SURVIVAL AND THE HUMAN MIND

A lecture given on 6 August 1951

Principles of Thought

I was talking a short time ago with someone who had suddenly gone into a long line of furious computation; evidently he had suddenly realized that there is no reactive mind.

Of course this is true; you will notice it says in the Handbook this is an analogy that makes it understandable, because there is a portion of the intellect which is out of immediate recall.

There is a great deal to say about loss, for instance. It is all right to say that pain is the sixth and seventh dynamics in collision. That is true, but what happens on any collision? What happens is loss.

In the art of surveying there is only one kind of error that can be made, just one error possible. For instance, if you are surveying from one point to another and between those two points is a clump of bushes and a hill, you can’t take a transit shot with a stadia rod or anything like that between those two points; you have to go around these things. So you chain off the distance around the bushes and the hill— in other words, measure it.. Your rodman stands there holding the rod, usually swatting flies and so forth.

There is a special way to hold one of these rods, by the way; it is very intricate. If you hold the rod just right so that its weight isn’t on your fingers and you keep adjusting it so there is no weight on your fingers, you have a perfect vertical. But if that rod falls off a little bit to one side, the fellow running a transit from one of those points to the rod will get his shot as though it were off to the side. He will get his angles wrong.

In addition to that, this distance may be many hundreds of feet, and you have to do what is called "break chain." A chain is three hundred feet, so you go three hundred feet and then you measure another three hundred feet, and you measure another three hundred feet. If you break the chain twice, going a little off the line each time, it makes the starting point and ending point appear further apart than they actually are. So every time your chain comes off line you are measuring something that is apparently longer, and this keeps pulling everything together. That is to say, all of your surveying errors are shortening errors— loss, in other words.

Now, the only thing we are trying to survey is the human mind. Every time thought comes up against an obstruction, it is curtailed, interrupted, shortened; in other words, there is loss of something.

The basic reason pain is aberrative, then, is that pain is a loss. It is a definite loss. It is a loss of survival, but much more important, it is an actual loss in the physical level. A fellow burns his finger. That is the loss of a certain number of cells. A fellow gets hit in the jaw. There is obviously shock there, but at the same time there is a certain amount of physical damage. There is material lost there, MEST that is damaged. The body, in healing, has to refabricate that lost material. It is this way with all pain. Pain is loss.

Think of how a fellow would feel if he lost his arm. That is a big loss! There is also a lot of pain involved with it. He has lost an enormous amount of his own anatomy.

Now, suppose a man has a child and he loses the child. He has connected himself up with the child as though the child were part of him. So when the child disappears, that means there must have been a lot of pain there. We just figure this thing on both sides, and it says that every time there is physical pain there is loss, therefore every time there is loss there must be physical pain. The mind calculates it out this way. And we get the secondary— loss.

The sensation of pain could be ventured in various ways. Mechanically it can be very easily explained, but what is it computationally? On a computational level the awareness is an awareness of loss, and that is a painful awareness. If a fellow gets too much loss he is dead. It is not only how wrong you can get— and the answer to "How wrong can you get?" is dead— it is also how much you can lose. The answer to "How much can you lose?" is you can lose yourself.

Therefore all of these categories of pain as they register and so on are more or less in the same category: pain is loss.

Suppose a fellow has too much loss occur in his life: he loses this and he loses that, and the next thing you know, he is on an awareness level where he no longer has the computational area, you might say, or the computational power necessary to back off from these losses mentally. He is up against the losses. In other words, he is continually losing.

What he loses is himself and the way that happens is just a parallel. Mentally, a person does with his thoughts what happens with the MEST around him. There is a parallel which is operating. An individual’s environment exists in terms of MEST, and he loses a segment of this environment; it is lost. He parallels this in the field of thought— he says, "This was my environment"— so that segment is lost in the field of thought.

In other words, whatever happens in an individual’s environment is mirrored or duplicated or paralleled by thought. If you lose a hat, you might not have much trouble with future hats but the chances are you won’t remember that hat you lost. Of course, you lost it because you forgot it. It works both ways.

If you lose the material object, you lose the thought connected with the material object. So, naturally, when you have physical- pain losses, it is registered as physical pain. Then, when you just lose something else from the environment that is not even connected up to your body— it is not part of the body nervous system at all, it is just something in the environment which is suddenly lost— that says immediately in the field of thought that this is physical pain. Therefore the loss of MEST is very aberrative. But the loss of MEST could not be aberrative unless the organism had already been thoroughly taught that the loss of MEST is painful.

The mind, in other words, considers the cells of one finger as MEST. The most valuable MEST (if you will pardon mixing terms) that a person can have, then, is a living organism. And the most valuable of all living organisms, to his intellect, is himself. Therefore it is a very valuable thing to have a finger, and it is very valuable to have the cells of the finger. So when one gets burned, one loses some cells of the finger and that is a very intimate loss.

The next thing that happens is that the body has to go to work and duplicate those cells, but it has been registered mentally that the cells of the finger are lost. They are gone.

There should be no mystery whatsoever in the fact that when you run out a burn you have just received the healing is very fast. That is a simple one which many of you have observed. People in Dianetics ordinarily do this. If they burn their hand on a cigarette or something like that, they go off in the corner and run it out.

As a matter of fact, there was a medical doctor who was very skeptical of Dianetics. He was at the skeptical level of the tone scale; he was skeptical of himself, skeptical of his wife and skeptical of everything else. He didn’t have any idea that there was anything workable about Dianetics until one day he was stirring up a fireplace and got himself most beautifully burned. He burned his whole hand. He had laid the poker in the fireplace and it got red hot, then he went back and picked it up and it burned him.

He had heard me say that you could run one of these injuries out yourself, so he started going through this thing. His hand was beginning to blister, but he went through it several times and he found out something immediately: he had perceived things while his hand was hurting at its acute state. At its highest level of pain, he had perceived things. In other words, there had actually been perceptics lost in the moment when the pain was taking place. And when he ran through it again, he found that there had been an instant of unconsciousness, real unconsciousness. The memory of it expanded, and as he ran through it several times he started to pick up more and more perceptics out of this moment. Whereas he had not supposed that he had been unconscious during that period, all of sudden he found a long period there that was blank, and he got the perceptics in it.

The pain disappeared out of his hand and the blisters went down. His hand did not hurt anymore. This convinced him that the tenets must have some degree of reliability to them, if a thing like this could happen. Up to that time pain to him had been something that you administered to patients in order to make them be good and not be sick anymore!

So here is what happens: On the MEST level an injury takes place and an actual loss occurs, and then it registers on the thought level, "Loss has occurred, right hand, so many cells, and so forth. There is an actual loss there. We shouldn’t think about this because it is painful! It is lost; it is gone."

Because the mind actually has the metering job on the restoration of tissue and it modulates the endocrine system and all the rest of it— it is a command post, in other words— it says, "That is lost; why send any repair materials down there?" This is completely silly, but unfortunately the computer has this initial error in it that says there will be a persistence of condition, which overrides the actuality of condition.

Now, there is something else occurring: The stuff which the mind sends in to heal this area is being sent into an area from which something has just been lost. There are actual cells going in there— for instance, the white blood cells.

The phagocyte has an interesting mental makeup. I am sure there must be a mental makeup to the phagocyte because any moment the body is punctured, white blood corpuscles immediately drive into this area to clean up bacteria. Their voracity for bacteria is greater than their fear of the loss which has just taken place. It makes one wonder if the white blood corpuscles really are under the control of the central nervous system. So in go the white blood corpuscles to mop this up. But hemoglobin— the red blood corpuscles— and other repair- materials and so forth avoid that area. Blood is the most cowardly substance under the sun. It has the idea that if it goes into an area of a cut it will drip out and get lost!

Fear is a threat of loss. So, if you get just a threat of loss, all the blood of the body retreats to the center of the body where it is good and safe; it lakes.

This isn’t one of those reactions that is in the category of "just like everybody else." As a matter of fact, the preponderance of people will get a sensation in the center of their body immediately following fear or a shock, because they are experiencing the taking of blood. The blood is scared. Life is busily approximating conditions which shouldn’t really be approximated. For instance, take the fellow who has had enough pain in his lifetime to know that pain means loss. Here is loss taking place; therefore, any threatened loss is pain. Any accomplished loss must have been painful.

The tone scale, of course, is predicated on this basis. There are many ways of deriving the tone scale. You can derive the tone scale through observing the acquisition of MEST, you can derive the tone scale through observing the loss of MEST, and you can derive it empirically just by observing somebody who is processing out an area of pain.

As a person comes down the emotional scale, the first threat of loss is met with antagonism by the individual. The next is anger; he wants to destroy what is threatening the loss. Then he finds out he can’t destroy it so he tries to get around it. Next he sees that it is probably going to win and he is going to lose something; that is fear. And then he finds out that he has lost something; that is grief. When he feels he has lost too much and can’t recover, that is apathy.

That is the tone scale; the tone scale goes down with pain much more certainly than it does with what you call secondaries. The secondary is called a secondary because it is resting on top of physical pain losses.

Somebody who has lost too much in life will develop an "anxiety complex"— so called by older schools of whatever they laughingly call therapy— and he gets to a point where he isn’t sure what he is going to lose next. He doesn’t know, on any piece of MEST that he starts to reach his hand out for, whether to take hold of it, to push it away from him or what, since if he acquires it he may lose it. So you get, down along the apathy line, the fact that a fellow is afraid to acquire MEST. He will say, "I don’t want it." A fellow along the apathy band will not even heal up his own body; he doesn’t want to repair that. He doesn’t want it. Anything, then, which might even vaguely be pain is something he must get rid of. This is the mechanism of negation.

A person will not only negate against MEST, he will negate in thought. For instance, you try to tell this fellow that you have gained something in life: You say, "A very funny thing, I was walking down the street a few minutes ago and I found a ten- dollar bill lying on the sidewalk."

This fellow is so leery of existence that the thought of even you acquiring something is too much (he is just mixed up completely on differentiation), and he will say, "Well, it’s probably counterfeit," or "The owner will probably reclaim it."

It does you no good to keep saying to him, "Oh, no! It’s valuable MEST. I found it. Everything is happy and cheerful," because the harder you do that and the more you demonstrate to him that it is valuable MEST, the more you are going to drive him into the necessity of getting rid of this stuff, because he can only think of the pain it would occasion if he lost it. So just the thought of acquisition comes into that line.

You could take a little child and start working on him on the basis of the acquisition of MEST, and you could show him that every time he is given a present he has to give away some of his own self- determinism. He won’t be able to figure this out. If he acquires MEST, then he is being told what to do about that MEST, SO the more MEST he acquires the more chances are that he will be MEST too. For instance, take a little boy who gets a pair of shoes. They are his shoes. And then somebody comes along and tells him he has to polish those shoes, he has to do this and he has to do that. The first thing you know, the acquisition of the MEST has made him MEST; therefore he has to negate against these shoes in order to recover his own self- determinism. In other words, he has to lose something in order to exist! So you get lower- tone- scale action; it is inevitable.

The person keeps running on a computation of this sort: Every time he feels that he has to regain some self- determinism it means he has to get rid of some MEST. This fellow is on a 180- degree vector now; he is 180 degrees wrong on anything he does. Therefore you will find him on the thought level— the theta level— reversing truth; he just turns it around. He turns everything around. He is supposed to live so he dies. He is supposed to heal so he stays sick. It all comes up along the line of the demonstration that acquisition is dangerous. That is an actual fact.

This has come down through the evolutionary generations, reaching back to the earliest dawn of the sea of ammonia from which "everybody knows man arose spontaneously." This, by the way, is not supposed to be miraculous; what is supposed to be miraculous is that man arose spontaneously in the Garden of Eden!

When we go back down the line, we find out that any time theta acquired some MEST and made some new cells as a part of the organism and made a slightly bigger organism, it was more likely that that piece of theta would be damaged by other organisms. This is big- pattern

behavior. That is an overall computation. The more you were and the better the MEST was that you had accumulated and made into cells, the more edible you became.

So it was a tossup whether or not the organism became edible or workable, because the small organisms are not basically very workable; they are not mobile. They can’t go out and seek food. They depend on the currents of wind or of the sea or something like that. They bump into food. Their level of mobility is not good. It is non survival to be that small, that helpless and that much at the whim of the elements. So the answer to it was to advance forward and become an organism which did have mobility, which was bigger.

Unfortunately, every time an organism became bigger and became more mobile, it also became more edible. So it was immediately built in as one of the theta fundamentals that acquisition of MEST also means the threat of loss of MEST. Because of this, we have animals which finally went into a complete apathy and became armadillos and such. The mobility of an armadillo is a very sorry compromise. The whole run of the armor- plate family sacrificed mobility in an effort to protect the accomplished and acquired MEST.

You must not overlook the fact that the body— no matter that there may be theta unity— is actually a colonial aggregation of cells. It is made up of colonies of cells which have aggregated into a more mobile and then a more and more mobile organism. Various functions have been taken over, then, by various parts of the body.

Most of the gains in evolution were probably more or less planned out somehow or other, but it is a fact that what we now consider disease germs are bacterial efforts to infiltrate organisms and ally themselves with the organism.

Probably white blood corpuscles were a deadly disease once upon a time, but they were quite able in the destruction of bacteria and so the body and the white blood corpuscles got along fine. In other words, the other cells of the body found that they had a compatible mission and the white blood corpuscles stayed around.

In other words, the organism would assume any cellular entities which could agree with the organism that the survival of the organism was the paramount mission. There had to be a high level of agreement: "All right, if you want to get in here and pitch, then there is no sense to this business of trying to eat up certain of the brain tissues and so forth the way you have been doing and causing what we have been referring to around here as ‘a hell of a mess. ’ What you have to do is find some kind of a specialized function. If you agree with us that you can get a specialized function and assist this body in its survival, we will go along with it and you can stick around. Otherwise, we are going to bump you off, or we will play you the dirtiest trick of all and the whole organism’s species will die out and stop, and then you won’t have anything else to chew on." A successful bacteria is one which can adopt an organism and then adapt itself to the survival purposes of that organism.

A lot of the things about an organism are pretty makeshift.

There is a very funny thing about theta; as soon as you begin to consider this, you begin to see that there is something strange about theta. Theta has a strange unity. Man has been talking about this unity for some time. He keeps talking about the unity of God. He tries to keep reaching this unity, some kind of cosmic unity. He tries to reach this unity and then he backs off from it rapidly.

He says, "There is only one god and his name is Zeus- Amon— except, of course, there is Jupiter, Venus, Saturn..." He will then build up a subfamily on the thing. Then somebody will come along and say, "What it is, really, is cosmic unity; there is only one God and his name is Yahweh— except of course there is the Son and the Holy Ghost." And they will back off from this unity. There is a seesaw going on.

Man’s efforts to think about this thing try hard to approach a unity, then they come a cropper and fall off, and then they go back and try to approach the unity again. The main trouble is man has no data of comparable magnitude.

It is just as though there were a cosmic consciousness which didn’t care what organism it survived through! It was perfectly willing to individualize any and every organism that it contacted and take its chance on getting through on many routes. Getting through where? Through time— that is a part of MEST. It is getting through time and space, working on the conquest of the physical universe and so forth. Actually to all intents and purposes, as you can see in groups in operation, it is probably all the same energy. You don’t have much of a monopoly on it. But it gets individualized, so individual units of this energy form up as the overall unit personality of the organism.

Once an organism begins operating in high- level cooperation toward the mobility and survival of the operation, this unit personality starts to develop.

There is no unit personality to the sponge; I know, I have talked to sponges. They are "every man for himself." If you kick through a sponge and then come back and look a little while later, you will find that these pieces and parts that you have kicked apart have settled on other rocks in the vicinity, and they have begun growing again. In other words, the sponge is evidently unable to experience the pain of loss. So there is a ratio there: The more mobile an organism is and the more it is going to attempt in the conquest of the physical universe as an organism and the more unified is its purpose, the more pain it is capable of feeling and the more loss it can experience. It isn’t that it can lose more; it can experience more loss.

So man— at least until we look on a few other planets and find out what funny- looking things there are on those— is at this time the most mobile and the most capable of all life organisms, is the most capable of conquering the physical universe and is the most susceptible to losses and can most acutely and chronically feel pain. So there is a tremendous capability on one side being paid for over on the other side by a tremendous sensitivity.

Of course, unless this successful organism is sensitive to potential losses, it isn’t going to advance at all because it will never learn that losses can be experienced.

The human mind got so good that it could predict losses with a great deal of sensitivity, and then it could go on out and imagine the losses. And about that time it got awfully tangled up and moved away from the basic. It is a long way from the basic. However, it is capable, once its physical pain is cleared up, of reorienting itself against its actual experience.

It will dub in experience to account for past, present or future losses. It will go into all sorts of explanations to itself. But it is still capable, when it is in the process of receiving a shock, of accounting for not only lost MEST but lost thought, so lost MEST and lost thought are parallel.

It is very dangerous to lose MEST. There is some very esoteric reasoning a fellow can do about losing MEST. The original error might or might not have been Adam and Eve, but it is certain that the original colonial aggregation of cells split off, and the cosmic consciousness became divided so that there was a second individuality. This individuality attacked the first individuality and there was conflict. No matter how necessary it was to have that conflict for survival, there is a primary basic lesson that might or might not have been there: Loss is to some degree attended by an increased power on the part of the other individual. You can see this in the fact that if a lion walks up and bites off a big piece of the colonial aggregation, the lion becomes stronger. There is a transfer of MEST there. Therefore there is a threat to loss.

There are probably a lot of other threats encompassed in loss. But something lost for some reason or other, whatever the reason is, is more powerful than something one still has.

If you talk to amputees, you will find out that the loss of a limb is much more powerful than the fact that he still has others. You can point out to the fellow that he still has a left hand, and he will say, "Yeah, but this is the one that counted, and it is gone." This accounts for phantom- limb phenomena and so forth.

By the way, I ran into a case that had phantom limb at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. He had lost his phantom- limb delusions in a very simple way. The doctors had simply put him under sedation and pounded at him and hammered him until they convinced him that he had lost his arm. And he no longer had phantom- limb sensibilities there; he no longer had the sensation that he still had an arm. He wasn’t sane, either, but that was beside the point as far as those doctors were concerned! That is what is known as "The symptom was greatly improved."

Now, for some reason or other, things that are lost have command power. A person will still try to hold on, on a sub awareness level, to whatever is lost. This is the command power of engrams. Of course, it was a dangerous situation; it created a certain emotional tone. There are a lot of various descriptions that could be made on it, but the basic point is that when something is lost it thereafter has command power.

For instance, if a fellow loses his hat, he thereafter has to be more careful about hats. The pain of losing hats becomes too great and it gets completely buried. He will find himself after he has lost a hat being meticulously careful for a while where he puts his hat.

You can watch somebody who has had a recent loss of some object— for example, the car keys. For a long time after losing the car keys, he will take the new set of car keys and bring them in and put them carefully on the mantelpiece. You can watch him; he does not realize how careful he is being with these new car keys. The lost car keys promote care with the new MEST. That is a pretty good modus operandi. That would be one way to convince the organism that it ought to take care of itself and take care of its MEST. This is the command power of a whole experience being approximated in the thought line.

What I am amplifying to you is a parallel, a basic, a fundamental, and this fundamental is that the intellect does with thought what the organism has done with MEST. The experience of the organism with MEST is approximated by the organism in the field of thought. It does with its thoughts what has happened with its MEST.

Have you ever seen a man with a poor- man orientation? That is a gruesome one to live with. Sometimes a potential loss is so present with an individual that he will go into the doggonedest devious ramifications about every piece of property, every possession, he has. He is doing the same thing with his thoughts. Maybe he was raised in a family which had nothing, or maybe he was raised in a family which had a lot of things but had a lot of people in it who claimed that it had nothing. He gets to the point where he doesn’t believe he has anything, which means he has no right to any MEST.

That is all that is wrong with a criminal. He doesn’t believe that he has any right to MEST. MEST has been made so painful, and is so painful to him and his losses are such, that he doesn’t have any right to possess external MEST. SO he will try to destroy external MEST, steal it, disrupt it or wreck it, and we have what is known as a criminal. He has no direct right to ask for anything. He can’t go in and lay down ten dollars on the counter and say "Give me five cartons of cigarettes." He has the ten dollars in his pocket (this mystifies police), but he will go down the alley and break into the back end of the drugstore and steal a carton of cigarettes. He doesn’t have the right to buy that carton. He has no exchange value; he has no ownership level.

What kind of a thought pattern does this postulate for this individual? He has no right to his own thoughts, then, either, does he? Therefore this individual can be dominated by anything on his tone level. So criminals, when they go into association with one another, are very susceptible to leadership. They can be formed up into gangs.

When you go to the movies, it is not an error when you see the hero, with his FBI badge or his Wheaties badge or something, charging around and he tells somebody to do something but they don’t do it right. Something will interrupt the confederates of the hero almost every time: the police won’t arrive in time; the hero is always getting battered or tied up, and something is always wrong. The hero’s confederates don’t work well with him. But boy, do those villains have a smooth gang!

This was tradition in the movies. If you ever go to The Perils of Pauline and subsequent serials, you will find the "Crimson Eyedrop" or something sitting there massively, issuing orders to these criminals around him. He says, "Now, you go and bring me the right eye of the Buddha Lump Gump, and so forth, and make sure that you disable the plane of so- and- so." He gives his men these incredibly intricate tasks, and all of his men go out and they really function! It is always "Yes, Chief!" and "Aye- aye, sir!"— no argument. But the hero doesn’t live in that kind of an atmosphere; everything is going wrong around the hero.

So you get these beautifully smooth criminal organizations. Actually, the criminal is so confused about MEST that his confusion makes it possible for him to be very thoroughly dominated on his own level. He cannot be thoroughly dominated on any other level than his own, however, and he is below 2.0. So anybody who comes along who can think along the band of the criminal can dominate criminals.

One of the easiest things there is to do is organize a gang of criminals. I know, I have put naval vessels together. As a matter of fact, that is what happened to me once. I boarded ship innocent and unsuspecting, and then the crew of this new vessel marched aboard. They were dirty and miserable— they were a mess— but aboard the ship they came. These guys didn’t look quite right to me, so I started looking in their service records’ and I found out that the navy had shipped me a complete crew who were all intended for Portsmouth!

Somebody, probably by telepathy or some other method, had informed an admiral there was a war on. (The admiral wouldn’t have learned otherwise.) And the admiral said, "This means that we need all the men available. Now, here on my base (of course we have to keep this base running smoothly) we need a thousand seamen to sweep the dry dock, we need a thousand seamen to sweep off the compound here in front of my quarters— of course, nothing but first- class seamen. And we have got to have those boys to run hot- water bottles between the dry- dock and the radio station; that’s another five hundred seamen. Now, how are we going to outfit that ship there? They need a hundred people; they need a hundred sailors."

Of course there was only one answer to that, and that was to reach down into the brig for the contingent being sent to Portsmouth and send them out to the combat ship. (It was a disgrace to go into combat in the last war!)

I was aghast! I tried to protest but I couldn’t get anywhere by protesting; nobody would pay any attention. So in a sort of a whipped frame of mind I said, "We can do wonderful things here— I hope." It was the funniest thing— I managed to show these boys that their survival or lack of it depended on an agreement that the ship ought to survive, and that there wasn’t any reason to put anything down in their service records. They didn’t believe this for thirty days. They thought any officer who would go along and not put down all of a man’s court- martials and reprimands in his service record, of course, could not be sufficiently GI and therefore wouldn’t get along well. That is true, too.

I would bring this seaman and that one up to mast and just work them over, bawl them out: "Do you realize you are threatening the life of the people around you by being inefficient? I don’t care what you do, whether you salute in the morning or not, but you had better keep that gun clean!" The guy would go away. He had been expecting to get a deck court- martial or something like that. Nothing would go down in his service record. Their service records were just sitting there gathering dust.

All of a sudden they realized they had a criminal gang, that somebody was protecting them from law and order! And that ship came together! You never saw such a ship after that; I never had any trouble with it. I turned all the management of the ship over to a kangaroo court. They used to sit down in the mess hall and try somebody who had done wrong. Their whole definition of doing wrong was "Did the person lower the potentials of the vessel to survive the war?" They were very serious about this, and they would take him out on the afterdeck and beat his head in, but I would never hear about it.

We had a wonderful ship. It took me a long time to find out that actually what I had organized was just like one of these perfect criminal gangs. It was a very efficient ship, though.

Actually, an army, to be a good, solid army, has to be at 1.5. I have heard officers of the regular navy before the war talking fatuously once in a while about how it was a funny thing that every time they had seen a group of criminals brought together into one division, it would be a crack division. How could they better approximate the tone level of the navy than to get all of the real 1.5s into one group, and then get an officer who liked to loaf, or something of the sort, and put him over the top of this group?

On the battleship Oklahoma, the captain one morning noticed a spot of rust or something on the sword tassel of one of the younger officers, so he went back to his own quarters and began to figure out what he could do to this young fellow that would be nice and devious and covert and horrible. He had a lot of people on his ship that he was going to get rid of, so instead of getting rid of those people he put them together into one deck division. These people were all miserable; they were good for nothing. They were getting summary courts- martial they were getting deck courts; they were AWOL; they would go ashore and beat up shore patrols, and they were just in continual trouble. On locker inspections, their toothbrushes would be out of line— horrible things! So he took all of these people and grouped them into one deck division and gave them to this officer, and this officer all of a sudden had the E turret and had the E divisions of the ship. This type of thing has happened many times.

Have you ever seen these silly cords, the aiguillettes, that they give some regiments and so forth to wear? That originally came about because there was a regiment in Spain which was recruited from the prisons. They emptied all the prisons and put all the prisoners together in one regiment, and the king’s officer said, "You men had better get out and fight those Moors, and just to convince you that you should, we are going to give each of you your own noose to carry with you. That is just to remind you what will happen unless you get in there and pitch." So these fellows went around carrying a hangman’s rope, and they wore it for the duration of that war. At the end of the war the king awarded it to them as a badge of valor. I think that hangman’s noose is very representative of what all wars are about, and just about what valor is in a war.

The point is that if you can approximate the tone level of the individual with the activity of the unit to which this individual belongs— whether it’s the Kiwanis Club or a naval vessel— and if their tone can approximate what they are supposed to do about MEST, you will have a smoothly running organization, but if that tone is not approximated you won’t. In other words, in figuring out an organization, you have to figure out what that organization should do with MEST and then approximate it in tone level.

In Dianetics you have to have 4.0s to run a smooth organization because you are trying to straighten out and bring order to and be completely Lord Fauntleroy about MEST. You are not supposed to shoot it up; you are not supposed to pull it out from under and burn it; you are not supposed to go around and stab somebody in the back. You are supposed to all be very honorable and straight forward and so on. A person at 3.0 starts to strain about this a little bit; even he has occasional thoughts that say "It would be an awfully nice thing, a little bit of arsenic in . . . Oh well, that is too much to think about." In other words, it’s a strain.

Now, if we were fighting a war, we would have to specially recruit people at 1.5— that low on the tone scale. We could approximate that easily.

But actually, when you are trying to bring this much theta into a society you have Go approximate on the tone scale with your personnel what you are trying to do with the MEST. It takes 4.0 to organize all the MEST thoroughly. In Dianetics we are trying to organize the MEST of the whole cockeyed world. As a matter of fact, we don’t even dare look at the magnitude of the job— it is too big! It has to be too smooth an operation and so forth, so we just pitch into it where we can, and approximate it as well as we can.

But we can’t have one of these fine, beautiful, smooth- running organizations where our noble president can sit there and stroke his long black mustaches and say, "Well, boys, go out and blow up the waterworks and put the diphtheria germs in all the babies’ milk." No, we could easily get a good organization that would do that.

This is why the most popular and largest organizations in the world are armies. It is very simple to recruit an army. It is very, very difficult to recruit a crusade, mostly because of the tone scale. So one of the first things that has to be solved is bringing everybody up to 4.0 so they will stay there stably. This world has not had its MEST so well under control that everybody is a tailor- made 4.0.

Furthermore, we are handling MEST with an indirection in it; we are handling people who handle MEST. But believe me, we are up at the highest echelon that you can get to! The individual is in there handling MEST, his thoughts are approximating and paralleling the MEST methods he has used and handled, and we are handling the individual as an organism. But we don’t want to own this individual, so we are handling him on the thought level in organization and order. We are bringing organization and order to his thought level over the organism so that he can handle and straighten out MEST .

In other words, there are many stages down. We are doing about the highest- flown job that you could possibly do on these individuals. It is a very priestly job, if I may say so, only we can have a little more success with it than most priesthood’s have had.

There would be many ways of approaching this problem if it weren’t for the fact that it had to be approached at a high level on the tone scale. You could drive Dianetics into the society without much trouble, unless you wanted to put it in there at 4.0. That requires both a slow advance and a very orderly advance.