Chapter Seven

EXHAUSTION

     To work or not to work, that is the question. The answer to that question in most men's minds is exhaustion.

     One begins to feel, after he has been long on a job and has been considerably abused on that job, that to work any more would be quite beyond his endurance. He is tired. The thought of doing certain things makes him tired. He thinks of raising his energy or of being able to force his way along a little bit further, and if he does so he is thinking in the wrong channels since the answer to exhaustion has little if anything to do with energy.

     Exhaustion is a very important subject, not only to an individual involved in earning his own living but to the state as well.

     Scientology has rather completely established the fact that the downfall of the individual begins when he is no longer able to work. All it is necessary to do to degrade or upset an individual is to prevent him from working. Even the police have now come to recognize the basic Scientology principle that the primary thing wrong with a criminal is that he cannot work, and police have begun to look for this factor in an individual in establishing his criminality.

     The basic difficulty with all juvenile delinquency is the one-time apparently humane program of forbidding children to labor in any way. Doubtless it was once a fact that child labor was abused, that children were worked too hard, that their growths were stunted and that they were, in general, used. It is highly doubtful if the infamous Mr. Marx ever saw in America young boys being pulled off machines dead from work and thrown onto dump heaps. Where there was an abuse of this matter, there was a public outcry against it, and legislation was enacted to prevent children from working. This legislation with all the good intention of the world is, however, directly responsible for juvenile delinquency. Forbidding children to work, and particularly forbidding teenagers to make their own way in the world and earn their own money, creates a family difficulty, so that it becomes almost impossible to raise a family, and creates as well, and particularly, a state of mind in the teenager that the world does not want him and he has already lost his game before he has begun it. Then with something like universal military training staring him in the face so that he dare not start a career, he is of course thrust into a deep sub-apathy on the subject of work, and, when he at length is faced with the necessity of making his own way in the world, he rises into an apathy and does nothing about it at all. It is highly supportive of this fact that our greatest citizens worked, usually when they were quite young. In the Anglo-American civilization the highest level of endeavor was achieved by boys who, from the age of 12, on farms, had their own duties and had a definite place in the world.

     Children in the main are quite willing to work. A two, three, four year old child is usually to be found haunting his father or her mother trying to help out either with tools or dust rags, and the kind parent who is really fond of the children responds in the reasonable, and long ago normal, manner of being patient enough to let the child actually assist. A child so permitted then develops the idea that his presence and activity is desired and he quite calmly sets about a career of accomplishment. The child who is warped or pressed into some career, but is not permitted to assist in those early years, is convinced that he is not wanted, that the world has no part of him. And later on he will come into very definite difficulties regarding work. However, the child who at three or four wants to work in this modern society is discouraged and is actually prevented from working, and after he is made to be idle until seven, eight or nine, is suddenly saddled with certain chores. Now this child is already educated into the fact that he must not work and so the idea of work is a sphere where he "knows he does not belong", and so he always feels uncomfortable in performing various activities. Later on in his teens he is actively prevented from getting the sort of a job which will permit him to buy the clothes and treats for his friends which he feels are demanded of him and so he begins to feel he is not a part of the society. Not being part of the society, he is then against the society and desires nothing but destructive activities.

     The subject of exhaustion is also the subject of prevented work. In the case of soldiers and sailors hospitalized during any one of these recent wars, it is found that a few months in the hospital tends to break the morale of the soldier or sailor to such a point that he may become a questionable asset when returned to his service.

     This is not necessarily the result of his lowered abilities. It is the result of injury compounded by inactivity. A soldier who is wounded and cared for in a field hospital close to the front and is returned to duty the moment he can possibly support such duties will be found to retain, in a large measure, his morale. Of course the injury received has a tendency to repel him from the level of action which he once thought best but, even so, he is in better shape than a soldier who is sent to a hospital in the rear. The soldier who is sent to the hospital in the rear is being told, according to his viewpoint, that he is not particularly necessary to the war. Without actually adding up these principles, the word "exhaustion" began a general use coupled with neurosis. This was based on the fact that people with a neurosis simply looked exhausted. There was no more co-ordination to it than that. Actually a person who has been denied the right to work, particularly one who has been injured and then denied the right to work, will eventually encounter exhaustion.

     Technically in Scientology it is discovered that there is no such thing as gradual diminishing by continuing contact of the energy of the individual. One does not become exhausted simply because one has worked too long or too hard. One becomes exhausted when he has worked sufficiently long to restimulate some old injury. One of the characteristics of this injury will be exhaustion. Chronic exhaustion, then is not the product of long hours and arduous application. It is the product of the accumulation of the shocks and injuries incident to life, each of them perhaps only a few seconds or a few hours long and adding up perhaps to a totality of only fifty or seventy-five hours. But this accumulation - the accumulation of injury, repulsion and shock - eventually mounts up to a complete inability to do anything.

     Exhaustion can then be trained into a person by refusing to allow him as a child to have any part in the society, or it can be beaten into a person by the various injuries or shocks he may receive incident to his particular activities. Clear up either of these two points and you have cleared up exhaustion. Exhaustion, then, is actually the subject of a Scientology practitioner since only a Scientologist can adequately handle it.

     There is a point, however, which is below exhaustion. This is the point of not knowing when one is tired. An individual can become a sort of hectic puppet that goes on working and working without even realizing that he is working at all, and suddenly collapses from a tiredness he was not experiencing. This is our sub-zero or sub-apathy Tone Scale again.

     And again we have the subject of control. Here the individual has failed to control things, has tried and then gone down Tone Scale about them into the sub-zero band. Eventually he is incapable of handling anything even resembling tools of the trade or an environment of work and so is unable to inhabit such an environment or handle such tools. The individual can then have many hard words cast in his direction. He can be called lazy, he can be called a bum, he can be called criminal. But the truth of the matter is he is no more capable of righting his own condition without expert help than he is capable of diving to the center of the earth.

     There are some means of recovering one's verve and enthusiasm for work short of close work with a Scientology practitioner. These are relatively simple and very easy to understand.

     We have in Scientology something we call Introversion and something else we call Extroversion.

     Introversion is a simple thing. It means looking in too closely. And Extroversion is also a simple thing. It means nothing more than being able to look outward.

     It could be said that there are introverted personalities and extroverted personalities. An extroverted personality is one who is capable of looking around the environment. An introverted personality is only capable of looking inward at himself.

     When we examine the A-R-C Tone Scale we see at once that an introverted personality is shying away from solids. In other words he is not confronting reality. Reality is agreement in the mental plane and is solids in the physical plane.

     A person who is capable of looking at the world around him and seeing it quite real and quite bright is of course in a state of extroversion. He can look out, in other words. He can also work. He can also see situations and handle and control those things which he has to handle and control, and can stand by and watch those things which he does not have to control and be interested in them therefore.

     The person who is introverted is a person who has probably passed exhaustion some way back. He has had his attention focused closer and closer to him (basically by old injuries which are still capable of exerting their influence upon him) until he is actually looking inward and not outward. He is shying away from solid objects. He does not see a reality in other people and things around him.

     Now let us take the actual subject of work. Work is the application of attention and action to people or objects located in space.

     When one is no longer able to confront people or objects or the space in which they are located, he begins to have a lost feeling. He begins to move in a mistiness. Things are not real to him and he is relatively incapable of controlling those things around him. He has accidents. He has bad luck. He has things turn against him simply because he is not handling them or controlling them or even observing them correctly. The future to him seems very bad, so bad sometimes that he cannot face it. This person could be said to be severely introverted.

     In work his attention is riveted on objects which are usually at the most only a few feet from him. He pays his closest attention to articles which are within the reach of his hands. This puts his attention away from extroversion at least to some spot in focus in front of his face. His attention fixes there. If this is coincident with some old injury incident or operation, he is likely to fix his attention as well on some spot in former times and become restimulated, so that he gets the pains and ills and the feeling of tiredness or apathy or sub-apathy which he had during that moment of injury. As his attention is continuously riveted there he of course has a tendency to look only there, even when he is not working.

     Let us take an accountant. An accountant's eyes are on books at fixed distances from his eyes. At length he becomes "short-sighted". Actually he doesn't become short-sighted, he becomes book-sighted. His eyes most easily fix on a certain point in distance. Now as he fixes his attention there he tends to withdraw even from that point until at length he does not quite reach even his own books. Then he is fitted with glasses so that he can see the books more clearly. His vision and his attention are much the same thing.

     A person who has a machine or books or objects continually at a fixed distance from him leaves his work and tends to keep his attention fixed exactly where his work was. In other words, his attention never really leaves his work at all. Although he goes home he is still really sitting in the office. His attention is still fixed on the environment of his work. If this environment is coincident with some injury or accident (and who does not have one of these at least) he begins to feel weariness or tiredness.

     Is there a cure for this?

     Of course only a Scientology practitioner could clear up this difficulty entirely. But the worker does have something which he can do.

     Now here is the wrong thing to do regardless of whether one is a bookkeeper, an accountant, a clerk, an executive or a machinist. The wrong thing to do is to leave work, go home, sit down and fix attention on an object more or less at the same distance from one as one confronts continually at work. In the case of a foreman, for instance, who is continually talking to men at a certain distance away from him, the wrong thing for him to do is to go home and talk to his wife at the same distance. The next thing she knows, she will be getting orders just as though she were a member of the shop. Definitely the wrong thing to do is to go home and sit down and read a paper, eat some dinner and go to bed. If a man practised the routine of working all day and then sitting down "to rest" with a book or a newspaper in the evening, it is. certain that sooner or later he would start to feel quite exhausted and then after a while would fall even below that and would not even wonder at his unwillingness to perform tasks which were once very easy to hint.

     Is there a right thing to do? Yes there is. An individual who is continually fixed upon some object of work should fix his attention otherwise after working hours.

     Now here is a process known as "Take a Walk". This process is very easy to perform. When one feels tired on finishing his work, no matter if the thought of doing so is almost all that he can tolerate without falling through the floor, he should go out and walk around the block until he feels rested. In short, he should walk around the block and look at things until he sees the things he is walking near. It does not matter how many times he walked around the block, he should walk around the block until he feels better.

     In doing this it will be found that one will become a little brighter at first and then will become very much more tired. He will become sufficiently tired that he knows now that he should go to bed and have a good night's sleep. This is not the time to stop walking since he is walking through exhaustion. He is walking out his exhaustion. He is not handling the exhaustion by physical exercise. The physical exercise ha; always appeared to be the more important factor to people but the exercise is relatively unimportant. The factor that is important is the unfixing of his attention from hi; work to the material world in which he is living.

     Masses are reality. To increase one's affinity and communication it is actually necessary to be able to confront and tolerate masses. Therefore waking around the block and looking at buildings will be found to bring one upscale. When one is so tired that he can barely drag himself around, or is so tired that he is hectically unable to rest at all, it is actually necessary that he confront masses. He is simply low on the Tone Scale. It is even doubtful if there is such a thing as a "fall of physical energy". Naturally there is a limit to this process. One cannot work all day and walk around the block all night and go to work the next day again and still expect to feel relieved. But one should certainly spend some time extroverting after having introverted all day.

     "Take a Walk" is, within reason, a near cure-all. If one feels antagonistic towards one's wife, the wrong thing to do is to beat her. The right thing to do is to go out and take a walk around the block until one feels better, and make her walk around the block in the opposite direction until an extroversion from the situation is achieved. It will be discovered that all domestic quarrels, particularly amongst working people, stem from the fact that, having been overfixed (rather than overstrained) on one's work and the situations connected with it, one has failed to control certain things in his working environment. He then comes home arid seeks to find something he can control. This is usually the marital partner or the children, and when one fails even there he is apt to drop down scale with a vengeance.

     The extroversion of attention is as necessary as the work itself. There is nothing really wrong with introverting attention or with work. If one didn't have something to be interested in he would go to pieces entirely. But if one works it will be found that an unnatural tiredness is apt to set in. When this is found to be the case then the answer to this is not a drop into unconsciousness for a few hours as in sleep, but in actually extroverting the attention and then getting a really relaxing sleep.

     These principles of extroversion and introversion have many ramifications and, although "Take a Walk" is almost laughable in its simplicity, there are many more complicated processes in case one wished to get more complicated. However, in the main "Take a Walk" will take care of an enormous number of difficulties attendant to work. Remember that when doing it one will get more tired at first and will then get fresher. This phenomenon has been noted by athletes. It is called the second wind. The second wind is really getting enough environment and enough mass in order to run out the exhaustion of the last race. There is no such thing as a second wind. There is such a thing as a return to extroversion on the physical world in which one lives.

     Similar to "Take a Walk" is another process known as "Look Them Over". If one has be en talking to people all day, has been selling people all day or has been handling people who are difficult to handle all day, the wrong thing to do is to run away from all the people there are in the world. You see, the person who gets over-strained when handling people has had large difficulties with people. He has perhaps been operated upon by doctors, and the half-seen vision of them standing around the operating table identifies all people with doctors, that is to say, all people who stand still. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why doctors become so thoroughly hated in a society since they do insist on practices known as surgery and anaesthesia and such incidents become interlocked with everyday incidents.

     Exhaustion because of contact with people actually necessitates that the "havingness" (another Scientology term for reality) of people has been reduced. One's attention has been fixated upon certain people while his attention, he felt, ought to be on other people, and this straining of attention has actually cut down the number of people that he was observing. Fixed attention, then, upon a few people can actually limit the number of people one can "have", which is to say, limits one's reality on people in general.

     The cure for this is a very simple one. One should go to a place that is very populated such as a railroad station or a main street and should simply walk along the street noting people. Simply look at people - that is all. It will be found after a while that one feels people aren't so bad and one has a much kinder attitude towards them and, more importantly, the job condition of becoming overstrained with people tends to go away if one makes a practice of doing this every late afternoon for a few weeks.

     This is one of the smartest things that a salesman can do, since a salesman, above and beyond others, has a vested interest in being able to handle people and get them to do exactly what he wants them to do, that is, buy what he has to sell. As he fixes his attention on just one too many customers, he gets tired of the whole idea of talking to people or selling and goes down Tone Scale in all of his activities and operations and begins to consider himself all kinds of a swindler and at length doesn't consider himself anything at all. He, like the others, should simply find populated places and walk along looking at people. He will find after a while that people really do exist and that they aren't so bad. One of the things that happens to people in high government is that they are being continually "protected from" the people and they at length become quite disgusted with the whole subject and are apt to do all manner of strange things. (See the lives of Hitler and Napoleon.)

     This principle of extroversion and introversion could go much further in a society than it does. There is something that could be done by the government and by businesses in general which would probably eradicate the idea of strikes and would increase production quite markedly. Workers on strike are usually discontented not so much with the conditions of.work, but with work itself. They feel they are being victimized, they are being pressed into working at times when they do not want to work, and a strike comes as an actual relief. They can fight something. They can do something else than stand there and fiddle with a piece of machinery or account books. Dissatisfied workers are striking workers. If people become exhausted at work, if people are not content with work, if people are upset with work they can be counted upon to find a sufficient number of grievances to strike. And, if management is given enough trouble and lack of co-operation on the part of the people on the lower chains of command, it can be certain that management sooner or later will create situations which cause workers to strike. In other words, bad conditions of work are actually not the reason for labor troubles and disputes. Weariness of work itself or an inability to control the area and environments of work are the actual cause of labor difficulties.

     Any management given sufficient income to do so, if that management is not terribly aberrated, will pay a decent working wage. And any workman given half a chance will perform his duties cheerfully. But once the environment itself becomes overstrained, once the company itself has become introverted by overt acts on the part of the government, once the workers have been shown that they have no control over management, there can be after that labor disputes. Underlying all these obvious principles, however, are the principles of introversion and extroversion. Workers become so introverted at their tasks that they no longer are capable of affinity for their leaders and are no longer capable actually of viewing the environment in which they work. Therefore someone can come along and tell them that all the executives are ogres, which is obviously not true, and on the executive level someone can come along and tell the executives that all the workers are ogres, which is obviously, on that side, not true either.

     In the absence of broad treatment on individuals, which is a gargantuan task, a full program could be worked out that would handle the principle of introversion. it is certain that if workers or managers get introverted enough they will then find ways and means of inventing aberrated games such as strikes, and so disrupt production and decent relationships and living conditions within the factory, the office, or the concern.

     The cure would be to extrovert workers on a very broad scale. This could be done as one solution by making it possible for all workers to have two jobs. It would be necessary for the company, or related interests such as the government, to make available a sufficient number of public works projects to provide work for workers outside the sphere of exact application. In other words, a man who is made to work continually inside and at a very fixed task would find a considerable relief at being able to go outside and work, particularly at some disrelated task. As an example, it would be a considerable relief to an accountant to be able to dig ditches for a while. A machinist running a stationary machine would actually find it a very joyful. experience to push around a bulldozer.

     Such a plan then would actually take introversion and extroversion with a large hand and bring it about. Workers who are working in fixed positions with their attention very close to them would then be permitted to look more widely and to handle things which tended to extrovert them. Such a program would be very ambitious but it would be found, it is certain, to result in better labor-management relations, better production and a considerable lessening of working and public tension on the subjects of jobs and pay.

     In short, there are many things that could be done with the basic principle of extroversion-introversion. The principle is very simple: when an individual is made too introverted things become less real in his surroundings and he has less affinity for them and cannot communicate with them well. Furthermore, what does communicate is apt to communicate at his lowered Tone Scale so that even good news will be poorly received by him. In such a condition he becomes tired easily. Introversion results in weariness, exhaustion and then an inability to work. The remedy for it is extroversion, a good look at and communication with the wider environment, and unless this is practised, then, in view of the fact that any worker is subject to injuries or illnesses of one kind or another, a dwindling spiral will ensue which makes work less and less palatable until at length it cannot be performed at all and we have the basis of not only a non-productive, but a criminal society.