Lecture: Union Station – R-46
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1955, 30 August
Document title: Union Station - R-46
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Academy Lecture Series/Conquest of Chaos
Location: Washington, DC
Document ID: CofC-04
Description: Hubbard is lecturing on the topic of games and identities; talks about an Archbishop Sheen in the context of privacy; says the Catholic Church claims to have the only workable psychotherapy; argues that an investigation of a Catholic will shake his faith, and that this investigation would be a study in weakness.
Now, wherever — wherever we get this departure from identities, you see — I mean, we get a departure from the fact, well, let’s all consent to have identities, you see? Let’s all have identities. And now we depart from that to where a person has the only identity, that game isn’t being played anymore. Some other game is probably being played but certainly this game of identity isn’t being played anymore because we have the only identity in the midst of all these identities — and that is silly, of course.
Now, these individuals sit around and start worrying about themselves and start picking up things like psychoanalysis and all sorts of things to find out about themselves. Why? Because they’ve become a secret to themselves! Bzzt! In other words, they’ve moved out as an identity out here until they were a secret to themselves. Well, what is this but aberration? Finally, they get a stable datum — I’m a secret. I’m unknowable.
We get Archbishop “Shenanigan” Sheen whistling through his false teeth on the subject of… You know, I was perfectly willing to sit and listen to that man until one day he started talking about: “You wouldn’t let strangers come into your house, would you? Well, of course you wouldn’t.” You wouldn’t do this and you wouldn’t do that, all on a privacy basis; and he was really getting worked up in some direction, and I sat there saying, “What tricks is he working up?” “Therefore, you wouldn’t let anybody investigate your mind, would you?” I said to myself, “Dong.” The Catholic church has always been renowned, according to itself, as having the only psychotherapy that was effective amongst men. And all of a sudden here we have this clown, standing up in the name of the Catholic church, saying that we mustn’t have any investigation of any kind and we mustn’t let anybody invade our knowingness in any way. And he was getting more and more colorful on this subject till, you know, I got the spooky notion that that fellow was working an operation on people. You know, I didn’t quite hear the ring of sincerity in what he was saying anymore.
If Catholicism is something that’s so shaky that an investigation of a Catholic will shake his faith, why sit and listen to somebody on something that has that little strength, you know? Why not study the strength of the left-hand hind leg of a grasshopper.
It’s a study in weaknesses then, isn’t it? So I says, “The devil with it.” But they’re throwing a constant and continual pitch in this direction.
Hubbard, L. R. (1955, 30 August). Union Station – R-46. Academy Lecture Series/Conquest of Chaos, (CofC-04). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC.