The Factors should be, by and large, self-explanatory. It is not an effort to copy the book of Genesis. It really isn't an effort to copy that. It happens to be in very simple language. It's in very simple language. That's this — as a writer, that happens to be as simple as I can say something. And if I were saying it scientifically, it would not communicate as well.

Now The Factors there are — that paper is just exactly what it says it is. It's the upper level of certainty for the MEST universe. Of these things you can be as certain as you are that you are. You can be certain, in other words. That's a level of certainty. You can establish the shift and change of view-point. You can establish and observe for yourself the handling, the creation of what I called there dimension points.

An anchor point would be a specialized dimension point, by the way. All points are dimension points and an anchor point is one that stays pretty still to keep the space created.

All right, here we have — here we have a level that — on which we can communicate and which we can experience. You can see readily that there could be such a thing as a viewpoint. And you could see readily that other view-points could come into existence. But you could also see that there is no way for viewpoint one to observe viewpoint two, except via the dimension points of viewpoint one and viewpoint two.

This, by the way, is not guesswork. This is test. You take two viewpoints and you get them to observe each other. And they don't observe each other, but they observe each other's anchor points. And they can observe each other's anchor points, but they can't observe each other.

And tells you that the first hidden influence is the thetan, or the human spirit. He is and probably always will be a hidden influence. He very easily goes into hiding because he is in hiding. But he's not even really in hiding because there's no way to make himself visible. He just got the idea he can be visible. Well of course, he can be visible by the manufacture of anchor points, the manufacture of dimension points. And when he neglects to manufacture these or fails to remember that he can manufacture these things, he then gets the idea that he doesn't exist and that he is other things. And he knows he is and he can think as he is, in a way that is very easy for a person to experience.

We — this as a whole thing is based on this. Herbert Spencer once said that you could divide knowledge into the knowable and the unknowable.

That's a beautiful way to divide knowledge to work with. You can work with that. But it doesn't happen to be true.

Now the transcendentalist came along and he said, "All things worth knowing," (boy, was he a pompous ass, you know, my God), he said, "all things worth knowing transcend the bounds of human reason." Only he said it in German. In other words, anything which you will ever know is beyond your power to know. That stopped philosophy. That was about 1792 or something like that, if I remember rightly, and it stopped the course of philosophy.

Everybody after that didn't bother to think. They hadn't been thinking since 1792. They went into a state of catalepsis or something and got off into the field of science. You don't have to think in the field of science; you just dawdle. You collect all the grasshoppers in Nebraska and you count their legs and then you multiply this by all the grasshoppers you've collected and then you issue this huge bulletin to the effect that this is how many grasshopper legs there are in Nebraska and everybody says, "Ah, science."

The — that's by the way, I'm overstating the case. That's an exaggeration. Science isn't — not quite this bad.

That is, science pretends to be something it isn't. It pretends to be truth and the search for. Actually, it's a sort of a qualitative, quantitative analysis of what they can find. But usually what they — what they have found other people writing about. That's real bad. Now, if science measured up to exactly what it says it is, that'd be wonderful. There isn't anything measures up to what it says it is. Probably not even this stuff.

All right, let's look then at this "beyond the realm of human experience." Well, if they just had brains enough, mind enough, being enough, (instead of being in some university someplace in the middle of Germany) to recognize one thing: by our existing techniques of knowingness. If they had just said that! All knowledge that is worth knowing is beyond the realm of human experience when looked at by the techniques we now have for knowing.

Well, they didn't even realize that there would be such a thing as a technique for knowing. That's what we've been working on and that's what's new about all this work. It's a technique for knowing. It is, rather than knowledge itself. Knowledge itself is a collection of data. What's a datum? Well, that — this is the route by which you find out what a datum is.

Now then, it wasn't true — it wasn't true that all things worth knowing were beyond that range. And it wasn't true that all the things that Herbert Spencer put into the bin of the unknowable belong there. Because anything worth knowing about this universe is in your hands. That's a fact. It's in your hands the moment you have a technique which permits you to know it. That's something you must never lose sight of: is that a technique for knowing is superior to a datum.

And you can go on and collect data to the end of time without knowing unless you have a technique for knowing. And when I say we have something here with which we can experience knowing, we have then a tool with which we can know and do. But it is a tool and as such is a servant to knowing and doing. We've studied knowledge and this is the technique, or a technique, by which we can come to gain knowledge.

Actually, there's nothing quite as good in learning about a buzz saw as to be a buzz saw. But nobody in the past had any technique by which he could become a buzz saw. Yes, that's right. And yet now you can be a buzz saw if you want to and know all about buzz saws.

Now you think this is very strange. But if you sit and look with your MEST eyes at the handle of something, it requires your experience to know that the thing has a hollow in it. You see, from where you sit you look at this thing with a handle and you just experience this: "Well the inside of that is hollow because that's a handle on something." What are you relying on? You're relying on past experience. Oh, that is a dangerous thing to rely on. That is so dangerous. Everything in the whole universe changes from hour to hour to hour. How wrong can you get? Know by experience. That's how wrong you can get.

The best way there is available to us of knowing is being. But this would all be very well if we were simply operating in a philosophic strata and so on and we could all balance a teacup on our knee and discuss all this. We don't have to discuss it because we have a technique which detaches an individual as a viewpoint. And the second he becomes detached from something as liable to injury as a MEST body and yet be able to continue his control of the MEST body, he becomes at that moment capable of assuming any viewpoint. And the positiveness and the certainty with which he assumes these new view-points is the positiveness and certainty of his ability to know by being.

What is the liability of knowing? Well, the liability of being . . . If you were in a human body and you tried to be a buzz saw, by occupying the same space as the buzz saw, possibly you'd lose a button or something. But you can as yourself actually occupy the same space and say, "Look at it buzz."

Of course the first time you ask your preclear, "Now let's go out across the country until we find a sawmill running. All right, now step into the buzz saw." He's going to say gulp. It's going to astonish him. But you'd be surprised what happens to him when he finds out he can do just that. He's going to realize all of a sudden that there he is. He can be anything.

Well, if he can be anything then he can have an unlimited number of viewpoints. If he can have an unlimited number of viewpoints, then he can know anything, can't he? Well, if it's written down, he can certainly be in the middle of a book at the library and read it. Well, that's very easy. Or if somebody knows it at that time, he can go pick that somebody's brains. That's right. Read somebody's mind.

I mean, this however — this however is not within your immediate frame of reference. But you do know and can know immediately that you can detach yourself as an individual from the body you think you are and thus gain viewpoints, and that as a viewpoint you cannot be injured and therefore cannot be penalized. What an enormous difference that makes in one's field of action.

The reason people do bad things is because they have a deep-seated fear. Bad action stems from fear. A person has to be pretty well up the Tone Scale before he can be ethical. Therefore the road to ethics was the road which led out of fear. Any man who could be put in fear sufficiently, theoretically could be made to do anything. As long as that condition existed, how could you have a society which would operate on an ethical level?

But what if this person cannot be penalized in such a way as to cause him to do bad acts? There is no profit in doing bad acts. You'll find out as you start him up the Tone Scale that there is an actual thirst for pain, a craving for pain. That's just a craving to be alive. And that's because it's been forced on him so often. That's all.

You take almost any preclear, he'll go through this part of the band. It's probably about 8.0. And below that part of the band he's a liability really, because he cannot afford to be ethical. His cravings are too great. Because when a man can turn around to a point where he could actually crave the agony of another being, he's not safe. But above that level, he is.

All right, that's the bridge we've been trying to jump. That's where we've been trying to go. Where is that level of ethic? Well, it's a level above penalty.

Now a man has to be awfully strong to have principles and stand by them. If he is in a body, he actually has to be willing to die for those principles. And that's uncomfortable, dying for principle; and very few people bother to.

All right. What then do we have in The Factors? We have the course of a viewpoint attempting to associate with other viewpoints. And all the viewpoints are hidden and all the anchor points are visible. But we have an ambition on the part of this viewpoint and that ambition depends upon a decision to be. And it is better to be anything than nothing. That isn't stressed in The Factors. It is better to be anything. It is to better to be in screaming agony than to be nothing. And the thetan has the idea that he would be nothing unless he is identified with something. And he gets to the point eventually where he's identified with things and then is the thing. And thinks he's pretending to be the thing because he knows he is not the thing and that he is only in the act of becoming the thing. But actually, all the time he could be the thing. All he had to say was, "I'm it." You see how simple that was.

So, he becomes identified, in other words, with objects. Objects which he himself could make. And if he could make these objects, certainly there could be no scarcity of them. But what if he forgot he could make them? Then everybody would be dependent upon some kind of an automatic "Lord knows how it takes place; Lord knows how it keeps going" piece of machinery — a universe that sort of just turned over pocketa-pocketa-pocketa and we never quite knew how it went or anything of the sort. We're making it go all the time. And then we say, "Well, we don't know anything about this universe, and so on. It must be a strange foreign place" and so on. Yet we're making it go all the time.

Well, a being like that would get into a state of mind whereby he'd think everything was scarce. He couldn't make anything. He had to take something from something else to have anything. He would have a feeling like he couldn't buy anything except at a vast price. Things would be scarce in other words. And as long as things are scarce, why, things can get pretty bad. You have to sacrifice all sorts of things in order to have something. And if some-thing is terribly scarce, why you'll find men will do anything for it.

The story of the idol's eye, which is written time after time by the very best authors, demonstrates the course of murder which immediately ensues after somebody has possessed himself of something valuable. Yes, that's because it's scarce, you see?

Well now, if everybody starts depending on these existing items, and nobody makes any new existing items, this dependency is going to wind up in a scarcity and this scarcity is going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. It'll get so bad after a while that nothing exists. I mean, one has gone out through the bottom. "Nothing exists," he'll think, "because it can't exist because it's so scarce I don't even dare …"

Did you ever hear of a — of anybody who had one of these fabulous stones or gems? It wasn't sitting on the parlor table and it certainly wasn't sitting on the front doorstep. If it was sitting on the parlor table, that would be forgivable to have it. But such a valuable item is never kept on the parlor table. It's stuffed in a safe.

There's many an old house which all of a sudden seems to be more empty than it has before and the neighbors have called the police and so forth. And there's been some recluse living there and has lived there for 35 years and the place is just piled full of junk, and the person's in bed dead of starvation. And the police start tearing up the floorboards and the fireplaces and so forth in order to get the junk out of there and so on, and there's 250,000 pounds or something or 30,000 pounds or fabulous sums of money which are lying right there to hand. This person hasn't even looked at them. That money is so scarce it can't be spent, so the person will die before he'll spend it.

Well, you know it'll go further than that? That person will go through that band of holding it and hiding it to a point where he'll get it out and throw it away before he'll spend it.

Now that's how scarce things can get. It doesn't exist, so it has to be thrown away. Theoretically, one would throw away anything to which he assigned too much value. You'd eventually throw it all away. Theoretically, the last possessor of the idol's eye would inevitably pitch it into the middle of the sea. And sure enough, all the stories about idols' eyes seem to wind up that way. They either wind up in a British museum or in the middle of the sea.

Well now, we have then — we have then a viewpoint which forgets it can make things. It forgets it can make things merely because other viewpoints are making things and because there's a consideration going on. And this consideration says, "This is beautiful and that is ugly."

What's beautiful? What's ugly? Don't get a one-year-old child passing judgment on what's beautiful or what's ugly. Because it won't agree with yours, not even vaguely.

Art is a consideration. You take eventually the viewpoint of this culture. And you say, "Well, they say so-and-so is beautiful and so-and-so is ugly." And then you're left in a sort of a bewildered state of all these static assignments of beauty and ugliness.

You'll discover this, by the way, in running part one of the Case V in Standard Operating Procedure 8. You'll eventually discover this, that you have basically your own capability and appreciation of beauty and ugliness and that it's been completely overlaid and forgotten about and you've been struggling ever since. Things are beautiful because you say they are. That's all.

Now, out of beauty and the desire for beauty and ugliness, we get a high level of practicality. And scarcity gets down to a point — scarcity of mock-ups, for instance, this — these beings get to a point where they get a scarcity of mock-ups. Can you imagine anybody getting a scarcity of mock-ups? They'll start making mock-ups, see, two of these viewpoints will start throwing out mock-ups.

You can get two children by the way, doing processing and they'll keep putting up mock-ups on a mantelpiece or something like that for the other one to look at and see if they can see. And they'll just keep comparing mock-ups and comparing mock-ups and comparing mock-ups. And finally, one of them will decide the other one makes the better mock-up. So he'll take one.

Well, now mock-ups become valuable because there's one under contest. And the next thing you know, they don't bother to make any more mock-ups. They're busy trying to keep the mock-ups they've got. Well that's silly, because all they've got to do is say, "There's another mock-up." But it makes a better game if they don't do that. And so they, at that moment, think they're pretending and then they sink away from knowing that they are.

So, we have this curve of decline which comes about. And we have mock-ups deteriorating to a point where the person is so anxious to hold on to a mock-up that he is the mock-up, 100 percent. He's standing right in there with the mock-up and he picks up the mock-up so it can defend itself and so that it can punish and deliver punishment and protect itself and so on. This mock-up has become so valuable it has absorbed his whole beingness. That's the first body.

And then one day he didn't provide against somebody saying something about the body or criticizing it or hitting it or doing something with it that knocked it all to flinders. Death. Now, how does he get another mock-up? He's forgotten — he's forgotten how to make them. He's forgotten you say, "Mock-up will now appear." He's forgotten that. How do you get another mock-up? So he steals one. And he uses that and he defends that and he steals another one and he steals another one. And these mock-ups are getting more and more solid, more and more actual, more and more and more and more solid until at last, they're these terribly valuable things you call bodies.

And you can know these things because you can trace them. You can actually process an individual through that step by step creation until he can recognize that. Without you telling him, you just keep processing him there and you make a viewpoint, makes a mock-up.

You start processing any preclear by the way on mock-ups — if he starts to get good mock-ups. A few days later he'll tell you something funny. "You know — you know, while you were processing me there in the classroom, I covered all one wall with turkey feathers. And when I went in there this morning, they were still there," he'll say proudly. Uh-huh, here we go. He liked those turkey feathers.

Now a few days later — a few days later, here he is. You're processing him and he'll say — you notice he's not paying much attention to you — and you say, "What's — what's the matter with you?" And he'll say, "Well, it's — it's the dog."

"Dog? I didn't give you any dog …"

"Oh yeah, it's the one I got day before yesterday."

He's still got this dog. This dog was so good and so solid and in so many dimensions and colors and did such cute things that he's still got this dog. And if you left him alone on the subject of that dog, he would just build on that dog and build on the dog and build on the dog and, who knows, the dog might be running around the room and you'd say, "Here, Fido. I wonder where that dog came from?"

Now, this is your sequence of evolution. What this tells you — this tells you that a consideration is possible without any contact with MEST or space. Because it says there's the decision and the decision is to be and then it says there's space.

This should tell you immediately that there's some thinkingness inherent in the viewpoint. Well there's a lot of figuring inherent in the viewpoint when it gets in contact with a lot of other viewpoints. Because the counter-actions and the counter-effects … One viewpoint's mock-ups versus the other viewpoint's mock-ups will give you a system of thought which is represented in the Axioms and which eventually evolves into that thing called a human mind. That very silly, simple thing called a human mind.

Now — tells you that at that level there is a thinkingness before there is a beingness. Somebody want to discover what that is? Anybody's welcome. Door's wide open. The universe exit is right over there, slightly to the right. And he can go outside and find out what that was and so forth. And he might even pick up language enough and come back and tell you all about it.

But doggone it, that's another universe. That's another thing. That's a capability that came from some other capability. And perhaps this is what they're talking about when they talked about transcendentalism. Anything you cared to know about that thinkingness before beingness occurred, was possibly beyond the ability to discover so long as you stayed in this universe. If they'd added that, that too — that would have been a correct statement.

All right. It is not impossible to know that. But it is not quite germane. Because any action that can — we have the modus operandi of producing any kind of an action we want to produce in this universe.

If you don't believe it, take a preclear when he's in fairly low stages of horsepower and have a cat running down the street and have the preclear reach out right from where he is and pat the cat's head. Well, the cat's forty feet away from his body, you see? And the cat's liable to stop dead still or look around or snarl or scream, because he gave it too hard a pat, too much juice.

You could do anything with animals. You can make them — waitresses, animals, all sorts of people. Just by, just by reaching out to a distance and touching them.

Well now, of course, if you were to touch somebody who was pretty well a Theta Clear, you'd probably get a bad kickback. The moral of the story is be a Theta Clear.

You get these incidents on the track where somebody tries to assume a body that is already occupied and he's immediately forty feet away and still rolling. Flashback.

But that too is in the realm of experience. You can experience this. This is not hard to experience. None of this material is hard to experience. It would be hard to experience being the viewpoint back of the viewpoint back of the viewpoint back of the viewpoint and so on. You could just go on that in that direction forever.

You don't have to go on in that direction to do what we're, I hope, all of us are trying to do. And that's trying to make ourselves better and if we care to, to help others and try to make a better culture and a better universe.

All right, if we're trying to do that, why, we have all the tools we need. The other, as far as I'm concerned, is speculation until there is a way to know it. And we have hit the roof as far as the way to know manifestation here. Because by these techniques, any of us can get to know these manifestations. And we know these manifestations, they become workable and things happen better and we reach a level of ethic. Now that's the value of what we have. It's a tool toward knowing and better beingness.

The remedy is stated there in The Factors. Remedy the scarcity of view-point and the scarcity of dimension points and the scarcity of prosurvival things and the — remedy the abundance of contrasurvival things.

How do you do that? Well, you could actually do it with blocks. That is to say, you could actually do it in this universe in a body with MEST objects. You could run the technique that way. You don't have to run it in a mock-up.

Or you can go into the actual modus operandi of being a viewpoint; the person is a viewpoint independent of an object, and he makes objects which are satisfactory to him. If you want to carry him on along the line, he'll be able to make objects that are satisfactory to others, too.

But we're not interested in that right here at this level of processing. We are interested in rehabilitating his ability to be, and that requires a remedy of viewpoint and the remedy of his creation — his inability to create which he's had until this time. You remedy that and you give him back his ability to create points, energy.

It's very fascinating the first time a person starts to put out that material. It rather frightens him, by the way, when he first starts to create dimension points in abundance. He thinks of himself as a, I don't know, steam engine going down the track with a bunch of sparks flying out the stack or something of this sort because it's very sparky.

Had a preclear one time, called it flitter. I don't know where he got the word, but it's a beautiful word, just flitter. Gold. Gold sparks. There's this terrific cloud of gold sparks an individual will put out. He's — whee! Oh, he's really fond of doing that. And then he'll put them out a couple of times and then he'll decide that's dangerous. Something else is liable to see him or something. And he'll stop it for a while. And then he'll go back in and do it again and then he won't do it for a while and then he'll do it again. Well, that's making dimension points.

Well, how does this remedy bodies? Well, it's very simple for an Operating Thetan or even an thetan exterior. You, you just manage to drag him out with a pair of ice tongs or something and he's only six inches outside of his head. He can right then remedy things that are wrong with the body. All you have him do is just look into the body and find out if there's any old energy deposits or disconnected things or something he wants to fix up. And you — he says, "Yes, by the way, there is! There's some nnah-nnah-nnah-nnah . . ." You say, "Well, go ahead and fix it up."

Do you have to know what he's doing? No, but isn't it funny what he's fixing up — what he's fixing up stays fixed. You get him about six inches, a foot back of his head and say, "All right, now let's fix up — let's fix up those eyes. Just look along the optic nerves. Can you find any old energy deposits along there?"

"Yes," he says. "My goodness!" he says. "Loads of, along one optic nerve — it's really some."

Well you say, "Why don't you wipe it off and clean it up?"

He says, "Well, I don't know. Nothing seems to happen. It's real black."

And you say, "Well, turn it white and throw it away." He turns it white and it goes away. And he gets a sudden flash pain in his eye and kind of jumps back into his head and jumps out again and says, "Gee, that was bad." And after that his eyesight's best — is just as good as it ever was.

Is it effective, then? Believe me, it's effective. You understand that that isn't the end goal in processing — it's the remedying of one mock-up. Just look at it in that — from that viewpoint that the rehabilitation of one mock-up would not be the end goal of processing, but most of the preclears that come in are running scarcity of the body to such an extent that all they can do and think about and so on is fixing up that left eardrum or something. I mean that's the thing, the whole end of existence is to fix up the left eardrum. Well, you exteriorize him and have him reach in, fix up the left eardrum and this — they're satisfied. How unimaginative! They fixed up the left eardrum.

This doesn't say that bodies aren't valuable or useful. They are. Very, extremely. They're very good communication gimmicks. They're like fountain pens and things. But they are not the end goal of all. But they can experience sensation and a lot of other things. Very interesting, too. They're very complex and so forth. You could study them for years. It takes a thetan, oh, I don't know, sometimes it takes some thetan about forty-five minutes to get a complete picture of anatomy that he would take years to get out of a textbook.

They step back and look it over and look at the body in depths, you see? Depths of perception. They look at the outer level and then they start looking into the body at deeper and deeper depths. They say, "Is that what a kidney looks like? How horrible!"

Well now, our task — our task is not to process that one who processes with such great ease that all you do is have to say, "Be two feet back of your head. All right, now fix up your body. Now be in several dangerous places and that's fine. You're Clear. Goodbye."

No, no, you see there are lots of those cases. Many, many of the cases you run into will be just — they're just like that.

But let's take all the cases. And let's be interested in all of those. Well, as far as I can see at this time, you can do a thetan-ectomy on almost any-body. That's right. Somehow or another you can get the fellow out with ice tongs or fishhooks or threats or something. "If you don't get out of your head in the next two years I'm going to plow you one." Yes, that's American Medical Association technique. Anyway … That's Standard Operating Procedure O.

We have, then, in The Factors a brief statement of a road by which we can know. If you can't know by this road, then it's no good. No good to you or anybody else. But if you can know by this road, then it's some good.

It's stated simply and I hope understandably. It can't be very badly or widely misunderstood for an excellent reason. It's because it can be experienced fairly easily with the use of Standard Operating Procedure 8. And if it can be experienced easily why, then, you see, it's easily understood because it can be understood in present time by demonstration. And that's the way to understand anything. You can read about something for an awfully long time and not understand it at all. Well, if you experience it, that's something else.

I'm aware of the fact in engineering schools they read about things for an awfully long time. Then they go out on a job and they're supposed to measure how much stone there is in a barge. You send a young engineer down. He goes down and he — all morning he's gone. You sent him down there to find out how many tons of stone are in a barge that's floating alongside of a dock. And you ask him to come back and tell you. Gone half the afternoon. "What the devil happened to that fellow?"

So you go down there and you — here he is sitting down. He's got a slide rule, got logarithm tables, eight-place log table. He's got out his handbook. He has computed the density of gravel. He has done the calculus formula of the curve that the mound of gravel makes on the barge. And he's got several pages covered with figures. He's done estimates of various kinds. He's found out whether or not the barge is really flat, you see. He's got all this .. .

You say to him, "Come here, son." And you show him the end of the barge. And the end of the barge has some white markers on it and the deeper the barge sinks, why, the higher the mark, you see? And it says, "two tons, three tons …"

Well, here — of course I wouldn't, I wouldn't advocate you sending some-body down and tell him to be the gravel and then go weigh himself. That's theoretically possible. No, you could study and figure-figure-figure for an awfully long time, but if you could experience something, you could under-stand it easily.

Well, if The Factors has any value at all, it's merely a statement, and a fast statement, as to how you can recover this experience. Now, you need that and you need that for this reason.

As a thetan plowing around you're liable to misplace facsimiles. They're very easily misplaced. You get them in your hip pocket and you lose them down glaciers and other things happen to facsimiles. Educations, thousands of years in universities is liable to slip over the side and the fish eat them or something.

Anyway, these facsimiles go quickly. And what you need is something which you can look over and look it over several times, and then experience it, and then look it over again very carefully, so that you do have an experience of a piece of knowledge. Therefore, the knowledge itself must be very brief, and your ability to experience it and the experiencing of it must be equally effective so that you can join these two things together and then at no time — at any time — should you ever forget how.

And you see it took all the Axioms and it took Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and it took Science of Survival and Advanced Procedure and Axioms and the Philadelphia Lecture tapes and it took all this other stuff endlessly. And you'd have to know all of that. You could lose those facsimiles. You could hire a truck, a theta truck to carry them around after you.

But this little piece of paper is very easy to stand by. And now if you've experienced broadly in this and if you've had experience as an auditor, and if you've watched other manifestations of the mind and if you've looked at circuits at work and you've got a lot of other bric-a-brac knowledge on the thing, you've got a pin to hang it on. You'll find out the education of any auditor takes a sharp upgrade at the moment when he has a terribly brief, orderly statement of this subject.

If he can make to himself a very brief, orderly statement of it, all of a sudden he's got it. And after that, he never loses it. Well, The Factors is an effort to get some sort of a statement, part of which at least he can hold on to solidly.