One of the basic things that we all face is a new adjustment. In your past many lives here on Earth you were probably well adjusted. You probably went on and on doing more or less the same thing. All of a sudden here’s this brand new look. You’re not doing what you were accustomed to doing. You are not riding at the same speed that you rode before. You are not handling the same cultural values that you handled before.

In this society burning questions scorch all of us. How do you keep marriages together? How do you raise kids? How do you hold in check and in democratic balance a government which so outweighs the populace with weapons that you never dare smile at it? How do you bring reform to an organization that is totally powerful and is getting more and more ignorant? How do you live in this changing world?

Once upon a time you could pick up a scythe and go down the line and take your chance with the mounted knight and somehow or other bring about a social reform. Once in a while you could win. Once in a while some principles would triumph over the status quo. But right now that really isn’t possible.

How do you hold in line the gains we have made culturally and make more gains? In what sort of culture should we be living? What sort of life should we be living? How should we increase our own security? How should we make things more successful, easier, better, more secure?

There is hardly anyone living a life of good security. The reason good security isn’t discovered is you have not yet worked out a pattern you yourself consider secure in the face of advancing scientific technology and advancing cultural pattern changes. The third dynamic is getting disarranged and rearranged and the fourth dynamic is getting changed considerably and none of us have really found our feet in this new change.

There used to be a miller. He ground the flour. Somebody brought him four bags of flour, he ground four, kept one and gave three back. That was his life.

Now the farmer has to buy back his own wheat, ground, from some large company and pay top price for it. His economics are so complicated, thereby, that he can’t acquire a security.

It’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t do any good to save money for your old age. The government has taken that all off your back. Or has it? Will they ever pay you an old age pension? Who knows? Or will the old age pension be so valueless in terms of money by the time it gets to you that it will buy nothing?

People have gotten busy and started to fire rockets at the sun. This makes a change up into space opera. In the old days, waaaay back, when man was going into

space, he did it with hypnotism, implantation and heavy duress — and he folded up. All the great space societies were built by losing the individual totally. They lost him utterly, and so they lost his initiative. And they lost everything else that was good about Man. They became criminal societies.

We are in a space age and that age is being built at the sacrifice of the individual. On Earth today we alone can preserve the individual. There are several committees for civil rights and that sort of thing that try to fight against this incursion on individual liberty. But for every bit of pressure they can exert or every power they can develop, somebody is developing some new weapon, some new high-speed missile, something new that overreaches again Man’s own individual power. It is quite an interesting view. It will become more and more interesting as the years move.

When you begin to sacrifice the individual for the good of the society, as has already happened here on Earth, you also sacrifice that which is best about an individual: his individual sense of good, his individual sense of responsibility for his own life and guiding it.

When that individual no longer feels that he is responsible for his own life, when he is totally cared for by the state, when he is born in some sort of a nursery and gets put on board a spaceship or in an army, and his indoctrination consists of some hypnotic mumbo jumbo, you’ve lost one thing: You’ve lost leadership.

For the individual is the only leader. A group can lead nothing. A group democratically operated can select its leaders, who in turn govern it. But when there are no longer leaders in a society, who do they elect? Who is there to elect who can help or guide the society in any way? No great mass of people can possibly elect a leader when there are none.

And that is what happens in a society. Individual liberty, individual work, individual beingness and understanding go down in front of a tremendous onslaught of modern scientific improvements. Gadgets and guns, dependence on the state, all wipe out the individual. Therefore in this society leadership suffers. And where you do not have adequate and responsible leadership, you don’t have a society, you have a criminal element. All criminality is, is the abandonment of all responsibility on one or more dynamics.

So what happens in a space opera society? Oh yes, we have fancier and fancier ways to implant people. We have fancier ways to shoot dogs and satellites and Christmas messages into outer space. We have gadgets and keyboards and countdowns and cracked space helmets....

But who is around with enough responsibility to say what is to be done with these things? Or does it all turn into some huge Frankenstein monster that somebody has started and nobody can control?

Societies of that character don’t like individualists. I remember a famous story called “He Didn’t Like Soup.” This individual, who was an individual, gets raised amongst a bunch of space jockeys, space opera fellows. He is in their midst at a meal as the soup comes along on the assembly line. Each one of them, of course, takes off their bowl of soup. Except this individual. The bowl of soup that appeared in front of him goes on down the assembly belt. It gets into the works and gears at the end of the assembly belt. Nothing like this has ever happened before so they don’t even have a fuse on the thing. It flashes back and closes out the power plant of the building and, because the power plant goes, there is no way to stop the atomic fission on the main power plant and it blows up the whole town. When they ask this fellow why he did it, he says, “I didn’t like soup.”

There we have an example of building a society so flimsily, but apparently strongly, that any action contrary to its general will, blows it up.

Similarly, the will and worth of one individual can always overthrow a large, complicated, interdependent society — providing that individual can come up to revolution, and there is no provision in the society for leadership.

What we are doing in Scientology today is not necessarily providing the leaders of tomorrow. We are raising the general level of responsibility at the same time all other social actions seek to depress it. We are keeping something in balance that is more important, probably, than even I understand.

If the future society cannot have men capable of sufficient responsibility to be entrusted with tremendous weapons and the violence of which the society is capable, then the more the society improves, the more it will blow itself up! We have, perforce, a police state. What are the police trying to do? They are trying to keep individuals from doing things. Why do they have to keep individuals from doing things? Because individuals are so irresponsible they are liable to do anything. That’s why a police state grows.

What we are doing is the only impulse I know of in the society at this time which is actually directly pointed at the heart of the future police state.

In a society where individuals are free, where individuals can be rehabilitated, where individuals can still think, you can still have leadership. One individual can be selected by other intelligent individuals to represent them, or one individual by his natural ability can at least control some sphere of the social order around him. And unless this social order is controlled, unless there is a sphere that a thetan can bring order into, you have nothing but chaos.

To lay down a big plan for Scientologists and say, “This is the organization and this is what we are going to do: steps one, two, three . . is saying that none of you have a right to think or plan. The only thing we can do inside Scientology is hold the communication lines of Scientology and its service in an orderly state. And we can keep the show on the road. But this is an inside perimeter.

How about where Scientology influences things outside?

Do you know if you processed a very small percent of the society, enough order would result from their action alone to bring about sensible actions on the part of the society! We are almost talking in terms of mysticism; it isn’t totally traceable. Where an individual is capable of bringing order, there is order, whether he brings it or not. Where an individual is capable of bringing disorder, there is disorder, whether he makes it disorderly or not.

If you clear a few people in a town, a greater order is generated; we have a greater sphere of order occur. This is not necessarily because these Clears are going around being very active.

Now, leadership is totally the action of bringing order or it is not leadership.

You hear people speak of the “leader of the mob.” A mob doesn’t have a leader. It is a technical truth that a destructive mob or any large mob, if called upon to elect somebody, normally elects somebody they can push around but who will destroy them.

Here we have the impulse of Man toward destruction unless he has responsible and reliable leadership so he can turn, in his own affairs, toward areas that are being led.

Where you find irresponsibilities, your society tends to fall apart. Then people try to push it back together again by making it all equal or making it a welfare state, and things start to go broke, inflation starts to happen and the state takes all the responsibility away from everybody and puts it nowhere.

We are directly in the teeth of such a movement. We are not a political movement, however. Not even vaguely!

We are creating somebody who can live a better life. It is worthwhile right in that sphere but we might as well look a little bit further.

We are creating somebody who can take responsibility in his own sphere of action. We are creating people who can take responsibility for things.

If we create them as fast as the society says the individual can have no responsibility, we will keep this ship from going down with all flags struck.

Leadership and clearing are not necessarily in the same basket at all since you could have a society totally made up of Clears and you would probably have no leaders. But where you could only make a sprinkling of Clears, you would undoubtedly be making some leaders. There is some difference there.

An individual who will take responsibility generally does. And he keeps things rolling.

It is all right to say “leadership,” but what is it? It is a curious thing, but do you know that there have been tomes written on this subject that would crack your back? There are little gimmicks and “you never do this but you do that,” and tremendous numbers of rules, but nobody ever said what leadership was!

If we are going into a society which is all but leaderless, we had better know what a leader is.

That is awfully simple, isn’t it?

In a Scientology Church, if your Registrar and Assistant Registrar cannot take responsibility for every reactive bank in the country, they don’t do very much. That is an awful mouthful: “Take responsibility for every reactive bank in the country.” And yet that is what it takes!

The next attribute of leadership is

It certainly seems funny when you hear about the general who walks down the ranks and no private may talk to him, and it is said the general is the “leader” of these privates. Maybe their sergeants are, but not the general. Why? Because the privates cannot talk to him. Communication.

Of course, that means within his ability to have time enough to hear everything that is said to him but, nevertheless, he can hear quite a bit. And he certainly must have that ability to communicate.

Furthermore,

And

and

The agreement has to be fairly good on the goals.

In addition to that

What is their reality. And recognizing their reality clearly, he need not necessarily fall into it at all.

One of the great empires of all time, the early Turkish Empire, had in charge of it a fellow named “Suleiman, the Magnificent.” He had one great fault: he never appointed any task within human possibility. He got a lot done, but he shattered the whole thing. He never took a long look at, or got a reality on, what people could really do. Therefore he fell away from being a leader of that particular nation.

But leaders do not just lead nations. Every family has to have a leader, unless it is composed of Clears. Two people can come to an agreement but two people cannot plan. There has got to be somebody who, in the final analysis, makes the last decision. Otherwise that decision is never made and all activities undertaken are flimsy for that one reason.

You will find people who are getting Clear or being Clear starting to take leadership in their own zones of action. They are taking more and more responsibility for what is going on around them. And, taking more and more responsibility, they become more and more leaders. And, because they are surrounded by people who are not Clear and because they are surrounded by people who are in doubt or feel insecure or muddied up or scared, they will find out that by their own ability to communicate, their own ability to have affinity, their own concept of reality and the agreement they have with their fellows — by these tokens alone — they will lead. Whether they want to or not.

(A funny part of it is, the more they lead, the less gold braid you will see them wearing because gold braid is to identify a leader who cannot be identified otherwise.)

As we look at this, we look at our next step up the line which will be influencing spheres of action, intentionally or unintentionally — intentionally, I hope. And, influencing these spheres of action, we should better and better understand what we are doing. People start turning to us for some idea of what to do or where to go or what to

say. It is all right for you to keep saying, “Well, you make up your mind.” But sooner or later, to get the show on the road you are going to have to make the decision and say (and the clearer you get the more willing you will be to say it) “Black, white, yes, no.”

If we are going to get the show on the road at all, whether we are Clear or not — just by reason of what we know — we have to take a little wider responsibility on this Earth today, a little more responsibility for the reactive banks of our fellows, a little more responsibility for the state of order in our immediate vicinities. And if we do that we can win.

It does not seem to me to be a very difficult job. It is a job you are already well embarked upon.

[Note: The original mimeo copies of this policy letter were incorrectly numbered as Executive Series 32.]