Okay. This is December the 13th, a special afternoon lecture — Sunday.

What I'm going to tell you today is perhaps going to upset you, from the standpoint of Book One and so forth. However, we're interested in getting individuals to function. We're much more interested in getting individuals to function than we are in being a consistent propaganda line. If you'll remember that and use that datum, why, a lot of things that have happened will be much better understood by you. Much more interested in getting individuals to function than we are in being a consistent propaganda line.

The world at large deals mainly in propaganda, and it's often very difficult for an individual to differentiate, because he is so thoroughly indoctrinated in propaganda, between an effort to convince and an effort to be functional. And in Dianetics and Scientology, if nothing else, we've tried to be functional.

Now, in Book One, I said man was basically good. This is true, at such a terrible seven-league boot step from where you find him, that it becomes almost unattainable utilizing any earlier or, you might say, aforestated techniques. Simply because man has been fooled too often and because man is unable and incapable of differentiating between goodness, truth, decency, trustworthiness and evil, playing the "only one" and so on.

Anyone who is good — or the word good itself — defines himself or the word on the basis of how little harm he does. That's funny, isn't it? So here we have — earlier I talked to you about the redefinition of words: We take freedom — now freedom has become something that one has "freedom from." You know, I mean, freedom doesn't mean "freedom" anymore, it means "freedom from something bad."

That's the way the US government started to redefine freedom not too long ago — a few years ago.

All right, good — let's take the definition of this word good. You were taught arduously, when you were very small, that good meant "not doing any harm." Well, if you don't do any harm to things that are harmful, you're in a bad way. A man who destroys harmful things is not bad; he's good. So goodness can be redefined as "weak," and any individual who is redefining goodness as "weakness" is not going to progress very far as a case.

Now, let's hit on to the basic consideration of bad and good, and we find out that is the basic consideration. And this basic consideration is extremely valuable to you as an auditor, and it includes such thing as "justice" and so forth, and it's valuable to you in the case. That is to say, what is bad and what is good to this case? Because those things which the case says are bad he has resisted, and those things which he has had defined for him as good, he has tried to be.

Well, let's take "good and bad art." Nah. I mean it's balderdash. We can't do anything with such a definition. There isn't any such thing as good and bad art. The beautiful, the ugly. Well, it's interesting that the early Christian church redefined nearly everything in the Roman Empire that was beautiful as ugly. They just almost completely swapped. What became beautiful was sordidly apathetic, actually filthy, and what was ugly was glaringly colored and so on. There you had a redefinition of art itself. So there aren't any basic considerations here beyond the individual's own consideration of what he's considering.

Now, I refer to you, the Factors. It would be very, very well for you to look over those Factors, because it says the basic consideration. All right.

Let's find out what's holding an engram in. An engram is a unit of force which is held in because one has chosen force itself for his randomity. First one chooses space for his randomity and then doesn't know any place but where he is. And then he chooses force for his randomity and he starts making pictures of things by resisting things with force. And then finally these very force pictures which he himself made come in on him and begin to press hard against him. And so we have, in this instance, a man choosing force as an enemy.

When you choose force broadly as an enemy, you have also chosen beauty as an enemy, because all beautiful objects are made of force. Just digest that for a moment and you see how far adrift somebody can go by eschewing all force. He will also eschew all beauty.

The sculptor deals with force. He deals with force with his chisel and his hammer, and he is working on a block of stone which is in itself force. Now, if he says force is bad, he is saying it is bad for him to grip his chisel and hit it with a hammer and to make statues out of blocks of stone.

Because we have had the word force redefined for us carefully down through the ages: "Force is something bad." Oh no, it isn't. Force is simply a statement, a definition. It's just energy. It isn't bad, it isn't good.

And they say, "It was a government that used force on its people," and that's a condemnation. I would like to see a government exist without using force. I would like to see anyone put on a play without using force. But force is something bad. And you say to most preclears, "force," they practically jump out of the processing chair. They don't want anything to do with force. "No, force is very bad," they know that. Force has been used on them too often.

And so out of this wilderness of bewildering words and definitions, we get a wilderness of mind. And an individual is at last incapable of knowing what he's for and what he's against, because he's had all the symbols redefined for him this way and that way, and easily, by gradient scales, pushed over into other definitions and so on.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with force, neither is there anything necessarily completely right with force. Force is force — force is energy, it's foot-pounds, it's effort. Anything you want to do — if you want to move your body down to the sidewalk, you will have to employ effort. That's sad. In other words, that — force is just another definition of effort, that's all. But because it has a specialized definition in terms of punishment, individuals become afraid of it. And the moment you can make a man afraid of something, you've made him choose it to some degree as his randomity. And when you have done that, you've collapsed every engram he has, potentially, upon him. In other words, you've collapsed his bank on him. You've given him no space because he can't hold out anchor points.

Now, force depends, in space terms, on being able to hold two terminals apart. And the ability of an individual to hold two terminals apart determines immediately the amount of force which he can generate. I mean, this is the way he gets force. So, if he can't hold an engram off of himself, he can't hold two terminals apart. If he can't hold two terminals apart, he can't hold an engram off of himself. If he thinks there is something terribly wrong and disgusting and horrible about force, he immediately considers, then, that he mustn't hold anything off of himself. He can't hold two terminals apart, and he doesn't have any space.

Am I making myself very clear here? So when we say, "Man is basically good," we're saying, "Man is basically capable." You might as well say that word — that word actually means more than the word good. See that? He's basically capable.

Now, let's take the difference — and don't think that I'm comparing men to wild animals, I'm not — but let's take the most uninterfered-with thing on the evolutionary line, and that is a wild animal. He's not much interfered with except by the mest universe itself. In other words, there isn't a great deal of consideration, and there are no symbols pushed at him. There are very few symbols changed around for him. Believe me, no tiger has anybody standing around telling him, "The symbols mean this and they mean that."

And we find out that a wild animal, although he may get vermin and this and that, he is still in pretty good shape psychically. That's a fact — he's in pretty good shape. You can say he's — he just meets the situation with its proper mood: He's mad all the time. He meets the mest universe — I mean, he expects it to be cruel, he is cruel and he dwells in a realm of certainty thereby.

Now, I don't know that you have had much conversation with wild animals. I might know a little bit about this. I have had quite a bit to do with wild animals. And when you compare a wild cat to a domestic cat, you're apt to find a domestic cat rather disgusting. When you compare a wild dog to a domestic dog, you get a picture which is very strange.

The wild dog has his self-determinism, he lives or dies by his own acts, he takes responsibility for what he does. He dwells in a realm of certainty, and that certainty is "Kill or be killed." That certainty is "Run with the pack, and you're as — you'll run with the pack as long as you are useful to the pack. You will run with the pack as long as the pack is useful to you." Terrifically, sordidly, you might say, blunt logic goes along with this.

Let's take a pack of wolves, which is not too far from a pack of wild dogs, and we find out that the wolves will pause in pursuit — if they are starving — pause in pursuit of game sometimes when one of the wolves becomes injured. They'll eat him. Then they'll go on and pursue the game.

A wolf is safe in a wolf pack as long as he has force to contribute to the hunt. That's all. That's as long as he's safe. That's as much as he's good for. When he no longer has any force to contribute to the hunt, he's food.

And the efficiency of the wolf is wonderful to behold. One of — the wolf is one of the most efficient animals imaginable. He is also, in the animal kingdom, the world's best father. A wolf father is a fantastic beast — I mean, he does more things for his family. That doesn't stop him for a second, as far as the family itself is concerned — once that family has run for a little while as a pack, he's finally gotten them up to there — his treatment of his family is just the same as his treatment of any other wolf.

You have to make a pet out of an animal in order to drive it mad. Now, remember that: You have to make a pet out of an animal to drive it mad. And as far as bodies are concerned, there is no difference — not one iota of difference — between the GE and any other wild animal. The GE is not even more intelligent. Man is not intelligent because of his great brain.

We'll take the Cro-Magnon and we find out that he was much more stupid with his enormous brain capacity than the Neanderthal who eventually took him over. Brain capacity has nothing to do with this. The brain capacity of the dog, the brain capacity of the cat — these things are — have nothing to do with it. Just bluntly — I mean, so there's a quantity of neurons. It is a measure of how much beating in the head has had; that is a measure of that, because it's formed as much neurone shock cushion as was developed by impact. So we have a direct index between brain and the amount of blows something has had — which would be sideways, to some degree, an index of how much experience something had had — but that's not necessarily true either. You could make something develop a big brain simply by banging it in the head regularly, but it wouldn't make it any smarter.

Now, we have this problem of the wild animal domesticated. And we findthat it loses its self-respect, a domesticated wild animal — I've had considerableexperience with these — not because they're caged up so much, but becausethey're taken off of a certainty of what this universe is all about, and they'reput on to a cert, an uncertainty that it might be some other way.

All that's happened — it's not true, you see, that all things are uniformly bad. It's not true that all things are uniformly good. It's not true that everything is a game as a child understands a game, or that everything is work as an adult understands work. These are whole or absolute statements. These are almost arbitrary statements. Life is a mixture of all these things.

But where this universe at this time is concerned, this universe at this time presents an aspect wherein the greatest certainty which can be realized by an individual is that it's a cruel universe. That he will eat as long as he serves, as long as his force is great enough to meet the situation, and he will die when that force is no longer adequate to the problem. And that is very close to the truth.

Now, we take in this society a little child, and we raise them up on sweetness and light: that if you are a good boy, and do not employ any force, the society will take care of you and you will have justice, and you'll this — and it's all love and sweet sympathy.

Now, just because this kid is living in the middle of a bunch of smoke-filled chimneys and narrow streets in something called "culture," does not for one moment remove his environment from the environment of the mest universe, which is essentially a cruel, dog-eat-dog universe. In other words, he's being falsely trained. He's being trained that he's living in some kind of a special strata.

Well, now let's take an extremity: Let's drop him into the ocean for a moment where we have sharks, and we will find out that not one shark present will ask whether he is sweet or full of light before he bites. The shark will bite regardless.

Not one of the acts of charity of this individual will save him for a split instant between the teeth of that shark. What will save him — if he had the force of prying open the jaws of the shark and eating the shark, that would save him.

So essentially, man is impractical. In his effort to control his fellows, he has fallen into a very dangerous situation, and that situation is "that if one is good enough, and if one is sweet enough, and if one helps enough, he will then be repaid by endless adoration and survival." And this is not true, he will not be.

A man is as good as he can use effort, use force and predict it. And he's as bad off as he cannot predict on his own part, or on the part of others, effort and force. And that's about all you can say about it.

Now, it's true that if an individual — and I've said this often in lectures, but it's generally missed, mostly because I haven't immediately followed it by a process which remedies this — when an individual is way above the ability to generate almost unlimited force, then and only then can he afford the rather expensive luxury of sweetness, light, sympathy, kindness and forbearance.

A man who has two guns strapped on can be sweet. He can be forbearing, and he can follow a noble code which denies himself certain rights. But as he degenerates from this situation of being armor-plated and possessed of unlimited force, as he degenerates from this, another factor enters in. And he has to be careful to be kind, so as to prevent other people from being cruel, because he can no longer defend himself. And cruelty, then, in various ways, becomes a sort of a covert proposition that runs around, and people eat each other covertly. And there's nothing understood or certain about it all, and man almost goes mad from this very fact — he cannot predict.

If you were to forthrightly consider, and if you were to know with certainty, that this universe was a cruel universe — that it was brutal, that it was possessed of potentialities of death and pain above anything that one could imagine — and if he could know that with certainly and count upon that with certainty, he would have a certainty, wouldn't he? And sanity depends upon being certain.

The mind, because of the factor of time, is trying to predict actions. It can predict actions so long as it can be certain. Where does a sense of humor go, for instance? A sense of humor goes immediately when, "well, it's — it is possible," or "anything is possible."

Now, somebody gets a frame of mind "anything is possible." Well, therefore, there aren't enough certainties left there, you see, so that you can throw some­thing ridiculous in as a certainty. And humor depends essentially upon surprises which depart immediately from the certainties on which an individual is engaged, and that's humor.

And yet, this individual has so few certainties, he considers anything's possible — just anything is possible. He's had so many shocking surprises — in other words, he's failed to predict so often — that he considers anything is liable to happen. Anything!

Now, high on the scale, when he's able to combat this, that's just straight randomity — "Anything can happen! Whee!" Low on the scale — "Anything can happen. Lord help us all."

An individual walks down those stairs and out into the street and sees a real live dinosaur out in the middle of the street eating up people. And do you know that there are a great many individuals who would simply look at the dinosaur and say, "Well, that's that." Anything is possible. They have had too many shocks. Their certainty is too low.

Now, other people would walk down and if they were terrifically high on force, they'd laugh like the devil, because that's a real big joke, you see. And other people, in ratio, would express surprise, and people who were fairly sane would express fear or horror; because this is completely non sequitur — a dinosaur in the middle of the street eating people.

But to an individual who is very bad off, it would not appear either ridiculous or upsetting. He would simply look and he would see a dinosaur and he'd know anything was possible.

Well, why can he know anything is possible? It's because he can't predict. He doesn't dare predict. He can't know tomorrow. He can't know the next moment. Because there are no certainties. He knows this. And you can't get such an individual to laugh.

Therefore, getting an individual to laugh was synonymous with curing a person of insanity in ancient Italy. They had only one type of insanity — it was melancholia. And if you could get somebody to laugh, why — eventually, why, he was sane, you see.

Well, look at the situation of a person who thinks anything is possible. You of course can't get him to laugh. And so they were on a very, very reliable basis when they said that insanity and melancholia were synonymous.

Seriousness. An individual is serious for various reasons. One, he could only be serious because he's imitating his fellows. And on the other hand, he might be serious simply because he had to be very careful, because too many things were possible. And the more possibilities an individual has in terms of prediction, the less certain he is — the more factors there are in the problem. He can't handle any more than just so many factors.

And if you run in on him this problem "anything can happen" — on any problem he has, rather, "Well, anything can happen"; if he's a little bit tippy to begin with, he will almost go mad.

You can sit and tell an individual who is worried about the outcome of tomorrow's — oh, I don't know, court trial, tomorrow's examinations, tomorrow's whether or not he's going to get fired for having been late for work or something. And you wouldn't make — drive him mad by painting up to him how horrible it was to be out of work and — or how horrible it was that the court trial went against him. Why, you could just go on and on, on that same line of how dolorous and of how ugly and mean this whole thing was — you wouldn't drive him mad.

But you could, theoretically, drive him mad by … Let's take a court trial: You discuss for three minutes the extremely good possibilities of the thing coming out in his favor. And then discuss for a couple of minutes it coming out in nobody's favor. And then discuss for a moment or two the impossibility of its coming out in his favor. And then discuss the impossibility of its coming out in his opponent's favor. And then discuss the impossibility of its coming out. And then discuss the — how victorious the opponent would feel if he won. And then the possibility that the judge might get sick and it might not be tried, it might be dragged on for a week or two. See? Just keep feeding him factors, feeding him factors, each one of which is variable.

And if you do this rather consistently, he would practically go mad, you see? Because you have shown him anything is possible on something very serious.

Well, it's not true that anything is possible in this universe. This universe runs on a dwindling spiral. The thing that is possible is death. The thing that is possible is cruelty and pain; that's what's possible. That has a greater degree of probability than any other thing — that the outcome of any given situation is going to be bad.

A wild animal knows this. He hasn't been petted as a puppy into believing otherwise — he hasn't been reassured and reassured and reassured and reassured. His own survival factor, then, isn't being betrayed. So he has the certainty that it's going to be bad. And believe me, that's a very low order of certainty, but he at least has that order of certainty.

Now, let's take and cut him below that level by shaking up the fact that it's going to be bad with a bunch of sweetness and light which won't work out, and then let's change his mind on that score every time we turn around.

We find, then, that the individual is being crushed at every turn by the feeling that he shouldn't do it to other people because they don't deserve it — only he does. We can get somebody to repent — how could we possibly get him to repent? By teaching him everybody is good but himself. That's how we could get him to repent. "Everybody else is good and deserving and trying hard, and they're all loyal and noble and swell, and they're just fine people. And you, you dog, you come along and you eat one of them." And you tell him this and convince him of it after he's eaten one of them, and he's been wrong. And there's the finest way to make anybody wrong.

It isn't true that everything has to be cruel and bad and evil — nobody's saying that. But at this lowest level that man is operating in right now, his certainty actually lies much better in the field: "People are mean, they're out for themselves, they're not going to give anybody any quarter. You give them a two-second chance to cut your head off, and they will." And if the fellow went along on that basis, he'd be about 80 percent right. If he goes along on the other basis, he'll be about 20 percent right. We mustn't overlook the fact that he can be 20 percent right by going along the other way. Somebody becomes, however, morbidly absorbed with this problem.

And most preclears with whom you are having any trouble at all are morbidly absorbed in this problem: a problem of justice. The only thing that is wrong with the administration of justice is that you might administer it to somebody who was kind, sweet, loving and deserving. You might administer punishment to the wrong party. That's all that's wrong with it.

Now, you go down the street here and you take out a Sten gun and you start shooting up every pedestrian that you meet. You say, "I'm mad at this town. This town is real mean to me," and you shoot up every pedestrian you meet. You might feel just fine about it, up till the moment you read in — tomorrow's paper, in which the husband of five children who were expecting him home for Christmas, and a pathetic picture of Christmas presents scattered across the sidewalk, met your eye. Your glory at having made nothing of all of these people would at that moment fade.

So here we're looking at the raw, basic mechanism of regret, repent, and the imbalance of minds. We're also looking at how people are civilized.

They are taught that others are more deserving than they are, that people are good, that all things are sweet. And I point to a moment on the track, very, very early on the track, when the individual first met this. It's called the "Dear Souls" area for slang; that's just a slangy term for it. But they caught somebody who was a perfectly good wild thetan — he was a real tough, mean thetan, too. He was perfectly willing to give anybody quarter as long as they'd ride with the pack. He'd serve as long as they could serve, he would go forward, he would do anything constructive that was constructive, and he was running on the complete — running on the beautiful computation that he couldn't die anyway, so it didn't make much difference.

And all of a sudden he got into the "Bubble Gum," and the next thing he knows, he was in the "Dear Souls" area. And everybody was so good — they were so good to him. They'd rescued him out of the Bubble Gum. They had rescued him out of the traps. They were sweet to him, and they had taught him the "good things," and what "good behavior" was, that they were all "nice" and they were "loving" — and they just laid it on.

He eventually escaped from there. Almost anybody coming down this track has been through that area — that's the first indoctrination on the track in this subject.

And from that moment on, he was completely befuddled. He was really befuddled. What had happened to him? He had realized that everybody was good and that there was something missing in himself. He realized that he had killed a great many deserving people. His consideration of the universe had immediately become incorrect. He had assumed that everybody else besides himself was mortal and could be damaged and could be hurt irreparably, and that he alone had to go on and on and on, and bear it and endure it somehow. And not be cruel, and not be ugly, and never be mean, and never lose his temper, and never do a mean act, because the recipient of the act might be a just, deserving person on whom many sweet things were dependent.

Now, that's of course a very, very low consideration. That's almost only visible with a microscope. It's very, very low. It's on the Tone Scale level that's down there, I don't know in what basement. But from there on, you have cruelty, betrayal, and most important, complete irresponsibility. Because an individual becomes afraid of force, and the second an individual is afraid of force, he can no longer be responsible for anything because he cannot protect or direct it.

So, he goes wandering on. Your preclear who's in this state expects you, as an auditor, by some necromancy he does not mention, to wave a wand over his head and without any use of force on his own part, or responsibility or volition on his own part, to clear him. You cannot clear anyone who is afraid of force, because that person will not take the responsibility of being cleared.

Let's take the preclear who has stepped out of his head and has run into something, has bumped into something, has been frightened, and has ducked back into his head again. He has to be there, because only the body can be responsible — he can't be responsible. He stepped out of his body and immediately recognized that anything he did he was responsible for. He couldn't blame it on the body then. And so his recognition of that: He did make a mistake. He therefore banged back into the body, and since that time when that incident occurred, has been saying, since then, "The body is responsible."

We have a package which works this way — horribly enough, it works this way: A person who is not able to handle force or effort is a person on whom any engram can move in, because any engram or any energy or anybody else's wavelength is his own randomity — I mean, it's an enemy. So therefore he'll fight it, and it will cave in on him eventually. So we have a dwindling spiral right there, and the dwindling spiral is negation of the use of force and energy. Because it's a negation of responsibility, which is less and less space.

You see why it's less and less space? Because of the double terminals. He can't impose space on two terminals. All right.

Let's then look over our preclear and realize that he is as well off as he can take responsibility. But one cannot take responsibility unless one can take over, handle and direct force. You can't give a man responsibility for a car which he can't drive. I mean, he doesn't have enough strength in his arms to drive this car, and you can't hammer and pound at him and tell him he's responsible for its erratic course down the road. It's an impossibility, he sees it clearly, for him to drive the car. He won't be responsible for it — he won't even think of it.

You tell some little kid — you can always get a line charge out of a little kid if you see an airplane pass overhead and the airplane swoops a little bit too low, and you stand the little kid up on a fireplug or something like that and just give him a mock bawling-out like mad for flying so low over the town. It's very funny to him.

A bus goes by and it fails to stop. You can turn around to some little kid standing there and say, "What's the idea making that bus go on by?" He laughs, it's very funny to him. He knows he hasn't got the force or — of command in any way, shape or form, to have stopped that bus or to control that airplane. But there is only a — too wide apart as terminals. He has some sort of a certainty just out of that. You give him a certainty. He suddenly realizes that he isn't driving that bus, and that makes this very funny to him. Maybe up to that moment, he was pretending he was a bus driver or something.

So force is not something which we must run away from. Force is something we must get the individual to assume to the end of permitting him to be good, which is to say, able. Permitting him to go his way without preying upon others. Because an individual will prey upon others as long as he does not think he can create havingness.

And as long as individuals are disabused of their ability to handle force, as long as individuals think they can't create it, they will go on preying upon others. And there is cruelty, and there's where the game breaks down. That's why animals eat animals. They are parasites upon animals. Each one of them is too low on the Tone Scale to recognize his own ability to create force.

And so we have all of the universe, at this time, devoted to preying upon all of the universe. And thus if you say . . . You can be sure that an individual who cannot handle force and will have nothing to do with force — you can be sure that he will either apathetically conduct his business and really be not responsible for any part of it, or he will conduct it in such a way or a manner, to prey upon people. He has to be capable of handling and using force. Capable of it — that's different, you see, than using it.

A man who begins to use force has immediately admitted that he cannot control without force. When you first have to slug into a company of men or a squad with your fists to line them up and make them do right, at that moment you've lost, really, the largest margin of command over them.

The day a society has to sentence a single man for a single crime, it has admitted its inability to handle the society. Therefore, a society is as bad off as it is court-ridden. It is as desperate as it is employing punishment against its citizens. It requires a society so capable of force that it never uses it.

If any nation of the world today were really capable of the use of force — that is to say, nationally capable of it, not did it just have bombs — if it were nationally capable of force, there would be on Earth today an honorable nation. There would be also peace on Earth; there would not be war.

A huge stockpile of atom bombs is an enormous amount of force. But then, you can buy shotguns in any shop; that's an enormous amount of force, too. Nobody buys those shotguns to use against his fellow man. Nobody will ever use those atom bombs, really, until he is so depraved and so afraid, that he must resort to the use of force.

This is really a very difficult point for an individual to see who is indoctri­nated in a society where sweetness and light and "love thy neighbor" predominate over "get the show on the road." Very difficult to bring it across, because people immediately tell you right after a lecture or something like that, "Well, you believe everybody ought to be in a state of anarchism and everybody ought to be able to cut each other to pieces and everybody ought to be able to shoot each other and so forth, and therefore, this is real bad." Well, that person's really lost; he's really fogged up.

He's depending upon the repression of force in the society to guarantee his own survival. How craven can you get? A person who is afraid of force and who has turned his force over to police, who has turned his force over in all directions, at once will get no justice, and eventually will be unable to forge ahead even through his own engram bank. His locks won't release, for one thing. That's your fastest manifestation on the case — the locks won't release.

You say, "Now, do you remember — remember your mother saying that?" — his pat phrase or something; he all of a sudden says, "Yes! Sure! Ha!" Gone. The lock released.

You say, "Do you remember your mother saying that?" and this individual is very low on responsibility, very low in the use of force, he's very incapable of going forward — he says, "Yeah, I remember." You'd have to get him to remember it a dozen times before it'd get beaten down a little bit. That's because it's composed of force. It's an idea fixed in force.

Now, an individual early on the track tried like the dickens to get his ideas fixed in force — you know, give them position. He put an idea up here in space and it stayed there. And then he got it to stay there by putting force around it. And then he got it to stay there and to be effective because it had force around it. And after a while, why, all of his ideas were coated with force. And that in essence is a symbol: It's an idea fixed in space coated with force.

Well, the letter "A" in a book is fixed in space, in force — ink, paper, that's force. The walls of this room are made out of force.

Now, your individual who doesn't get out of his head has this first and foremost: His body must be there to be responsible for what happens. It's just a lack of force, you see. He can't enforce his own responsibility. He doesn't have enough force to enforce his own responsibility. But the body has some capability of doing so, so it's a better cop than he is, and it can be more responsible than he is. And it's visible to others and he isn't, so therefore, the body has to be there to be responsible. That's the first thing you run into in the case.

And the next thing is that the individual has been driven, if you please, rather completely mad with the idea that everybody is better than he is, and everybody is so sweet, and everybody is so kind, and everybody is so good that he wouldn't dare do anything to them. He is going on the 20 percent, compulsively.

No, he's trying to figure out in a wrong certainty: "It's all good; it's all ethical." Now, if you try to figure this universe out "it's all good; it's all ethical; it will all work out justly in the end," you're going to be 80 percent wrong. And yet if you insist on — insist on this as your only adjudication of this problem, that everybody is good, that everybody is so-and-so and that — so on, you're going to have 80 percent of your problems wrongly predicted.

The purpose of the mind is to predict — as far as circuits and thinking is concerned — is to predict the future. Now, if the service of the mind is to predict the future — the circuits there, the mind itself, is to predict the future — prediction with certainty is then the guarantee of the rightness or the Wrongness of the mind. That is the way the mind is measured. How certain is one's mind? Predicting rightly or predicting wrongly? If the percentage of predicting wrongly is too high, the mind becomes unwilling to predict.

So in this universe, we have individuals trying to make other individuals wrong by making them mispredict. The way to make them mispredict is to tell them everything is good, and nothing is going to happen. This is essentially true, you see, way up scale this is true, but in the middle range it's not true — in the animal kingdom, living with a body.

Actually, I don't care how many theaters there are or how many cops there are on corners, it's a society of animals. And the only way to really predict it 80 percent right would be to just bluntly measure it up on the basis that it was all going to work out wrong, and it was all going to come to disaster and so on.

That isn't being pessimistic, that's just being right. You don't have to be — put a sour emotion along with it.

You say, "What's going to happen to this city?" Well, this city will go into ruins. It will probably be betrayed. There will probably be a police state. One of these days, it will be atom-bombed. You don't have to be emotional, you know, about a decision. A postulate is one thing, and an emotion is quite another.

And if you insist that this city is going to go on for the next thousand or two thousand years being untouched by any invader, remain uncorrupt in the face of any government, that it's going to go on protecting its citizens, that its taxes are all going to be just, that it's going to progress and evolve into higher and higher states — you're going to be wrong! You'll probably be wrong within ten years.

So how do you keep from being wrong? That's to make an accurate prediction. Don't be compulsively disabused of your own adjudications. Well, that's a lot of big words, but that's what happens to people. They permit themselves to be disabused of their own actual judgments.

You can track back on any preclear and find out when he solidly considered that his life had certain enemies — and the enemies were probably, he figured out, Papa, Mama. These were enemies.

He had it figured out that — well, let's say she had it figured out that all men were going to be enemies, and that if she paid too much attention to them and didn't take care of her knitting, she was going to come to no good.

And then they got to work on her and "all men were good," and Papa and Mama were doing everything for her that they could, and they were doing everything for her they could, and they had no axe to grind, and they were — had her own best interests at heart, and no time did they mean to do her any evil. No, she came first where they were concerned, and Mama kept walking around saying, "You know, your papa is so fond of you." And Papa kept walking around, "You know, your mother has sacrificed so much for you."

And after she got to be ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — probably the swan song of it was when she was about fifteen. She got into a real hectic state of "No! No! No! These things are not true," and then she kind of caved in and became an adult.

And after that, went along. Then she got to be twenty-three, and she'd married Raymond or somebody and she got to be twenty-three, and here he was. And she had a couple of children and he went off and got drunk — he couldn't stand the atmosphere or something, or he went to war, or something happened to him, or he stepped under a car, as lots of people do. And here she was left with these two kids, you see. And she says, "Well, I always have Papa and Mama." (I tell you, two kids are awful noisy.) She has them for about thirty days, and then they practically cut her throat. They're much more interested in her younger brother. They're just real upset by it.

But they suffer along somehow and sacrifice somehow, and she's put in — more deeply in debt. And then they find out that Raymond has ten thousand dollars insurance or something like that, and boy, they really love her about this time. They really love her — really, she's really the star. And that gets spent, and they say, "To hell with her."

It's real remarkable. I mean, they're running on the same computations as a wolf — on, really, no other computations than the computations of a wolf — if there's prey, you eat it.

Sometimes a person has to live fifty years to find out what the devil his parents really intended. Sometimes he just never finds out at all.

There are ten aberrative things. They are the Ten Commandments. Nobody's saying these are bad or good, but these are plenty aberrative. These are just fine.

A society of giants — a society of tremendous people would dare adopt these Ten Commandments and consider that they were the things to live by. But what giants they would have to be!

Well, you can go at it several ways. You can either go on monitoring the society as a control unit, controlling it at all times by lying to it — telling it that everybody is deserving except the individual you're talking to, and he's scum, but somehow or other you'll get him through, because not everybody hates him.

You can control him that way, or you can control it on the highly sensible basis that the Roman Empire was using, which was strictly dog-eat-dog: a fellow was as good as he could produce and perform. He lasted as long as that.

There are tribes in Africa — people get up to a certain age, they simply knock them in the head and throw them back of the brush for the hyenas to eat. He — a fellow was just as good as he could produce. Well, that's terribly practical; it's hard-headed, hard-boiled.

Kindness — a man falls by the roadside and he's generally left to die. I have seen this happen to people in north China. I would not say the Chinese were a terribly superior civilization or an inferior one. I've seen fellows who would simply stumble on the street from hunger and fall down. There'd never be a single pedestrian would ever give him a hand to stand him on his feet.

You'd say that would be an awful society. And that society has been surviving now for about four thousand years. It's never changed this one. When a man's down, he's down.

I've seen soldiers who have fought to free their country from the invader in China and so forth, dumped on a railroad siding, wounded, and they just lie there and die without water, without food, with nothing. You can say this is cruelty that's utterly incredible.

You ask a military commander, "Why don't you do something for those troops?"

"What? Tie down a whole lot of troops to make those troops into cripples so that they can go out into the society and starve to death? No."

You'd say, "Well, you should do something about this here. You shouldn't leave men there to lie and suffer."

And he might think about it for a moment and then realize that, well, he had lots of extra bullets, and he'd walk over and put bullets in their heads. That would be his practical application to it.

And one can handle it that way. That's the way the animal kingdom handles it. Or one can simply go up to a height of being so strong that one can easily afford to be just. Now, that impossible dream, as some might call it, is yet the only place I can see anywhere where there's any entrance into the problem.

I consider the forthright cruelty of wild animals unfit for man, but I don't see that there's any progress or anything else for man if he has to fall below the level of courage of a wild animal; if he has to be less sane than wild things. And there's certainly not very much hope for the 1.1 civilization — sweetness, kindness, all so somebody can cut your throat — in which man lives right now. And he certainly lives in that one right now.

The state will support you if you sign the right papers. Who wants to be supported by the state?

So we look at this problem in terms of practical application, and we find out we would have to take a little bit of a chance on the thing and try to get it up to a point where the society itself was sufficiently strong that it could be ethical and just, and would be.

There is nothing short of the highest level and we can't go any lower than that level, because I think the beast of the field today has more honor in him than men. Remember, I talk from a lot of observation of Homo sapiens.

You and anyone has within him potentials of beauty, ethics, far higher than any philosopher has ever philosophized about. But in an environment which suppresses them, why, not only these can't endure, an individual can't endure either.

Now, what's basically the point of entrance with a great many preclears — not all preclears, but what's a point of entrance? It would be to run, with one technique or another, out — "anything is possible." Masses of agreement on "anything is possible." And then "sweetness, light, we must all be kind, we must all be good." You just take this type of Viewpoint Processing, where you have masses of viewpoints and you mock these up in brackets or not in brackets.

And you use this to clear out of the way the first barrier against force. Usually, this thing called the Assumption gets into restimulation and won't get out of restimulation, merely because the individual feels that having stolen the body, anybody can do anything to him now. I mean, he's used up all his right to harm or injure people.

The truth of the matter escapes him: that body would never function unless he seized it. And another great truth escapes him utterly, and that is, the things on which he preys cannot do anything but survive. That escapes him utterly; never gets into his computations. Everything gets so convincingly dead. It so convincingly convicts him with its stillness and its motionlessness, that he cannot think otherwise than that he has committed some horrible, great crime.

Nobody under any circumstances should deal along lines of vengeance and so forth merely for the sake of vengeance. Because if one has to exert vengeance, one first has to admit that he is afraid. If one goes out on a track of vengeance, he has to first start on a track of resisting something which he conceives to be dangerous to him.

The first step on any track of resentment, and on what we call "justice," is a cowardice. It's a cowardice. It's a fear of being destroyed by something which one must then contest. And there's your first entrance, and that first entrance is fear.

And one might say the first moment that fear appears, is the first moment when man becomes evil. So the solution is to go way up on this problem, not stay down low on it.

Okay.