SOME NOTES ON BLACK DIANETICS

A lecture given on 17 September 1951

The Darker Side of the Picture

There is a maxim that one does not evaluate Dianetics or try to put it forward in terms of his own case. That is to say, one does not take one’s own case and dream up a technique that would solve it, and then present to the public a technique which will solve the case of Julius K. Swizzlebum but nobody else.

However, there are certain basic things which an individual really has to know and there is no better laboratory than himself. If something goes wrong, at worst he can be prosecuted for suicide; he at least will not be prosecuted for murder.

Although I have never said very much about it, in Dianetics you are playing around with highly explosive material. I would say that a person using Dianetics in certain ways might much more happily juggle two or three hand grenades with their pins pulled. For instance, take some of these people who run around self- auditing: why don’t they just go get a gun? That is much simpler and quicker.

A person can drive himself mad with Dianetics without any trouble. What you have concentrated on in your study of Dianetics has been the process of making people well. That is your emphasis line. But don’t think for a moment that that is any more than half of it. There is as much data on how to make people insane, uncomfortable, sick or dead as there is on how to make them well. We ordinarily do not handle that side of the data; we ordinarily do not look at it. But once in a while, in order to learn something, it is necessary to look at it.

Knowing the potentialities which are inherent in Dianetics, one is rather aghast to look into the field and see the wild abandon with which somebody will put out what he calls the "lollipop technique," which will wind a person up in a spinbin about as quick as scat!

This is something like the fellow who goes out and shoots oil wells. There is a hole in the ground and something has happened down in this hole that they don’t know anything about, so the way they fix up the hole is by dropping some nitroglycerin in it. The nitroglycerin goes down the hole and explodes down there, and after that maybe the hole is all right and maybe it isn’t.

Now, the oil- well shooter will take a flask of nitroglycerin and put it inhis pocket. He mixes up his nitroglycerin at home on his stove, and- he doesn’t care about that. He will tell you, "Dynamite is safe; you can light a cigar from dynamite." As a matter of fact, I had one of these fellows demonstrate to me one time that it was possible to light a stick of dynamite and then light a cigarette from it. Nothing to it!

What he was overlooking was that other people can’t do that. It isn’t that familiarity breeds contempt but that he knows exactly how far he can go; he knows what he can do with this stuff. He knows that you don’t drop nitroglycerin on concrete. He also knows that when he picks up a notebook, for instance, and puts it in his pocket, his chances of dropping that notebook are very slight. So he picks up the nitroglycerin and puts it in his pocket; he knows his chances of being hit in the side are very slight. So he just says, "Those are the odds against it," and life is all very comfortable and he goes on.

Now, the funny part of it is, the oil- well shooter would say, "Well, dynamite will burn! Ten- percent dynamite will burn. You touch a match to ten- percent dynamite and it will burn just like sawdust, and you can light a cigarette with it." Then you start to do it and the dynamite blows up and they pick your head up someplace else.

Part of his technology is that you can always burn fresh dynamite. He just left out one adjective. And the dynamite you picked up was a couple of years old and all the nitroglycerin had settled in one end of it. That was the end you lit.

There is a case of familiarity with a subject. These shooters very seldom kill themselves, very seldom have accidents.

It is the same with a Dianetic auditor: He has looked at engrams, he has looked at preclears, he has looked at screamers; he knows what he is going after, what he can do with it and what he can’t do with it, more or less. So he throws his preclears on the couch and runs them into this and out of that and maybe sticks them up in something; then he says, "Well, that’s all right, they don’t go nuts— not for twenty- four hours. I’ll get that tomorrow." In short, he shows a wild abandon with the subject. But he is operating within known limits. Even a fair knowledge of Dianetics lets you operate within those known limits.

Now let’s take Julius Q. Checkbook, the great psychiatrist. He takes this beautiful course; he is gone for twelve years and when he is done he knows his subject thoroughly. Of course, he never measures what he knows against how many people go crazy in his office; he doesn’t do that. But, believe me, there are people who go crazy in his office and he always says, "Well, he just didn’t come to me soon enough; he came too late. If he had come a month earlier I could have saved him."

The truth of the matter is that he takes his patient and says, "Now, just relax, just relax. What did your mother used to accuse you of? Now, you do know. "

The fellow says, "Well, no, I don’t know, see?"

"Yes, you do! Now, you know what your mother used to say accusatively. Now, you know what she used to say."

"Well, I don’t know, I can’t "

"Now listen, you know darn well that you know what it is! Now, what is it?"

All of a sudden the patient sort of shudders and surrenders, and he goes right into his tonsillectomy and says, "Yhaaahh!"

Then the psychiatrist says, "Now, you see, you d id know. Next patient."

The nurse says, "Doctor, Mr. Spin bin is looking rather pale. What do I do?"

" Oh, give him some sedation— phenobarbital. Fix him up and so forth. If he had only come to me a month sooner I could have done something for him."

This is actually what happens. I tried to get the figures on how many people committed suicide after being psychoanalysed for thirty days and I couldn’t get those figures. Somebody seems to be shy about them; they seem to be reticent about the whole thing. But it apparently added up to 2 or 3 percent and this was too high.

Now, the point is that a fellow who would do this gets ahold of the Handbooks and reads it, and he says, "Isn’t that interesting— repeater technique. Oh, you can really get them back and get childhood memories. Oh, that’s great! You know, Hubbard has really added something to psychiatry: you can get childhood memories this way. Well, of course the rest of this stuff is a lot of bunk, but this repeater technique, that’s awfully good." So he gets his patient and he says, "All right now, you say ‘It’s a boy." ’

In Washington, D. C., May 1950, we went through all this just over and over and over again with a group of psychiatrists. We would say, "Now, you study your subject and you know about the time track, you know about engrams and you know about secondaries. And you don’t get people latched up in them. You get them moving on the track and you get up some light stuff if you can’t get some heavy stuff and you go."

"Yeah, that’s fine, that’s very fine. Now, this repeater technique . . ."

"Well, you have to know the rest of this stuff. Repeater technique is very limited in its usefulness." "Yeah. Well now, you know, it sounds pretty good to me."

You see him the next day and he says, "Say, you know, you’ve really got something in this repeater technique! I’ve had this patient that I haven’t been able to get anything out of for two years. I’ve had this patient in two or three times a week— you know, light session, short course in psychoanalysis. And I fed him this repeater technique and do you know, I got the first release of affect which I have ever gotten from him."

"What did the patient do?"

"Oh, he screamed and writhed around and became very angry— a beautiful case of transference He walked right out of the office. And . . ."

I am not even clowning it up. This conversation actually took place. He told me about a week later, "You know, I wish you’d do something about that patient." He found out he couldn’t get near the patient anymore.

Another one ran a paranoid schizophrenic back down the track. He said, "You’ve always had a feeling about your father. Now, let’s see if we can’t get something on this now. Repeat the words ‘I hate you." ’ He repeated the person back down the track to "I hate you," and there the preclear was, lying in a crib, and Papa had just beaten him and was telling him that he hated him and didn’t want a baby anyway and that he was just a dirty, nasty little brat. The second that the preclear ran into this— he was way back down on the track, almost revivified in the incident— the psychiatrist told him, "Now evaluate it. Now, what does it mean to you? What does it mean? Who does your father represent? What symbol does your father represent here? Now, you know! You know! You know!"

The paranoid schizophrenic did a very interesting thing: He came up to present time one way or the other. He felt much relieved for about two days and then we got a hysterical wire from the psychiatrist saying the patient had really gone crazy and "Do something about it."

As a matter of fact, we got this one patched up. In the first session at the Foundation, this preclear calmly rose up on the bed, took out a knife, looked at the auditor and said, "I am going to kill you now."

The auditor knew this was a dramatisation (he hoped), so he merely said, "Well, all right. That’s fine; that’s very good. Put the knife in your pocket now and we’ll go on with the session." So the preclear did.

In short, we forget how much we know and we forget that somebody else walking into this, with no observation of it at all, could really do a job of work. There are a lot of things lying around in Dianetics which I wonder that somebody hasn’t latched on to yet.

Most of the new techniques which people are dreaming up out in the field are, however, rather old. Most of them are about the level of the first book. Some of them are about October 1949 and they are not dangerous because they don’t go very deep. But someone could go monkeying around, turn a corner and run into some of the stuff we have run into since and really make some trouble.

The publisher of the book was insistent on Dianetics being pronounced a highly safe operation. I had put in a paragraph saying, "You want to be very careful that you know your subject very, very well, because you can really make a preclear unhappy," and he took that out because he thought it would kill book sales. So I put another paragraph back in the proof which said, "Only after a very careful study of the text. . . Psychotics should not be permitted to read this book.... Be very careful that your auditor really wants you to get well."

And the publisher said, "Well, this will inhibit the whole thing, so we’ll take that out," and the book came out with none of that in it.

As long as you practice something remotely resembling Standard Procedure, l as long as you know there is a time track, as long as you know you ought to keep chasing the preclear through the incident until it finally desensitises, as long as you know enough never to lose your nerve, you can’t do anybody very much damage— unless you go over onto the side of complete Black Dianetics.

With Black Dianetics, you could tailor- make any kind of insanity you wanted to. The person might not manifest this the next day, maybe not the next week or maybe not for thirty days. Maybe three months later he is walking down the street and feeling a little bit tired when somebody honks an auto horn just right or something of the sort, and all of a sudden he goes crazy, and there he is— insane! Or terribly sick and uncomfortable.

So they take him off and put him in a spinbin and put electrodes on him and then they push big levers and he goes into a convulsion and breaks his spine, breaks his jaw, and so forth. In other words, one can expect the maximum of cooperation from psychiatry in Black Dianetics. They will bury what has already been planted, and they will bury it deeply. This is rather brutal, isn’t it?

You could put a little book down in Czechoslovakia called "How to Drive People Insane: PDH" filled with various kinds of insanity and how to plant it to really make it good. You could drop this book into the hands of a thousand people in Czechoslovakia and a thousand people in Poland, and you could go in on the other side and make sure some copies were in Chinese, and then hire a private jet pilot and have him go over at seventy thousand feet and drop a few on Moscow.

Sooner or later, some muzhik who has seen the little book is going to watch Colonel Umphbumski come down the steps of the beer hall full of vodka and very drunk. Maybe this little muzhik is the carriage driver, and as he drives along he notices that the colonel is asleep.

"Well, what do you know. The colonel is asleep. This is too good to miss— Hap! ‘Stalin is against me . . ." ’ and so on.

In other words, no high- ranking officer and no political entity is safe in a world where a technique of this character exists. You couldn’t wipe out the Foundation now and stop this technology from existing and you couldn’t wipe me out and stop it from existing; it is already out! You couldn’t go around and propagandise against it because that would just popularize it.

You can’t stop an idea with sixteen- inch armor plate. Unfortunately, Black Dianetics is inherent in Dianetics. In 1945, this was all the Dianetics there was— how to drive people crazy, how to foul up political systems, how to restimulate individuals just by talking to them— without planting engrams— and in addition to this, how to interrupt life force in an individual. We haven’t gone into that very much. It is a wonderfully smooth way of committing murder.

I am mentioning this because somebody may ask you, "What could possibly be dangerous about Dianetics?" I am telling you what could be dangerous about it.

That was all it had risen to back in 1945. It became absolutely necessary in 1948 and 1949, when these techniques were released to psychiatry and to medicine, to release them much more widely.

Did you ever hear of an old fellow by the name of al- Hasan? He was called the Old Man of the Mountains. His group was called hashshasheen— drinkers of hashish— and that’s where the word assassin came from. His citadel was finally destroyed by Hulagu. Al- Hasan ruled Asia from one end to the other. All he had to do was write a small terse note to a prince and say, "I need 816 dancing girls, five caravan loads full of black Nubians and one quart of rubies. And I don’t like the way you put this new tariff on this country over here. Please take it off."

His message would be received by the principality and they would read it and say, "Well, yes, sir! Yes, sir! Get 816 dancing girls and all this stuff and put them on camels quick! " And they would label the caravan, saying that it was bound for al- Hasan, and nobody would touch it. Throughout Asia, which swarmed with robbers, nobody would touch such a caravan.

Al- Hasan’s citadel was impregnable; it rose up into the clouds. The only reason Hulagu turned aside long enough to take this citadel in the thirteenth century was that it had always been considered impregnable and he sort of liked going out and winning a Davis Cup. He decided the sporting thing to do was to take it, so he did. (Al- Hasan was already dead; he had been dead for some time but his followers had carried it along.)

This is a fascinating little story.

The way al- Hasan dominated his part of the world was very simple. He would go out and slug some young man and then have him carried insensible into the courtyard of his palace. There he had forty dark- eyed houris, a river of milk, a stream of honey and all the accouterments of Paradise according to the Mohammedan faith. It was tailor- made. He would let the boy stay there for a few days and then an "angel" would come to the boy and say, "The only way you can come back here forever is to go out and kill Prince Dogwhiler. Now, we’ll put you back on earth in your corporeal self long enough for you to go kill the prince. And the second you do, you go immediately to Paradise."

So the young man would wake up and find himself in the village or the city where he was supposed to do his assassination. Of course guards meant nothing to him. He would stand in the crowd and the prince would come by and he would simply run out and chop off the prince’s head. The guards would cut this boy to ribbons but the prince would already be dead! I don’t think any of these boys ever reported back to al- Hasan’s citadel.

But it was certainly an effective method of control. During the eighty years of al- Hasan’s lifetime, he kept Asia under a very tough thumb. They all paid him tribute.

At this moment, absolutely nothing restrains a group of men from banding together and taking over almost any political entity or organism they care to take over, by Black Dianetics. It would be much quicker and much more effective than maintaining all the expense of rivers of milk and so on. Milk costs money.

In 1945 Black Dianetics was all there was. And then in 1948 when this other stuff had been released, all a group would have had to have done was suppress Dianetic processing completely and there would have been no remedy or cure for or prevention of anything they wanted to do with the black side of the picture. It became vital that a book be thrown out into the public. Bad or good, it didn’t matter as long as the processing in it was relatively effective and as long as it carried weight enough to alert people to its existence. It wasn’t any great suspicion on my part. I didn’t know anybody was going to do this. I merely knew the potentiality existed, and as it existed the antidote had to be handed out rather rapidly.

It is interesting that the person who invalidates Dianetic processing is setting up Black Dianetics. Of course, no organization which is publicly responsible would ever dream of going against something like White Dianetics. Fortunately, the AMA is not imaginative enough ever to pick up and use Black Dianetics intentionally, though they use it all the time unintentionally.

As a matter of fact, there was a doctor one time to whom I was explaining Dianetics, and I had gone over the first elementary steps eight or nine times. All of a sudden a light dawned, I heard this whir occur and saw the lights flash and the stoplights flick a few times, and he said, "You know, that’s why she keeps coming back to see me."

And I said, "Who?"

"Oh, well, nothing. Forget the whole thing."

"Well, tell me more about it."

"It just occurred to me one day that maybe it was true that a patient was in a sort of a hypnotic trance. I was operating on this very beautiful woman, and after I’d finishing operating on her I said, ‘You can come back and see me any time you want to, honey." ’ Of course she had been sick ever since, and she had come back and seen him continually. Two months later he was driving a much better car!

This should give you some sort of an idea about it, anyway.

I wanted to tell you about Black Dianetics— pain- drug- hypnosis— not to alarm you, but in case one of these days you have to audit some. If you ever have to audit this stuff you had certainly better know how to do it. It is very simple, very easy to audit. There is nothing easier. The funny part of it is, the way to audit PDH is not the way you would think. You would think that you should tackle the engram.

We take this fellow with conception in place, prenatals in place, the AAs in place, birth in place, infant illnesses in place, his appendectomy and everything else right on up the line all in place clear on up to present time, and within a few weeks of present time he has a ring- tailed snorters of a PDH. What do you suppose that PDH has done? It has gone down and hooked on to every lower engram it could get, and if the operator really knew his stuff it is also hooked on to all his past lives, and all of his past deaths are grouped right up with it.

Of course, if you started into this engram you would just latch on to everything else in the bank. You would not get any further. So what you do is avoid it and under no circumstances do you let him get into it. You just straightwire this preclear left and right with all the Validation MEST Processing you can possibly hand him.

All of a sudden he will start to go into that engram. You say, "Yes, yes. And what did your mother say when she gave you candy?"

"The candy. Oh yes, yes, the candy. Yoww!"

Don’t let him into that engram, because if he goes into it he may never get out of it. Don’t restimulate it, because the strikes are all against you. It will not lift or reduce.

And yet with Straightwire alone you can free up enough attention units from his track to let him lift above this PDH and get moving on his track again so that you can get him to a point where you can reduce and erase basic area engrams. You can do this because it is no more and no less than a very, very fancy engram. If you let him into one of these late engrams it will behave even worse than any late operation engram, because a late operation engram can be run if you get it right away before it keys in. You can pick up a woman’s birth, usually, sometimes without even getting her own birth. The engram is not yet hooked up into any of the earlier material.

So you want to remember that this can’t be treated that way; you can’t run it off as a late engram. Don’t get the idea that you can. Just ignore the whole thing. Bring enough attention units up to fix it up and go happily on your way. He will be all right. You can get enough attention units to the surface so this will not bother him particularly. But if you go into the engram, you can just figure that this preclear will either go daffy or he will have to have about five hundred hours of your valuable time in processing. Remember that at the moment you start running it, it is not hooked up on everything in the bank; but the second that you even start to get near it and restimulate it, it starts hooking up on all the rest of the English language in the bank. But as long as you leave it alone, you are all right.

Don’t let this individual stay in the vicinity of whoever it was that might have laid it in, because that person’s voice is probably restimulative.

In the process of working precleans you will find that about one preclear out of fifty has been talked to when he was asleep, either by his mother or his wife or by her husband or father or mother. It is interesting how well this is known in the society. People even have little rules about it: "You don’t mention the person’s name because it will wake him up. But, you know, when you ask people things when they are asleep, they will give you the right answers. But don’t mention their name because it will wake them up."

You ask the young divorcee, "Now, how did you know your husband was going out with this beautiful dame?"

"Why, I asked him when he was asleep, of course."

"Where did you learn about this?"

"Oh, my mother used to do this to my father. I saw her doing it one night." Or "Gracie told me." It is very well known.

One of our auditors at Elizabeth was having the devil’s own time trying to do anything with one preclear. The preclear couldn’t get a somatic, he couldn’t do anything. The auditor wasn’t giving him Straightwire, he was trying to run engrams and he couldn’t get any. He kept this up for much longer than he should have. I got to talking to him one day and said, "What is his relationship with his wife?"

"Oh, very strange. He does mostly what she tells him."

"Such as?"

"Well, he had about three hundred thousand dollars about a year ago and he suddenly gave her two- thirds of it."

"Oh, yeah? Well, what kind of a car does he drive?"

"He drives a Ford."

"What kind of a car does she drive?"

"Well, she drives a Cadillac."

"Yeah? Does he go out of the house very much?"

"No."

"Does she go out of the house?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, how about you trying to penetrate the last time he went to sleep around her?"— because there you wouldn’t find an engram, all you would find is positive suggestion.

A few hours later we had a preclear with a somatic who was very happy, who was very cheerful and who had to be more or less forcibly restrained in the Foundation so that he wouldn’t go home and kill his wife.

"Now, dear, you can hear everything I’m saying to you and you want to please me, don’t you, dear? You love me. You know you love me, don’t you? Now, say yes. Now, promise me you will give me that fur coat."

"Yes, I promise you."

You would be surprised at the number of parents who will sit on the edge of the bed and say, "Now, Georgie, you want to be a good boy, don’t you? You don’t want to be bad and you want to mind Papa and Mama, don’t you? You want to do what you’re told, don’t you?"

Little Georgie will sort of mumble "Yeah" in his sleep.

You get this person as a preclear twenty years later and there seems to be some hypnotism on the case but you can’t find it.

"Did you ever know a hypnotist?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about hypnotism?"

"What’s that?"

"Well, lie down."

"Okay."

There is the case. You want to examine the principals in the fellow’s life. It can be almost anybody. People don’t know they are using Black Dianetics; they don’t know they are using hypnotism.

Now, hypnotism in itself is a sufficient louse- up, but hypnotism made into a good, solid, twenty- two carat, knock- out, drag- out engram is really something. You may have seen what hypnotism has done to some people or seen hypnotic cases. Just multiply that by all the talking in hypnotism plus all of the computations that could be given to them dianetically plus all the pain that could be handed them without making scars or bruises, and you have Black Dianetics.

You can give a person the kind of an engram which is tailor- made to psychiatry. You can give him the kind of an engram which has all the component parts in it which make up some specific type of psychiatric insanity. These psychiatric types of insanity do not actually exist; there are no clear- cut schizophrenics, there are no clear- cut paranoids. The actual cases overlap between these types.

But if you make this a classic case with the engram, every time the person tries to protest on this score or say anything about it he is just more and more insane according to the rule book. Nobody will believe him. He has lost his civil rights and cannot swear out a warrant for the arrest of the person who has accomplished the PDH.

Now, that brings us into the jurisprudence side of this thing. We find that nobody can protest an implanted engram except the person into whom it has been implanted. He is the only one who can protest this. He is the only one who can sign out a warrant. Even if he goes insane, nobody can sign out a warrant. So he could say, "Well, it was Bill and I know it was Bill and I saw Bill and Bill has taunted me with it since," and so forth, but if he has been pronounced insane or if some of his family have been coaxed into putting him in a spinbin, he has lost his civil rights and he can’t issue a warrant. In other words, this is legal murder, legal punishment and so forth.

Because the law does not know anything about this, no laws exist to prevent it or inhibit it. It is against the law to administer drugs, but who is it against the law to? The person to whom the drug has been administered is the only person that can make the complaint.

As auditors, you are liable to run into this. And you are liable to run into it particularly because I am planning on writing a book called "Pain- DrugHypnosis: The Secret Weapon," because PDH is being used. The only reason on God’s green earth I would ever issue it would be to prevent PDH from being used, so that if the book is issued widely enough, people can look at it and say "It’s real," or "Can this happen?" or something of the sort. And it will give an antidote.

Now, the fact that PDH is being used rather forces one’s hand. But it is very easy for a person to hallucinate that this has happened to him, and the reality level is very low because this kind of an experience does not compare with a person’s basic reality. It is possible, on the issue of such a book, for people to pick it up and suddenly start appearing all over the place claiming that this has been done to them, whereas all they are talking about is their ordinary engrams. This is ordinary delusion, yet they could claim it is PDH.

So publishing this material could cause something of a stampede and it could cause a considerable upset. But PDH is being used privately without any recourse to anybody’s instructions. We stand upon the edge of a great big dogfight, in other words, so I haven’t any choice but to issue this book.

A lot of people will suddenly pick it up and say, "All this has been done to me," and a lot of other people will say, "Well, that proves they’re crazy," but here and there somebody will have had PDH done to him. And the fact that this material exists in this wise, even though it runs into considerable discredit immediately, means that it will be rolling along in the society picking up credence so that sooner or later people will recognize that PDH exists.

We need to do this because in this modern world we cannot risk having a political leader, a military leader, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission or a member of the armed forces who is entrusted with the guarding of good property suddenly walk over to the safe, open it up and get out all the secret documents, put them in a little envelope saying "To Joseph Stalin— Kremlin" and send them off.

The FBI agent, who has been faithfully in charge of the files on the German Bund or something for a long time, comes in one morning and all of a sudden takes eight names out of the files and tears them up and destroys them so there is no further trace. He doesn’t even think why he did that. But it is a funny thing— he has had a bad hangover lately. The last time he got drunk . . . and as far as he knows that was really all that happened to him.

Or, the newly elected president of the United States with the faith and confidence of everybody behind him suddenly says, "Now, I believe we ought to have a new peace pact. Let’s all go down to Cairo and let Russia declare war on Japan for eight days, and then we will give all the Asiatic possessions to Russia so that we get communist China." It sounds absurd that anybody could do that— nobody would do that!— but it is possible that this could happen even without PDH.

Assassination has always been a very "valid" method of government. There was an article in a Princeton textbook at the school of government there which was entitled, very cold- bloodedly, "The Effectiveness of Assassination in Determining the Political Activity of a Country." It has been a weapon that has been going forward a long time. The Greeks used it, the Persians used it, the Japanese very recently have used it and we have had a couple of times here in the past when it has been used. The defeated southern states changed this government, to their sorrow, by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, feeling that something could then happen— that the

South could rise again or do something or other. Then there was Garfield and McKinley; someone even tried to get Roosevelt. So these activities are always going forward. But assassination on the violent side has always been "effective" when it has been accomplished. For instance, we got into World War I because of an assassination. The Archduke Ferdinand got killed in Serbia, and everybody went to war.

Assassination may be a valid political weapon, but PDH could be a much more "valid" weapon because it doesn’t leave a corpse! And a corpse is always embarrassing to a murderer. It is said amongst murderers that a corpse is the most embarrassing thing about the profession.

The manipulation of a country— politics, government, war, peace, these various things— would be very simple. For instance, the daughter of the majority leader of the Senate walks out of the house, goes into the garage, gets in the car and drives away. She feels she has to go to this party, goes to the party, gets into the car and drives home. She wakes up the next morning without the faintest recollection of anything bad having happened to her. But she is rather hazy about the party and she decides that there must have been a couple of slugs of sloe gin in there that she didn’t quite know about.

Then a few days later, Papa is sitting at the dinner table and she says, "Papa, why don’t you support that bill?"

And he says, "What bill?"

And she says," Well, the bill; you know, the important bill— the bill that cuts all of the appropriations for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now, you know the taxpayer . . ."

Papa wouldn’t listen to this from his constituents but he will certainly listen to this from his daughter. He has spoiled her.

Or let’s say his father comes to visit him and his father starts saying, "You know, what we ought to have is a new dam out in the state there— a big dam." He will take this from his father, though he wouldn’t take it from his constituents. So he keeps agitating around until he gets a bill forward. And there can be a lot of graft on a two- million- dollar dam or a ten- billion- dollar dam or something of the sort.

This is simple, this is easy. It sort of makes you uncomfortable.

The general of the Tenth Army Corps has a very nice adjutant. He is a good boy, he goes to all the parties, he knows all of the dowagers and officers’ wives, and he always has a quart in his drawer for the general. He is a good adjutant. He never gets out any papers or orders or anything, but he is a good adjutant. The first thing you know, about every third order that starts going out to the battle doesn’t go! Every time the general tries to push an order down the line through this adjutant, it fouls up in some fashion. And the adjutant doesn’t even know anything about it except that he just can’t seem to remember orders anymore except this one: that he can’t remember orders.

An enemy could probably win an awful lot of square miles of ground if he had an adjutant sitting in the general’s office for the week or so that it would take the general to find out that his adjutant was pretty good at parties but not very good at relaying communications. There would be a lot of ways to win a war, wouldn’t there?

Generally speaking, this will not be a problem for quite some time. It can be resolved, evidently, that PDH is indifferently detectable by a psychogalvanometerl or a lie detector. And when I say "indifferently detectable," I mean indifferently. If it is in good, solid, hard restimulation and if the psychogalvanometer or lie detector operator knows the exact questions to ask which will restimulate it, he will get a register on it. But he is liable not to get any unless he is asking specifically for it, any more than he would get a kick off all the other engrams in the bank. You understand that a psychogalvanometer or a lie detector will kick— that is to say, register— when you restimulate an engram, but you have to restimulate it in almost the same words.

"Have you ever lied?" This is obviously analytical knowledge.

So the fellow says, "No," and it kicks.

But now we ask about an engram. Supposing this person’s father didn’t do right by the girl until he was three months on the way (to be a little bit crude about it), and this fellow is having a little bit of trouble with a girl right now. So he goes into the police sergeant’s office and they strap this machine on his arm and they pump up the blood pressure and get him all set up and they ask, "Now, did you have anything to do with a girl?"

Bong! goes an engram in the basic area and he says, "No."

Bang! goes the lie detector. "He’s lying."

No, he isn’t. Lie detectors don’t detect lies. But they are pretty good at detecting engrams if you give the question just right. In other words, there is a possibility that the question itself can key in and get a kick out of an engram, which affects respiration and blood pressure. You could prove this up much more accurately by merely conducting some clinical tests on it. But there is this little indifferent proof on the subject right now. It will have to be a better one.

Any time something new comes into the world, people are more prone to use it for destruction than they are for constructive purposes— anything which happily, cleverly and swiftly lends itself to that. Black Dianetics cannot remain underground and not generally known. It has to be punched up, even though it makes people unhappy and incredulous and we get some bad publicity through it. It has to be released. That is why the first book was released— to prevent it.