Lecture: Sec Checking Types of Withholds
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1961, 5 October
Document title: Sec-Checking: Types of Withholds
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Saint Hill Special Briefing Course
Location: East Grinstead, Sussex
Document ID: SHSBC-67
Description: This is one of many examples where Hubbard compares Scientology's interrogations (security checks) to religious confessions. He holds up sec checking as a superior technology that gets all the crimes, a shortcoming of religious confessors. Points out that religions have different and even opposing moral codes, and teaches that security checkers must simply elicit crimes against any moral codes to which their subjects subscribed or subscribe.
Security checking flattens emotional affects from past moral codes and facilitates Hubbard's reconditioning ethics tech which always demands allegiance to Scientology and compliance with his orders and "Command Intention."
Okay. This is the 5th of October, 1961, Special Briefing Course, Saint Hill. And I’m going to talk to you today about Security Checking. And boy, do you need a talk about Security Checking. Because what you don’t know about Security Checking would fill volumes.
Now, of course, I am a very bad authority on Security Checking from a subjective point of view, because you realize that if anybody went into my crimes it would just be too grim! No auditor would be able to stand up to that. We realize that you see? These crimes are so innumerable because they cover such a long period of time. That’s the main thing.
So I’m not talking to you from the viewpoint of sinlessness. And you must get your point of view oriented there. If I were talking to you from the point of view of total sinlessness . . .
This is an optimum state which, religiously, people get into. They somehow or another lay the right pennies on the right altar and at that moment they become totally sinless. Then they can condemn everyone. And this gives them the right to condemn everyone, you see? And they can’t approach this subject objectively.
Unlike various people of the past who have said “Repent ye. Repent ye. Ye Kingdom of Heaven is at ye hand,” something of that sort, people who do have sins, you see, find it much easier to talk about the subject. They have some reality on the subject. And let me assure you that from my point of view, if I had it all to do all over again, I would probably do the same things.
So I don’t want to give you the false impression that I give you any lecture on the subject of Security Checking from the basis that my security, unlike yours, has been pure for two hundred trillion years. That would make a very great unreality. No, amongst us boys, us girls, what we have all been up to only could not bear the light of day because we think it couldn’t bear the light of day.
Now, it’s funny that every group that has sought to enforce sinlessness on one and all, with the stake vast punishment, condemnation, assignment to hell—that is the primary mechanism: they give you a ticket straight to hell. Doesn’t work sometimes, by the way.
[...]
So, you see, lecturing from the high platform of sinlessness, you very often run into the creation of more sin than you get rid of. And what’s interesting is that any group which wishes to blow itself to flinders simply has to engage upon an activity of making everybody guilty of their sins. It’ll hang together for a little while, and everybody will be miserable while it does, but it’ll eventually blow up.
Why? Because it now gives people a complete map on how to accumulate withholds. The group mores defines what is a withhold. It says you must not be guilty of such sins and such sins and such sins, and therefore and thereby blows itself to pieces, of course, because it says everybody that has committed these sins should withhold them, even though they are saying at the same time “You must confess them.” But they make confession, you see, rather rigorous.
Now, we have to understand this at the outset of Security Checking. Thou, the auditor, are not sinless. That’s what we have to understand about it. And thou art not an enforcer of a public mores while thou art being an auditor. Thou art simply a Security Checker, period. You got it?
You’re not the avenging angels of the Mormon church or something like this, see, while you’re security checking. You’re simply a person who is skilled in certain technology to attain a better frame of mind and actually a much greater honesty and decency on the part of somebody else.
You have the weapon in your hands with which to attain a greater decency, a greater state of health, a greater efficiency, a greater ability, higher ability for ARC. You’ve got the weapon in your hands with which to do this. There is the E-Meter and there is the Security Check, and there is you and your technology.
So you are going to be able to accomplish what groups have been trying to accomplish for a long time. You are going to be able to make an honest man or an honest woman. You have the weapon with which to do this. That’s very important for you to realize, because all of these other mechanisms—such as “make the person guilty,” “show the person the right way,” you see, “and the error of his ways,” and frowning upon him and punishing him in some fashion or other because he’s just gotten off a withhold —are mechanisms of older groups by which they sought to enforce their mores. Because they had no way to make honest people that was positive and lasting, then they used these very poor mechanisms of “make them good and guilty,” “punish them ‘ “show them what will happen to them if they do that again.” All of these other things are added in. But what are those? Those are the security mechanisms of yesteryear. Those are yesterday’s tools.
So you don’t combine Scientology with other therapies. And that is all that you would be doing if you were trying to make somebody guilty and so forth, and doing something else with a Security Check rather than just getting off withholds.
[...]
Now, you security check a Catholic sometime, or you security check a Baptist, and you’d have two different Security Checks. They’d be different. You security check an Afrikaner and security check a Zulu. You’re going to have two different Security Checks, man. And they’re almost vis-a-vis different Security Checks. Almost everything one thinks is right, the other thinks is wrong.
Who’s to say who’s right or who’s wrong? That hasn’t anything to do with it, which is why I gave you a little bit about the moral note at the beginning of it. The rights and wrongnesses of things are what groups have determined on in order to perpetuate survival. And that’s the rightnesses and wrongnesses of things. It’s what is survival to the group, not whether you are enforcing the mores of a group because you are so sinless. So you have to actually be able to security check both sides of the fence.1
Hubbard, L. R. (1961, 5 October). Sec-Checking: Types of Withholds. Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, (SHSBC-67). Lecture conducted from East Grinstead, Sussex.