Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (64 page)

248

The auditor is interested in what has been done to, not done by his patient; for whatever the patient has done is forever beyond recall and was not the source but was only the manifestation of his griefs.

Given a society of unaberrated persons, given a culture from which has been deleted all unreason, then and only then can Man be truly responsible for his acts, then and only then. But we must take the shadow of the responsibility now for the fact of it. A man does not have to surrender to his engrams.

Perhaps at some distant date only the unaberrated person will be granted civil rights before law. Perhaps the goal will be reached at some future time when only the unaberrated person can attain to and benefit from citizenship. These are desirable goals and would produce a marked increase in the survival ability and happiness of Man.

Even now the codes of jurisprudence can be reformed and it can be ascertained with precision whether the act which brought the individual before law was an aberrated act, or stemmed from an aberration of culture, or was an act which was committed to the detriment of another or of society. Surely the process of punishment can be refined so as to sentence the individual not to further aberration as a prisoner or a ruined man but to a higher plane of reason through the deletion of the aberration.

The past acts of an individual who has been cleared should be stricken from his record even as his illnesses have been, for with the cause removed there can be no point in retribution unless society itself is so aberrated that it desires to operate on sadistic principles.* There is more than idealism here for it can be shown that aberration in individuals and the society rise in progressive ratio to the amount of punishment employed.

Efforts to resolve problems of jurisprudence which yet did not embrace precision definitions for right and wrong, good and evil, had recourse only to a principle known in dianetics as the Introduction of an Arbitrary. Our present society is not aberrated in this respect: the insane man is not held guilty or responsible for his acts. Lacking definition of a precise scientific nature for insanity and failing to recognize that all irrational acts are temporary insanity, the society has not been able to carry out its fundamental intention.

Broad, unchangeable rules were thrust into problems in an effort to resolve them and yet each new rule further drove reason aside so that more rules were needed. An arbitrary structure is one in which one error has been observed and an effort has been made to correct it by introducing another error. In progressive complexity, new errors must be introduced to nullify the evil effects old errors. A culture, to say nothing of jurisprudence, grows complex and unwieldy in progressive ratio to the number of new evils it must introduce in an effort to nullify old evils. At last there can be no reason; there can be but force and where there lives no reason and yet lives force, there is naught but the maelstrom of an insane rage. Where there dwells an insane rage, still unresolved, there must at length come apathy; and apathy, dwindling down, inevitably reaches death.

We are here at a bridge between one state of Man and a next. We are above the chasm which divides a lower from a higher plateau and this chasm marks an artificial evolutionary step in the progress of Man.

The auditor is at that bridge; when cleared he will be at its higher end. He will watch much traffic cross. He may see customs, laws, organizations and societies attempt to avoid the bridge but, being swept along, tumble into a nothingness below.

In his attitude toward his pre-clears or toward society at large, he can gain nothing by reprimanding and judging past error in the light of current sentience. Not only can he gain nothing but he can inhibit progress. It is a remorseless fact that the attack upon unreason has begun. Attack unreason, not the society or the man.

249

DIANETICS AND WAR

The social organisms which we call states and nations behave and react in every respect as though they were individual organisms. The culture has its analytical mind, the combined sentience of its citizens in general and its artists, scientists and statesmen in particular. The social standard memory bank is the data accumulated along the generations. And the social organism has as well its reactive mind as represented by the prejudices and irrationalities of the entire group. This reactive mind is served by an engram bank wherein lie past painful experiences and which dictates reactive action on certain subjects whenever those subjects are restimulated in the society. This, all too briefly, is an analogy used in Political Dianetics.

The social organism behaves in a manner which can be graphed on the tone scale; it has its survival dynamic and its suppressors, its internal suppression due to engrams and its urge toward an infinity of optimum duration. Criminals, traitors, and zealots constitute, for instance, internal engrams which suppress the survival potential on the tone scale.

There is a precision definition for each social level as related to the tone scale. A free society, working in complete cooperation toward common goals would be a Tone 4 society. A society hindered by arbitrary restrictions and oppressive laws would be a Tone 2 society. A society managed and dictated to by the whims of one man or a few men would be a Tone 1

society. A society governed by the mystery and superstition of some mystic body would be a Tone 0 society. The potential of survival in each case can be seen anywhere in history. Any Golden Age is a Tone 4. Oppressive practices, individual greeds and miscalculation in general reduce the society by introducing into it dissatisfied elements. To cope with these, in the past, further oppression has been used. The survival of the society reduced further. With more oppression came new engrams and so down the tone scale slipped the chances of long survival. And with this reduction of potential came pain as the lower zones were entered.

Societies rise and fall on the tone scale. But there is a danger point below which a society cannot go without reacting as would an individual so suppressed: the society reaches a break point and goes mad. This point is around 2.0.

The quarrel of society with society, nation with nation, has many causes, all of them more or less irrational. There have been many times when one society was forced to crush another less sentient than itself. But with each clash, new engrams were born both in the international scene and within the societies themselves.

War is an international Tone 1. It is no more rational than any individual who, reaching a general and chronic Tone 1, is placed in an institution or, temporarily Tone 1, commits some crime and is thereafter imprisoned. But there is no jailer to societies, there is at this time only death and so they die and so they have died.

Before this time no tool could be employed by a nation but force when faced with another nation gone mad. By contagion of aberration, both nations then went mad. No nation ever fully won a war. No nation ever finally triumphed by force of arms. No nation ever averted war by posing threat or exhibiting defense.

Man is now faced, by these pyramiding hatreds, with weapons so powerful that Man himself may vanish from the earth. There is no problem in the control of these weapons. They explode when and where Man tells them to explode. The problem is in the control of Man.

There is no national problem in the world today which cannot be resolved by reason alone. All factors inhibiting a solution of the problem of war and weapons are arbitrary factors and have no more validity than the justified explanations of a thief or murderer.

The farmer of Iowa has no quarrel with the storekeeper of Stalingrad. Those who say such quarrels exist lie.

250

There are no international concerns which cannot be resolved by peaceable means, not in the terms of supra-national government, but in the terms of reason.

Jockeying with indefinable ideologies, playing with mass ignorance, non-existent entities like nightmares march the world in the form of the Gods of Ism.

No self-interest can be so great as to demand the slaughter of Mankind. He who would demand it, he who would not by every rational means avert it, is insane. There is no justification for war.

Behind the curtains of language and different customs populaces are taught to recognize no kinship with other populaces. Taught by their own terrors and governed by their own aberrations leaders hold up other isms as detestable things.

There is no perfect political state on earth today, there is not even a good definition of a perfect political creed. States are the victims of internal and external aberrations.

Dianetics addresses war because there is in fact a race between the science of mind and the atom bomb. There may be no future generation to know which won.

Rationality alone can guide Man past these threats to his extinction.

Insanity does not exist without a confusion of definitions and purpose. The solution to the international problem does not lie in the regulation or curtailment of weapons nor yet in the restraints of men. It lies in the definition of political theory and policy in such terms that there can be no mistaking the clear processes; it lies in the establishment of rational goals toward which societies can collectively and individually work; and it lies in an inter-social competition of gains so great that none become dispensable to any other.

Man’s primary fight is not with Man -- that is insanity. Man’s primary fight is with those elements which oppress him as a species and bar his thrust toward high goals. Man’s fight is with the elements, with space and time, and with species which are destructive to him.

He has hardly begun his conquest. He is just now armed with tools enough and science enough to make good his conquest of the Universe. He has no time to bicker and indulge in tantrums and yah-yah across back fences about atom bombs.

The harnessing of atomic power puts other worlds within his reach. Why haggle for this one? The late discoveries in the field of photo-synthesis bid fair to feed and clothe him royally even though he number a thousand times his present two billions on earth. For what reason can he quarrel? Why?

Two rational men will enter into a contest of gain and worth and production. Are these mighty nations, these powerful, fearful, thundering “giants,” actually small and poorly educated, barely sane little boys screaming insults at each other over the possession of a dead cat? What of armies? Armies die. If might makes right, then Rome still rules the world. Who fears now this archeological curiosity that was Rome?

There is a higher goal, a better goal, a more glorious victory than gutted towns and radiation-burned dead. There is freedom and happiness and plenty and a whole Universe to be won.

He who would not see it is far from worthy to rule. He who would indulge his hates is too insane to advise.

How much can Man conquer? He loses if he conquers Man. He wins if he conquers his own fears and conquers. then the stars.

251

Attack the natural enemies of Man, attack them well, and war of Man with Man cannot thereafter be a problem. This is rationality.

Dianetics is not interested in saving the world, it is interested only in preventing the world from being saved.

One more time would be fatal! Dianetics is not against fighting; it defines what may be fought. Those things include the sources of Man’s travail within the individual, within the society and the enemies of all Mankind. Man, bewildered, has not known his enemies. They are visible now; attack!

THE FUTURE OF THERAPY

In twenty or a hundred years the therapeutic technique which is offered in this volume will appear to be obsolete. Should this not prove to be the case, then the author’s faith in the inventiveness of his fellow man will not have been justified. We have here something which has not before existed, an invariably working science of Mind. The application methods cannot but be refined.

All sciences been with the discovery of basic axioms. They progress as new data is discovered and as the scope of the science is widened. Various tools and techniques rise up continually, improved and re-improved. The basic axioms, the initial discoveries of dianetics are such solid scientific truths that they will be altered but little. The data discovered by those axioms is already large and daily expanding. The techniques of using that data as represented in this volume will, before much more time elapses, be modified and improved. Their virtue just now is that these techniques work and produce good, solid, scientific results.

Once upon a time somebody set up the basic principles which had to do with fire. There had not been controlled fire before. Cooking, heating and finally metallurgy made a new culture. The basic principles of fire are not much altered. The techniques employed in handling fire soon after it was discovered by Man would be considered somewhat obsolete to us now.

We have matches and lighters and fuels today, but just after fire was understood and began to be used, the bow-drill fire-maker and flint and steel would have been considered marvelous inventions: even so Man was already using fire and had been using it with profit for some time both as a weapon and as a household utility when the bow-drill and flint and steel were discovered or invented.

In the case of the wheel, basic principles were laid down which have not altered to this day. The first workable wheel must have been a rather unwieldy affair. But compared to no wheel, it was a miracle.

Thus with dianetic therapy. The basic principles, axioms and general discoveries of dianetics form an organization not before possessed by Man. Not unlike the first fires and the first wheels, the therapy technique can be enormously improved. It works now; it can be used now with safety and effectiveness.

There are two definite drawbacks to this present technique. It demands more skill of the auditor than should be necessary and it is not as swift as it could be. The auditor should not be required to do any computing whatever and indeed, a therapy technique could be envisioned where no auditor at all was necessary, for he is vital at the present time. A complete clear should take but a handful of hours. The problems here are those of improvement in terms of less skill required and less work.