of Harvey, who was a graduate of the Royal Medical College of Physicians. He was I think a physician to the Crown. I think he was everything you could think o£ And this man dared come up and say the blood beat, not because of the tides of the body but got pumped through a bunch of tubes. And he very carefully carried on a lot of experiments this way. And promptly the whispering campaigns and so forth which rose up around this were fantastic. It tore the whole medical profession to pieces about 1620 or thereabouts. Tore them all to pieces. Ripped them up one side and down the other. And one doctor was heard to say, “I would rather err with Galen than be right with Harvey,” which I . . is the most marvelous, I think, statement ever made in a controversy. Let’s go back a little earlier. A short time ago I was standing outside the prison of Socrates on Pnyx, I think the name of the hill is, in Athens. And it rather struck me as very peculiar that the story they have about Socrates in Athens is quite different than the story which we hear about Socrates in our own textbooks. And of course, there’s always local information about various things which has a sort of a verbal tradition when they come on. And apparently Socrates said that those gods of stone and marble and so forth didn’t have much to do with the regulation of the universe; that man was basically a spirit. And so they finally tried him for heresy against the pagan religion of the day and had him drink the hemlock. That’s the local tradition about Socrates. It’s not the story we read in the Encyclopedia Americana Britannica or anything, you see. But everybody got upset because here was a new idea. But let me show you something. Today people feel a pulse. They don’t look at the sun to measure the tides of the body. They know very well there’s body circulation. When somebody gets his arm cut, they put a tourniquet on it. Got the idea? This is very well accepted theory. Actually, it became a well accepted . . don’t think these things take a long time . . it became a well accepted theory by about 1628. There was hardly a ripple by 1632. In other words, this had become an accepted idea, but in the first early years of its advance, there was an enormous amount of upset. Now, Socrates was henpecked and unfortunate in his choice of wives. And being so, of course, the man was emotionally unstable to some degree, and worrying all the time that he daren’t be out talking in the club or the . . or the groves, you see, because he ought to be home and he shouldn’t be wandering around like this; he ought to be making a living like honest men do and all this sort of thing. But anyway, he decided to give it up. And he gave it up. And the charges of heresy and so forth that followed with his relegation to the prison and all that sort of thing . . . Well, it is interesting that about a quarter of the people of Athens, that particular night that he was put in jail, were standing there with tickets bought on the nearest ship to Crete, see. People all over the place were trying desperately to get Socrates, who was not under very close arrest . . his guards were very, very happy to turn their backs . . they were trying to get him simply to walk down to the dock and walk up a gangplank. And everybody thought that this was what he would do and he didn’t. He stood around and said, “Well, for the principle of the thing, I ought to take this hemlock.” He really made the government of Athens guilty, because that sort of thing ordinarily, you see, didn’t happen. They’d condemn somebody to death, and then the fellow would walk out the back gate and over the hills, and that would be it. It was actually a charge of banishment or something of this sort. But in his particular case, he had so many friends who would have paid his passage, who were trying to pay his passage that night, who were trying to get rid of his guards, who were trying to help him out, that they went into a total dismay. What is wrong with this man? Well, as I say, you make wrong marriages, and you’re liable to get all sorts of repercussions and suicidal impulses. So this thing about Socrates hasn’t anything to do with the price of fish at all. Fact of the matter is that promptly and immediately everybody in Athens practically was talking Socratian philosophy and have continued to do so ever since. His critique stayed as one of the primary philosophic modes right on up to the time when Kant overdid it. And this . . this is a new idea, however, in a society. Not necessarily attended by fatality at all. You hear a great many martyrs, but every time you find yourself a martyr, you find yourself somebody who is bound and determined, you see. What happens is, well, on the whole track you may have been a tyrant yourself at one time or another, you see. And this fellow kept going out in the public square, you know, saying, “Regulus the Third is a schnook and he eats herring. And he does this just to popularize it so that the populace will eat it and he can collect the duty, you see. And herring is actually very bad for you and will rot your teeth, you know,” and so on. And this fellow kept prowling around and telling people things like this, and I dare say that for, oh, I don’t know, for maybe months and months and months, you’d keep getting ahold of somebody or sending some of your police or something like that to go see him and say, “Look, son. Just lay off, will you? You know, skip it.” You’d probably offer him a free passage to Gaul or almost anything you could think of, you know, and say, “Just go away and get lost,” and so on. And eventually, why, he just kept saying, “Well, kill me then if you believe this,” and you had to. You got the idea? I mean, there’s this idea of being so stuck on the idea that you have to get stuck on the spears, you see. But it’s perfectly all right to be dedicated to a thing, but when one consistently fails to advance an idea, he feels, then, that he must commit suicide to fan . . to further the idea. You got the idea? In other words, it’s a failure to advance the idea which brings about this suicidal frame of mind. I imagine if anybody at all around Galilee had bought the Nicene Creed, I’d imagine Pontius Pilate for . . for a split sesterce would have knocked that whole thing off, you know. But it was a failed idea, and . . he made it stick by proving it with suicide, right? I’ve never been in a very suicidal frame of mind; must be something lacking in my makeup or something of this sort. I believe first in making the idea effective. I don’t believe in the idea that you should fail with an idea, you see? If you’re carrying something forward, you’re standing for something, you shouldn’t be ineffective about it. You should go forward and carry out the idea. The object is not to fail at the idea and then make everybody guilty because they kill you. You got this? I’m not putting us in any category of any religious or philosophic lineup. I’m just showing you that new ideas are very often attended with tremendous success, although we are taught carefully that people should martyr themselves for new ideas or sacrifice themselves for new ideas. And that’s to prevent new ideas, don’t you think? Would do so rather effectively, wouldn’t it? So if you got enough philosophy abroad whereby, that anybody comes up with a new teaching or a new idea is then martyred . . if you got that philosophy abroad, of course, the old ideas are protected. And somebody sooner or later . . Socrates or somebody . . will fall for it. You know, you’ll say, “Well, this is the thing to do,” you know. “I seem to be failing in getting this stuff across, so therefore I’d better commit suicide.” Harvey, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age, revolutionized the whole field of medicine. A few years later, why, his worst enemies were patting him on the back saying, “Good boy, good boy. You remember when I was right in there with you.” Now let’s come up to more recent times. Of course, I’m talking about magnitudinous ideas because it’s something about which we all know something about. Let’s take a fellow by the name of Albert Einstein. Of course, Einstein should have done some of his thinking in a private notebook. He shouldn’t have been writing Franklin Delano that he could blow up Earth, which was in effect what he did, and then years afterwards worked all he could possibly do and then gathered up all the funds he could gather up to wipe out what he had done with atomic fission. He organized organizations, societies; they maintained offices every place. The man . . old man worked himself into a grave through having actually made a discreditable creation. Nevertheless, the actual course of history of Albert Einstein is quite interesting from our viewpoint. The man advanced a brand-new theory of mathematics called “relativity.” There might even be some truth in relativity. Who knows? At one time a fellow by the name of something or other in the University of George Washington was holding his job as the Chair of Mathematics, simply because he was one of the twelve men in the world who understood the theory of relativity. I went in to see him one day to interview him for the college paper. I wanted him to tell me something about this theory of relativity this fellow Einstein was kicking around with and so forth. And I never had such sneers, contempt or was turned out on my ear quite so fast, you see. I turned out one on our Mathematics Department instead. “Mathematics: Has It Come to Stay?” I think was the name of the article. You probably don’t know the theory of relativity too well. You think you have a talking acquaintance with it because everybody’s dressed it up now so that it fits with modern atomic physics. And you’ll read textbooks and pocketbooks off the bookstalls all about the theory of relativity and so forth. Actually, the theory of relativity is that c is a constant. You can’t go any faster than light. It brings up all kinds of wild surmises, such as if a man went the speed of light he would then be the . . as big as the universe, you see, and that time would not exist if you were going at the speed of light. I mean, it’s a whole bunch of fantasies and fairy tales is what this thing originally was, you see. Well, it had “MGs equal Jaguar squares,” or something like that as its primary modus operandi. And nobody could, of course, prove this fellow wrong because this “c” that he keeps throwing into all these equations, of quantum mechanics and so forth, is not a constant. The speed of light is not an exact constant, so therefore, all these equations go a little bit wrong. So you never can quite prove it. It’s very interesting. When they developed the atomic bomb, they did not use Einstein’s theory. They put stuff in and out of a pile until they found that there was something called “critical mass.” And they thought “That’s very fascinating,” and they took it from there. And every atomic bomb you’ve got today was developed empirically. None of them were calculated. But he led the way, and it was a new idea, and so forth; the old man was sorry he did it. But what is actually the history of the Einstein theory out in the public? In 1928, a paper was read before the combined societies of mathematics in Germany . . and you can imagine how many people that was. The paper was the wildest piece of slander and libel that anybody ever heard. And it condemned the Einstein theory as the greatest mathematical hoax of all time. Einstein was in trouble with this theory for years. He was practically hounded out of jobs in universities, and everybody was on his back, and he finally went to Princeton and wrote Frankie, and we’ve got the atomic bomb. That’s the history of the Einstein theory. But look-it-there. In spite of the fact that it was a discreditable creation, the old man died with his boots on, and the . . and the old retainers weeping around the bedside, you know. Why, he was actually totally successful. There’s no martyrdom connected with this at all except he was sorry for having developed the atomic bomb. Now, what about many other creations of this character? Like Freudian analysis, for instance. Old man Freud, he got thrown on his ear by the medical association of his day. And they just gave him the yo heave, and they wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and they just raised the devil down around Melba and it just went on for years. And finally, about 1894, why he made some startling statement and made a breakthrough of one character. He announced his libido theory in 1894 and from that time thereon, why, all was good roads and good weather. And look, the man would . . had practically nothing to go on. He practically had no results, he practically had nothing but a dreamed up theory and so forth. It was terrific, I mean, that he’d go so far. But he did have a new idea. And that is that man’s physical ills could be assisted mentally. And that was a new idea. And that was the idea that Freud put into the world. But the old man died with his boots on surrounded by the old retainers who were weeping to see him go, you see. Sung the world around and very successful. This man was a very successful man in spite of the fact that just before he died, he wrote a paper called “Psychoanalysis: Terminable and Interminable.” And he had learned that some people go on and on and on and on and on, and you can’t seem to do much about it. The paper and this sort of thing is now a woof and warp of our existence, and it isn’t even true. Eighteen ninety-four, and he was totally over the top by about 1933. That’s very interesting, isn’t it? There’s an idea the breadth of the world. But don’t think the idea in its early stages wasn’t fought. Harvey’s ideas were fought. Galen, Socrates: any new idea gets fought. That’s the nature of man, is when he sees something new, it threatens change and man is a great believer in no-change while he obsessively changes. While obsessively alter-ising everything in view, he believes in no change. And of course, that’s why he obsesses everything of this character. That’s why his alter-is is so obsessive, is because his basic belief is on a zero. All right. Now, I’m just talking to you about this, just looking coldly and dispassionately. What’s the chances of Scientology, of success? Well, we’ve been told it takes a hundred years to get anything done. And we’ve been told all sorts of discouraging tales, that it’s martyrdom, that it’s this, that it’s that, it’s the other thing. Nah, we’re over the top. We’re over the top. But we still get fought; and we’re still in a period of being fought. And you can be fought with a velocity that you are right. Because then you are terribly dangerous. You think of the thousands of philosophies that must have come up since 1950. There must have been just libraries full of books written by people all over the place detailing theories about life. Where are these books? Where are they? They just don’t exist. And right now the psychologist is changing his own textbooks; and all sorts of weird things are happening in the world. The medical profession now will tell you most glibly about prenatals, and we’ve long since forgotten them. But the point is, is we’ve made our incursion, but we threaten to upset far more than somebody’s belief in whether or not the god was of marble or lightning, you see. We threaten to upset far more than that, if you’re looking at it in terms of upset. The only reason it’s safe for us to do any of this is because we can undo what we do. And Mr. Freud couldn’t undo what he did. And Mr. Einstein couldn’t undo what he did. And Socrates couldn’t undo what he did. Let’s take a look at this, you see. And they’re all kind of sorry for it. And they got into a suicidal frame of mind. But we’re in a very safe channel because we can undo what we did. Do you know that you can take somebody that’s been very thoroughly badly audited and simply run the auditor off? And the auditing disappears. Why do you suppose that I include and will continue to include in any Security Check . . there’s two reasons . . questions about overts against myself. This seems an odd thing to do. Actually, there’s two things: One, if a person has a lot of overts against me that he thinks is bad, he won’t get any benefit from Scientology. That’s quite obvious. He’s got overts against the source. That’s the thing. And you think basically that’s the only reason that’s there. No, there’s another much more subtle reason why you have to keep these overts off. The only way you could acquire a forceful, overwhelming valence called “Scientology” would be by piling up a bunch of overts and motivators on it. Think of it for a minute. Isn’t that the way, basically, you got into any valence you’re in? So this would be the first time that anyone was going along the track saying, “All right. Here’s what I say. Try it out. Run me out.” Don’t you realize that? So there’s no overwhelm mixed up in this. In the early days, people who had been all mixed up with Taoism, and all that sort of thing, they kept telling me that we needed tremendous aesthetics. You know, we needed a swinging incense pot and all that sort of thing. And these tremendous aesthetics which we were supposed to have something to do with, of course palled on me in the very earliest stages, because I’ve said you can always overwhelm a thetan with aesthetics and we haven’t the least desire to overwhelm a thetan. So if you wonder why Central Organizations don’t hire the Empire State Building or we’re not flat out to make a totally overwhelming ritual of it all, don’t you see, that’s all part of the same picture. If it’s true for you, it’s true. It’s not true for you because we have overwhelmed you. Get the tremendous difference there? This is the first time this has happened to man so, of course, it appears very dangerous and very strange. They could understand it if we were simply trying to overthrow the established church, established science or established governments. Then they would understand this and you’d probably find that we weren’t being hard fought. “Oh, well. Oh, yes. Oh, those people? Yeah, we understand them. Revolutionary group. Revolutionary group. One of the things which they’re going to do is blow up Buckingham Palace and the White House. Yeah, that’s what they’re going to do.” That’s right. And you’d probably find the cops coming around and seeing you, being quite chummy . . I’m not kidding . . and understand you. But to understand somebody who was . . basically has no evil motives . . . Every man who has been overwhelmed by what he considered evil valences, asks himself this question: “What’s the pitch? What’s the pitch? What’s the pitch?” He’s just totally frantic. You know? “Well, you audit this fellow, and he gets more intelligent and he gets more able and he’s happier and he . . what’s the pitch?” And, of course, with running Security Checks all the time on pcs that come up the line, what’s the pitch? Well, there his question becomes totally unanswerable, because we’re running ourselves out as auditors, philosophers, teachers or anything else. Of course, if you can’t make a thetan commit tremendous numbers of overts against you or set him up in a situation where he can commit tremendous overts against you, and then remove any possibility of his ever running the overts, that’s the only way you can actually overwhelm him and get him so stamped down with a valence that he can’t thereafter wriggle. You see that? So these former efforts were entrapments, and this is not an entrapment. It is not even a total freedom. I’ve even told you occasionally total freedom would be existence without barriers, and I think you would find everybody very miserable. All right. We’re an incomprehensible factor. This is the first time, actually, a high-powered, rather selfless philosophy has hit Earth which didn’t at once demand of its practitioner or in . . the person who embraces it, that he totally subjugate himself utterly and become enslaved by the philosophy, don’t you see; and which didn’t say that the originator of the philosophy must then be carried as an imperishable valence from there on to the end of the track, and everybody should bow down to this, don’t you see. That alone is incomprehensible amongst the . . the works of man. These are different. These are different. And these are the differences that man becomes alarmed at, because he’s certain that if there’s this much and you neglect these obvious factors, which he sort of senses you neglect, there must be some much deeper, much more vicious motive mixed up in all of this, you see. And they can become quite excited. And recently some chap out in California took his finger off his pc and probably didn’t flatten the process. The pc went out and assaulted her husband on the street and had him arrested and tried to have the auditor arrested, and signed a check over to him. The police raided the building and took his E-Meters and tapes and made the usual mule’s south ends out of themselves (because I like horses), and went ramming around madly, you see. Now look at the hysteria. Look at the hysteria. They sent a telex to every police department in the state of California about this terrible case which they had just uncovered. What terrible case? Well, with a good attorney on the job and this thing sorted out and everybody keeping calm about the thing and not fighting it violently but just putting up a consistent and continual effective pressure against that particular attack angle, . . . and it will not wind up in 30 days, I assure you. Courts are not rigged that way. Nor will it wind up in 60 days, nor a 180 days. You will still be hearing about this in about three years. And there is never any reason to rush anyplace and do anything about characters like that. What you do is just put up a steady pressure in that particular direction. Just take the effective actions and let it coast. Do not become absorbed in it, because it is out of terror that the attack is born and people who are in terror make mistakes. And all we do is just don’t make any mistakes and continue to put up an effective pressure against this sphere. And investigate loudly is one of the things we do. We have a regular modus operandi and these people become more and more terrified because they now begin to feel guilty of an overt act. I saw the president of a law university who had me arrested one time as a witness in a bankruptcy. You see, in the United States, if you’re a witness in a bankruptcy in a Federal Court, you can be arrested. Because you’re liable not to witness, you see. They even fingerprint you, you know. It’s very degrading. Witnesses in bankruptcies . . that has to do with money. And after all, all the money in a bankruptcy belongs to the attorneys and the judge. And you can’t . . you can’t go around . . you can’t go around being a witness lightly, you see. And these fellows . . the only way they could be coaxed and the judge could be coaxed, and everybody could be coaxed, was to issue this silly witness in a bankruptcy warrant. You see, that’s totally meaningless, you know. You watch . . you see an accident happen and in New York City the cops can grab hold of you and put you in jail for three days. As a consequence, accidents and murder happen in broad daylight in New York City and you just ask anybody around you what was going on, and they look at you rather searchingly and don’t answer. And you say, “Is there anything that happened on this corner?” And the fellow said, “No. I wasn’t here” . . his twenty cigarette butts littered around his feet you know. He wasn’t there. He just arrived. You can’t get anybody to interfere in New York City or witness anything in New York City, just because of these silly witness rules. Anyway, the president of a law school had been employed to obtain this warrant and the Chief Federal United States Marshal . . I think they have a sort of a feeling like they’re still western marshals or something. They go around with big guns hanging on them and so forth. The only trouble is they normally pick people off skid row to have these jobs, and it’s rather incongruous, you see. And this fellow, he was utterly mad-dogging because he was sure that I had just beaten up two of his marshals. Actually, I hadn’t beaten up a marshal. I had taken the gun away from one and told him how to use it and put it back in his holster, because I thought he would get into trouble. I explained it to him. I said, <‘You’ll get in trouble waving that about and so forth; and this is the hammer, and this is the trigger.” And he handed it over to me, and I said, C