Lecture: Man’s Search and Scientology’s Answer

Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1953, 19 October
Document title: Forget and Remember, Good and Evil
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: First American Clinical Course
Location: Camden, New Jersey
Document ID: 1ACC-26
Description: Hubbard puts an early spin on demons, hell and volcanoes, before his "research" into OT 3; relates these ideas to a history of slavery, brainwashing and Pavlovian conditioning experiments.

Now, true enough in Scientology we have done an awful lot of describing, but as a description on a brand-new level of action. What I describe in a book you can look for and find at once. And a book on Scientology is not a book of philosophy to air the erudite and aesthetic opinions of LRH. It is a road map of where it is, what it is – if you want to look at it. And the end product is not reading a book. The end product is taking a look at it.

Now, the only reason a road map is necessary is because so many phony road maps have been issued. And a book on Scientology becomes necessary if one has had the misfortune of being educated in the twentieth century in a public school.

Female voice: I agree.

You’ve been told all sorts of things – via-via-via, wiggle-wiggle, alter-is, not-is. And a book on Scientology is a road map out of a morass of “don’t looks.” Do you see that?

That’s all it is.

But we have achieved a subject then. But the subject itself embraces life and the subject of the subject is life: livingness, actingness, doingness, beingness, and havingness.

Now that is the subject of Scientology.

The subject of Scientology is not Professor Fromptf’s contradiction of Professor Snodgrass’s Phrumpfs. It is not a learned dissertation on how many angels can stand on the head of a pin.

I ran across a book the other day which was used until recently by a very large and profitable organization. I think it has – its central organization is in, just a minute, don’t tell me – its central organization, it’s someplace over in Europe. A lot of our troops took it recently, but they left this central organization alone. I don’t know why. Rome, that’s right – Rome. I knew it was some town where the plumbing was sort of outside.

And they talk all about demon exorcism. But I assure you, they had to invent the demon before they could exorcise him.

There is a great deal of material of a discursive nature on whether or not man is going to go to heaven or going to go to hell. And a lot of attempts to put in his hands some sort of a road map that will take him to either place. But the key question has never been asked: Is there heaven? Is there hell?

I’ve been looking recently and I can’t find them.

Imagine the disappointment of somebody who kicks off, well aware of having led an exemplary life, gets a knock all ready, and can’t find any Pearly Gates. He would then feel he was rather lost. Just as you would feel lost if you were told to go to Brumpfville and nobody had ever built it. But that’s no reason for an individual to believe he’s wrong just because he can’t find Brumpfville. The question is: Is there such a town?

Now if somebody wants to come up and say, “Look, here’s a road map: You take two turns to the right; three good turns to the left; three pennies in the collection plate; and a couple of Ave Marias – and there’s the Pearly Gates.” If somebody comes up with that, I follow the directions, I arrive at the Pearly Gates; I’ll go back and shake him by the hand.

But I’ve read several road maps on the subject recently, exteriorized rather neatly – went around. As near as I can find out somebody fell into one of the volcanoes out in the South Pacific or something one time, and got an idea that hell existed. But I don’t know what kind of a shape a thetan would be in to be bothered by a little heat!

These road maps that man has been given to read all had a pitch. They had a pitch – they were to make him be good for somebody else’s benefit but not his own. That is my opinion, for what it’s worth. To make him produce for somebody else – not himself.

All of these road maps have been written out of a misguided idea that you have to have slaves. And I’ve seen slaves around, and I’ve never found them doing anything but giving trouble. Man cannot afford slavery. It isn’t whether or not slavery is bad or slavery is good, or whether it’s esoteric or against the Emancipation 24th Amendment, or the 29th, or which ever one that is.

That is not the point.

The point is, can people afford to have slavery in their vicinity? On a national level, can any nation afford to have a poor, bunged-up neighbor? No. Can any nation afford to wreck the government of another nation? No. ¹

Just a passing glance at this, look at the French Revolution. The stable government of France was overthrown; her neighbors kept that government in a turbulence by declaring war and making pressure and so forth. There was a broad world war grew out of that at the end of the eighteenth century. When France started to go out of control none of her neighbors, England, or the rest of them, reached out and said, “Let’s put it back together again. Let’s get the controls lined up so we have a more equitable exercise of the government of France.” They didn’t do that, and as a result they were living with a psycho for fifteen or twenty years. It was causing war on every side. Two generations of the manhood of Europe were eaten up in the flames of the uncontrolled hysteria of France.

Now, France, herself, was eaten up because she founded her economy on a sort of slavery. And other nations around her were able to sit with great aplomb and watch the feudal slave state go on and on and on, to see man tromped into the mud and dust. They paid for it after a while.

No nation on the face of earth can afford to loosen the power of another nation. No war ever earned anything but war. And anytime you loosen the control over himself and his environment of another human being, you get the same circumstances. You get somebody that you can’t live around.

And what is slavery but the substitution of one area of controls for the proper area of controls. We take a human being who should be able to control himself and his environment and we put him in chains and we tell him that he is now totally controlled! And he mustn’t breathe or spit without some kind of a government permit. And we say, “Ah, this is the way to go about it. This is the way to have a civilization.”

Oh no, it is not. That is the way to have chaos! And man cannot afford slavery. He cannot afford duress. He can’t afford to tear his fellow man to pieces if he wishes to live any kind of a life at all.

There is nothing wrong with the world today, except the world believes in duress and slavery as a method of possession.

No, it’s a very simple thing. It’s a very simple picture. Let’s look what this has done to the entire study of the mind. A study which came up from Chaldea. A study which came through all of the ages of Asia.

Every time somebody would come up with a little idea that had some notion of what it was all about, there was always somebody standing there ready to take that little idea and use it as a control mechanism on somebody else, and enhance slavery, but not man.

In other words, somebody would try to look at this, and then the next thing you know anything that was discovered would be used to make slaves.

Let’s take a poor, innocent little goof who really must have had something. You know, he was not a man of stupidity; he was a man of some genius – a fellow named Pavlov. Interesting fellow. He left government alone, he didn’t have anything to do with government, he went down to one corner of Russia there someplace, and he had a hard time. He eventually got some money and he experimented on dogs.

And all he was trying to do was change training patterns by identification. And he had the whole idea of conditioning identification. He was creating engrams every day, but he missed the whole subject. But he was all right. He had dogs, and he was happy, and the dogs slavered when he rang bells, and it was very useful material.

Nobody around the Red Square – because he lived on after the revolution – said to themselves, “You know, we have an enormous number of men, women and children out here to control. We’re a government. These people have got to be clothed and fed and sheltered. There’s been a revolution, and we’ve got to get things going again, we’ve got to put them back together again. Let’s see what Pavlov could teach us that we could employ in our effort to make these people happy, to make them better people.”

No, no. No, no. The Kremlin didn’t do that. The Kremlin wrote Mr. Pavlov a letter. And they said, “Dear Mr. Pavlov, You come and see us. We are going to fix you up. We are going to give you laboratories. If you don’t come voluntarily, we’re going to bring you back on active service.”

Undoubtedly Mr. Pavlov bad reached a considerable understanding of some of the factors of behavior, and so a chap by the name of – I don’t know what his name was. He called himself Stalin, he’s dead now. Wonderful how beams work. And this fellow, Stalin, put him in a little corner of the Kremlin, and he says, “Professor, write me a manuscript that tells me how to employ on human beings every slavery mechanism that you have found in working with dogs.”

And Pavlov wrote a four – he didn’t know any better – he wrote a four-hundred-page manuscript. He didn’t throw Stalin into session as any of us would have done. He didn’t say “Well, I’ll have to give you a demonstrttion here, Mr. Stalin, I mean, I can’t just write this stuff out. It would be meaningless. I’d have to give you a demonstration. Here’s a couch, see, “The somatic strip will go back to birth.”

He didn’t do that. He didn’t know how. But he did write this manliscript – four-hundred-page manuscript. And ever since that time, this undoubtedly valuable piece of know-how about human behavior and animal behavior has been employed exclusively to extract confessions from human beings as to how they have injured the Red state, or why they should at once desert some other control factor and join up in some fashion.

In other words, it’s been totally misused and they’ve made slaves with it. And we call that today “brainwashing” and that’s where brainwashing comes from. All brainwashing is, is getting a person to identfy beyond reason. Any time you can get somebody to identify beyond reason, you’ve brainwashed him. It has nothing to do with scrubbing brushes; they sure could have employed some.

But here, here is this whole … this whole panorama of thousands of years all in vignette. Here we have Pavlov writing what he knew, and the material then being used for the enslavement of his fellow man. In other words they give it a big pitch. They colored it. They didn’t want anything to do with making people happy, making people free. They wanted nothing to do with that at all.

And yet, who knows? Russia, which at this moment is failing, might well have become a successful experiment and therefore a successful nation had she taken people like Pavlov and said, “What do you boys know? Now, how can this be used to free from slavery – the slavery of superstition, the slavery of indolence – the Russian people?” But they never made that request.

We didn’t wait for somebody to make the request, we’re just going ahead and doing the job. That’s the best way to go about it, by the way.

A road map is only necessary because every time a truth has been discovered heretofore, it has evidently been put to a misuse of further slavery and greater duress, and therefore the whole track is booby-trapped.

Hubbard, L. R. (1953, 19 October). Forget and Remember, Good and Evil.   First American Clinical Course,   (1ACC-26). Lecture conducted from Camden, New Jersey.

Notes