Thank you. Thank you very much.

Well, I am very, very happy to see you here tonight and I imagine amongst us are some people who have just heard of Scientology — just, just heard of it just a moment ago — and think it's a new method of putting tops on bottles. Well actually, that's technically not correct — not technically correct.

We put lids on people.

Now, it's very difficult — it's very difficult to describe Scientology, and tonight I'm going to talk about some of the ways and means of reaching people with Scientology and trying to give them some sort of a notion of what's going on in the world in the way of technical development in mental sciences, and so forth, without having to work at it.

And the one that just heard about it five minutes ago, well, you'll pick it up in passing. But the old-timer, I think, will be very happy to have some of this data.

Now, an awful lot of us have had the marvelous experience — fellow sitting there, you know, he's going "Huuh, huuh," and we say — we say, "How are you getting along? How are you getting along?"

"Never felt better. Nothing wrong with me."

If you were to ask him, by the way, if there is anything wrong with him, he would say, "Well, once in a while I have a pain in my foot." High reality case.

Now the very funny part of it is, is you sit there and try to interest him in something. You know it could do him some good, you know, and you try to interest him in this thing. Well now, there's where the whole thing falls down — interest. Interest.

There are many gradients on a Tone Scale. Now, a Tone Scale is the relative positions of people — well, actually, the relative freedom of the individual to think and to be and to exist.

And you start way up here, see? Interest. He hasn't got any acquaintance with the subject of interest. He doesn't know what interest is.

Of course, if he were in the Bank of England, he could tell you what interest was; it's something Heathcoat Amory fools with.

But here we have — here we have tried to make an entrance to an individual who obviously needs our help. And if we got a diver's suit and then a shovel and dug a hole in the bottom of the ocean, we might about get to how far we were from being able to reach that fellow's reality because, I tell you, there is no interest in the world. He basically and actually is interested in nothing — nothing whatsoever.

Now that's a pathetic state of being. If you looked around — if you looked around the world today, you'd find out that was basically what was wrong with people is they weren't interested in anything. Now how can a democracy work, for instance? Democracy is a wonderful political philosophy, been working for quite a long time, more or less. But in a democracy, how can you have a democracy unless people are interested? You can't. They don't vote. They skip it. The reality that the whole thing is rigged probably long since has come home to them. They know they can't do anything about it so they're not interested anymore. Well, it forces a government into the position of becoming a dictatorship or an oligarchy or something of the sort. It's inevitable that this occurs.

In a business, the head of the business or the head of a department is always assuming that everybody is interested in his job. What folly! They're not interested in their jobs. Most of the people on post these days are below interest — well below interest. They're kind of — they're not really even interested in their paychecks. I know that because in the United States the government takes — I think it's one and a half times the paycheck out as tax. And hardly anybody notices it

The world at large can have all sorts of things wrong with it, but if nobody is interested, who's ever going to put any of these things right? And so you get the deterioration of social states. You get the deterioration of broad — well, things that were great reforms at one time or another ceased to exist as reforms. They just kind of all fade out and life is just too horrible.

Well, you say, "Well, if there is no interest, then that's it." Now, that's kind of what we've assumed up until very recently. If there is no interest, that's it. If a person isn't interested, you can't do anything else about it.

Well, Scientology, being the science of knowing how to know, for a long time has sort of posed the idea that you could do something about it. You know, there must be something there someplace and there must be some answer to dissemination. And so there is.

There are basically three steps below Interest where you can still have a meeting ground with a person. There are three steps below Interest and that's a long way down.

Immediately below Interest is Communication. A person may not be interested very much, but he will communicate, somewhat. He'll talk. He'll answer.

Now, if he won't do that, there's the next step below and that's Control: a person's willingness to control or to be controlled. And if you want an index of where the world sits today, just ask anybody offhand what control is and they say, "Oh, that's a bad thing."

Well, down in — down in Sussex, I'm the road safety organizer. And by the way, we just had a tremendous drop in local statistics. Most remarkable coincidence.

And I could tell those people that when they — I could ask them, you know, "Is control bad or good?"

And I would get an immediate response, you know, "It's bad. Control is bad. It's bad to be controlled. It's bad to have to control things," and so forth. You get this response from people.

Well, this assumes, then, that the automobile is taking the person down the road. It just assumes that immediately, that the automobile just takes the person and turns all the corners and goes over the embankments all by itself. If control is bad — if control is bad, then confusion must be good.

Oh, I don't know, confusion has its points. Last time I took a little kid to a carnival, he seemed to be very overjoyed at some of the confusions we got into. Of course, I couldn't walk very straight afterwards, after some of the rides at the carnival, but he seemed to be doing all right.

Confusion was wonderful if you — or is wonderful if you can take it. That kind of a state of mind of what is confusion … Of course, anybody who worked in the early days of Scientology, they know what an extremity of control is: it's a confusion — people bursting in and bursting out and doing this and doing that and tearing off over the far horizon, and so forth. And yet it was all very orderly, compared to most governments.

Now control, that's just the idea of control, is foreign to a tremendous number of people. It's only the person who cannot embrace control in any form whatsoever that has accidents. And basically, you could take this person, you could examine him for this one point before you granted him-a driver's license and simply end accidents in the United Kingdom, just as easy as that — if you could check him out on this point: Was he terribly averse to all forms of control? Well, you know you've got your hands on the accident-prone.

Now, if you just said, "Son, we're not going to give you a license at this time because we can demonstrate that you would have an accident within the next six months. And we can do without your accident, because we don't want you becoming a statistic."

It would not be a cruelty because the facts of the case are, a Scientologist, taking that person in a group — at a cost of actually only a few pence per person — could straighten them out and let them see what was what and which was which and put them into a state where they could be trusted with a license. This is not an expensive program. But it depends on this one button, this one fact of control — straightening that fact out — because unless a person is straightened out on this point, they of course will have accidents.

Now, there's a point below that and that's Help. A person is still willing to help even though they don't like control and even though they won't communicate and even though they're not interested. Now, that's one of the wildest things you ever saw.

And do you know, we're catching this planet today — we're actually catching it — on the last bottom shreds of help. People will help. They will drop a penny in the Society for Disabled Children or something like that, even though they don't care what happens to the society. They see the sign, and so forth, and they say, "Well, they probably need some help," and they drop a penny.

They're not really interested. If you ask them, "What is your interest in — what is your interest in disabled children?"

And they'd say, "Huh?"

Well now, it goes downscale on Help to a point where the person will help but won't receive help. That's getting down into the lower realms of this thing.

And if you could just see these things as Interest, Communication, Control and Help, with a sort of a curtain being pulled down across each one of these, you'd see there was still a little tiny bit of help possible, but nothing else.

Well, the person's life has simply gone out to that extent. Just gone out. And as you raise the curtain, it gets back up to interest, enthusiasm, verve, and so forth.

Well, how would you get a person up there? Well, of course, you could get him up there with processing, but how could you get him up there any other way?

Well, it's relatively simple. It depends on this one fact: Psychosis, neurosis, maladjustments and so on, when you address the exact thing about them that makes them awry in the personality, are so susceptible to being knocked aside that it's a wonder somebody didn't do it before we came along. In fact, I don't know how people manage to keep these things alive!

For instance, I start discussing something that's wrong with somebody, or he's worried about or something, and I start discussing it and reach the actual thing that is awry about this in his understanding and it folds up so quick I can hardly put my hands on it. All you have to do is discover exactly what it is that set him off that way. It's wonderful! How on earth do people stay crazy? It's heroic.

As for me, I don't — I don't think that it's probably a good thing to go around knocking all these crazinesses in the head, and so on. There must be something wrong with straightening people out, you see? Because look at all the work they go to, to stay crazy.

Now, if they're working that hard to stay crazy and a Scientologist comes along and says, "Zip, zip," and they say, "Wow!" you know, "I feel better."

No, you have to have a pretty broad understanding of what it is before it becomes an overt act. The truth of the matter is the fellow is staying crazy because he's trying to restrain himself from doing the horrible things he knows he is capable of. And if he can just stay just a little bit mad, then he's not capable of enough control to do anything very effective. This is no compliment, I assure you, to the police.

A kleptomaniac, you know, he walks by a — walks by a goods counter in a store, and you may not realize it, but the stuff leaps off the counter and into his pocket and when he comes home he finds them. Well, he's got a problem. He doesn't know how to straighten it out. He doesn't know why he's got a problem, and so forth, so the best thing for him to do is what? And I'll tell you what he will do. But first, let me give you another little example here.

One time I was looking around for people to straighten up on a series — I was trying to do a series of about ten — and I got a hold of a criminal who was a real hardened criminal. He is what is known as the dyed-in-the-wool criminal, I think that's the technical name of it.

This fellow had a habit. He would find somebody who had some money, lure him down the street, take him into an alley, and then hit him a hard blow on the jaw, take the money, put it in his pocket and walk off. He'd been doing this for years. And his arm was very shriveled. But he hadn't quite made it yet. He was still capable of striking a blow with this shriveled arm. But he was working on it. And I tried to get this shriveled arm straightened out and he went so fast that he practically got a total paralysis of one side before I'd worked on him more than a few minutes.

I gave him a wonderful opportunity of really crippling himself. He was desperately trying to get himself into a state whereby he could no longer hit people on the jaw, because that's what he did. And the way he was trying to work it out, you see, was that way.

He never — he never asked the question of why he hit people on the jaw. This was something he couldn't confront. So he just never looked for that; he just looked at ways and means to prevent himself from hitting people on the jaw. That was all he did. Obvious answer: crippled arm.

You see some old man going down the street on two canes, gimping along. Terribly interesting what that old man thinks he would do if he had two good legs. It's quite fascinating. You find out what he would do if he had two legs — it's easy, because he himself can hardly stop himself from answering you if you ask him, "What would two crippled legs prevent you from doing?"

And before he can hardly open his mouth, the words come out, "I'd just get any woman I saw and knock her down and just kick her and kick her and kick her. That's how I got two crippled legs, see?" It's very funny.

Now, as long as man has been fooling around with man, he has considered that man was basically evil. And factually, this isn't true. Man tries to prevent becoming evil to such an extent he moves right around into the middle of it. He tries to restrain himself to a point of where he can't restrain himself anymore and there he goes. And there's what? There's your Control button.

He's lost control of himself. He no longer has confidence in himself. He doesn't feel he can control himself anymore. Now people are around who know they can't control themselves but who know they can help it somehow. And you've got the graphic description of this button.

In other words, he can't control hitting people in the jaw, but he can keep from doing it. You see, he can't control this, but he can put himself into a position where he won't do it. And that helps people, oddly enough.

This button Help is so interesting that if you see any kind of a disability in a person, that disability is actually helping everybody. Well, of course, there is nothing nuttier than nuttiness.

Now, you can go ahead and be logical if you want to, but you're never going to find out, really, about craziness by being logical. It's totally illogical. And perhaps the only thing that Scientology has accomplished is seeing through a labyrinth of illogicalness on a somewhat logical basis until something is disclosed to this degree.

Now, the fellow who has the crippled arm — I found out, by the way, why he had a crippled arm. When he was a little kid, there was an older boy on the newspaper route who used to beat him up and take his money. And this happened at least once a week. As soon as this fellow as a child had collected his money on his route or collected his money from his customers, this other fellow would come along and beat him up. And he got so fixated on this whole thing, he got so fixated on the idea that the best thing to do was beat somebody up and take their money away, that that's all he could do for the rest of his life.

But he really didn't get a paralyzed side until one day his mother woke him up, unexpectedly, and he drew back his arm to hit his mother. And actually, his arm was drawn back in the act of hitting his mother from there on out, because he checked that, but good. But he couldn't check the other dramatization; he could no longer control that dramatization.

You straighten out these various buttons, try to find out what the individual has failed to help — that is your lowest entrance point. And if there's anything lower than that, the case is probably not conscious, unable to talk to you in any way, is in an asylum someplace and you have to use another regimen of processing entirely, called the CCHs.

But we assume that this individual can still talk to some slight degree. And if you find out what that individual failed to help, you will find out at once one of the points that prevents you from helping him.

This is one of those interesting things. The individual says — this fellow that's got his head going like this, you know, and he's — doesn't want any assistance from you and he's not interested in life and he isn't able to say anything about anything, and so forth. This fellow — you know he'd be out of communication. You, before, have tried to do something for him or tried to handle him in some way. There is a question that brings him out into communication with you and that is "Who was the last person you failed to help?" That's the lowest question you can ask, "Who was the last person you failed to help?"

Now, of course, people that are well up above this level — people well up above this level — are very, very alert; they know that they have failed to help a lot of people; they're not in a state of mind where this wrecks them in any way; they know they failed to help Joe or Pete or Bill or Agnes or something of the sort and it didn't — it didn't spin them in.

But this fellow that's going this way, now, the last fellow he failed to help, he had it. That was the rung down. And if you get him to discuss it, you can actually bring him back up to a point where he will accept some help.

Well, you haven't got him interested yet. You've only got him at a point where he'll accept some help. But look on that as a tremendous victory. You've already brought him maybe a little bit higher than the human norm. He will accept some help or he'll give some help or he will talk about it and you'll find out that you have — by asking him a question or two, if you went around and checked up with him later, you'll get one of these shocks that I got one time in New York City.

There was a fellow, artist friend of mine — artists are strange people. They find strange places to live and work. And this artist friend of mine made a great deal of money and set up a studio in the middle of Hell's Kitchen in New York. This was the toughest, meanest district that any man ever tried to walk into. You didn't even dare walk up and down the street in Hell's Kitchen after sunset.

But he set up a studio in the middle of Hell's Kitchen. Well, that was the thing to do and he almost started a fad. And I was down there seeing him one day and we heard some pale screams next door and we went next door and there was a fellow lying there in bed and he hadn't worked for several days and there were two children and his wife in the house and there was no food and the fellow was lying in bed and his leg was apparently turning gangrenous. And, well, you find these things if you look back of the shutters of life, and you don't have to walk very far, and this fellow was obviously — would have to have his leg off or something like that.

Well, I talked to him for a few minutes (and, if you please, this was a long time ago), I processed him in the crude processes of that time. And the hospital came and got him before I could finish it up — the municipal hospital, they came and got him — so I said, "Well, that's it. They'll take off his leg and that's the end of his livelihood because he's a longshoreman." And you never saw a longshoreman succeed without legs.

So anyway, I thought that was it.

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was published in 1950; been going strong ever since. But the mail came in, in mailbags and I didn't get much of a chance to pay too much attention to this mail. Fortunately, this fellow didn't write on the first wave; he waited for a while, evidently. And one day I was just flipping through mail, not knowing how to answer it or take care of it in any way, and I suddenly saw this letter and it was Hell's Kitchen.

I opened it up. It says, "Dear Doc, Thank you for my leg." It was a letter from this guy, four years after the fact. They'd taken him to the hospital and while they were waiting to prepare him for the operating table, and so forth, the gangrene had stopped. So the doctor said, "Well, that's interesting. Let's observe it for a couple of days." And they did, and the leg healed up and sent him home.

I didn't — hadn't heard another blessed thing about it, you see, until this letter: "Dear Doc, Thank you for my leg." So quite, quite interesting and I don't think I processed the man any length of time. But apparently I must have been processing on more or less what was wrong with him because it unsettled it. And the difficulty of keeping a leg in that condition was so great, he didn't make it. That's basically what that's about.

You know the answers to life and the rightnesses of life are apparently so powerful that they assert themselves and the wrongnesses of life fold up. Maintaining a wrongness is difficult.

Help is evidently so deeply ingrained in every being that only when it folds up and you show the individual conclusively, or he has been shown that he is not helping anybody, does he fold up as a being.

Up to that time, he'll function. It's when he loses that last one that he's gone. And anybody who is severely neurotic or insane or extremely ill or anything of that character has had that happen to him. He has had it demonstrated to him conclusively that he can't help anything or anybody.

Now he realizes he is so dangerous that he can never pay back anything that he owes society. He can never pay any debt; he can never make it right; he can never do something to equalize all the bad things he's done, and so forth.

In other words, this man cannot pay off. He can no longer walk in the sun because he can never be of any help to anybody. When he gets into that condition, he's gone.

Well, all you have to do to trigger that condition . . . And these by the way, are the people you have the most trouble with and who are the most trouble and who are sitting in the midst of the most trouble. If you don't straighten this out, by the way, you can help them a great deal and very, very often, and they just keep fouling up again.

You can help them in other ways without helping them with help and they just keep folding up. This is the person that you — that you straightened him all out; you loaned him some money; you made sure that he had a job, you know? Or the girl that you made sure that she met a nice guy and was all going to be just set, and then somehow or other zzzzzut! — it all went wrong.

Well, she's dramatizing that you can't help. But this is that person that you've had trouble with in trying to assist — is, this person has something wrong with his Help button and that's the only thing that you can straighten out.

Well, oddly enough, if this is so fundamental, it runs through all cases and all people. If a person can't be controlled and can't control anything, there's something wrong with the Help button. If a person cannot communicate, there's certainly something wrong with the Help button. If a person isn't interested in life, then there's something wrong with the Help button. This inevitably is true.

Now, people's Help button can be in better shape or in worse shape or something of the sort. You can do a great deal to straighten somebody out by straightening out Control. You can just talk to him about control and do some straightening out of this subject of control — and do a lot for them. But if there's a great deal wrong with the Help button, it won't stay right, don't you see? Person will go on in again.

Now, you can set up a person so that his communication level and his fear of communicating with people, his fear of what he'll do, and so forth — just on a communication basis — you can set that up and do a lot to straighten it out, but it won't be permanent unless you've also straightened out the Help button.

This is so fundamental that the reason life is life and people are together and grass grows and trees grow and apparently the rain falls and everything else, is because it helps somebody.

I don't know who cries when a hurricane blows too loud and blows everybody up, but I do know that you probably wouldn't have any wind at all if it didn't help somebody. You get the idea?

The help of anything that is consistently here is greater than its damage. And every once in a while some naturalist comes along and says, "Well, you know, you know … you know, the wobble-eyed oriole, you know, that we were killing off up in North Downs, we found out the other day all he ate was spiders. And he only ate the bad spiders. And now we're having an awful time trying to replace the wobble-eyed oriole." Very, very remarkable.

Now, of course, a pest probably thinks he's helping by just putting himself there to be cleaned out. You ask any criminal, you just — you ask any criminal, "How could you help the police?" And he'll say, "Well, get caught. Be a criminal and get caught." And any time you inspect a crime, if you're capable of looking at anything or capable of observation at all, why, the fellow did everything but write his name in chalk across the middle of the desk and carve his initials and his home address and phone number, and so forth, on the dead man's chest.

I tell you, the police really shouldn't pride themselves too much on having caught criminals — not too much. Because the criminal that's on the reverse flow, which — the answer to the question that they're living is, "How would you help police?' Well, the best way to help police is totally puzzle them or totally amaze them so that they will then have to have more police, and so forth. Well, he does clever crimes. And of course they never catch him. And it sort of works out that the fellow who is trying to help police by getting caught gets caught and the person that's trying to help police by not getting caught, he doesn't get caught, usually, you see?

And I got a lot of friends that are cops. But I'll tell you, I've never quite let them in on what makes their statistics.

Of course, the policeman — the policeman serves best by just standing there. This is pretty, pretty simple. It gives everybody that's law-abiding confidence. They think it's all cared for.

Actually, a cop has his role in life, too. But it's a very funny thing about the police. I've seen police absolutely coming down on some poor criminal with a club until the criminal needed a handkerchief and the cop reaches in his pocket, you know, and he gives the criminal a handkerchief, you know. The dumb criminal sits there, see, and continues to just sob and need a handkerchief, or something like that. He doesn't go on and take the rest of the lineup. He doesn't say, "How can I fight this rap?" He doesn't ask any of the pertinent questions because he's already gotten a police officer to help him with a handkerchief.

"Now how do I get out of this place?" is just two or three questions up the line. He'll have cops helping him.

I remember one time I was arrested by mistake. They do that — they do that in the United States every once in a while. Somebody wanted me as a witness. They wanted me as a witness in a bankruptcy case of some kind or another. I was just a witness, an innocent bystander — factually an innocent bystander. But I must have had something about that particular area in some past life because the next thing I knew, why, the cops rushed in, you know, and practically shot everybody down and grabbed me and took me off and held me very carefully so that they would have this witness for this case.

And I said to them, "Don't you think this is sort of unfair?" And they didn't pay any attention to that. So I got kind of mean, in my own inimical, mean way. And when I finally appeared on the witness stand, I had the prosecuting attorney and the attorney for defense arguing with the judge that I shouldn't be required to be held more than the next fifteen or twenty minutes anyway because they wanted to help me. The judge helped me, too.

I sat down and gave some testimony. I said, "Well, I don't know anything about it. I was hardly there," and that was it. Boom.

But I had been treated to the fantastic sight, you see, of several high officials all flipping into this Help button. They did, one right after the other! They were all trying to help me. And they did. They did.

But you know, it must take some doing to prevent being helped. You know, a fellow really must work at it if he's never helped by society or the life around him.

Look at the — there's a pillar there and lights, and so forth. What do you suppose the pillar is doing?

Well, the pillar is helping you by holding the roof off your head. If the pillar wasn't there, why, the roof might fall in, you see? And the light? Well,

that helps you by letting you see things. And there's some electronics gear here and it assists you with the magnification of sound waves, and the floor keeps you from falling to the center of Earth. And some of you are wearing glasses; well, that keeps the air from your eyeballs.

But everywhere you look, boy, are you being helped! It is such an avalanche, such a landslide. There are fish out there swimming in the ocean right this moment that just have one idea in mind and that's to appear on your plate so you can eat.

Or maybe they don't have that idea in mind, but the fishermen do. And we start looking around at this world from a viewpoint of help and you can't avoid it. You're sunk.

And if a person can't be helped, he can't see the light, the light waves don't go straight for him; he can't hear these sound waves, has something wrong with his hearing; probably he doesn't appreciate the floor keeping him from falling to the center of Earth. All sorts of weird things are going on because he can't be helped.

If he can't be helped, believe me, this must be a funny-looking world, because that's all it's got in it.

You look up and down any given street and just spot things that are helping people and you'll lose count in an awful hurry. It's just too many.

Now basically, as long as things help you and you help things and you know who is doing what, you're all right. I mean, there can be any quantity of help. Who cares?

It's when you lose sight of who is helping who and when you start refusing help, when you start refusing to give help, when you start refusing to get help, that things start going wrong — when you start figuring out "there's something awfully wrong with this thing called help and I'd better resist it."

Well, give you an idea that Scientologists develop many peculiar characteristics. They only look peculiar from the norm at large because they respond easier on certain things or they're able to do certain things.

And there was a chap not too many years ago had two Scientologists at the table with him and all day long this fellow had been having a ball. He'd been playing a joke on everybody — he'd been playing this joke in the office and everybody — and he reached into his pocket and he took out his wallet and he took out two five-pound notes.

Now, all day long he'd been handing out these two five-pound notes to friends and says, "Here. Here's a five-pound note."

And you know, he'd had people sitting there looking, you know, saying, "What's that? What's that for?" You know? 'What's . . . what's that?" You know?

You know, they wouldn't be helped that much. But he had two Scientologists sitting at the table with him at lunch. You know they never gave me my cut? Horrible. But he lost his five-pound notes. He's possibly even here tonight. He'd tell you that's true.

But here is — here's the difference, you see? Now somebody protests against this machine society. Now, here's exactly what the machine society is doing to people: Machines, this stuff called MEST, is doing all of the help, doing all of it, from a viewpoint of somebody who's resenting machinery or something like that.

Don't for a minute think the housewife is totally sold on appliances. She's being moved out of a job. Up to a certain point, it's all right for metal to do all of the wash. You see, up to a point. But sooner or later she comes to realize that this makes her relatively unnecessary. It's moving her out of a position of helping anything, don't you see? That works that way with all machinery.

I imagine men probably don't find this out until the last moment. Somebody invents photogravure or something and the last fellows that were doing hand plates, they thought this photogravure was all right for a long time, and then they realized nobody wanted their plates and they were just expected to pull levers on a machine, or something like that; nobody wanted their help. And at the last moment, why, they joined some union that's fighting automation, see? Always too late.

What they've done is get fixated on this one channel of help, don't you see, and they resent something else taking their hat and wearing it; that's upsetting. The machinery is doing all of the help. And when the machinery gets up to a point where it does all the help in the society and even machines are repaired by machines so you don't even need this anymore — you see, you don't need a repairman anymore because machines repair machines — and when you get up to the point that all the thinking is done by machines … It's very amusing. The scientist today thinks that machine thinks, you know, and they're getting so dazzled on this, they think this is wonderful, you know? And they say, "Well, the machine thinks, you know? It thinks."

I had an awful argument with one, one day. I was — there was this huge electronic brain. I was standing around admiring it all and I was helping them by admiring all of their machinery. And they were telling me, "Now, you see" — I helped them right up to the point they got nasty. They said, "What you're working on is passé. We don't need smart people anymore, because we've got all this wonderful machinery and it does all the thinking and computing and calculating, and so forth. And the human brain is subject to error, only machines are right. The human brain — unable to compute things. These machines can compute in four or five minutes what a human brain would require four or five years to compute. So therefore man is no good and he ought to be abolished because the machines are all."

I said, "Well, that's very interesting." And I said, "I want to show you an experiment."

"Yeah?"

"Now, put in the machine an algebraic equation with a request for the answer. Now, you stand right there, put that in the machine. Will you do that?"

Guy did. The machine goes whirr, clang you know? Bells ring, tilt, you know, and all that. Answer comes back out. It was the cube root of 0 or something of the sort.

And I said, "There."

"Yeah," he says, "there! You got it." He said, "Look at what the machine did," and so forth.

I said, "Who fed it the data?" "Oh."

I hadn't realized at the time because I hadn't explored this thing called Help, but the one thing you can really get what you call comm lags on is Help.

I had shown this fellow that he had helped the machine. And he, of course, had been getting help from the machine so long that there was no reverse to the flow. And there being no reversed flow of any character, naturally, when I ask him to help the machine or note that he'd helped the machine, he became helpless.

What did the machine do? The machine was built by the mind, it served the mind, it took all of its orders from a person, it gave all of its assistance to a person. What was the machine?

Well, one thing it wasn't was superior to people. And yet this idea in the society is getting more and more prevalent: that the machine is all, that the product is all._

And all of a sudden, man sits around and realizes he's not needed anymore.

And watch it, because the moment large bodies of workmen find out they're no longer needed, comes the revolution. You can starve them, you can beat them, you can slice their paychecks in half, you can tax them, you can do almost anything to them. They're fantastic in the amount of abuse people will take. They're utterly fantastic — as long as it isn't a certain kind of abuse.

If you really want the revolution, just convince them they're no longer of any assistance. And if broadly the whole society were persuaded, you see, that it no longer was of any assistance — it was all being done by machinery, and so forth, and they were sort of a thing that wasn't necessary anymore and that was it — you'd have the whole nation in revolt.

I notice how husbands get revolts at home, for instance. They get them very easily and very naturally. And how wives get revolt outside the home.

Husband comes home and he looks around. The house is all clean, and so forth, and he can't see that any work has been done, however. So in various ways, he explains to his wife how she hasn't helped that day. After all, she has all the automatic equipment and machinery, and so forth. So she hasn't helped that day. So she counters around and convinces him that he hasn't been of any help either that day.

If you want to examine any argument, you'll find out it breaks down to this fundamental: both parties are trying to convince the other party that they aren't helping. Now if you carry that along far enough, somebody is liable to believe it. The moment they believe it, you really do get a splang!

We have a case right now of a race driver here in England who has parted from his wife. I have been amazed that some Scientologist hasn't shown up in his vicinity. Hasn't occurred to me to say anything about it, one way or the other, but I've just been rather amazed that something hasn't happened in that direction because it very often and routinely does happen across the world these days. We hear about them and hear about them.

You can't use the names of famous people, however, in order to spread it along and nobody has gone near him, so we won't worry about it. That's Stirling Moss. All right.

Look at this fellow, though. Look at this fellow. He even gets hurt and his wife doesn't come to his bedside, see? He's trying. You want to know why Stirling Moss is driving so badly? Well, if he got … She actually coached him. The last time he got hurt she said, "Well, he wasn't hurt bad enough for me to come to his bedside."

Now, after he gets out of this, what's he got to do? He's got to get that close, see, to the exact, correct amount, and she will come to his bedside, see?

But look at the knuckleheaded way he's working at it. He's not really going to win this thing, you see, by losing all the races and smashing into all the signboards, and so forth. That isn't the way he's going to do it at all.

He evidently started working on it a long time ago the other way. He was trying to convince her she didn't help.

I know if I were in that position, I would hold only myself guilty. It's quite a — quite interesting. You say, well, there isn't anything that a wife like that could do for the husband and he's in a dangerous profession and what help could she be, and so forth. Well, there's plenty of people in the stands to cheer. He's got mechanics, and so forth, to straighten up all the spokes and change all the wheels, and so forth. Well, how could she possibly help?

Well, if he was a Scientologist, he might or might not be a race driver. But for sure, a long time ago he probably would have started in along a program of "But Katie, the wheel doesn't work right until you've polished it. It's unlucky, you see? Unless you come down into the pit and polish up the steering wheel, it just don't drive."

I ran into a girl one time that had been divorced — show you how far this — how deep this sort of thing is. She'd been divorced for about four years. And one day — one day she came over to pick up a whole bunch of things in the way of papers, and so forth, in the office, and she emptied out this hatbox on the floor to make sure there was nothing in it, you know, and she turned it over again, and falling out of the hatbox were three or four little white phials — vials of chemicals of some kind or another.

And I said, "What are those?"

I said, "Well, what are they? What are they? This is very curious; they're strange looking chemicals, and so forth. Are you trying to blow something up?"

"Oh, no," she says. "Ooh, no, quite the contrary." She says, "You remember my former husband was an explosives engineer. And if I don't carry some of this around with me all the time, the stuff doesn't work for him."

They'd been divorced four years before. She was still making sure that the explosive exploded.

Well, you say, well, maybe it didn't keep them together, but as a matter of fact, it was he that was trying to part, not she. She was still trying to keep them together by carrying around this sort of thing. That's a token.

The Freudian token, by the way, comes under this heading. A Freudian token can be understood just that fast if you just ask somebody who it's helping. That's all you have to ask them. They'll explain to you and throw it away. It's just that quick.

Now, wherever — wherever you see the Help button gone, you've got a gone dog. You've got a very, very gone dog. That's the end of the road.

You might say everything or anything in the whole universe will help if it could be shown wherein or how. And that's something to remember.

Sometime when you're captured by bandits in northern Mongolia or something, or captured by police at the Earl's Court police station or something, when you're in the hands of barbarians, why, that's something to remember.

When some large industrialist is busily — some large industrialist is busily trying to hire you or not hire you or something of the sort, that's something to remember.

The one point of existing communication that will still remain there is the Help button.

And before you get anybody up to Interest, you have to handle the Help button. And you have to handle it pretty well. Discuss it with him. Discuss his failures of helping — that being the last line. Discuss how he could help things. Discuss these things on up the line. You'll eventually get into a discussion of control. Well, that's fine. You can discuss control with him and you'll find out that if you understand Control and he doesn't, that 000-whang, it straightens out awfully fast.

And then as far as communication is concerned, you can also straighten out some communication with him.

When you've straightened these things out — which you can do, oddly enough, in almost casual conversation with somebody — you'll have interest. And until you've straightened those things out, you won't have interest.

Now, control — somebody has been beaten and somebody told him he was being controlled. You know, you're being controlled: wham! wham! wham! — beating somebody around. Of course, the person isn't being controlled at all. That's complete miscontrol to kick somebody around to get him to do something. Well, you don't control things that way.

Those of us that have been in the military too long, why, we've gotten used to this and we think of it sort of a little bit as control, you know? But it's not control. Just try beating a car to make it go down the road. Doesn't work.

Communication — communication breaks off only when a person is afraid that he'll injure somebody with communication. He has injured too many people with communications.

There's things he's liable to say to people. There's things he shouldn't say to people. There's this — he just better not; he just better not. Better not talk to people. Better not talk to you. Well, why better not talk to you? It's what he could say to you that's important.

He'll finally find out that he can say things to you without searing your head off or something of the sort. You'd be surprised how nutty people are on the subject of communication.

If you want to find out — without finding out how goofy somebody is on the subject of communication, you can break through and make communication contact with people.

Somebody that walks into the office or wherever you work, or something like that, habitually and says nothing — you know, rrr-rrr-rm-bmm, sit down, and so forth — just start on a campaign of saying to them once each morning "Hello." Just say "Hello" once each morning — no matter what they do. Maybe two weeks, maybe three weeks, something like that, the fellow is liable to turn to you rather shyly and say, "Hello." And a short time later, he'll be in communication.

I know I was — used to run into a bus conductress every once in a while that was one of the orneriest-looking people you ever saw, you know? Just hate, hate, hate, you know? She was really mean, you know, really mean. And I used to ride down Holland Park Avenue and every time I'd turn around, I'd catch this same bus conductress, and so forth. So I said, "Well,-here is a project."

Yeah, yeah. No passenger tickets ever got collected after that, and I got on. The passengers got ignored. She kept telling me what a wonderful driver this particular driver was. As a matter of fact, he was a good driver. He was a sports driver who was driving a two-decker bus.

But that one was an amusing one and an interesting one to straighten out

But if you would be friends with the world, why, one of the best things you can do is to bring people up to a level of interest. Doesn't matter in what — bring them up to a level of interest in anything.

Well, how do you get them there?

Well, you have to kind of straighten out their Help button and straighten out their Control button, straighten out their Communication button and after that, why, they can see and look and be interested in things with a great deal of relief and relaxation. And it's a very good thing to do.

If all you knew about Scientology was that, you'd still make a go of it.

There's an interesting thing about it, however, is you start accumulating friends when you start doing things like this and unless you're prepared to have a lot of friends, I wouldn't advise it. Be a bad thing to do.

Well, wherever we look in life, we find there is — there are things we can help. There are things we can do. The only thing that goes wrong with this is not helping, but in not being able to.

We start — well, think of what you're mad about in the field of politics or the field of government, and so on. You're just not permitted to help, you feel. You can get awfully mad at those fellows. They never ask anybody; they go on and make their own cataclysms all by their lonesome.

Never occurs to them that they're making an awful lot of people mad at them, going on with these various things, but it's just that they deny any help. They don't, apparently, need any.

And I myself a long time ago woke up to a fact that whereas I needed lots of help, there were people around who were totally convinced that I could never be helped. They arrived at that idea. I didn't. And there were some around who were awfully mad at me because of it; they were furious with me. And I think the only reason maybe psychiatry or something like that gets mad at us, and so forth, is we just say they don't help.

There are awfully good people in Scientology and actually, if you look around, there are awfully good people in the world. But you have to look around to find this out and you have to do an awful lot of understanding,_ maybe, to find out how somebody is good, but if you look real hard you will make it.

Of course, there are people around that we just couldn't believe this about totally until we started processing them.

And then we would find out, probably, that the reason some of the worst villains alive had done some of the things that were done, they were trying to help something and it was so knuckleheaded that nobody else could understand it.

Yeah, there have been several fellows around like this — Napoleon, and so forth. I don't know who Napoleon was trying to help; can't figure that one out. I don't know who Hitler was trying to help. He must have been trying to help somebody, though. He sure missed the boat.

But where you find somebody missing the boat, then what they're missing the boat on is what they're trying to help; or what they're trying to do is totally incomprehensible, even to them.

Good night.