Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (7 page)

Averaging out, the future possibility of strain because of the act, added to the state of being at the moment the debauchery was experienced, again depresses the survival dynamic. Because of this, various kinds of debauchery have been in indifferent odor with Man throughout his history. This is the equation of “immoral pleasures.” And any action which has brought about survival suppression or which can bring it about, when pursued as a pleasure, has been denounced at some time or another in Man’s history. Immorality is originally hung as a label upon some act or class of actions because they depress the level of the survival dynamic.

Future enforcement of moral stigma may depend largely upon prejudice and aberration and there is, consequently, a continuous quarrel over what is moral and what is immoral.

Because certain things practiced as pleasures are actually pains -- and how easy it will be to trace out why when you’ve finished this volume -- and because of the moral equation as above, pleasure itself, in any aberrated society can become decried. A certain kind of thinking, of which more later, permits poor differentiation between one object and another. Confusing a dishonest politician with all politicians would be an example of this. In ancient times the Roman was fond of his pleasures and some of the things he called pleasure were a trifle strenuous on other species such as Christians. When the Christian overthrew the pagan state, 25

the ancient order of Rome was in a villain’s role. Anything, therefore, which was Roman was villainous. This went to such remarkable lengths that the Roman love of bathing made bathing so immoral that Europe went unwashed for some fifteen hundred years. The Roman had become a pain source so general that everything Roman was evil and it stayed evil long after Roman paganism perished. Immorality, in such a fashion, tends to become an involved subject. In this case it became so involved that pleasure itself was stigmatized.

When half the survival potential is struck from the list of lawful things, there is a considerable reduction in survival indeed. Considering this graph on a racial scale, the reduction of survival potential by one-half would forecast that direful things lay in wait for the race.

Actually, because Man is after all Man, no set of laws, however enforced, can completely wipe away the attraction of pleasure. But in this case enough was removed and banned to occasion precisely what happened: the Dark Ages and the recession of society.

Society brightened only in those periods such as the Renaissance, in which pleasure became less unlawful.

When a race or an individual drops into the second zone, as marked on the chart, and the general tone ranges from the first zone barely into the third, a condition of insanity ensues.

Insanity is irrationality. It is also a state in which non-survival has been so closely approached continually that the race or the organism engages in all manner of wild solutions.

In further interpretation of this descriptic graph there is the matter of the survival suppressor. This, it will be seen, is a thrust downward out of potential immortality at the race or organism represented as the survival dynamic. The survival suppressor is the combined and variable threats to the survival of the race or organism. These threats come from other species, from time, from other energies. These are also engaged in the contest of survival to potential immortality in terms of their own species or identities. Thus there is a conflict involved. Every other form of life or energy could be plotted in a descriptic as the survival dynamic. If we were to use a duck’s survival dynamic in a descriptic graph, we would see the duck seeking a high survival level and Man would be a part of the duck’s suppressor.

The balance and nature of things do not permit the infinity of the goal of immortality to be reached. In fluctuating balance and in almost unlimited complexity, life and energies ebb and flood, out of the nebulous, into forms and, through decay, into the nebulous once more.*

Many equations could be drawn concerning this, but it is outside the sphere of our present interest.

In terms of the zones of the descriptic it is of relative concern what the extent of the force of the suppressor is against the survival dynamic. The dynamic is inherent in individuals, groups and races, evolved to resist the suppressor through the eons. In the case of Man, he carries with him another level of offensive and defensive techniques, his cultures. His primary technology of survival is mental activity governing physical action in the sentient echelon. But every life form has its own technology, formed to resolve the problems of food, protection and procreation. The degree of workability of the technology any life form develops (armor or brains, fleetness of foot or deceptive form) is a direct index of the survival potential, the relative immortality, of that form. There have been vast upsets in the past; Man, when he developed into the world’s most dangerous animal (he can and does kill or enslave any life form, doesn’t he?) overloaded the suppressor on many other life forms and they dwindled in number or vanished.

A great climatic change, such as the one which packed so many mammoths in Siberian ice, may overload the suppressor on a life form. A long drought in the American southwest in not too ancient times wiped out the better part of an Indian civilization.

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A cataclysm such as an explosion of the core of the Earth, if that were possible, or the atom bomb or the sudden cessation of burning on the Sun would wipe out all life forms on Earth.

And a life form can even overload the suppressor on itself. A dinosaur destroys all his food and so destroys the dinosaur. A bubonic plague bacillus attacks its hosts with such thorough appetite that the whole generation of pasteurella pestis vanishes. Such things are not intended by the suicide to be suicide; the life form has run up against an equation which has an unknown variable, and the unknown variable unfortunately contained enough value to overload the suppressor. This is the “didn’t know the gun was loaded” equation.

And if the bubonic plague bacillus overloads its own suppressor in an area and then ceases to trouble its food and shelter, the animals, then the animals consider themselves benefited.

Reckless and clever and well-nigh indestructible, Man has led a course which is a far cry from “tooth and claw” in every sphere. And so have the redwood tree and the shark. Just as a life form, Man, like every life form, is “symbiotic.” Life is a group effort. Lichens and plankton and algae may do very well on sunlight and minerals alone, but they are the building blocks. Above such existence, as the forms grow more complex, a tremendous interdependence exists.

It is very well for a forester to believe that certain trees willfully kill all other varieties of trees around them and then conclude a specious “attitude” of trees. Let him look again. What made the soil? What provides the means of keeping the oxygen balance? What makes it possible for rain to fall in other areas? These willful and murderous trees. And squirrels plant trees. And Man plants trees. And trees shelter trees of another kind. And animals fertilize trees.

And trees shelter animals. And trees hold the soil so less well rooted plants can grow. Look anywhere and everywhere and we see life as an assist for life. The multitude of the complexities of life as affinities for life is not dramatic. But they are the steady, practical, important reason life can continue to exist at all.

A redwood tree may be first out for redwood trees and although it does an excellent job of seeming to exist as redwood alone, a closer glance will show it has dependencies and is depended upon.

Therefore the dynamic of any life form can be seen to be assisted by many other dynamics and combines with them against the suppressive factors. None survive alone.

Necessity has been declared to be a very wonderful thing. But necessity is a word which has been taken rather loosely for granted. Opportunism seems to have been read largely into necessity. What is necessity? Besides being the “mother of invention,” is it a dramatic, sudden thing which excuses wars and murders, which touches a man only when he is about to starve? Or is necessity a much gentler and less dramatic quantity? “Everything,” according to Leucippus, “is driven by necessity.” This is a keynote of much theorizing down through the ages. Driven, that is the key to the error. Driven, things are driven. Necessity drives. Pain drives. Necessity and pain, pain and necessity.

Recalling the dramatic and overlooking the important, Man has conceived himself, from time to time, to be an object of chase by necessity and pain. These were two anthropomorphic (manlike) things which, in full costume, stuck spears at him. It can be said to be a wrong concept merely because it does not work to produce more answers.

Whatever there is of necessity is within him. Nothing is driving him except his original impetus to survive. And he carries that within himself or his group. Within him is the force with which he fends off pain. Within him is the force with which he attracts pleasure.

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It chances to be a scientific fact that Man is a self-determined organism to the outermost limit that any form of life can be, for he still depends upon other forms of life and his general environment. But he is self-determined. This is a matter which will be covered later. But right here it is necessary to indicate that he is not inherently a determined organism in the sense that he is driven on this wonderful stimulus-response basis which looks so neat in certain text books, and works so completely unworkably in the world of Man. The happy little illustrations about rats do not serve when we are talking about Man. The more complex the organism, the less reliably these stimulus-response equation works. And when one reaches that highest complexity, Man, he has reached a fine degree of variability in terms of stimulus-response.

The more sentient, the more rational an organism, the more that organism is self-determined.

Self-determinism, like all things, is relative. Compared to a rat, however, Man is very self-determined indeed. This is only a scientific fact because it can easily be proven.

The more sentient the man, the less he is a “push-button” instrument. Aberrated and reduced he can, of course, in a limited degree, be made to perform like a marionette, but then it is understood that the more aberrated a person is, the closer he approaches the intelligence quotient of an animal.

Given this self-determinism, it is interesting to observe what a man does with it. While he can never escape the “didn’t know it was loaded” equation in terms of cataclysm or the unexpected gain of some other life form, he operates in a high zone level of survival potential.

But here he is, self-determined, rational, his primary weapon, his mind, in excellent working order. What are his necessity instincts?

Necessity, according to that very sentient if rapidly subject-changing article, the dictionary, is “the state of being necessary; that which is unavoidable; compulsion.” It also adds that necessity is “extreme poverty,” but we don’t want that. We are talking about survival.

The compulsion mentioned can be re-evaluated in terms of the survival dynamic. That is interior in the organism and the race. And what is “necessary” to survival?

We have seen and can prove clinically that there are two factors at work. The necessity of avoiding pain is a factor because, degree by degree, little things, not much in themselves, can amount to large pains which, compounded in that rapid geometric progression, bring on death. Pain is the sadness of being bawled out for poor work, because that may lead to being fired, which may lead to starvation, which may lead to death. Run any equation into which pain has entered and it can be seen that it reduces down to possible non-survival. And if this were all there were to surviving and if necessity were a vicious little gnome with a pitch-fork, it seems rather obvious that there would be scant reason to go on living. But there is the other part of the equation, pleasure. That is a more stable part than pain, Stoics to the contrary, as clinical tests in dianetics prove.

There is therefore a necessity for pleasure, for working, as happiness can be defined, toward known goals over not unknowable obstacles. And the necessity for pleasure is such that a great deal of pain can be borne to attain it. Pleasure is the positive commodity. It is enjoyment of work, contemplation of deeds well done; it is a good book or a good friend; it is taking all the skin off one’s knees climbing the Matterhorn; it is hearing the kid first say daddy; it is a brawl on the Bund at Shanghai or the whistle of amour from a doorway; it’s adventure and hope and enthusiasm and “someday I’ll learn to paint”; it’s eating a good meal or kissing a pretty girl or playing a stiff game of bluff on the stock exchange. It’s what Man does that he enjoys doing; it’s what Man does that he enjoys contemplating; it’s what Man does that he enjoys remembering; and it may be just the talk of things he knows he’ll never do.

Man will endure a lot of pain to obtain a little pleasure. Out in the laboratory of the world, it takes very little time to confirm that.

And how does necessity fit this picture? There is a necessity for pleasure, a necessity as live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself. He who said that a man who had two 28

loaves of bread should sell one to buy white hyacinth, spoke sooth. The creative, the constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the maw of oblivion, these things are pleasure and these things are necessity. There was a man once who had walked a thousand miles just to see an orange tree and another who was a mass of scars and poor-set bones who was eager just to get a chance to “fan another bronc.”

It is very well to dwell in some Olympian height and write a book of penalties and very well to read to find what writers said that other writers said, but it is not very practical.

The pain-drive theory does not work. If some of these basics of dianetics were only poetry about the idyllic state of Man, they might be justified in that, but it happens that out in the laboratory of the world, they work.