HCOPL: Group Sanity
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1970, 14 December
Document title: Group Sanity
Document type: Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter
Book title: The Management Series
Edition: 1991
Volume: I
Page(s): 266-279
Location: Los Angeles
Publisher: Bridge Publications, Inc.
Description: Hubbard uses the Catholic church as an example of an organization that went insane and failed because they began to exclude people. Hubbard clarifies exclusion and inclusion in terms of personnel and hiring. He directs his executives to consider everyone in Scientology "hired," whether they are paying customers or contracted staff. Scientologists must align their lives to Scientology's goals, purposes, and programs, and must comply with orders from Scientology management.
The Suppressive Person doctrine of course requires Scientologists to both exclude and attack everyone who opposes Scientology. Here Hubbard characterizes attacks on Suppressive Persons as "short-term defense actions" to force them to stop their "non-survival" practices, i.e., opposition to Scientology.
The points of success and failure, the make and break items of an organization are
1. HIRING
2. TRAINING
3. APPRENTICESHIPS
4. UTILIZATION
5. PRODUCTION
6. PROMOTION
7. SALES
8. DELIVERY
9. FINANCE
10. JUSTICE
11. MORALEThese eleven items MUST AGREE WITH AND BE IN LINE WITH THE ADMIN SCALE1 (Org Series 18).
Where these subjects are not well handled and where one or more of these are very out of line, the organization will suffer a third dynamic aberration.
This then is a SANITY SCALE for the third dynamic of a group.
The group will exhibit aberrated symptoms where one or more of these points are out.
The group will be sane to the degree that these points are in.
Internal stresses of magnitude begin to affect every member of the group in greater or lesser degree when one or more of these items are neglected or badly handled.
The society at large currently has the majority of these points out.
These elements become aberrated in the following ways:
1. HIRING
The society is running a massive can’t have on the subject of people. Automation and employment penalties demonstrate an effort to block out letting people in and giving them jobs. Confirming this is growing unemployment and fantastic sums for welfare—meaning relief. Fifty percent of America within the decade will be jobless due to the population explosion without a commensurate expansion in production. Yet production by US presidential decree is being cut back. War, birth control are two of many methods used to reduce population. THIS THIRD DYNAMIC PSYCHOSIS IS A REFUSAL TO EMPLOY PEOPLE. EXCLUSION OF OTHERS IS THE BASIC CAUSE OF WAR AND INSANITY.2, Scientology has waged war on Gerry Armstrong since he escaped the cult in 1981.
[...]
The COMMON DENOMINATOR of all these insanities is the desire to SUCCUMB.
Insanities have as their end product self or group destruction.
These eleven types of aberration gone mad are the main points through which any group SUCCUMBS.
THEREFORE, these eleven points kept sane guarantee a group’s SURVIVAL.
[...]
SANITY
If this is a description of group aberration, then it gives the keys to sanity in a group.
1. HIRING
Letting people INTO the group at large is the key to every great movement and bettered culture on this planet. 3 This was the new idea that made Buddhism the strongest civilizing influence the world has seen in terms of numbers and terrain. They did not exclude. Race, color, creed were not made bars to membership in this great movement.
Politically the strongest country in the world was the United States, and it was weakened only by its efforts to exclude certain races or make them second-class citizens. Its greatest internal war (1862-65) was fought to settle this point, and the weakness was not resolved even then.
The Catholic Church only began to fail when it began to exclude.
Thus inclusion is a major point in all great organizations.
The things which set a group or organization on a course of exclusion are (a) the destructive impulses of about 10 or 15% of the society (lunacy) and (b) opposition by interests which consider themselves threatened by the group or organization’s potential resulting in infiltration (c) efforts to mimic the group’s technology destructively and set up rival groups.4
All these three things build up barriers that a group might thoughtlessly buy and act to remedy with no long range plans to handle.
These stresses make a group edgy and combative. The organization then seeks to solve these three points by exclusion, whereas its growth depends wholly upon inclusion.
No one has ever solved these points successfully in the past because of lack of technology to solve them.
It all hinges on three points: (1) the sanity of the individual, (2) the worthwhileness of the group in terms of general area, planetary or universal survival, and (3) the superiority of the group’s organization tech and its use.
Just at this writing, the first point is solved conclusively in Scientology. Even hostile and destructive personalities wandering into the group can be solved and, due to the basic nature of Man, made better for the benefit of themselves and others.
The worthwhileness of the organization is determined by the assistance given to general survival by the group’s products and the actual factual delivery of those valid products.
The superiority of a group’s admin tech and its application is at this current writing well covered in current developments.
Thus inclusion is almost fully attainable. The only ridges that build up are the short term defense actions.
For instance, Scientology currently must fight back at the death camp organizations of psychiatry whose solution is a dead world, as proven by their actions in Germany before and during World War II. But we must keep in mind that we fully intend to reform and salvage even these opponents. We are seeking to include them in the general survival by forcing them to cease their nonsurvival practices and overcome their gruesome group past.
There are two major stages then of including people—one is as paid organization personnel and one as unpaid personnel. BOTH are in essence being “hired”. The pay differs. The wider majority receive the pay of personal peace and effectiveness and a better world.
The org which excludes its own field members will fail.
The payment to the org of money or the money payment to the staff member is an internal economy. Pay, the real pay, is a better personal survival and a world that can live.
Plans of INclusion are successful. They sometimes contain defense until we can include.
Even resistance to an org can be interpreted as a future inclusion by the org. Resistance or opposition is a common way point in the cycle of inclusion. In an organization where everyone wins eventually anyway the senselessness of resistance becomes apparent even to the most obtuse. Only those who oppose their own survival resist a survival-producing organization.
Even in commercial companies the best organization with the best product usually finds competitors merging with it.
Hubbard, L. R. (1970, 14 December). Group Sanity (Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter). The Management Series (1991 ed., Vol. I, pp. 266-279). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc.
Notes
- Definition: Admin scale ↩
- Cf. SPD 28 Suppressive Act Dealing with a Declared Suppressive Person ↩
- Scientology does not just “let people in” as Hubbard suggests here. Scientology disseminators aggressively pursue their marks with coercive and underhanded psychological games to lure people in and put them to work for Scientology. See, for example, Project Celebrity. ↩
- The percentages are a bit lower than his usual 20%, but Hubbard is obviously referring to the group of people that must be excluded from Scientology, the Potential Trouble Sources and the SPs. ↩