[Start of Lecture]

Thank you. Now, you may not have recognized it — you may not have recognized it as such, you see — but you are attending tonight a PE Course.

But a couple of little notes before I go on.

This PE Course is a very international affair, truthfully, very international. In fact, tonight as I stand here, I want to call to your attention that the international character of it is somewhat sullied, however.

You remember the king that was King of England when the United States revolutionized? That was George III, and if you look here carefully, I've brought back his head.

Well, the main difficulty that we're up against in teaching PE Courses is exactly that — their international character — because there are certain various things which intervene between public interest and sanity.

Now, I wouldn't mention any names, I wouldn't mention any cults, I wouldn't mention any activities at all.

However, the Roman Catholic church is an organization which has a great many people in its membership. And when we teach a PE Course to a large class that contains almost totally members of the Roman Catholic church, if we go heavily on the Roman Catholic church and give them a poor time, what happens? Next week we have no attendance, not because the people don't want to come, but because they've been told that they will be excommunicated and go to hell if they do! This makes it much more attractive, but they stay away.

Now, this international character is observable in small districts, in small countries and in big countries. And the handling of an international activity on a blunt, this-is-the- way-you-do-it basis is almost impossible because it does not take into account the randomity in existing areas.

Now, it would fascinate you to know that today Scientology is active in nineteen separate countries. You don't hear much about that. In some of these countries numerically the activity is very small, but wherever Scientology has gone it has continued to flourish. And particularly since PE Courses have been introduced, they have cut a swath that nothing else has ever cut, including early Christianity.

The mere fact of teaching a PE Course is evidently one of the most civilizing activities that has been conducted here for a couple of thousand years. Now, that's quite fascinating to know that.

So let's start right out at the beginning of What is the goal of a PE Course?

Internationally the goal is to bring about a superior civilization in which peace can exist on earth. The modus operandi by which this is done is education in the actual, simple facts of existence. And a PE Course is equally welcome to the government of Ireland, it is welcome to the government of England, to the government of France, and oddly enough to an Arabian government and the Israel government. It is welcome to the British nation and to the Indian nation. Wherever you look you'll find these people ready to tear each other's throats out and both sides accept a PE Course, the data of which is contained in Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought. And they both accept these tenets as good roads and good weather, and here we are.

The Republicans, the Democrats, the Communists, the Socialists might also accept this, not then on a national basis, but a political basis.

However, I'm afraid that I have to report that we're not too successful in educating commissars. We are not too successful in educating high priests — and other psychiatrists. We are not too successful in educating people with a pitch. Get that.

The people with a pitch conceive that you are going to subtract from their particular MEST — which is what people are to them, MEST — some of their vacuum lines. And I always tell them quite frankly, "We're not even vaguely interested in disrupting your control of your congregation or your populace. If you were to come and study this, you would see exactly how it is not likely to disrupt your control." And they fall for it and they come and they get all confused.

Scientology today is an effective mission in the Western world, highly effective. And the effectiveness of it is on the level of populace which, in the workaday world, runs the actual wheels of industry, commerce, agriculture and loafing in the various nations of the world.

We have an enormous appeal to the general public, an enormous appeal. But if you think we have an enormous appeal to intelligentsia, then your PE Course is going to fail. All right, let's not generalize on this, let me settle this problem once and for all of vested interests and pitching the substance matter of a PE Course so that people with a pitch won't start pitching at you.

You have to take the materials of Scientology and carefully edit them in your lectures so as not to start tromping on toes in the immediate front yard of some dinosaur or mammoth or overgrown bulldog.

You run it, then, good roads and good weather. Everybody's in favor of those — good roads and good weather.

We don't, then, start talking in Ireland about the eighth dynamic, nor do we talk too much about the seventh dynamic.

Every night at 69 Merrion Square South in Dublin, Eire, somewhere between twenty-five and sixty Irish assemble and are taught a PE Course. Good roads and good weather. There is the first PE Course. That was the first point of origin of PE Courses. It originated because an HCO — a Hubbard Communications Office — was being established in Dublin and it had a great deal of extra space.

At first the government was very wroth, it was very upset, it was very mad that anybody should come in. And then it sent one of its "best" investigators — some fellow way below minus zero — and boy, he thought that course was wonderful. And he went back and he told his superiors that, and several of them came too. The course had the cleanest bill of health that was ever written up on a pratique. The government loves it.

People come from far cities in Ireland into Dublin and spend the whole week just so they can go evenings to the PE Course. For a little while the course staggered. Its administration was far less than optimum. The teaching was good, everything was good. The recruiting was wonderful but the administration was so poor that a person walking in the front door could not get registered. And if he did get registered, the registration card got lost. They lost more people there.

I went from Ireland down to Spain, and during the ensuing ten weeks the entire PE Course fell to pieces, until we sent over a very fine, bright young man — a young Englishman — to take over and take charge of it. And he had it back up into solvency and so on in a matter of three weeks.

We found many things. We piloted this course from its tiniest beginnings on through and developed various things about it. We developed it in such a way that it would continue to reach in to the workaday world of Ireland.

Some of our Instructors, for instance, on occasion have talked to business colleges in Ireland — just gone over and given them a part PE Course, and then sold a number of Advanced Courses. They've even received pay from business colleges of a guinea a lecture to talk to the students of the business college. Very great interest, very great interest.

Ireland realizes that efficiency is desirable, it has so little of it. It really does have very little of it. The way an Irishman is accustomed to seeing a post filled adequately and its efficiency raised is to put five more Irishmen on the same post. That's their standard method of operation. And as a result, the American College of Personnel Efficiency — which is the name of the Irish operation — is a tremendous success. It is a financial success. It pays its own payrolls. It takes care of its own activities very nicely.

It is running now in a direction which quite interestingly forecasts a change in the Irish civilization. I'm not now just drawing a longbow, it's already being felt. If a taxi driver around town hasn't heard of the American College of Personnel Efficiency, other taxi drivers would think he was stupid, which he is.

Scientology, of course, is an Irish science developed by an Irishman. That'll inevitably become the legend. Probably it was a fellow by the name of Saint Patrick who drove all the psychiatrists out of Ireland. That's the way these things evolve.

But it is factually so that the civilization of Ireland, if it changes radically, will have changed because of the PE Course.

What we are doing abroad today is much greater than what we are doing in the United States of America. We are bidding up toward the principal goodwill American activity abroad. It's very fascinating. Because we don't talk about being an American activity. We talk about being a local activity, accidentally associated with an American of — I don't know, pick your country — of Arabian descent. I have acquired more ancestors! My only European ancestry actually, however is, actually — just to be absolutely factual about it — French, Scotch, English and Irish. Anyway…

The truth is that the only thing you can export with success is an idea. It has to be a good idea, and you can't export the idea that the only country on earth is the country exporting the idea. A chap by the name of Schicklgruber tried this and there were several bodies lying around at the end of the trial. We can't teach the Scot — I think you'll recognize this as an impossibility — we can't teach the Scot that the English is a superior beast. We can't do that. The Scot will not buy this.

Neither can we teach the Englishman that the Irishman is the superior entity. We can't teach the French that the only good ideas there are, are Irish. Now, France might be able to teach the rest of the world that the only place there are any fashions are in Paris, but this is a different thing. That's simply teaching a single facet of superiority. No country buys the total superiority of another nation.

We're very fond of believing that in America — that the exportation of the superiority of the American is a possibility. We believe that is a possibility. Actually, Americans are very acceptable abroad — well, not American government officials. I mean Americans. There is a difference. Don't think there isn't a difference. The people who hang around the embassies and — or the commercial attach�s, and so forth — actually only function in many foreign countries simply by the grace of American businesses in those countries. They would never have a commercial report if it were not for the local manager of the Ford agency. He has all of the lines.

The American government is too big. It has too many guns. It has too much money. It's a colossus. It's something to be afraid of.

South Africa, for instance, could not ask a reasonable favor from the United States of America, because there would be strings attached, they say. But man, can they ask favors of an individual American. Now, that's an interesting difference, isn't it?

So an American abroad today has a tendency to be — well, he's Gary Cooper or somebody, you know. They know who Americans are. And the American government, however, that's something that lives on another planet.

Give you some kind of an idea of the impossibility of exporting the superiority of any one being — give you just a little idea of this: A bunch of friends of mine up around Coppermine, Lord knows where up to the north; you go just a couple of feet further north than Coppermine and you bump your nose flat against the North Pole. There are Eskimos who occasionally descend — despite the cautions of the Northwest Mounted Police — into cannibalistic activities. And of course the police up there are fairly reasonable about it because they realize a man that far north gets hungry.

But these chaps used to use a word which was of some interest to me. I won't try to pronounce it for you because Eskimo is much more complex than any other language I know of on earth, and I don't think there's a white man alive that knows it. He knows some of it, but he doesn't know the language called "Eskimo."

And they rather protect this language by its complexity, and so on. And I'd hear them using this word that was something like glumb-bu-glm-glumb-bu-glm, and "That fellow over there, he's glumb-bu-glm-bu-glm," and so on. And I finally got curious because I noticed they were pointing to people who loafed and who did nothing: people who didn't hunt, people who didn't support their families, people who did nothing, who had to be waited on if anything happened at all.

And so I said, "What does glumb-bu-glm-glumb-bu-glm mean?" And they said, "White man."

We have done something very, very successful. This talk is not about, you understand, the international overseas activity of Scientology. I'm just pointing out something to you. We're doing something very successful. We are not exporting the vast superiority of the American or an American technology. We are not using any of the controls which would normally be expected to be used by an American organization to impress other people how great and mighty and wise it was.

Our people abroad and your fellow Scientologists abroad are of the nations, for the most part, that they inhabit. I admit that I have to tell these people every now and then to be loyal to their own governments. I have to tell them, "You're not a citizen of Scientology. You're a citizen of Lebanon." It's a difficult thing for them to get through their heads. They say, "All right, we'll act that way if you say so, Ron."

But it is a test of a PE Course. It's a test, a terrific test. In America today we are being very careful not to permit ideological teachings to be broadcast far and wide. We confine them exclusively to our best schools. We teach communism practically nowhere outside the university. We are not a people bombarded by a great number of ideologies.

It's very, very fascinating that foreign nations are not in this category today. The vast sums appropriated by the Kremlin to teach people communism would stagger you. They have agent provocateurs and educators and experts afloat in all of these countries who are doing a terrific job. They're terrific trained men. They have literature, they've got the know-how, they know all of the appeals, they've got experience. After all, they had a tremendously successful revolution once. They're still swell- headed about it. They're still appropriating money for this educational program the length and breadth of the world. We don't let them in here, but that doesn't mean they don't exist abroad.

You would be amazed at the number of political philosophies and educational philosophies being taught in Spain, for instance, a very great country.

Communism is taught as an everyday occurrence. At least half of the people are full-blown, dyed-in-the-wool, utterly convinced communists. They have anarchists, completely different from communists. Communists only depend on anarchists to get a foothold. They have republicans — the popular, modern philosophy of Spain since it won. And they have this and they have that, and they have this and that. And you never saw so many things or so many people that were so anxious to teach people about things.

And in that kind of an atmosphere a PE Course is the one that wins! Now, if that isn't a test of something, I'd like to know it! We're even doing better than the Irish National Educational Program. They insist that everybody learn Irish, the native language. They insist they listen to Irish on the radio. They insist that they sing Irish songs and learn to play harps. Suzie bought a harp for me because she wanted me to be in practice if I got knocked off! But when we looked at the harp very carefully we found it had been made in Wales and there were no harps available for sale in Ireland. It looks to me like that government program wasn't so good.

And yet millions are spent on that program by experts in the government. And how many pounds get spent on the PE Course down at 69 Merrion Square? Oh, about fifty pounds a week is its total payroll and outlay. And it's successful, and these others aren't.

Now, I am talking about countries that are a long way away from the United States, and each one of them has its peculiarities and each one of them has its problems.

But these things are a long way away from America. I wonder what it is in America that a PE Course (1) has to step around, and (2) can help. I wonder if these things vary from district to district and area to area. And I wonder if it might not be true that Americans are slightly less observant of the exact problems on which they're sitting in their own particular district and the things which they themselves have to avoid to keep from stepping on toes. I wonder if that could be the case.

It's very easy to look a long way and see much. It is sometimes hard to look right here and see anything. This has a great deal in it. Because it's an oddity that Scientology and PE Courses are going better abroad than they are at home.

Now, it'd be very easy to assign this to the peculiarities of the American nature. Be very, very easy to do that. You'd just get rid of the whole thing, dump it in the ditch and you wouldn't have to worry about it anymore.

I'm afraid though, that isn't true. The only thing peculiar I find out about the American nature is how peculiarly similar it is to any other human nature. The only peculiar thing I find out about America as a whole is the fact that its natural resources and ability to produce have far outstretched other nations, at the expense perhaps of some of its culture. At the expense of some of its culture.

You find in Spain, for instance, oddly enough, better worker morale, better general morale than you find in America, just in general. Nobody ever retires in Spain. If you were to tell somebody that they had to retire or something they'd think you were crazy. "What's this new idea you're trying to import?" We wouldn't even be able to sell it in a PE Course. Spain has never been indoctrinated with the idea that there's a virtue in loafing. Now, that's a great peculiarity because we — close to the Latin countries — rather believe in this oddity of the Mexican with his hat down over his face, sleeping against a wall as a national symbol because we see it on everything. Boy, that's not Spain.

It's quite amazing you know. You've got your cookery, you've got your saddle harness, trappings, most of your ideas of conveyance, all from Spain. You can't even buy pepper in Spain. It's very difficult; a specially-imported item — and you're peculiar because you're trying to buy pepper. It has no … Spain hasn't anything in common with Latin America. I don't know how come we ever tied them together. They don't even both speak Spanish. You ever hear any Argentinean? Yeah, it's a real interesting language, but it's not Spanish.

Anyway. Here's the Spanish nation: it hasn't learned yet that it shouldn't work. Here's the Italian nation: the same thing. The French nation is exactly on a reverse polarity: they've never heard of work. The Irish nation have heard of it too well, and the English nation are willing to learn about it if there was anybody in the management characteristics that would steer them in that direction.

And what happens is in all of these countries the various activities are varied from the American view, of course, but not at all dissimilar. Not at all dissimilar, their variations. But you haven't wild differences.

There's nothing peculiar about an American. There's nothing really strange about his ideas of work. He just has ideas on the subject. But there is something strange about his ideas of education that are so strange it's a wonder any of us can read and write. It has become the most peculiarly complicated subject about which nobody knows anything in the world.

We have educated with such ardure, with such thoroughness, at such a fantastic tone level, that our children today come home from school and ask us how to spell "cat." They're only, you see, in the seventh grade.

Look at their writing. Schoolboy writing I thought was bad enough, but in the last decade it no longer compares favorably with copperplate writing of 1860. It no longer compares favorably with that. In fact, you can't read it at all.

We do have, temperamentally perhaps, no wild difference between ourselves and the nations which gave us our genetic lines. But we do have some oddities on the educational line, and it may be these more than anything else which hold us up a bit in PE work.

We have been made to resist school, and in foreign nations it is considered a privilege to go to school. Go to school, go to jail: that's about the same thing to an American boy, not much difference. And you ask him to come to "class" to take a "course" and he doesn't respond in droves. He's been there.

So I would look forward to a longer program of civilization in America than in Europe, mostly because of this training factor and no other.

So it means that a PE Course in the United States would be successful, but not as successful per capita unless we carefully review the exact conditions of the environment in which we are working, and discover (1) what factors we should avoid, and (2) what we can really help. And maybe we've never studied those in America. Maybe with a long view I see them much more clearly in Ireland or England or Lebanon. Maybe.

Maybe there are things that we should avoid in America that we're too American to avoid. Could be, could be. But there's possibly something in this.

I think the PE Course in America has to be tailored up to fit the American scene like nothing has ever fit it. I think that is still, in the main, to be built as a technology. I think we're starting from scratch. But I know what our entrance-point is. Our entrance-point is the education of educators. I know that is our entrance-point. The education of educators.

Until they are educated it is highly unlikely that a long- distance program of American education would be entirely successful. So in the interim — in the interim — we have to dub in another program, at the same time educating educators.

I don't know if you realize it completely, but the first Logics - - The Logics, actually, all of them, of Dianetics — are the science of education. Those are the axioms of education. With a few more that immediately define education, no more than that, we have it made. No difficulty should accrue then; we do have this business of education down.

But the trouble with education in America is it entails the word school. And it's very probable that an individual would take much more kindly to something that avoided this, avoided school. It's very probable.

But if you're going to avoid school, how will you run a PE Course? Because it's a training course. I don't stand here and tell you I've got this problem solved. I tell you we're just at the entrance of a whole series of problems.

Our people can at least read. That isn't true of many of the people taking PE Courses outside the United States. Well, if they have this, that's quite an advantage. That's quite an advantage. We should make use of it.

Exactly how we get over this hump of you say, "Come to school," and the fellow backs up at light speed, I don't know. It may not even be true that people are avoiding school. It may be true that they only avoid a certain type of school. If we found this out exactly, then we would know what school they were avoiding and not be it.

If we would look over the enrollment figures of adult education and find out what subject was most heavily subscribed to in polytechnical colleges, adult education in adult night schools, adult high school — if we got the most heavily attended class and said the PE Course was that, we'd have it, temporarily, as long as we didn't say "class" too loudly.

I have even thought of coaching people so that they would know how to go to school. That's a quiet entrance-point: Run a coaching course so that they could study something.

But it is an entrance level. Now, we could take the United States, now that we've come home on this — you know, we've been looking abroad, now we're looking at the United States — we could take the United States itself and consider it to have certain problems which were common denominators to all the United States. And then we would have to look at the individual areas statewide.

I myself have lived in Connecticut. A young writer, I lived in Connecticut. And I know the (quote) "Connecticut native" (unquote) is quite different from the Arkansas native. I know that for sure. There's quite a difference. The ferocious independence of the Connecticuter and the professional indolence of the Arkansaser are not compatible. Both however have their very good points and their charm. Therefore, it probably would not be possible to lay down something that would be good for all districts and areas of the United States. It may be, you know, that the United States is actually a number of nations held together by common transportation and television.

And the first thing that I would teach anybody who was going to start a PE Course would not be to Q-and-A with what I did. I looked abroad and went abroad. But remember, I organized and taught PE Courses abroad.

Now, what I'm asking you not to Q-and-A with is this: You're in San Francisco, and you model a PE Course exactly for Denver and teach it in San Francisco. Now, I'm not going to model a PE Course for Dublin and try to teach it in New York, because there would only be the New York police force that would attend it.

Why is this?

It's because there must be a common meeting ground in the R of the ARC triangle before A and C can take place. There must be an agreement between the course and its area, its administration and the administration of the area, before it can occur as a communication medium. There must be.

We almost emptied a course in Ireland on Tuesday night because on Monday night we had a young English girl — a very, very brilliant auditor — lose her head while lecturing. And having been cautioned very carefully not to mention the Roman Catholic church, she promptly explained to everybody that they ought to be "Angelicans" because she was one. Have you got that? And we emptied the course. I mean, that was that. That was the end of that week.

Well, the funny part of it is that when you're teaching a PE Course, if you don't ever mention the fellow becoming a Scientologist, it becomes inevitable. You're not superman, then, asking somebody else to be you. You're asking somebody else to be better what he already is. And when he learns how to do this, he is of course a Scientologist.

Now, I can tell you some of the blunders that can be made. And one of those blunders is to continue to appeal to the intelligentsia — to publish in intelligentsia media.

You publish and disseminate to people who do things. The intelligentsia only talks about people who do things. That's the definition of the intelligentsia. They're people who talk about people who do things. You got it?

Now, this is very interesting. Many people consider themselves intelligentsia who aren't. That's just a difference of definition of intelligentsia.

Scientology already contains a very top strata of brilliance. I know some Scientologist who is very low on the critical level looks around and he says, "Oh, no. My God, don't tell me that I am looking at the most intelligent upper five thousand of the ten thousand most intelligent people in the world. Don't do that." Well, I won't do that. I won't say it. Don't have to, because it's a fact. It happens to be. It happens to be.

And amongst Scientologists there are many who have thought of themselves quite a bit as members of the intelligentsia. They have thought of themselves in this category. They are the smarter people, and so forth, and they look around.

But I'll tell you a singular difference. Their friends, and so forth, aren't doing anything. Their friends aren't Scientologists. They merely talk about it. That's true, isn't it? This rather singles them out of the pack, doesn't it? It certainly does.

I don't tell you this for any other reason than that I consider it factual that the Scientologists today do represent a terrific upper strata.

Of course, I could say about myself like Fred Allen said about himself right after the war. He came on his program and he explained that due to the war all of the great comedians had fallen away, so as to leave him on a pinnacle. Maybe that's the case with Scientologists, you see. It could be. It's undoubtedly the case with me, you see?

Because as far as mathematics are concerned, I can remember some old boys way back when, see — in terms of logic and extrapolation and a few other things — that could think so many rings around me, I felt like I'd been played a game with by being ringed with pretzels, you know? It was just, wow! You know, whoa! I haven't seen them around. I just haven't seen them around lately. It isn't that I'm seeing fewer people. Something has happened, somehow.

And maybe something's happened that leaves us, not on a pinnacle, but certainly a plateau. Got the idea? Evidently something has. I wouldn't know or attempt to plumb the exact chemistry and reaction of human beings throughout the world today, but I do know that as we look around, we find the strata of leadership less and less apparent. What they would call a wise action today would have been considered a rather stupid one a decade or two ago. You see, there's something at work here.

And we, being the brighter people, knowing more about it here and there, have a great tendency to confuse brightness with class. And you find the brighter people are not necessarily members of one or another class. Remember that. That's a very important thing.

You will not get all of your PE Course attendance from the lowest laboring level or the highest social strata. You will get the brightest ones in the lowest and the brightest ones in the highest. You get the brightest ones.

The people who simply sit there and read your ad are not as good as the people who sit and read your ad and wish they knew more about it.

The people who sit there and read your ad and wish they knew more about it are not as good as those who sit there and read your ad, wish they knew more about it and call you up. Those people are capable of reaching a bit.

But they're not as well-off as the people who sit there and read your ad, wish they knew more about it, call up, make an appointment, come down and see you and go through the course.

That is a mechanism of superselection in itself. That's quite a mechanism. And it means that you eventually wind up with the brighter ones, no matter what social strata they're from. You always do, by the way. The brighter ones and the braver ones.

So there really isn't any hope of running through a PE Course at once a totality of any given section of the population. It would almost be catastrophic if you did so. The people who will reach that far are capable of leadership, and when you're through with them, they're fitted for it. Got the difference? They're capable of it and they're fitted for it. And that's why it goes rapidly.

But I feel that there must be some small flaw in the way we have begun to approach it so far in America on this selectivity, because we have not followed such an exact pattern. But already we have learned that it does no good in America to advertise. It doesn't do any good to advertise.

We get everybody we get by word of mouth. You understand, I'm merely talking on percentiles. Something like three out of fifty or three out of twenty-five come in because of ads. That is our average for all over the country.

We must then, to start a PE Course, do this: We must find a strata of people who can reach, reach them, get them to reach, and then know that they will reach others. And then we will be a success. And that is in essence the formula of recruiting a PE Course. And if you avoid the pet blasphemies and bugaboos of an area — discover them and avoid them — and if you find out what in an area is most in need of help and has the most interest centered on it in an area, and parallel that, your PE Course will be a tremendous success.

America ran out of frontiers a long time ago, until we found another one, America.

Thank you.