[Start of Lecture]

Thank you.

I usually come fully prepared to lectures. Occasionally, though, I don't. And this particular instance is one of those occasions. I did want to round off for you these talks on organizations — pushing home the idea, which is extremely valuable to all of us, that organizations are composed of individuals.

An organization itself is simply a series of communication lines and communication terminals with a common goal, and you use organizations to get things done. You assume the post of a terminal, you see, and you use the terminal and so on, and it assists you in getting things done. But the organization itself is nothing. I wish you could get a full appreciation of that.

You sometimes talk about the HASI, and so forth, does this and does that. HASI never does anything. People in the HASI do this and do that, and some of them are fair, and some of them are good and some of them are real good. And some of them are on easy posts, and some of them are on mediumly difficult posts and some of them are on completely impossible posts.

But here we have an example of it. Certification is good or certification is terrible. You mean the person who is doing certification is good just now; the person who is doing certification is poor just now.

Well, because people think of an organization as a continuing thing, they begin to believe that it itself has great command power because it outlives them. It never does! The semantics may outlive something, but that's about all.

The semantics are quite interesting. We talk today about freedom. We talk about freedom. That's a very important thing. Wow! You couldn't overstate the importance of freedom. Couldn't. But freedom 1776 reads a lot different than freedom 1956. It's a different word. And we get one of the fundamental tricks of the agent saboteur, which is change the meaning of the word: Don't change the word; define it differently.

You could take a whole people and bankrupt them of any freedom or civil liberty simply by changing the definitions. Don't change the words.

Now, a president we had, President Frankie, used to talk about "freedom from." That isn't the way it was defined in 1776.

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? That is a fascinating document. And with what fascination I read the other day the Supreme Court's opinion of the Declaration of Independence. You didn't know that it had an opinion, but it does. "This Declaration of Independence has never been used to clarify decisions presented to the Court," it says, "because it is not considered a legal or fundamental document of the United States of America."

Audience: What?

That's what they said. It is not a legal document. It is not that thing upon which American liberty is founded. American liberty is founded on the Constitution of the United States, which is founded, of course, on the most recent civil-rights bill. Oh, this is fascinating.

You couldn't put a case before the Supreme Court on the grounds that the Declaration of Independence said so-and-so and so-and- so. You couldn't. The Supreme Court would not accept it as an argument because they would tell you that the Declaration of Independence is not a legal or fundamental document in our government. But they take it out and wave it in front of you all the time in school and say, "See, see, see. This is what you are. This is what citizenship means."

As a matter of fact, it's left to persons like myself to complete these cycles of action like Declaration 1776. Not just the way you thought here. If you notice here, wearing a little coin — this tiepin here. Saw this in a shop over in London and realized that a cycle of action had never been completed. One of our great revolutionary heroes said that he was going to finish the revolution by bringing home the head of George III.

Well, anyway, this head of George III which I'm wearing here I did bring home, which shows you… Actually that's a third of a sovereign. It's no sovereign at all now, you know, none at all.

But the Declaration of Independence says certain things. It says something about in-unalieni-a-e — excuse me, unalienable… That — I — I got it out! Unalienable — that means no aliens must have these rights. Rights to freedom and the pursuit of happiness and things and stuff, you know.

Well, actually, what they really meant was that the politician has the right to say what he pleases when making campaign promises. That's actually what that all means. It means the pursuit of happiness is an office of the government. See how you could explain this all upside down?

In 1776, these better-minded men had no reservations on what they meant for the people of the country. They didn't have a lot of reservations. But the Constitutional Convention got together. They closed the doors, and having closed them with a dull snick, they did not even permit scraps of paper to be kept from session to session. The chamber was entirely cleaned out. It was in complete secrecy. No one was admitted to the convention.

And the only roster or notes which were ever kept were those of James Monroe which were published almost — correct me if I have the length of years wrong — almost fifty years after the fact. I don't know exactly when they were but I think James Monroe was either dead or almost so. And the country had been going for an awful long time at the time they finally published his incomplete notes of the convention.

We have then created a mystery. What was meant by our Founding Fathers? Now that is usurped by the Supreme Court as their mission to tell us what was meant by the men who wrote that convention document — the Constitution of the United States. Otherwise, it's a total mystery.

No minutes of their meeting, no opinions, no expressions of reservation are alive today for the use of anyone for their interpretation. It's an interesting thing. Why would they so cripple and abet a future redefinition of terms?

Freedom to them meant freedom. It didn't mean freedom from. It didn't mean the freedom to tax. It didn't mean the freedom to exercise our police duties without restraint. It didn't mean some people will be citizens of the country and some won't be. In matter of fact, it says in the Constitution of the United States that all persons in the United States shall be citizens. And a citizen is somebody who has the right to vote, and he's somebody who has this right and that right. And because right after the Constitution was published and adopted people were still cloudy about some of these things, they tacked on ten clauses which we call the Bill of Rights. Ten amendments, just to classify and clarify what these rights were. And there we had a pretty good definition of what a citizenship meant.

What was a citizen entitled to? He was entitled to these first ten amendments. And with what glee does the government thereafter reinterpret, redefine these various phrases and words.

If you were to take freedom and redefine it, if you were to take democracy and redefine it, if you were to take taxation and redefine it, as the right to seize the body, if you were to take legislation and define it as that action taken by an executive of a nation…

They do this in Brazil, you know. You know how they do this in Brazil? It's very interesting. It used to be this way. I don't know, they've had a revolution or two since. But all they had to do was publish a law in the newspaper. The executive of the country dashed it off in a moment of pique or something like this and he just published it in one obscure newspaper up in Sao Paulo or something like that, and it became the law of the land. Nobody ever had to know what it was. They could be arrested, tried and hanged on that, and they never would have heard of it. That you could define as legislation.

You could take each and every name or word in the Constitution and redefine it or you could take these common catch phrases that are used by the politicians — I'm sure most of them believe these things are simply catch phrases — and define them quite adequately and arduously, and you could have yourself a complete slave dictatorship with the greatest of ease.

And yet people could be so reasonable with you. They say, "Well, you say you're a citizen. You know what a citizen is? A citizen is somebody who is employed on public works without pay."

Now, you take involuntary servitude. You know what involuntary servitude is. It means the employer has no right to change the government pay rates. You'd say it means involuntary. Well, involuntary — that means unchanged.

Now, anybody who commands police and armed forces can define anything any way he pleases.

At once upon a time the citizens of the United States were armed. A man who didn't have a couple of spare horse pistols was not considered a gentleman.

You know, I knew a fellow once that was snubbed, absolutely snubbed, in Charleston. His dueling pistols were old, very out of date — matchlock. Not the new flintlock. The matchlock, of course, had the interesting mechanism, you see, of going off for a long time before it fired, and you could duck. And the fellow was actually considered a coward because he maintained that these were good enough for his father, they were good enough for him.

Squirrel rifles, muskets, shotguns were very, very much around. Powder was very easy to come by. Lead was very easy to come by. People made their own bullets, had their own bullet molds. You didn't go down and buy a bunch of "catridges" at the general store the way they did a few decades afterwards.

When this country was founded, everybody had his bullet mold, and he used to go down and get a couple of pounds of lead, and if nobody gave him a couple of pounds of lead, and if he couldn't get a couple of pounds of lead, well, there was always that little figure outside the Peaceful Arms Inn that he could suddenly knock off and put in his pocket and go his way. There was lead around. And he could always melt up the wife's pewter. There were numerous things he could do. And there were parts of the country where the lead mines had not been sufficiently developed, but what you couldn't pull off the dumps, some rocks, and put them in the oven and have lead.

Furthermore, it may seem incredible at this time of high development of arms, but all powder consists of is the niter which accumulates underneath a pile of manure and some charcoal and a bit of sulfur. You can always get sulfur for somebody's cough, and there was sure plenty of uh… of um — certainly was — lots of charcoal. You could make gunpowder.

Today, as close as you can get to making gunpowder is taking a new deck of cards, scraping it carefully with a razor into little shavings, and you'll have gunpowder. That's right, the plastic on those cards shaved thin enough is an explosive. It's nitrocellulose — or some such chemical compound. Maybe playing- card companies have been restrained from doing that however.

But at one time we had a considerable number of arms. Furthermore, the military was armed exclusively with government issue, and it didn't care whether it fired or not. It couldn't have cared less. Somebody handed me something once that was made in 1835 at Springfield Armory and asked me to fire it, and I did a double take on the thing. I was perfectly willing to fire an old pistol. But I said, "Where did you say it was… Oh look! U.S. Heh! Dragoon pistol. Well, very interesting, very interesting piece. Why don't you put it up above your fireplace someplace. How are we going to draw the ball out of this thing quietly?" What was it going to do?

But the very best arms were simply comparable to the public arms. In other words, an armed uprising was a real danger. The city of Washington, DC, at this moment is built and planned to keep people from pouring down the streets and hitting the White House unannounced. Each one of the circles with their radiant streets is actually a field gun emplacement, and a field gun placed at those junctures, and crammed with a whiff of grape, would do a great deal to discourage petitioning of the government.

Now, they've gotten some holes dug under some of them — underpasses of one kind or another. They must feel a little bit defeated about the whole thing, or maybe they feel terribly safe. Maybe the government feels awfully safe. What would justify it in feeling safe?

The public at large, under the Sullivan Law and other laws, is not really permitted to own arms. The government itself is armed with subcaliber machine guns and all kinds of other anticivilian weapons. They're called antipersonnel in the war, and in peace they're called anticivilian.

Large armies are maintained, not to restrain aggressors, but to keep populaces in place. That is the real reason armies are maintained, although they are usually pointed outwards with a State Department creating enough commotion on the outside of the borders of the country to make it seem reasonable.

But armies of large size have as their first mission the restraint of armed uprisings amongst the population. And if it was only foreign aggression that worried governments at large, there would seldom be armies because they're expensive. They cut down the amount of pork you can take out of the barrel. You could, of course, go on manufacturing tanks, weapons, guns, and parking them in fields and keeping a militia, but a standing army does have as a primary use and mission the restraint of populations.

But what kind of a population is it today that one would have to restrain? It's not a population that's any longer equipped with pistols and weapons, swords, and so on. And any sporting rifle that you happen to have is unfortunately very inadequate against a Garand or other types of weapons which fire a rather fast, heavy slug. Submachine guns are very discouraging. I admit that you can fire a .45 with greater accuracy and almost as fast as a sub-Thompson machine gun. I've done so, but at the same time it is a particular skill, and there aren't even very many .45s around.

So we see that the arms are no longer held by the public and are held by the government. In other words, a difference of armament has come into being whereas you have a heavily armed government and an unarmed public. In such situations, you get a deterioration of the pride of the individual citizen. That is all that deteriorates, by the way: his own pride. He recognizes "I can have no effect upon. I can be shot at. I cannot shoot back. There is no threat from me, no threat whatsoever. I am unarmed. I have no voice that can spit fire." And, as such, he then goes into apathy. He permits his liberties to be redefined for him. He pays his taxes without protest. He does not any longer raise a large voice of outrage.

The idea that an armed uprising could win today without exterior help in armament or without a large part of the army itself defecting to the public cause would be just folly. You would have to have a very different strata, a very different parity, or lack of it, in order to have liberty. Nobody is restraining the government from putting FBI offices all over the country which are armed with tear gas bombs, submachine guns, automatic shotguns, and other weapons which aren't even good anticivilian weapons. These FBI offices look like arsenals. What are they afraid of? — which is really all I'm talking about. Of what are they afraid?

They must be scared or they wouldn't be so prepared to shoot. There must be somebody around hunting them. The politician must feel uneasy. Is it in his conscience? Is that what's uneasy?

I myself have gone the length and breadth of this world amongst the most savage people you ever cared to sit down and gnaw a human thighbone with. And nobody's ever laid a hand on me in anger — outside the United States. But in the United States I have actually had to calm down, on about three different occasions, police officers. They were nervous! I had to give them a talk at once, straight out of their own manuals about the care and use of firearms.

I remember one silly cop down in Los Angeles who made me sit sideways from the seat of my automobile. I was parked at the curb, and he made me sit away from the seat clear at the extreme side of the right-hand side of the car so that he could reach in the window and pick my keys real carefully out of the lock and get back out of the road.

And I said, "What's the matter with you, boy?" I said, "I don't bite."

And he said, "Well, we'll see about that."

And he went stalking back to his own car, and he put in a radio message straight to headquarters. I wasn't doing anything. There was no reason for all this. He put a radio message back into police headquarters, Los Angeles City, and of course he got back, "Officer, United States Naval Intelligence, Special Officer Los Angeles Police, Lafayette R. Hubbard."

And he came back and he said, "Here's your keys, sonny. Whatya doin' sittin' here parked?"

And I said, "Well, is it illegal to park here?"

And he said, "No."

I said, "I was wondering whether I should go and get an ice-cream soda or not."

But what was he scared of? Of what was this man possibly afraid?

Another one which I've commented on before: A Federal marshal grabbed me off a lecture platform. There are some people right here I think right this minute who were present on that occasion. There was a hell of an uproar going on this because they wouldn't present their credentials. But up in the office he was waving around a pistol with the most wild abandon. He didn't know what to do with it.

You don't draw pistols against unarmed men, not unless you're scared. You'd have to be real scared though to draw a .38, and then real dumb to put it in the belly of somebody who has been trained in judo. You don't stand, you know, two feet back from a guy with a muzzle of a pistol in his stomach, not in this modern age. Civil populaces have become educated enough in some countries of the world to realize what you do with pistols that are held two feet away from a man's body by him. You eat him up. In the first place, you can move before he can pull the trigger. He's completely helpless. I put his pistol back in his holster. I told him to be good. But what was he scared of?

One day a man walked up to me, and grabbed me by the shoulder and told me I was under arrest. I said, "For what?"

He said, "Never mind that. You're under arrest."

I said, "For what?"

And he started to get real mad and real upset, and I finally made him tell me for what I was under arrest. It was the wrong man. But, boy, that fellow was uneasy. He was nervous.

Noting this condition many years ago in studying the subject of Dianetics, Scientology — putting them together, working with them — I thought it might be an awfully good thing to become a member of a police force for a little while to find out what they were scared of. And I did — became a Special Officer in the Los Angeles Police, as I just mentioned. I wanted to find where these vicious criminals were that were making them so frightened.

I had a beat down on South Main Street. They didn't know who I was. I was careful to talk colloquially — like I do in lectures. And they were very friendly with me because I was something they could understand — a policeman.

But down on South Main Street amongst the gyps, grifts, and the dopes, the hopheads, the tea eaters and the rest of them — the lowest strata of humanity that comes across from the lowest strata of Mexico to mingle with the lowest strata of Los Angeles… And boy, that's low! Los Angeles is the only city in the world that deserves psychiatrists.

Amongst these people I thought I would find my answer. I was in bars and dens and things where I didn't know man could go that far south. I only had one fellow ever give me any real trouble, and that was a Mexican who was awfully drunk after having been high on marijuana. And he kept coming alongside of me and grabbing my gun out of its holster because he wanted to shoot his best friend.

In view of the fact that the gun was unloaded (never bothered with a loaded gun — the cartridges are heavy), I kept taking it away from him and putting it back in the holster and snapping it down — explaining to him that that wasn't what you did with friends. But he couldn't understand this, and I finally sat him down over in the corner of the cafe. He grabbed once too often, when I had my back to him after he hadn't bothered me for half an hour, and I gave him a push, and he knocked down a couple of tables.

And I apologized to the proprietor, and took him over and sat him down back of a table and poured him a glass of warm water filled with salt. And I told him that was the best Scotch and soda he ever drank, and it was on me. Well, after he had gotten rid of it…

He came around, my next time past that place, and he told me that he had decided something. And I asked him what he had decided, and he said he had decided that one should not shoot his friends. This was a wonderful thing.

Now, Los Angeles has the lowest strata there is. That was the only man that ever gave me trouble, and he actually didn't have any real malice in his heart at all. It was just sort of a sport he was engaged in.

Now, I've been down amongst one of the finest bodies of police you have ever cared to meet — the Federales. They're pretty tough, and they occasionally do take more away from you than seems quite just. They patrol the northern border there — they're to be found a little bit into Mexico — and when they go off the payroll they have to get their pay where they can find it as they have done in a revolution or two of past days. But these are fine men. And yet the criminals which they handle are really pretty easy to handle. Those men are real tough, and they really never have to be tough.

Where are all these tough human beings?

I admit that some man occasionally will become afraid and will become totally gripped by the belief that there is menace in every fellow man. I admit that a human being can become so aberrated as to constitute a menace to the bulk of the society, and that in such a case it is necessary to reacquaint him with society. But I will not admit that there is a naturally bad, evil man on earth.

It's a very amazing thing that the only men I have found in this society or any society who were dangerous were cops. And they have uniformly been afraid — they're nervous.

There are good cops. There are many, many good cops. There are cops who are not afraid. There are cops who are taking life easily. But I haven't met very many of them. The percentage I have met were by and large fellows who sat around and worried about what weight of brass knuckle they should sew into their new pair of brass-mounted gloves; cops who were upset because a recent regulation made it possible that the lead in their billy would be detected. I've seen cops who were nervous and cops who were afraid, and I've seen people who governed cops and handled cops and ordered cops around who were afraid. But I don't meet many anyplace else, even amongst criminals and cannibals.

A fellow comes out of a jail. He'll always tell, "You know, I don't understand why any of those men are in jail. That's the finest crowd of men in that jail you ever met. Swear by any one of 'em. Give 'em my last dollar, and I know I'd get it back."

I was with a bunch of criminals one time as a ranger, a ranger up in Montana when I was a kid. Rangers have to take over crews of tramps and so forth, sometimes, in order to fight forest fires. You suddenly find yourself with numerous fellows who have recently left Joliet without being properly discharged. You find yourself with fires occasionally set by tramps who need a job. You find all sorts of interesting complications, but very little viciousness. And there was a fellow there who kept telling me that he was on the run because he had taken a knife to a fellow and stabbed him in the belly. He kept telling me that this was why he was on the run. And he told me often enough until I finally realized that he was real worried about it. He wasn't running because he was wanted. He was running because he'd hurt somebody.

Now, these criminals and bums did a pretty good job fighting fire. Criminals can't work. That's mainly what's wrong with them, and you have to work real hard with criminals to get them to do work at all. However, one of them got his boots practically burned off his feet, so I loaned him a pair of boots that I had, an extra pair of boots. He was on another crew by the time I left the area, and I went back to Helena. And when I got back to Helena, I said to myself, "Well, I'll never see those boots again." This fellow stole a car and drove two hundred miles, and he returned me my boots. And then he drove the car back and left it parked and went his way. They have strange ways of transacting business in life, but they are seldom scared.

They are scared of police, however. Just look that over for a minute. Here you have a bunch of people who are scared, so they go and get themselves a job and then talk their superior into believing that they have to be armed to the teeth, with steel teeth. And then you have a bunch of fellows who are scared of authority and orders — get that, they're only really scared of orders. They're really only afraid because they can't take orders. Because orders have gotten them into too much trouble, and they fly back from them. And you get these two elements opposed, and you get newspaper stories, you get crime, you get all of the histories that you read in the FBI files, and you get this problem called criminality.

I don't know what would happen if you suddenly removed all the police. I don't know really what would happen. I don't know what would happen to police if you suddenly removed all the criminals, but I can guess. They would start, as they are doing today, attacking the common citizen. They evidently rarely arrest the criminal today. They will arrest, however, the honest citizen.

If you read of some honest citizen being shot, you'll read in the next paragraph how the police are investigating him. "Minister shot, the police are investigating his past." Not a word said about where the fellow went that shot him or whether the police were onto them or not.

Watch that, because it is a symptom of police closing terminals with the criminals. It's the deterioration of the game called cops and robbers. Television is televising it out of sight. When the cops and robber game is gone, then there will be no other plot that anybody can film for television. They've already worn out the cowboy in the white hat and the cowboy in the black hat. That's gone. I mean nobody will look at that anymore. They just say, "Well, I know how that's going to turn out. The fellow in the white hat's gonna win." They've been conditioned to believing this, so it's a no-game condition. It's against the law to have the fellow in the black hat win in those cowboy pictures, and they've ruined the game.

All right. It's against the law to have the criminal win in the crime pictures, and so, of course, that game will go by the boards too — even though the criminal has won out in the society.

The criminal might be walking around tomorrow, wearing a gun, in control of all those submachine guns, tear-gas bombs, automatic shotguns, calling himself a cop. And who would know the difference if all the words had been carefully redefined as to what was liberty, what was freedom, what were civil rights.

Cops and criminals have a tendency to swap valences, close terminals. When they do that thoroughly, you have the beginnings of a slave state.

A state caves in along the bridge that connects it with its lower elements. That bridge is police. The police close terminals with the criminals and then turn on the citizen. And only the police or people who are so turning would be interested in redefining the words of the Constitution of the United States. Only those people would be interested in redefining those words, because the rest of the people wouldn't be that afraid.

When you have to reduce liberty, it means you must be scared. When a man is afraid, he doesn't perceive, so it almost always happens that that of which one is afraid doesn't exist.

Definition: Fear is a state of imperception; fear is an unwillingness to confront.

If one cannot confront, he cannot become aware of. So, if one is unwilling to confront, then he doesn't know what he is confronting, and he doesn't see what is in front of him, and he can dream up this mirage called "the viciousness of man." He can dream up this big production about "the government must be all- powerful so as to keep these people in their place." He even goes as far as to make emplacements and wide streets so that populaces petitioning the government with some velocity can be whiffed a bit by grape. Do you see that?

Those are symptoms of terror. It is true that a mob can be talked to by a man who is afraid and can be talked into believing that there's something awfully bad over there, that they have no havingness of, and can be momentarily turned in that direction and made to run amok. But I don't notice many sheriffs standing there very long with shotguns to stop them. Occasionally we hear of heroic stands where lynchings have been prevented, or some such thing, by a lone lawman. But usually it's been my experience that he was out having a drink while it all went on and the jail was knocked down and the lynching was done. While the riot was in progress, there never could have been less police.

Of course, it's usually unfortunate that the police do get there, usually unfortunate that they do — in the first place, when they arrested the guy. What have they got him in a cage for? Are men supposed to be kept in cages? Well, evidently police think so.

Well, they must be very imperceptive, because if they go down to the zoo and look, they won't find any men in cages down at the zoo, and yet they think men should be kept in cages. They think that's what you're supposed to do with men. And I think that's rather dull. I don't think anybody's ever taught them any different. Nobody's ever walked up to them and said, "Hey, do you know something? You keep wild animals in cages, and you don't put men in cages. They don't belong in cages."

And I bet an awful lot of cops would look at you and say, "We don't put men in cages. We put 'em in jail. It's different."

I don't know how this would be different, however, since I have never known a criminal to be bettered by being put in jail, and I have known many to be worsened. They drop down below apathy by being put in jail, and their criminal tendencies are then totally in control of them.

There hardly exists such a thing as a one-time prisoner. They're repeaters — that is, in the ranks of criminals.

So the society at large could be said to exist in pretty good shape, going its way, doing the best that it can, floundering along into this rut hole and out of that one, helping their fellow man and being helped — except for two or three odd elements in it.

One of those elements is the insane. We can do so much about this particular one that there's hardly any use to talk about it. What we lack is facilities. If you were to process people who were insane in the society — if you were to take them — you would find it was absolutely vital that you sever their immediate connections with the society for a period of time, because the society is what is bothering them. The society is bothering them. You must keep them unbothered for a little while, and in addition to that, you must keep them in a state where they cannot injure themselves for a while until you can set them up straight.

And then you must be able to take your own sweet time about processing them, because their span of attention is so instantaneous, so momentary, that to grip it for three or four minutes at a brace is rather — it's rather big; that's rather something. To get an insane person to give you his undivided attention for thirty seconds is not rare, but for him to give you sane attention for about four minutes — well, it's practically impossible. And yet an auditor auditing them in any other place than a proper institution would discover that he was spending four hours of the five hours of processing doing nothing but trying to keep the guy quiet so the neighbors wouldn't be bothered, and that doesn't have anything to do with processing him at all.

You could do various things with a criminal. One of the things is to give him some rest. Give him some rest, give him some food, let him walk around, cut him away from the things that are worrying him a little bit. And a great many people with that treatment all by themselves would recover. Others would recover if you simply walked them into exhaustion so they could then sleep. Others would recover if you simply had an area that was very quiet, that they could go and sit down in.

It's quite amazing. If you didn't bother them with interviews and didn't bother them with this, that and the other thing, how many would snap back to battery — completely apart from any processing.

People, for instance, with electric shocks get out of institutions three weeks later than people who are [not] given electric shocks, on an average throughout the country. In other words, his incarceration is increased by three weeks by reason of having been given an electric shock. That is what you read into that figure. In other words, an electric shock deters his getting well.

All right. There are other things you can do, tremendous numbers of things you can do. If you had a motionless object floating in the air in some room, the criminal could go in and look at it for while. You'd find something odd happening. He'd just look at the stillness until he could accept that piece of stillness, and by the time he could actually go in that room and stay in that room quietly for a while, he would be well on his way.

In other words, there are ways of treating insanity which don't even require an auditor, but require an auditor's careful supervision: An auditor who knows enough not to get as desperate as they are. An auditor who knows that it is exactly the opposite — the insaner they get, why, the quieter and easier you get. Not the more frantic you get.

But this problem is not actually a tremendous problem in the society. It's being sold as one for the benefit of appropriation. I don't know how much an insane person is worth to the medicos and the rest of them that fatten on this particular line, but it's a real nice sum of money. That's why they give them electric shocks and extend them I guess.

But the amount of money one insane person costs in terms of appropriation — state, county, city and Federal — is not available but… I wouldn't even be able to guess at what the thing is, but it's a very high figure. It'd astonish you. You'd say, "If I had that much, I could take it easy and drive nothing but a Cadillac."

So, where do we have much of a problem? Well, we have a problem in a group of people who are redefining insanity. Insanity is becoming a new thing all the time. Insanity is a new group of words. There's schizophrenicmelancholia. And that's a new condition. It means a man who doesn't like to sit at a desk, or something.

You watch psychiatric classification and you'll find that insanity is apparently increasing all over the country, until you examine the increase of symptom classification. And when you go and look at this new list of symptoms and classifications of insanity, you'll find that this huge array is growing and getting huger continually.

And so the village idiot who used to be able to sit quietly on the curb and whittle or something; the fellow who would go into a sort of a trance every fall and go around throwing leaves on his head and playing like they were gay nymphs out in the forest or something; the fellow in the spring gets out on the desert in a full moon and dances like a rabbit, something like that (hardly anybody hasn't, see) — but these now become insane classifications.

And people can say to the wife, you know, "You know uh… have you ever taken this up with George? Uh… have you ever watched that? You know it's very, very unusual. You mean he actually does come home and he isn't cross with the children? That's very abnormal." That's called "non-crossis with the kinder." It's… So they get him a psychiatrist and an institutionalization. This is the way they do it.

The number of insane in the country are continually increasing, then, according to the statistics. But the statistics are, of course, totally obedient to the number of classifications and this opinion: What is insane? What is insane?

Now, I read the other day a psychiatrist testified in court. If a psychiatrist has a patient, you know, he can now give whatever the patient told him as testimony in court to get the patient convicted. Did you know that?

Audience: No.

Yes, that was passed recently as a Federal law — that the court can use as evidence anything that has been told to a psychiatrist in confidence by a patient. So they convict them this way.

And a young fellow who was quite mad was trying to get off of a criminal charge by pleading insanity, the psychiatrist said, because the patient had admitted to him that he was feigning insanity. It's the most interesting case I've read in a very long time, since I wouldn't put any stock in anybody's statement who was in the condition this person was in.

So this person wasn't insane merely because it suited the court, but he really was insane. He sat in the witness box batting a baseball all the time — was still wound up in a baseball game someplace, even when he was convicted.

But the psychiatrist had had him as a patient, came into court, testified that the patient had once said that, and that of course put him on a criminal count. That was very interesting.

Conversely, they say uniformly, down here in the District, that the only mad people that appear at the sanity hearings are the psychiatrists. The psychiatrists always look and act crazier than the patients. You hear jurors say this. I mean this is their considered opinion. And the psychiatrist has become almost uniformly a legal entity, under recent legislation and custom. He is a legal entity. You do not find him today very far separated from the courts and law. You find very few psychiatrists in attendance in institutions, very few.

They're always trying to train some psychiatrists, and then the psychiatrist will take over as the county psychiatrist, which is a legal entity.

The psychiatrist is closing terminals very rapidly with the police. So we have that problem as a problem which is next door to the criminal problem, and even its legal practitioner is, of course, sort of a cop today.

All right. Now we take, then, these two classes — the criminal and the insane — and we have compared with those, then, the psychiatrist and the police.

And the psychiatrist is very nervous about insane people. There was a fellow one time…

It would amuse you, by the way: there's a huge organization in this country that watches our programs and everything like a hawk. And they even get out their literature, and so forth, now in exact format, but very fancy. They must pay thousands of dollars to get print jobs that we pay hundreds for. They fancy it up, you know. They assign exactly the right type and so forth. For instance, they now call their meetings "congresses," and they have "first day," "second day," "third day" and "fourth day." They have "group seminars." Yes, fantastic business.

And now they've even gone so far as to hire a group psychotherapist to take over the sick companies, and so forth. They can't have what we really have, you understand. They can only have as much of what we have as they can understand, which is a program form.

This is a… It's quite amazing. The speed with which they send us all their literature, too, is quite amusing to us. It's almost as if they're asking us for our approval. Two or three times I have been tempted to write on one of these programs or releases which they put out — they're a tremendous organization; they're knee-deep in Wall Street — and I have been tempted to write on them, "That's fine. Ron."

But this organization falls off in the direction of trying to get it all down to being crazier, trying to get it all down to being a little nuttier, trying to get the "Now businesses go crazy." This is the new idea they've got. And they're getting psychiatrists for businesses. Don't you see?

This is quite amazing. It's a trend of the society that we see here, an amazing trend. But it is actually being put off on the average person that the performance of the policeman and the psychiatrist versus the criminal and the insane, form human behavior. And each one of these is so peculiar and particular in itself as a behavior pattern, that these games — which are becoming really just one game now: the criminal against the honest citizen.

You see, you could get all four of these — the police, the psychiatrist, the insane and the criminal — you could say, "Well, that's fine, they're all wound up." And now they convince the legislator that this is the behavior of the average citizen, and you would then get, really, the criminal — which would now include the legislator too — and this group against the honest and general public, you see.

Here we've taken a peculiar set of manifestations — insane manifestations, criminal manifestations, hate, fear; manifestations which cannot perceive. They cannot look at their fellow man. They cannot tell what their fellow man is like. And we're taking their opinion as the opinion of the human race and advertising it as such. And they are men who are afraid, and they are men who cannot see, and we notice that under their rule the problems of insanity and criminality increase continually. We're getting greater and greater problem here. We're getting more and more. So obviously, the sickness in the society, this bit of a cancer that is developing, is not getting less, it is getting greater. And it's getting greater, obviously, only because nobody out there has an answer to it.

This is mirrored in the newspapers. We see this crime, and the insane rape attacks and insane attacks by police on some honest citizen which resulted in a fight, or something of the sort, then represented as a terrible gun battle or something.

I remember right down here one time on 16th Street, a military officer's son was told to stop by the police. And it was a rainy night. He evidently didn't want to put on his brakes very fast, and the cops just grabbed a gun, shot him in the back and killed him dead. And his car then slithered over and ran into a lamppost with a dead body in it. And there was no criminal activity of any kind. But I happened to be on newspapers here in Washington at the time; I know what happened there.

And they turned in a report of a two-mile chase. And the witnesses were quite to the contrary, but nobody would listen to them, rather hurriedly, because this was a criminal action on the part of police. They had shot and killed an honest citizen.

We never hear of them doing that, do we? We always hear of them shooting and killing, or shooting and arresting criminals, don't we? And yet by the law of averages, they must, very often, pick on an honest citizen; very often. Well, we never hear of this, so we can assume, then, that it is carefully never advertised.

What is the state of crime? What is the state of insanity? What is the state of the society as a whole? The average citizen would not be able to answer these questions. And more and more, through what he is taught in the newspapers and on television and so forth, his opinion of his fellow man has deteriorated.

His fellow man, according to Freud, is a sexual pervert. If the fellow is artistic, it's because he's had continual sexual relations with his mother or something. That's the obvious consequence to being artistic, you see. It's just a downgrade — a downgrade of the society as a whole — advertised by people who, through their fear alone, advertise that they cannot perceive. So they wouldn't know what the society is like. They wouldn't understand the society because they'd have to look at it first. And they don't look at the society, and so they believe that criminality and insanity bring about the absolute necessity to create a police state to redefine liberties to keep the ordinary citizen under careful wraps, because he's liable to explode at any moment and tear them to pieces.

Now, the average citizen, finally learning this may someday do so — but only when he has totally become criminal and totally insane. And that isn't likely to happen, because we're here.

Thank you.

Thank you.