Human Evaluation is borne out of the fact that if you know some of the basic fundamentals of human thought you can then predict behavior.
Somebody mentioned to me that this is the thing that people went into psychology classes in college to learn and were terribly disappointed never to have discovered. That is rather true. I have heard this complaint rather consistently about psychology, and as a matter of fact, psychology is not in very good repute in the society because of this. It gives those of us in Dianetics a difficult time sometimes because we say, “We know so-and-so and so-and-so about psychology,” and people say, “But psychology is a lot of bunk! It doesn’t work. Therefore Dianetics couldn’t work either because it is also about the human mind.” This wonderful piece of “logic” is something we run into all too often.
I have absolutely nothing against psychology. As a matter of fact, if I had half as much against psychology as psychology has against Dianetics, I would be a raving lunatic.
I am going to lay out for you the prime principles, the basic tenets, with which we are working in Human Evaluation. The whole subject of Human Evaluation, of course, derives from an understanding of human behavior, which is something human beings have been rather curious about in the last few thousand years.
Any time you meet a human being and become associated with him socially, it would be of some benefit to know, by looking at him and talking to him for a couple of minutes, what this individual has in store for you in his friendship with you. It would be of some small benefit to know whether or not he is going to run off with your wife or borrow your car and not come back with it, or whether or not he will be a good friend who will loan you that hundred bucks when you need it.
Now, in the business sphere where we have a high level of competition and contest and so on, Human Evaluation goes into two levels: one, the people with whom we do business as a business, and two, the people we employ to take care of our business.
It is very important, when one is dealing consistently or means to deal consistently with somebody in business, to have some forewarning of whether this individual is going to be something less than kind in his dealings and to have some idea in advance whether or not his word is to be trusted. If you have noticed, most business failures — those that are not founded upon sheer ineptitude — come about when trust is mistakenly placed in another human being. It would be very nice to know how much you have to be on your guard with somebody when you are doing business with him.
A banker, for instance, is subjected to a continual running fire of people saying “I want a nice little short-term note here of, we, five thousand dollars.” He has to try to select out of the mass of people coming in front of his desk, one right after the other, the person who will pay it back. The banker has been stung so often, through an inability to know, that he has had to go around Robin Hood’s barns to test this. He says, “How much collateral have you got?”
You say, “Well, I’ve got so-and-so and so-and-so.”
And he says, “You want to borrow five thousand dollars? All right. You’ve got five thousand dollars in the bank. Now, if you will leave your five thousand dollars in the bank, we’ll loan you the five thousand dollars.”In other words, bankers become very “trusting” through an inability to forecast who is going to repay a loan. It would be very interesting to a banker to know with considerable accuracy who would and who would not repay a loan.
In the matter of running a business, it becomes of the greatest interest to an employer who will be what in his business staff. He has a hard time with it.
The various applications of Human Evaluation are valuable, then, wherever you have two human beings newly met and without past experience with each other. If you had a method of establishing a few years of experience with a human being in a few minutes, it would have some value — in particular, on the subject of employers and employees.
A few years ago my uncle, Elbert Hubbard, dashed out the article “A Message to Garcia.” It was written one night after supper in a single hour. The New York Central Railroad, after they had seen this in one of Elbert’s magazines, ordered a hundred thousand copies of it and distributed it to their employees. Then their employees evidently kept distributing this to other people, so they ordered half a million copies. By that time Andrew Carnegie and a few others had stepped in and begun to order this little pamphlet, until finally there were millions and millions of them distributed throughout America in this fashion. It demonstrates that there is a small amount of anxiety on the subject of trying to find a good man to employ. He writes:
In all this Cuban business, there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion.
When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba — no one knew where. No mail nor telegraf message could reach him. The President must secure his co-operation and quickly.
What to do?
Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia.
How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapt it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traverst a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.
The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?”
By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing — “Carry a message to Garcia!”
General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias.
No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man — the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant.
You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office — six clerks are within call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio.”
Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes sir,” and go do the task?
On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:
Who was he?
Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia? Was I hired for that?
Don’t you mean Bismarck?
What’s the matter with Charlie doing it? Is he dead? Is there any hurry?
Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for?
And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to find Garcia — and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.
Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Correggio is indext under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself.
And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place.
Advertise for a stenografer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate — and do not think it necessary to.
Can such a one write a letter to Garcia? “You see that book-keeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory. “Yes, what about him?” “Well, he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main street, would forget what he had been sent for.” Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “down-trodden denizen of the sweat-shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it all often goes many hard words for the men in power.
Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-well’s to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer — but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best — those who can carry a message to Garcia....
Elbert was bitter. The fact of the matter is, the tremendous expense to a business in running the business as a testing crucible for employees, if added up, would probably make a lot of businessmen faint. Not only that, but the employees themselves — since there is no real division between management and labor (there is practically no such thing as “labor”; it is just management of a lot and management of a little) — the people trying to do their jobs in the plant, are also very definitely affected by using the whole business as a crucible for testing employees.
Now, the more employees you hire, the harder it is to keep a line, until you work up to that epitome — or, you might say, that climax — of all nonsense, the U.S. government. You can even get that ridiculous.
You can have all sorts of beautiful tests — civil-service tests that say “Do you have a high-school diploma? Do you have a college diploma? Have you ever been in jail? Are you married? Do you have any children?” You put all this down on a government employment record and they look it all over and say, “Yep, hire him,” or “Don’t hire him,” or something of the sort.
These efforts to discover data about an individual cost a great deal of money, they cost a great deal of time and they sometimes cost a business its efficiency to a point where a business will fail which might otherwise have succeeded — all because the business itself had to be used as a testing ground.
Now, every time you bring in somebody, you might have the feeling you are hiring a pig in a poke, but you put him on the job. Three months later you happen to wonder if that fellow is doing well, so you go and look and find out the whole job has collapsed and has stopped a whole assembly line. That becomes very serious, doesn’t it? That is only one aspect of it.
In the business of counseling, in the business of trying to help and aid one’s fellow man, it is very important to know who and what one is trying to aid. For instance, in giving understanding or philanthropy to individuals, every so often on the assembly line there is a deadbeat, a professional desirer of sympathy. Some of these people seeking aid are very, very deserving and some of them are not. How do you tell the difference?
How do you tell when a man is telling the truth? Is there a way of knowing whether or not a man is telling the truth without subjecting him to a lie detector, which has a limited usefulness and to which he very often objects? And it is very difficult in the ordinary course of human affairs to go around carrying one of these lie detectors under your arm; it weighs several pounds. But there is a way. There is a way of telling this.
The whole subject of Human Evaluation is something man has been trying to reach for a long time. In looking over the books of the ancients and the ideas that were handed down before things were written, I found that man has been interested in trying to discover this for forty-five hundred years. I am not trying to tell you that it was suddenly discovered all at one fell swoop. There was a gradual accumulation of information over those forty-five hundred years.
Trying to find what was important in what had been accumulated was very important. Organizing that with which people had worked in the past — organizing it, evaluating it and putting it together — paid off, and it paid off in the form of Dianetics. It took a long time.
Sigmund Freud had the idea that all you had to do was clear up somebody’s libido and he would begin living. But Freud, in a rather heartbroken little memorial written about 1937, said, “Psychoanalysis: terminable or interminable and in that little monograph he stated that his hopes were dead; it had not worked.
He needn’t have felt so badly about it. Naturally, he had been up against the American Medical Association and probably the American Psychiatric Association, the “Association for the Rehabilitation of Cockeyed Alienists” and the “Association for the Suppression of Associations Which Try to Advance Something to Associate About”! In short, he had been pushing a lot of opposition in front of him, and he didn’t have any tool with which to clean this up so he could keep his own enthusiasm. So by about 1937 he was dead on the subject.
But he had contributed something enormously important: Working with Breuer, l he had found out that if you could get a fellow to remember back to his earliest times and get him to remember certain things he would get better. Freud didn’t know, and he eventually admitted he didn’t know, why a person got better. But he got better sometimes.
A fellow by the name of Charcot, around 1832, was experimenting with hypnotism. He found out there were some strange conditions of the mind by which you could look at somebody fixedly and they would go unconscious.
There were many little things like this back along the track. Assembled, those things become Dianetics.
In 1930 I knew a fellow by the name of Commander Thompson. I had known him before, actually; he was a friend of the family. He had studied under Freud in Vienna. Old Commander Thompson trained cats. He had a cat named Psycho, a black cat with a crooked tail, and he had Psycho trained to sit up and do other things. He taught me how to train cats — I have never had any luck with it, but he taught me how.
He got me very interested in the subject of the human mind. He taught me why it is that somebody starts to say one thing and says something else — but the something else the person has said is a clue to his character or what he is trying to hide — and other interesting gimmicks like this. That is just a gimmick; it has no vast importance.
I never got inside a high school; I went into engineering school first off. My father had said, “You’re going to engineering school,” and I had said, “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m going to write.” So I went to engineering school! In engineering school they had an interesting little subject called atomic and molecular phenomena, and there were those of us in that class who believed that the mystic and secret forces and powers of the universe were somehow hidden in atomic and molecular phenomena. There were fellows there — wild-haired, wild-eyed radicals, these students — who believed that a few pennyweights of some mysterious element, exploded in a certain fashion, could wipe out an enormous city.
Of course, nothing would ever come of this; naturally nothing like that could happen! Not until Hiroshima would anybody really believe it. Up until that time, the atom bomb was a science-fictioneer’s dream. Then all of a sudden the bombs were dropped on Japan. That validated the men who had struggled forward from 1930 on the track of atomic and molecular phenomena up to the atom bomb.
I was very radical — even more radical than they were. I said, “Atomic and molecular phenomena is very interesting. It must have something to do with the energy of life. Somewhere in here is life energy. We have described it somehow and the description is here, but we don’t know quite where. Now, it’s possible that with this new branch of nuclear physics we might be able to locate the energy of life.”
And people said, “Oh, heavens! Everybody knows everybody is dead. What do you mean, ‘the energy of life’?”
So I went to work in the laboratory, and I found out that there was no way to store memory. Atomic and molecular phenomena did not describe an energy which would store in the neurons and act as memory.
The latest theory on this was a Viennese theory which was fantastic. This theory was in a very thick book — all in German, with adverbial and participial clauses appended to the genders ! — and it described how the mind thinks up a thought or sees something or feels something or hears something, and then stores it in a hole in a punched protein molecule.
Now, a protein molecule is so small you can’t see it in a microscope, but he figured out that there were ten holes in one of these molecules and that each hole took about what he called a thousand shots. In other words, a thousand memories were stored in each hole in one of these little protein molecules. That would make ten thousand per molecule, and there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons. That is a big number: if you started writing that number, it would practically cover a wall, column after column. So there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of neurons, and these memories store at the rate of ten thousand specific memories per molecule. This Viennese had done the whole job all the way through except for one thing: he had never looked over into atomic and molecular phenomena and found out what wavelength was.
There is no wavelength that small. If it were that minute, it would be so far above the range of ultra light that it would be unimaginable — something like how far away is an island universe? It is so microscopic that it will not register on any known instrument. Therefore the theory is suspicious.
But accepting the theory, believing that this theory works, we figure this thing up and we find out that the human brain does not have enough storage space to store the memories of three months. And those are not the minor observations of three months, but just the major observations of three months.
This was a mathematical job. I guess the fellow could speak very beautiful German, but he couldn’t do very good mathematics.
That was the ne plus ultra of all the theories of memory storage and human energy. I took it around and showed it to Dr. William Alanson White. l He was head of St. Elizabeth’s, where they sent the naval officers after they had received their fifth contradiction from the Navy Department And old Dr. White said, “Gosh!”
I said, “Well, what do you think about it?”
“Well, naturally, not very much is known about structure.”
This and erstatement practically blew my stack. And I realized suddenly for the first time that I had been looking for something all this time that I thought people knew about! There was a psychology department, there were doctors — all these people certainly must know. They all acted like they did! After Dr. White gave me this blank stare and so forth and sort of a “So what?” and “This is just another puzzle on top of all these other puzzles,” I went over to the psychology department and I said, “What are you guys doing over here?”
“Oh — ha! You see this electric plate? Well, if a rat runs along here and he hasn’t been fed for three days — pop!”
I said, “Gee, that’s fascinating. Now, what do you know about memory storage?” “Erk! Well, uh . . . look, this rat . . .” (Very anxiously they went back to the rat.)
I found out in the course of about a week, actually, that I was Alice in Wonderland. I didn’t much like being Alice in Wonderland and I went on trying against all odds to believe that there was some rationale in the field of epistemology, human thought and human behavior. In spite of all contradictions, I clung to this belief.
I went out of school. Nobody was interested in this fact that nobody knew; they accepted the fact that it wasn’t well known. I went into the field of writing. My father had said, “You go to engineering school,” and I had said, “No, I want to write.” So I went to engineering school and professionally I wrote in an effort to support these researches, because I kept right on researching.
My wife would tear her hair out-by the handfuls when she got bills for books — a bill for $150 for “A Discourse on the Mystical and Spiritual Principles of the Magi, rare” — and she would say, “Gosh sakes!”
“Well,” I would say brightly, “I wrote a novelette last week and that brought in a hundred and forty dollars.” There was a lot of my money going out along this line, accumulating this material; I kept on studying and trying to figure it out.
It took me till about 1938 to find out that the first thing one had to know was a dynamic principle of existence that one could agree on, and maybe one could take off from there and find energy.
Between then and now there has been assembled quite a bit of material on the energy of thought. We know some of its behavior and some of its component parts. We can’t yet take a human being and put a hole in his arm and give him a shot and put more life into him. We can’t do it that way. That is very simple, but it hasn’t been done yet. We can’t, for instance, take a dead man and bring out a couple of cubic centimeters of life and chuck it down the gullet and have him take up his bed and walk. We can’t do that yet. It would be a very handy gimmick if we could.
But we can restore the life that he has. And we may even be putting a little more life back into him just by handling this energy seemingly the way it ought to be handled.
Dianetics, unfortunately for its repute, immediately went into the field of mental healing. For instance, the first book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, would not be accepted by the publisher unless it had to do with mental health. That was a big psychiatric textbook house, Hermitage House. They were very interested, but only as it pertained to sanity, insanity and sickness. That was not too good, because this subject is much broader in the field of human behavior than it is in the field of illness.
But maybe one is being too harsh when he is talking about the illness of the individual. Why is a social order sick? Why does a business get sick? Why do groups dwindle and perish? Why does the U.S. government get like it is today? These calamities can occur only in ignorance of the fundamentals of human behavior.
It is terrifically important to make people well. It is also very important to know how sick they are. You might say that Human Evaluation is sort of a diagnosis of behavior. It is possible to make a diagnosis of reaction with this rather rapidly. What we are doing is showing the manifestations of a person’s basic energy. We can actually make a test of it.
As a matter of fact, I have been trying to get some instruments in the last few months. It appears that the vibration level of a human being is in the supersonic range. I have practically no data for this; I am trying to get some instruments to measure it.
Evidently the vibration level of the tone scale is just in the supersonic range. There is some data to back that.
During the Second World War, the Japanese were going to kill off all the soldiers that confronted them by throwing deadly supersonic waves at them. They found out that this would kill bacteria and it would kill mice. (Here were mice and rats again.) And they got this thing out in the field of battle but nobody died. So after the war somebody came along and made a washing machine from this device.
The way you make a washing machine out of it is to turn it up to a high supersonic vibration with a heavy volume, and it shakes the clothes in a barrel or something of the sort and shakes the dirt out of them. But of course it is vibrating so fast that it is way above the range of human hearing.
When they first brought these washing machines out, a few of them were sold but the housewives would have nothing to do with them whatsoever. They wouldn’t touch them. So the company took this machine back and figured it out for a while, and then they speeded it up — gave it a little bit higher vibration — and after that the machine sold very well. You could go near one of these washing machines and you would feel so smooth and so happy and so cheerful! In other words, you could actually get a human being acting in sympathetic vibration on the supersonic range.
I was kidding the auditors one day and I said, “You know, Manning’s Coffee Shop up in Seattle has a coffee roaster right out in the window, and they blow a big fan across the coffee roaster out into the street. And people walk along there, smell that fresh-roasted coffee, and they go right in and have a cup of coffee. Now, the thing to do is to get several of these high-speed washing machine motors and put them across in front of the Foundation.” Actually, it would probably work.
The values of Human Evaluation are very difficult to sketch in a few minutes. I think you can conceive that there is some value to this. For instance, if a fellow comes in and we can take a look at him and see certain things about him, then we know that certain other things will follow rather inevitably and we can read him across a certain level. We can predict his behavior under various circumstances. If we were doing business with him, we would know in advance what he would do. Is he honest? What is his ethic level? What is his responsibility level? What is his persistence level? Will he persist on a given course? Is he responsible concerning the things he has had given into his charge?
These things, perhaps, we could answer with some considerable accuracy if we had an accurate scale of human evaluation.