HUMAN EVALUATION

A lecture given on 25 June 1951

Putting the Tone Scale to Work

We have a third of a million words in Science of Survival. That is the first thing you should know about the book. I had no idea there were a third of a million words in it. I think I would have felt very strange indeed if I had suddenly found out that that was the length of it.

It is actually two separate and distinct books. The first book should be or could be called Human Evaluation. You could take out every remark about processing as such in it, and you would have a little book which would go along with the first twenty- six columns of the Chart of Human Evaluation. You would just take out a couple of the columns there in the early part and you would have a text on human evaluation by which a person could learn what you can expect from human beings and learn to predict what will happen in their vicinity. If you know a few factors about them, you can know a lot more.

It is a strange thing about this chart in the first book. It was simply science to me as far as I was concerned; it was just something that was being derived, extrapolated and worked with, and then preclears were picked up and looked over in light of it and reviewed and checked and 80 forth. It was just mechanical work; it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was not in my personal field but I kept on working with it.

Two people showed up in my perimeter, and I did not spot either one of them on the chart. Everything bad that has happened in Dianetics since January is attributable to just that— I didn’t believe the chart! I said, "It probably works for preclears but it certainly won’t work for me!"

That chart is horribly effective. It is the grisliest thing that has been introduced into the society for a long time! I have seen people read that chart and spot themselves on it and practically spin in.

There was a fellow from the physics department at Columbia University who came over to my house in Elizabeth one day, and he said, "There’s one thing about Dianetics: the diabolical accuracy of your predictions!"

I can see the broken homes out across the land, too, because somebody is going to look up the spouse on this chart. He will find her, and there in the text it says, in effect, a person at this level will destroy or seek to bring about the destruction of any associate. He will say, "So that’s what she has been trying to do! To hell with her!"

The only thing one could do which would be more diabolical than the chart would be to write a book on pain- drug- hypnosis and release it.

Pain- drug- hypnosis is incredible. You can call it PDH for short. This is not covered in Science of Survival. But believe me, if we wrote up and released this one into the society, would we be popular! That would be right there along the tone band of the society— death, covert. They would say, "Oh, look! You can ruin people and they don’t even know it. Oh, Dianetics is just wonderful!"

That would be matching up Dianetics with what I have observed to be the current tone scale. It’s horrible! I looked this chart over and saw all this beautiful optimism and so forth: I had figured out "normal" to be up around 2.5. It even says so on the chart. It is actually much lower than that. I have been keeping my eyes open.

Psychology never figured out a normal. As a matter of fact, they say in texts on psychology that they steer away from declaring what is really a normal. That is a good, wise policy. In Dianetics we should have too, because it depresses people.

I think it would depress people more though if "PDH" came out. PDH would make a great book. You could put it out in a form that the social order would buy very easily: "Pain- Drug- Hypnosis: The Foremost Secret Weapon of the Communist— Mightier Than the Atom Bomb." I think that would be a good title for it. And then you could show people how it is very easy for somebody to go to bed Tuesday night and wake up Wednesday morning, not knowing consciously anything has happened to him, and go down and rob the First National Bank. This fellow has been a good citizen all of his life and yet, all of a sudden, he robs the First National Bank.

As a matter of fact, an investigation of PDH has been going forward here for a long time— about six months now. It is the most interesting stuff I have run into in quite some time. The reason I mention it is right in line with this first book of Science of Survival: sooner or later you are going to run into actual, intended PDH. You are actually running into PDH whenever you run out some physicians operation or some surgeon’s operation. That is really what that is. There is pain and he is drugged, and the yak- yak- yak makes it hypnotism! So PDH really is just an engram— the implantation of an artificial engram.

I merely wanted to point up that there is no reason to suddenly depart from Standard Procedure in order to suddenly start processing pain- drug hypnosis. It falls right into the category of engrams; a PDH engram is just a little bit worse than engrams ordinarily are.

A real, good, solid PDH engram will contain Dianetics terminology— bouncer, grouper, denyer, misdirector. "Go to the bottom of the bank, go to the top of the bank. The somatic strip is now stuck in conception. All of your somatics are aberrations, all of your aberrations are somatics."

Somebody is going to have to do something about PDH because there is quite a bit of it around. I say "quite a bit"— there shouldn’t be any. And just to run into it once in a blue moon is too often.

But you are going to find when you run into it that you have to process it just like another engram. And as far as I know at this time— with electric shock, with insulin shock, with all of these other things— there is no special case on this chart, not even PDH.

As an ambitious auditor, you take your preclear who is normally at 1.1 and you find out that somebody has slugged him around or that wifey has been talking to him when he is asleep or something of the sort, and you say, "Well, all we have to do to resolve this case is so- and- so and so- and- so," and you make a dive for that, disregarding his position on the tone scale. What are you going to do with him? You are going to spin him, just like you would spin any other 1.1. There are no special cases here.

Now, we have heard talk about ways and means of undoing electric shock cases. The only way I know of efficiently undoing an electric shock case is to pick the preclear up at the level of the tone scale he is actually on and use that type of processing. Get around those electric shocks, leave them alone, get them out of the road. In other words, by stressing something else on the case, park them, do something with them; but don’t just run them as engrams, because they are late- life engrams of terrific impact. The reason we have trouble occasionally with an electric shock case is because some book auditor has gotten in there and done something to the case, or because the case has become terrifically introverted since being shocked and has gotten hung up in the shock and a few other things. But there isn’t anything special about this.

In other words, we don’t now have fifty kinds of cases, for each one of which we have to know processes. If you just follow it out calmly and experiment with it a little while, you will find out that we are following along the natural sequence of positions on the tone scale, and cases will resolve fairly rapidly.

So book one of Science of Survival has to do with theory and human evaluation— how you use the tone scale. And book two has to do with Dianetic processing. It has a sample of each kind of processing which is used on the tone scale, a description of how you do it and so on.

This book, by the way, is going to be supplemented. A monthly supplement will come out which is to be composed of an article on advanced procedures, queries, letters and things pointed up about the book, and then it will carry independent papers in the back of it. This is just a method of keeping the book live, particularly for people who are vitally concerned with what everybody is doing in the field.

In this way papers can come in, they can be looked over and something can be done with them. This will place in your hands far more papers than you have had so far, because we really get lots of papers. If those things are published then the material goes on more or less permanent file so we have some kind of a check as to who is doing what and where it is being done and so on. Somebody out in the field can then pick up a new technique if he wants to and look it over and try to process somebody by it, and report in what results he is getting. That is an efficient way to go about it.

By not making a clearing center for the material of Dianetics, this subject can go off in nine different directions and become twenty- five different subjects, easily. But if we want to keep Dianetics rolling, we have to coordinate material on Dianetics, we have to standardize material on Dianetics, and we have to be able to assure people that what we have agreed upon works— which is good ARC— and that what we put out won’t throw people galley- west. That is important.

Now, processing, as far as the actual techniques are concerned, is not tremendously different. Most auditors were acquainted with every single kind of processing technique which is in the book— you are acquainted with them. But you shouldn’t overlook the fact that each one of these has been slightly refined. There are changes in the techniques themselves.

For instance, how do you use Lock Scanning? Someone told me not long ago, "Lock Scanning can only be done on a relatively few cases." I don’t know what people this gentleman had been working, but they sure must have been down on that tone scale, because Lock Scanning cuts in fairly early. You do a smooth job with it at about 2.0; it runs very well at 2.5; there is nothing to it at 3.0; at 1.5 a person will hang up occasionally, and at 1.1 they will start to bog.

It is important for you to know that it is not just that on some cases you use Lock Scanning and some you don’t. You need to know the various aspects of Lock Scanning for each level of case because it changes very definitely in its aspect. You start lock- scanning somebody at 3.5 and they just blow chains of locks in all directions; there is nothing to it! But you start lock- scanning somebody at 1.1 and you say, "Is there a chain of locks we can scan?"

And he says, "Yes. Oh, yes."

"What is the name of the chain?"

"Well, the hubbla- gubbla chain." "All right. Let’s go back to the primary incident on the chain and scan forward to present time"— crash!

When you start working with one of these cases, you are generally working with a haywire file clerk and various things that make it very complex. So how do you use Lock Scanning on that case?

That is what you as auditors should be addressing your attention to: how do you adapt these tools for various levels of cases? For instance, there are ways to run engrams out of somebody who is way down on the tone scale. You shouldn’t do it very much but sometimes you find yourself doing it: Your preclear keeps insisting that there is a phrase; there is no reality on this thing for him or anything else but he is way down the tone scale, so you get rid of that phrase and he seems to feel a little bit better. Of course, if you keep this up for a week or so, you will have him far enough down the tone scale to bury him, practically, because you are starting to run a reality level which is incredibly low.

Another thing is that you can occasionally artificially bring somebody up the tone scale just with your magnetic personality as an auditor. Your presence as an auditor does bring a person up the tone scale.

You sometimes get a psychotic who is sane in the vicinity of an auditor, and this psychotic will operate and run at that level of the tone scale, not at the level that he demonstrates to the guards or the superintendent and his doctor. So, you have this psychotic, and this fellow does a very good job of being a 2.0 around you so you start running him as a 2.0. And you will find out he will run as a 2.0. That is very funny because he is ordinarily a 1.1 or something like that as a psychotic— spun in.

You have to use your judgment on this thing, but believe me, you would have to be a pretty experienced auditor before you would suddenly see this jump or take advantage of it. The safe way to do it, of course, is just to run the fellow the way he is around everybody. You know that he will run on that technique. You can run engrams out of psychotics providing you build them high enough up the line with ARC. But the safe way to do it is just to take him at the level he is at and use that kind of processing, and then you can’t get into any trouble.

Another thing that we open up in this processing and with the chart is the whole problem of accessibility. What is an inaccessible case? What is an accessible case? There are quite a few accessible cases but there are more inaccessible cases.

You have been walking around the society and possibly sometimes not recognizing An inaccessible case when you saw one. That is very possible, because there are lots of psychotics around. There are millions of them! And they are not looked on as being psychotic because the definition for the psychotic is "a person who is harmful to himself or others."

Do you mean to tell me that this is the only kind of an engram phrase there is— one which demands the destruction of self or others? These people walk around the society completely ruining things. Standing straight up, they look perfectly all right to you until you really start talking to them as an auditor, and all of a sudden you find you are talking to a psychotic.

For instance, you go to a preclear’s house and Mama says, "Johnny is in very bad shape. Yes, he always has been a nervous boy. I don’t know why, but he always has been nervous. And now, Johnny, don’t go into one of your crazy spells. Talk to the man."

So you start to look around this household and you realize that the person who needs processing isn’t Johnny; Johnny gets along all right. But— oh, boy— Mama! You see that you could straighten up five kids or something of the sort by straightening up Mama. So you turn around to Mama and say, "Did you ever hear of Dianetics?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure."

"Have you ever thought of taking any processing along the line?"

"Oh, no. Oh, not for me. No. I’m perfectly sane!"

And you say, "It’s very simple. For instance, can you remember a time when "

"I wouldn’t think of touching the thing! That’s only for crazy people! No, I wouldn’t have anything to do with this. And you had better not try to treat me either, because it’s illegal!"

You suddenly start to see this dramatization go in, and you realize that Mama walking around talking about Johnny, Mama getting dinner, Mama doing this and Mama doing that is Mama dramatizing, and that the "I" is sitting in the middle of a valence and in the middle of a circuit, and is so crushed in by entheta that it couldn’t make up its mind to do anything unless the engram said so. You are talking to a real, honest- to- God dangerous psychotic!

This psychotic is really a dangerous psychotic because she passes for a sane person, and this disarms everybody. They say, "Oh, well, she is sort of peculiar, but she is good at heart. She gets dinner for her husband every night."

When we look back into the past a little bit we find out that every one of those kids is an attempted abortion, that her husband has been talked out of getting any better position that he ever could have obtained, that the household is a wreck, that the family fortune was spent on Uncle Binds funeral, that the kids are screaming wrecks, that all sorts of weird things have been happening in this household and it never can settle down or organize itself in any way.

To the society, it is obvious the kids are what is doing all this, because they make noise! Or the husband is what is doing it because he gets sore about it! So he must be the psychotic and they must be the psychotics, but she is a good soul because she never makes any noise. She is very quiet, very determined about everything she does— you know how an engram gets! That person is an inaccessible psychotic! It is easy to go out and process psychos in an institution. But if you pick some of the unrecognized inaccessibles out of the society and try to process them you have really got a job on your hands, because these people "know" they are sane.

Just look over their lives and see what they are doing with them. Watch them succumbing every time they turn around, or bringing somebody else in their vicinity down in a pile of junk.

You should recognize that the hardest person to approach is not the psychotic but the person who says "Dianetics? That’s a big hoax, isn’t it?"

You say, "No, it works."

"Yeah? I was asking a fellow the other day and he said it was a hoax."

"All you have to do is just take a look at it. One of the basic principles is so- and- so."

And this fellow says, "Oh, I wouldn’t be interested."

That is very peculiar. You start to follow along the track with this guy, and if you persist you will find out that you can process him by picking it up at the lowest echelon of inaccessibility. You are trying to process him too high; you are trying to talk to him in present time. That is a definite technique that cuts in somewhere up around 0.5 way up the tone scale from where he is.

One of the first things that you would have to do with this fellow is mimicry. For instance, if he takes a cigarette, you take a cigarette. All of a sudden the fellow will recognize there is something in his vicinity that is similar to him.

I wanted to point this up particularly because every time you turn around, you are running into one of these people.

"Well, my husband sent me down here. He’s the one that’s crazy. But he wants me to have processing, of all things. So I’ll just lie here on the couch and you go ahead and do what you want to do. He said I needed processing."

Have you run into any of those? They are nuts! You start going back into the family history and you will find out that all sorts of weird things have been happening around there— the kind of weird, non- sequitur things that just don’t add up. There isn’t any intention behind these things. There "obviously" was no intention to wreck the car. Of course, it was parked out there where there was "No Parking" on a high- speed highway. Every time she came home from bringing the children home from school she would leave the car there. "Well, it was easier to run into the driveway." As a matter of fact, she had to back up and go into the driveway and get out again when she wanted to start off and go downtown, but the car stayed out there where it could get hit. And it stayed out there day after day and one day it got hit.

You watch this effort to succumb, this effort to turn MEST into enMEST, this effort to bring disaster to people around them. These people are psychos; they are down below 2.0. There are too many of them in the society for anybody’s comfort. But they are the people that you try to process. It is not just because these people won’t believe Dianetics that we say they are crazy. This is the wrong line. The point is that you are trying to process somebody and she says, "I heard all about psychoanalysis once and it didn’t do my sister Mamie any good. She went for eight years to this analyst and it didn’t do her a bit of good. And I often said to her, I said, ‘Mamie, I don’t think that analyst is doing you any good." ’ And you will find yourself talking to this person, you will find that there are words coming out of her mouth and words coming out of your mouth, but somehow or other no communication line is set up. Why isn’t there any communication line? You are talking to a psychotic!

How do you set up a communication line? In the first place you have to put her in touch with present time; you have to put her in touch with some of the factors around her. How can she get in touch with you if she can’t get in touch with the chair she is sitting on?

Now, on the reverse of that, you go into a lawyer’s office and you say, "I would like to go down to the city jail and process a couple of the criminals down there with Dianetics."

And he says, "Dianetics? I thought that was a fad or something. That was a religious fad, wasn’t it, last year?"

"No, it’s processing." And you would look at him and say, "As a matter of fact, it is the only validated method of increasing sanity known to man today."

"Yeah?"

"It does remarkable things. It picks some people up and they do much better afterwards. It has patched up a marriage here and a suicide attempt there, and it does pretty well. And as a matter of fact, sometimes by just walking up to a stranger, snapping your fingers and saying ‘Let’s go back to the incident necessary to resolve your case, ’ the person will curl up in a ball and fall."

"He will!"

"Yeah. He will just curl up in a ball and fall on the floor, and he’ll find himself in birth or something."

"Is that right! Hey, that has some use!"

You are talking to somebody who is sane. That is normally the kind of reaction that you get. This is something new he hasn’t heard about. If you make it a little bit interesting, he will listen to you and communicate with you about it.

So you say, "Now, who is the person that you really like best in your present environment?" "Oh, yeah. I’ve got a guy."

"Now go back a little bit earlier— last year. What person did you like best last year?"

"I can’t think of any I liked best, but boy, there was one guy that I sure would have loved to have killed!" "Who did he remind you of very early in your life?"

And all of a sudden you get some Straightwire and the fellow feels a little bit better; you get a little tone 4 off him.

He will say, "You know, this Dianetics is interesting."

Ordinarily, if you are talking to people who are really up the tone scale, who are above 2.0, you can go into communication with them; you can show them what you are doing and they will listen.

But if you are talking to people below 2.0, they won’t. They might listen if you were selling atom bombs or if you had a new kind of rat poison which was just as effective on human beings. This is the tone scale at work.

So we have a new evaluation of what an inaccessible case is. We should not fall back on psychiatric definitions and say an inaccessible case is a psychotic who should be institutionalized or is institutionalized. No, an inaccessible case is a person who is low on the tone scale and cannot be processed easily. They can all be processed one way or the other.

But very low on the tone scale, you will find some cases very accessible. Here you have somebody who potentially has a little bit of Theta which is still offering to work. This is the gradient between Theta and entheta. This case is not closed off by reason of having gone completely out of contact.

Don’t depend on a psychiatric classification. Don’t say "This person is harmful to himself and to others, therefore he is a psychotic and I only process psychotics at this level on the tone scale."

What you want to do is figure out where that person sits on the tone scale by his conduct; the way you evaluate him is with regard to his behavior.

You will find sometimes that you don’t have time to evaluate a case. Maybe you are running one of these ten- or fifteen- minute offices where you are doing a lot of consultation and you are doing a lot of this and that and dressing people up, or maybe you are working with a doctor in his office like some of our auditors are now. You don’t want to use the long techniques in those situations; you want to give them the fast ones. You don’t have time to really size up every person that walks along.

There is still a method of sizing them up: What kind of processing can they stand up to? You can tell that at a glance and you will know where this person is on the tone scale more or less. And then you can predict what his conduct will be.