It is often incumbent upon one to try to explain Dianetics. He is feeling comfortable, he is at peace with the world; maybe he is sitting in a restaurant drinking a cup of coffee and he has a book under his arm, and a stranger comes along and says, “You know, I’ve heard about this Dianetics. That’s what’s curing the new penicillins, isn’t it?”

So one says, “No. No, as a — ”

“Oh,” the stranger says, “it’s something about a diet.” “No, as a matter of fact, it has to do with the mind.” “Oh, psychiatry!”

“Oh, no!”

In short, it is rather difficult.

I have found a way to short-circuit this whole thing. I don’t try to explain to them about engrams and secondaries or how crazy they are. That type of approach usually goes from a peaceful frame of mind to practically a battle of insults.

I quite by accident found out that you can just explain it on the basis of “Yes, well, it’s some new scientific research. And say, you know what they’ve got over there? They’ve got a tone scale, and it’s a funny darn thing but it tells how people behave. And people are at certain levels on this tone scale, and if they’re at a certain level on this tone scale then they behave a certain way and you can predict how people behave.” And I have not yet found anybody who didn’t alert to this data.

They say, “Yes? I wonder where I am on it.” It is an inevitable response.

So we can short-circuit the whole explanation right there. We don’t have to go into psychiatry, we don’t have to tell them about electric shock and we don’t have to tell them how Dianetics is not hypnotism. In short, it saves so many words!

“There is a new tone scale and you can predict a person’s behavior on it.” “Gee, I wonder where I am on that tone scale.”

It is that simple.

Now, I want to give you an explanation about this tone scale.

The word tone is one which is not misunderstood in the society. People know about high-toned individuals and they know about people who are low. And they know that the word tonic is derived from tone, and if they don’t they rather sense it. In short, there are a lot of derivations for this tone. It sort of sounds musical. When you say “Tone scale: levels of human behavior,” you get some amount of agreement on it.

Now, if you are teaching an elementary class in this subject, all you have to do is draw three lines and say, “Well, it’s like this: Have you ever met a guy who was about half-dead?”And they say, “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Reminds me of my father,” or something of the sort. “Well, about half-dead, huh? He is right there on this middle line.”

They say, “Why is he right there?”

“Well, you see, everybody below this line is pretty dead, and everybody above this line is pretty alive.”

“Oh, that’s sensible. You mean you’ve got a scale there that says how dead people are and how alive they are?”

“That’s exactly it: how dead they are and how alive they are. And if they are only this far up, they are just that much alive and that much dead, you might say. But if they are up here, they are obviously that much alive and they are only that much dead.”

Now you put it another way. You says “But of course we are not talking about how half-dead people are, we are actually talking about how conscious they are. You realize that a person thinks as well as he is conscious. A person who is conscious thinks; people who are unconscious don’t think.” You get agreement on that, and you say, “A person at the middle level on this graph is half-conscious. His analytical attenuations has set in to a point where his analyzer has shut down to 2.0 on the tone scale.” Only you don’t tell him those last few words because that will confuse him. You just say the person is “half-conscious.” “At the top he is all the way conscious and at the bottom he is completely unconscious — he is dead. Now, that is the tone scale. It goes from dead to one-quarter conscious, half-conscious, three-quarters conscious, conscious.”

You can say, “Up at the top, this level of consciousness is practically unheard of. Nearly everybody is just a little bit unconscious, the society being what it is. And people who have been in the service, particularly, get pushed down the tone scale. Now, you wouldn’t expect a person who was only half-conscious to have a good reaction if he were driving a car, would you?”

“No.”

“Right. You take a person who is only half-conscious — an ‘average driver’ — and put him behind the wheel of a car and send him off down the street, and he is going to get in a wreck. So, if he will break up a car, what else will he break up because he is only half-conscious? He isn’t thinking well. If he isn’t thinking well, then he doesn’t react right. His wife says, ‘Dear, how are you tonight?’ and he says, ‘Don’t swear at me, you hussy!’ He is only half-conscious. He is not hearing right and not putting it back out the way he should be.

“So a person gets into lots of trouble when he is only half-conscious. He looks down the street and there is a Great Dane walking down the street, but being only half-conscious he doesn’t see any Great Dane there, so he falls over the Great Dane and breaks his wrist. In other words, the fellow has a certain amount of liability in the society if he is going around in that state.

“Now, if he were fully conscious he would see the Great Dane. And if he were really fully conscious he might not only see the Great Dane, but he might say hello to the Great Dane. And if the Great Dane were fully conscious as well, he would probably say hello too.

“But supposing the Great Dane were only half-conscious and this fellow were fully conscious; he would see the Great Dane and say hello, and the Great Dane would bark and growl at him. The Great Dane would be mistaking a kind word and answering with antagonism. That is where that is on the tone scale: antagonism is being half-conscious.

“Now, what about an individual who is less than half-conscious? What happens to a fellow if you put a quart of rye in his brisket and send him off down the road in a car? He is a pretty poor insurance risk. He will get down the road just about so far, and he is liable to drive too fast and so on.

“What does a fellow do when he is only a little over a quarter conscious and something goes wrong in his vicinity? He has an interesting reaction: he gets mad. He gets very angry, as a matter of fact.

“That is the emotion when consciousness is cut down into this strata: rage, anger, destruction and so on. If a person gets down near the bottom, though, he is so unconscious he can’t even find something to get mad about. A little higher than that, he is confused about what he is going to get mad about, so he doesn’t get mad. And just below that he might cry, but that is about all. But down near the bottom he is too dead. He is too far off and he isn’t going to get mad at all.

“But in this upper bracket of the tone scale, you find that he is pretty conscious, he is pretty alert; he is on the ball, he is on the qui vive. He is the kind of fellow you wish you could hire.”

Let’s derive the tone scale another way. The mood of an animal or a human being is not dependent so much on its capability. A child a few weeks old or a few months old is not very capable, but the child’s mood is in pretty good shape and his survival potential is pretty good. He is cheerful, he is happy and nothing much worries him. As a matter of fact, have you ever watched a child a few months old watching a quarrel in his vicinity? He hasn’t got enough sense to be worried about it — he laughs. Then, of course, one of the parents gets mad and probably hits him over the head with a brickbat or something, and after that he has found out that when they quarrel he gets hit over the head with a brickbat, so that isn’t something you laugh about. But his troubles have started.

I don’t mean to postulate that all American homes are this brutal, just most of them. I look at the number of divorces that are listed in the papers and see the extraordinary things that go on, and I can’t find out if there are any marriages left in America.

So, we have this child; he has been born and he has gotten over that and so forth. We will start him out at a few months of age. There he is, happy and gurgling in his crib. Now, just think of what is going to happen to this child. When he gets to be five, people will say, “The thing for you to do is to get educated,” so for years he will walk in and out of a schoolroom. Then he is going to get to be about eighteen — and they will have long since passed a bill by which we will have universal military training — so he will go into the army. He will spend his year or two in the army, and when he gets out he will be willing to start out in life, finally, and maybe finish up his college education. But just about the time he has one foot up on the rung and he is just about to ascend the ladder and amount to something, he gets married.

Then think of his wife’s parents. They didn’t approve of him in the first place. He kept her out till four o’clock every night, didn’t he? They knew that was for no good. Of course, he did marry her, but they know he will never amount to anything and they tell her so frequently, and she begins to believe it too.

But he still gets over that hump all right. And then it would be perfectly all right to have children, unless one had them in a country which didn’t reduce your taxes enough to matter if you had children, and which put a rather high penalty on fatherhood and childhood and so forth. That is very taxable. It makes it possible for the society to nail a fellow down very closely.

He was going to change to another job, but now he has little Duncan. He is working at a garage and he says, “Well, I’ll pay off the hospital bills. It’s not a good job but I don’t dare quit because I have to pay off these hospital bills.” He just about gets little Duncan’s hospital bills paid off when Esmeralda comes along, and that is the end of him.

He gets to be thirty-five and by this time they have made him an executive down at the garage, so he can now get ulcers. Finally he has a salary that will really support all of his penchants.

He can go out and raise the dickens if he wants to, but that is the catch: if he wants to. He is too tired now. So he just wanes on off, and you can expect him, if he is an executive, to live five or six more years. If he is a laborer, you can expect him to live another fifty, of course.

That is the course of this fellow’s life.

Now, back in childhood, he is going along just fine and having a good time, and then he gets into kindergarten and he goes to school. He is getting older all this time but this is being nicely canceled by the fact that he is growing up, otherwise it would probably be a much sharper decline. He has the goal before him of growing up; just why he wants to be an adult, we are not sure, but he wants to be.

Anyhow, here he is — light as a feather, happy as a clam. There are dewdrops on the rose bushes every morning when he gets up, life is wonderful and worth living, and he is trying to get to be an adult. He is up on the tone scale at about 4.0. Life is happy, life is wonderful, life is beautiful. He is very alert: a car comes along and he dodges, a dog barks at him and he barks back.

Down the way he goes, and he gets up to the eighth grade and then he goes to high school. About this point he finds out how much smarter he is than his parents. It is just down the line a little bit when he finds out how much his parents have learned in the last five years.

Now, when he starts to get educated he goes down the line. He gets down to 3.0. He is doing all right. He has his problems but he is still pretty hard to suppress. Life starts pushing him very hard, and he sure pushes back.

Then he goes into the army. He still has a lot of get-up-and-go when he gets into the army, but after he gets out he is just in a mood of antagonism. He doesn’t antagonise very much, but he antagonises all the time. He sort of feels antagonistic toward life; it put something off on him that he didn’t expect, arid he fights back at it. He thinks something is wrong, he thinks the society ought to be organised a little bit better. He thinks that those old men on Capitol Hill didn’t have a right to pass a bill which would never include them — they had immunity anyhow because of their age and everything — and he gets to worrying about things like this and he decides that the government should be changed. He decides a lot of things.

But this is the point where he crosses 2.0, and he is coasting down now. By the time he gets down to 1.5 he is just mad. He doesn’t know what he is mad about, but he is mad. This is about the time his wife’s parents have assured her for the fifteenth time that she really should, in spite of the sort of a fellow he is, stay with him because it is the thing to do. They have also told him that he can keep little Duncan if he goes on with his job. They have a family conference, and he figures out that human beings don’t have this much right to tell him what to do, but all he can do about it is get mad. And when he gets awfully mad about it they make him terribly ashamed, and the madder he gets, the more ashamed they make him, so that finally drives him down to around 1.0. Here, physiologically, he starts to fail. That is about the end of him.

That is the tone scale from the standpoint of age.

Now let’s take this graph again from another standpoint. We know something about the goal of existence being survival. We don’t have to argue about it. There are a lot of people who are trying to survive. Some aren’t, but a lot of people are, and they would have some hope for the future and so forth.

Let’s take the modus operandi of survival: Survival depends on having something to help you survive and on not having something that won’t help you survive. That is very elementary.

A nonsurvival item must be absent and a prosurvival item must be present. In other words, the fellow has to have food and he has to have his mother-in-law in the next town if possible.

Everything that is going to seriously inhibit his survival and that he knows is going to inhibit his survival has to be away from him. Newspaper headlines and so on he needs to keep well away from him. And he has to have food, clothing and shelter — prosurvival items — near him. Some people include the marital partner in prosurvival items.

That is the way his life is arranged. What happens when you try to turn his life around, when you insist that he accept something that he considers to be a nonsurvival item? You tell this fellow, “We have just turned over Wichita. Wichita has just come under the new Fourth International Communist Regime.” Of course, I am talking about the far distant future — 1965 or something of the sort.

So the commissar for the block comes in and says to him, “What! You aren’t living with your mother-in-law? Well, I’m sending your mother-in-law a set of orders and she is going to move in with you.”

The fellow considers this a nonsurvival action. What will be his emotional response?

Of course, by 1965 he would be so beaten down he wouldn’t have an emotional response, so we will take it as if it were today. Suppose you went in and ordered a fellow to accept a nonsurvival item and he had to accept it; that was all there was to it. What would be his reaction?

Suppose you tried to take away from him what he considered to be a prosurvival item — you said, “I am now going to take away from you the right to eat beefsteak; you aren’t going to have any more beefsteak.” What would be his reaction?

These actions are best studied not in an adult but in a child. These are not necessarily the reactions of a child; they are the reactions of anyone, but adults become a little more fixed in their reactions. Their reactions have turned out to be pattern reactions, but a child — even a fairly aberrated child — is still very fluid in his reactions. He responds quickly. The joys and griefs of childhood follow each other with terrifically rapid succession. For instance, Mama walks into the house feeling terribly sorry for little Oscar who has just lost his last friend. She has done her best to cheer him up and she is thinking, “The poor little fellow, and wasn’t he sweet,” then she finds Oscar sitting there licking the cake bowl, and he looks at her and smiles happily. Or, he is Hopalong Cassidy. He hasn’t got any association with this; he is way up the tone scale again.

A child’s life, emotionally, is a sort of a roller coaster. And he reacts rapidly. So it is very interesting to watch a child when he is being denied something that he considers prosurvival. He considers that this item is vital to his survival — for example, a nickel for a candy bar. When a child wants something, he wants it with violence! There is no question in his mind about it.

So he comes around to Mama, and he is happy, smiling and cheerful, and he says, “Mama, can I have a nickel?”

Mama looks at him and says, “Now, what did you do with your allowance? I gave you a nickel yesterday. You should learn to be careful of money. How am I ever going to teach you to be careful with money?”

This, to him, is just extraneous data. What he wants is a nickel. So he says to her, “I want a nickel!”

Mama says, “You mustn’t talk to me that way. After all, I am your mother,” and other extraneous data.

But he wants a nickel! So he says, “Yaah-yaah-yaah!” He may even lie down on the floor and kick his heels against the wall — throw a tantrum. He is angry about the whole thing.

But Mama says, “You get right up from there, young man! I’ll disown you.” She is really going to fix him now; she will shove him down the rest of the line quickly into apathy. So she shakes him out of the tantrum.

If he still wants the nickel, he will say, “Well, really, I wanted a nickel for Jimmy Jones because he broke his leg.” (It’s a lie.) “He broke his leg, and actually he’s lying down in the gutter now, and I said I’d get a nickel and get an ice-cream cone and that would make him happy.” (Children learn to be skillful liars by trial and error.)

He is unable to make the grade there, so his next response is tears. And he still doesn’t get the nickel! So his last response is “I don’t want it. I wouldn’t take a nickel. I don’t want anything to do with this nickel. Nickels, I don’t know anything about nickels. The dickens with it!”

There is the tone scale reaction on the effort to obtain something desirable that he considers survival: happy, then maybe not quite so happy but serious, antagonistic, angry, deceitful, grief, apathy — doesn’t want it.

Now let’s go at it the other way around. The child we are looking at now has his trials. (I am sure no child has trials of this character! ) He has to eat his cereal.

“Now, Willie, you’re going to eat your cereal. Willie, why don’t you eat your cereal?”

He says, “I don’t want any cereal.” This seems reasonable to him. It shouldn’t need all these appendices and footnotes and so forth. “I don’t want any cereal!”

“Willie, you’ve got to eat your cereal.”

If the cereal is pushed off on him, it will go along a cycle like this: First he will say, “No, I don’t want any cereal.” Then he will say antagonistically, “I don’t want any cereal!” and then, angrily, “Rhhrrrrw!” — he doesn’t want any cereal. And then he will say, “But I have a stomachache”; now he has a good “reason.”

If that doesn’t fool them, then the cereal is being spooned into his mouth by this time, and he is crying and blubbering and so forth, but he is still swallowing the cereal. But whoever is feeding him shouldn’t get cocky with victory at that time, because just one more little push down the line will break the child down to a point where he will sit there dry-eyed and eat the cereal. He will grow up just that much, so that as an adult he will patronise cafeterias and so forth.

That is the way the society trains people to use the kind of restaurants you see around on the streets; they break people down into apathy about food and then they will eat anything.

This is the reverse scale — when you try to thrust something off on a person which he doesn’t want, or if a person is threatened by something that is all nonsurvival.

Let’s bring this Great Dane into the act again. The Great Dane runs up to a child, and if the Great Dane is actually a threat to the child, the child’s responses go somewhat in this fashion: First he looks up the street and he sees the Great Dane, and he says, “Look! A doggie!”

The Great Dane takes a look at him (we left the Great Dane, you remember, at 2.0; he is antagonistic) and says, “Call me a doggie, will you!” And he comes up to the child and he says “Grrrrr.”

The child says, “You go away,” but the Great Dane comes closer, and the child says, “You go away!” The Great Dane comes closer and the child gets mad now. He may get crying mad, but he gets mad — he is angry at the Great Dane. If he were big enough, or if the Great Dane were smaller, he would destroy the Great Dane at this point. But as the Great Dane advances nearer and nearer to him, he discovers the immensity of this Great Dane; he discovers that the Great Dane is too close, the Great Dane is antagonistic and the Great Dane is something to be frightened of. So from anger the child goes into fear, and from fear he goes into grief; he will cry if he can’t get rid of the Great Dane. If he cries and the Great Dane still stands over him and snarls and so forth, the child will just lie there in ashen apathy. He has given up. Actually, what he is doing is pretending he is dead because it is well known that “Great Danes do not eat dead children.”

There are animals that have this as a built-in mechanism of pretended death. This is a standard routine of the opossum and so forth — playing possum.

So, on being threatened with danger, a person goes right down the line. If the danger is a long way away, and as long as a fellow is safe from danger, he would just as soon laugh at it. I have never seen anybody so cocky in my life as an admiral sitting on a shore station. They are happy, cheerful fellows.

I knew an admiral’s aide once who went down this tone scale faster than I ever saw anybody go down the tone scale. He had been sitting one night at the officers’ club and telling three of us what a cushy job he had and what a lot of suckers we were, and he was really rubbing it in. You could just see him licking his chops. He was practically splashing saliva back over both ears as he licked his chops!

He had forgotten one thing: We were short of officers. And he told us that he already had three men trained to do his work.

The operations office was open that night at 2:00 A.M., and they received a visit. The next morning this fellow was presented his set of orders. He was sitting there happily — laughing, cheerful, the world was going on — and then he got this slip of paper. He became a little bit alert; he wasn’t quite as happy with a piece of paper in his hand. He opened it up and saw his name, and he was not anywhere near as happy by that time. He saw that it said “Orders.” It said, “From . . . To . . . Via . . . Subject . . . Enclosures . . . References…” and it said, “You will report aboard the U.S.S. ‘Blank’ as soon as possible to take the post of engineering officer.” And it said, “Signature” and then dot-dot-dot across the page; “First endorsement: You are hereby detached.” It was all right as long as he was reading the orders; he could be just sort of antagonistic about this whole thing, because there was some chance of getting out of it: the admiral hadn’t seen it. But then on the last part of the page it said, “You are hereby detached,” and there was the admiral’s signature!

He went down the line into anger, and then you could see the guy quiver a little bit. And then he sort of wondered to himself and sorrowed for a moment over the old happy days — a slight glimmer of a tear in the eye. And then he sank into complete apathy, got up, picked up his cap, shoveled the rest of the stuff into his bag and walked on down — pretending he wasn’t dangerous, pretending he was dead — walked on board the ship and went out and joined the amphibious forces.

There was that cycle of the tone scale again; the person received news and then was removed from one point to another.

Now, you have watched people react and you know they follow a sort of a cycle, and as you think on it you may realize that there is a sort of a patterned cycle in this sort of thing.

A person doesn’t lie unless he is afraid. A person has to be afraid in order to lie — unless he is just romancing. A person who is angry is very destructive; he is fighting something, and you know the irrationality of an angry man. Nobody has ever really seen a nice, rational angry man. You can watch these manifestations. You know what the common phrase is when we talk about grief: “Oh, I wish I were dead” is the standard phraseology. Here again we have the same band.

Anger is nonsurvival, but it is better to fight than not to fight at all. Being afraid is definitely nonsurvival. Grief is a recognition of the fact that some nonsurvival is inevitably going on, but apathy is the acceptance of this nonsurvival situation. And the pretended death is nothing more nor less than accepted death.

Up above 2.0 a person gets more and more alive — and what is the synonym for being happy and cheerful? On up the line, the happier a person is, the more alive he feels. So life goes in this cycle, emotion goes in this cycle and so forth.

We take this and divide it off and we find the standard reactions of individuals for these various moods.

Let’s take truth. How do people handle truth? A person high on the tone scale is liable to have a lot of creative imagination, isn’t he? He has a lot of verve and creative imagination. But that is not untruth: it is postulating a future; a creative imagination is trying to figure out a future. If a person has a lot of survival potential he feels that there is a future to dream about. When he gets down the tone scale a ways, he doesn’t have as much future and he doesn’t do as much dreaming.

But this fellow at the top will tell the truth; there is truthfulness. Down around 3.0 he tells the truth just enough. He isn’t quite as alive there so he isn’t quite as active, so he tempers the truth with a little conservatism. He believes something is completely true: Up above 3.0 he will say, “Yes, I believe cats have nine lives,” but at 3.0 he will say, “It is commonly believed in science, and has many times been investigated by the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, that cats possess, it is said, nine lives.” He has made an acceptable scientific utterance when he has said that. This is the conservative truth.

We know that a person, when he gets antagonistic toward life in general, may sometimes look for an excuse to get angry. He looks around and tries to pick a fight. He says, “What’s the idea of having done so-and-so and so-and-so?” But nobody did that! In other words, he embroiders it a little bit. So here at antagonism we are starting to get some lying.

Now, anger lies at 1.5. Let’s take the angriest man you have probably listened to, and that is the late Herr Schicklgruber of Germany and other European points — in other words, Hitler. Hitler was an angry man. He talked a lot of anger. It was a very funny thing, but he never seemed to tell much truth.

As a matter of fact, have you ever seen a person who was very angry? Have you ever seen him tell the truth? I am afraid you haven’t. It seems to be that when one gets to a point of anger the truth seems to be something that is avoided, and one goes on saying things about which to be angry whether they are true or not. In other words, there is quite a departure from the truth.

The next step down is fear. Would you trust a person to tell the truth who was afraid?

For instance, you say, “Mr. Dumbjohn, I think some shells are loose in the magazine. Would you jump down there and take a look around and see if you can’t get them secured up? And tell me if there are some shells in the magazine in the first place.” Then you turn your back and walk over to the other end of the bridge.

He comes back to you in about ten minutes and he says nervously, “Well, they’re all secured, sir.” Only you know this fellow is very frightened of shells; he didn’t want to go into that magazine, so he gave you a report. Fear made him tell you a lie.

Social lying is the fear of social consequences. There is all sorts of lying at this level. There is this type of lying: “I’m doing this for your own good. I’m going to tell you this for your own good. You know, I think you ought to make yourself more friendly to people. You know, people don’t like you very much, and you should pay some attention to it. And I bought a book here, and this fellow will tell you all about how evil you — I mean, how you should act. I know this might be a little bit hard on you . . .”

Have you heard that kind of talk? That is covert lying in an effort to convince somebody that he is telling the truth, when he is really thinking, “O-o-o-o-oh, what I wouldn’t do to you if I just had the nerve! Of course, I’m a little bit scared of you, but I would never confess to this. But I’m going to cut you down to size if I get a chance.” But he is saying, “You know, I really want to help you. It’s too bad that people don’t like you more.” This is covert hostility, and it is down in the band of fear.

Now, what happens to a fellow who is very afraid — who has just learned that he is going to lose his life? He is already afraid, and you suddenly tell him, “We’ve got you slated for the firing squad in the morning.” Does he suddenly get — like they say in the novels — terrifically brave? Or does he weep? He weeps. He goes down into this next level, grief. What about truth and weeping? You tell this fellow so-and-so — give him some news — and he will tell you all sorts of reasons he is weeping. You will get the most remarkable statements regarding his tears.

Take a husband who has just been deserted or something of the sort. He will tell people the most confounded things that have happened to him, and vice versa. People are seeking sympathy, and that is what tears are for: they are a plea, a supplication for pity. They say, “Feel sorry for me; help me out.” The individual at that level is defenseless but he can still be salvaged. He wants help from the rest of the human race, so he cries, he pleads for sympathy, and he doesn’t plead for it with truth.

If you want to check this over against your own reality and so forth, you will find that the reasons for tears and the reasons a person cries for sympathy are not true — for example, the fellow who says he has heart trouble but doesn’t have heart trouble. He is asking for sympathy. He is along the grief level.

Down around apathy, the person not only doesn’t tell the truth, but you can’t get any registry of what truth is. He is completely careless about any fact. He is in apathy and he is careless about anything. He is practically dead, so it doesn’t matter how he handles anything: “Truth? Who cares?” This is nowhere more apparent than in the interrogation of prisoners who are in apathy. An intelligence officer can get more data off apathetic prisoners!

“How many battleships did Japan build last month?” “Twenty-one.”

“How many aircraft carriers are in the Bering?” “Fifty-nine.”

He gets some remarkable reports. Some young officer who is out interrogating prisoners can really come back with stuff!

So the handling of truth, then, is what you might call a gradient scale. Down at the bottom is complete carelessness about it; this fellow doesn’t care whether he handles truth or falsehood or anything. At grief is a perversion in the direction of asking for sympathy. At fear is a perversion to excuse fear, and up at anger is another one to give reasons why one has to be angry. At 2.0 the individual is telling people that there are reasons why he is antagonistic and he is picking them out wrong. And way up at the top you get truth. It starts to ride way up there because the fellow is not afraid, he is perfectly happy, he hasn’t got an ax to grind about anything. He will tell the truth — unless he is postulating a future reality, and then watch out, because sometimes people below that level don’t realize that people up here do creative talking.

That is one column on the tone scale chart. In such a way, human behavior can be invalidated, validated, extrapolated, turned upside down, inside out and examined, codified, lined up empirically, tested against individuals and so forth. But this first extrapolation of the behavior of an individual in life when faced with dangers, and of these pattern behaviors, keeps summing up to this list of things. You find out that this list of things sums up at the bottom to death; apathy is the closest thing to it, then grief above that (which is loss accomplished); above that is fear of loss, anger to combat a loss that might take place, antagonism toward a source that might occasion a loss, and then we go on up the line until we get a high level of survival.

All along the tone scale, any facet of human behavior can be so evaluated. And as a matter of fact, when a person knows this subject very well, he doesn’t need a chart. All he needs to know is the working principles of it, and he can extrapolate for his own use at any moment about what somebody at some level will do about anything. And he will know enough about various things and by observation to know immediately when he is talking to a person who is fixedly and chronically at some level of the tone scale.

Now, the basic emotions of which we are speaking and with which we are dealing in the tone scale will be found to be only a few in number. First, there is the emotion which you could generally call happiness, for lack of a better term. Then you have a level of emotion which is a reserved attitude; here you have dignity, and there is a certain reservation from happiness. People can rather sense, when they observe this emotion, that the person is being just a little bit afraid to reach toward something. That is called conservatism. It actually seems to be an emotional state.

Below this level we get boredom. Boredom is where nothing is wrong but nothing is happening. The fellow has fallen into the horrible state of affairs where the goals are just a little bit unattainable and the pain threats are not particularly present, but he is not going anywhere; he is not running from anything and he is not going toward anything, he is just sort of idling in one spot. That is boredom.

The next one below this is antagonism. When you try to drive a person who is bored in any direction with anything, he will be just a little antagonistic toward you. That is because you have reduced him slightly by applying pressure to him.

Below this, antagonism, if pressed a little harder, will turn into anger. And a person who is angry can be solidly enough threatened so that he demonstrates fear.

Fear, threatened, pushed or pressed too much, will become grief. That is, the inability to escape from fear or the inability to escape from something which is a fearful object, or a loss which cannot be contemplated, brings on grief.

And grief, driven too hard, becomes apathy.

The way the tone scale was initially discovered was by observation of preclearsl undergoing Dianetic auditing. In auditing, the moments of physical pain of a past period may be returned to and reexperienced. The pain isn’t as heavy as it was at the time, but if it is re-experienced several times over, the pain itself reduces and the material which accompanied the pain ceases to be aberrative. That is a basic source of aberration: moments of physical pain — a great deal of punishment — accompanied by perceptions. That causes an aberration. The pain compels the behavior of an individual unless he seeks to avoid further pain of that type.

Now, the emotional tone of the incidents in the deepest and severest injuries is, uniformly, apathy. It so happens that if you discovered one of these incidents where the individual had been very severely injured, you would find that if you went over this incident once and it became just that much lighter and that much less effective, the person would come up into grief. He would experience some grief about this thing. He would talk about his loss and how sad it was and how it was all hopeless anyway. If you went through it again — had the person recount it once or twice more, re-experiencing the pain again — he would come up to fear. That is to say, he would be afraid that the thing would happen again. In apathy a person is not afraid, but at this fear level, if his mother had been associated with it or she had more or less caused it or something of that sort, he would be afraid of Mother and at the same time he would be propitiative toward her. He would say, “Oh, I shouldn’t have been so mean to poor Mother,” and so on. It is very strange that at that level he is quite propitiative and very concerned that he has not hurt Mother, he loves her after all and he is a little bit anxious about the whole thing. So you run it once more and he says, “Phew! Mother!” and starts to take off.

By this time the pain has very much lightened, and he experiences anger. He gets very angry at the people who have done this to him, whoever they are. He demonstrates the anger. You go through it some more and the anger damps down to antagonism.

After antagonism he says he is bored with it; he doesn’t want to go through it anymore or something of the sort. The auditor is very foolish who leaves an engram in boredom, because there are two more tones above boredom. The thing is not fully discharged if it is left at boredom; you have to run it again. And if you run it again, all of a sudden the fellow will say, “Well, I guess it isn’t so bad. It couldn’t have been so bad after all,” and so on, and then, “It’s all right, and I’m very happy about it.” So you run it a couple more times and all of a sudden he starts to laugh. He is perfectly happy about this. It was gruesome when it started out, but he is perfectly happy about it, and he stays that way about that incident.

He passes uniformly up this tone scale. And it is not an occasional preclear who does this; the preclears you run who have emotional freedom, who can freely express what emotion there is, go up this line.

Sometimes the incident starts with fear, goes up into anger, skips a level or two, and then hits the happiness level. In other words, it has gone up so rapidly over two or three of these tones at a clip that you haven’t closely observed them. But this is the uniform pattern. That is the tone scale.

Now, in the business of living, individuals get hurt. And the more an individual has been hurt — and I mean physical pain now, punishment in general — the more he is liable to find the environment something he has to guard against. In other words, basically the experience of being hurt tends to alert an individual thereafter to the possibility or to the fact that he can be hurt.

The amount of physical pain an individual has experienced establishes the amount of fear he has of that environment that may hurt him. You get a situation, for example, where the little boy constantly and consistently is denied the nickel up to the point where he tells a lie, and then he gets the nickel. He will go through this whole cycle many times until he tells the lie and gets the nickel.

Now, he isn’t being educated into this; he is not doing this willfully. He is challenging a factor in his environment up to the point where he actually has to come down to fear in order to procure something. The environment is asking the child to run the tone scale; the child will run the full tone scale, but remember that every time he goes into such a contest as this it is being demonstrated to him that the environment is not quite friendly to him. So if the environment isn’t quite friendly to him, he will go down from boredom and tell a lie to get the nickel.

Then he starts skipping these bands. He has been punished for being angry too many times, so he doesn’t get angry anymore. He just holds in this level. You might say he has a fixed response toward one of his parents and that response is fear, so he doesn’t tell the truth anymore.

He has discovered this to be a working method of procuring things he thinks he needs from his environment, and he has been fixed into an emotional state with regard to a part of his environment. As he begins to live, as his life broadens, more and more situations occur which are analogous to the situations he had with his parents. He gets up to a point maybe well above this level when he gets free of his family, but he will dive back down to it again. In other words, his fixed response all the rest of his life could be the response of fear. He could be anxious about his environment. He has to lie to everyone. He gives this same more-or-less pattern response. You might say that he is stuck on the tone scale.

In such a way, in trying to get things and in trying to thrust things away from him, an individual has possibly only been reduced down as far as antagonism. As soon as he got antagonistic he procured what he wanted or what he didn’t want went away from him. He finally got fixed on antagonism. He doesn’t bother to come down from happiness to antagonism and he doesn’t go up to happiness. His response to the environment going and coming is antagonism. He is fixed; he is stuck on the tone scale at antagonism. There is the antagonistic man.

If he didn’t have too much physical pain, if he found out he was in good control of his environment, if he was able to postulate and reach his goals in life and so on, he could stay high on the scale pretty well. And the higher on the tone scale he is, the more fluid a person can be, the more response he is capable of.

Now, in the same way, an individual can find out that the only way he got anything from life was by crying for it or begging for sympathy. He will descend this tone scale to sympathy, and there he procures or fends off. And he keeps going through this cycle. Where does he stop? He stops in grief; grief obtains.

Furthermore, the physical pain he has experienced has put him in grief. He is actually beyond the point of being afraid and he is expecting to die in his environment. When these things begin to compare, this individual will be, you might say, stuck on the tone scale at grief.

Apathy is something else. Nobody obtains anything in apathy. But the person has run this whole gamut so often — has found out that nothing worked, has been unable to fend off the pain of his environment, has had a great deal of it, doesn’t expect much from the physical universe — that he knows he can’t carry forward very far and he is not going to be able to reach any goals; he is apathetic about what he does and so on. He gets to that point.

Now, from all of its methods of derivation, you find out that each one of these levels of operation has its own behavior pattern. For instance, angry men do certain things. You can expect an angry man to break things, you can expect him to be untruthful, you can expect him to try to dominate people around him by shouting at them, by ordering them, by threatening to punish them and by being abusive. You know the pattern of an angry man.

You also would know the pattern of a person who is afraid — the person who is afraid to tell the truth, the person who is afraid to face the real facts of any case. He doesn’t even face the facts; he doesn’t bother to come close to the facts before he substitutes something else for them very rapidly so he doesn’t have to face reality, and then he will tell a lie about the facts he has already figured out. He starts going very far from reality because reality is very dangerous. Matter, energy, space and time and organisms in his environment, in other words, are dangerous to him to a point where he is constantly afraid. Now, if a person is constantly afraid he has a definite pattern reaction. He doesn’t dare make a frontal attack on anything or anybody; he has to come around the back door. He can never walk up to anybody and punch him in the nose. He has to go at it in some other fashion: he has to go and tell Joe that Bill said so-and-so and make Joe mad enough to punch Bill in the nose. That is covert hostility — a whole category of behavior. People who are afraid behave in that fashion.

The individual who is in grief can only be salvaged by sympathy; therefore he must impose upon others around him, one way or the other, for his own survival. He feels that he cannot survive unless he is in grief, unless he is sick and so forth.

The apathetic person’s method of handling people is just to pretend he is dead. That is a very good mechanism. For instance, a soldier goes over the top with the bullets flying thick and fast, then falls flat on his face and lies there stiff. Somebody comes along and kicks him and says, “He’s dead,” and passes along to somebody else. The enemy bullets don’t hit him. He is in good shape! By accepting the actual fact of death he becomes “dead,” so dangerous things go away and leave him alone. People use this as their whole pattern and philosophy in life: “If I’m just dead enough nobody will bother me.”

You can find this individual — he sells papers down on the street corner. He is dead. His conversation will be along the line of “I’m not dangerous. I’m no menace to you. I’m no menace to life. I couldn’t do that; I couldn’t do anything. Therefore you needn’t attack me. I’m dead!”

If you were to say to this fellow “We’ve got a big, enthusiastic project and we are all going to do this and that,” he would just say, “Well, it doesn’t bother me. I’m dead.” In other words, trying to get a rise out of him is almost impossible. He has to carry this role all the way through.

Suppose you told the fellow in grief “Oh, we’ve got this great big project and we’re going to do so-and-so!”

He would say, “It’s all hopeless anyway,” because he thinks he is very close to death. “Well, it’s all very hopeless and there’s no use going on, and life is pretty much of a trial anyway and you can go on with your project. But me — well, life is pretty close to over with me and I’ll just sit here and feel sorry for myself.” That is the standard grief response. He will answer everything across life in this way.

Now, with the person who is afraid, you say, “We’ve got this big, enthusiastic project, and we’re going to do so-and-so!”

“You sure you’ve asked the police?”

“Oh, yes! We asked them and we’ve got the mayor and so forth.”

He will exhaust all sorts of reasons why this can’t be an enthusiastic project, because you have come along and asked him to attack something. He can’t attack anything; he is afraid, he is liable to be killed, so he has all these reasons why you can’t attack this because he is liable to be killed. He is afraid and his life is under continual threat. He will nullify anything you tell him that is enthusiastic, and any time you are enthusiastic he will nullify you. Furthermore, he will nullify anybody above him on the tone scale. He has to! He will work on a person who is angry — he will say, “You always get into rages, don’t you? I know that you can beat me and kill me, but you always do get into rages, and I’m sorry that you do. And I forgive you,” or something of the sort.

Then when the person who is normally angry about things in general gets around this person who is afraid of things in general, he gets nullified. This angry person doesn’t happen to be very angry at the moment; he is sitting and snarling a little bit about the government and so on, and he says, “You know, I’d like to go down to Washington and show those people a thing or two! “

This person who is afraid thinks, “Oh boy, maybe I can get him down this tone scale just a little bit.” So he says, “I don’t think you’d do well in Washington.”

“What? I wasn’t even talking to you!” “But I didn’t say anything.”

“You d id say something.”

“You must be hearing things. Have you been to a psychiatrist lately?”

“What are you talking about, ‘to a psychiatrist’? I was sitting here enjoying myself and said, ‘I’ll have to go down to Washington and wipe those dogs out.’ I was having a perfectly happy time sitting here griping about it, and you tell me that I wouldn’t do so well in Washington, I’ve got no business going to Washington “

“I didn’t — I — I didn’t say that.” “Well, what did you say?”

“Well, I just said I thought Washington was a bad town to live in.” “That isn’t what you said! You know that isn’t what you said!”

“Yes, it was. Have you been to see a doctor about your hearing lately?” He just carves and cuts down on this angry person. “But I haven’t said anything. I’m perfectly justified in what I say because, after all, I . . .”

This person who is afraid, by the way, will be the first one to tell you “I am an honest person. I’m ethical. I am very honest and ethical. I never do anything illegal and therefore I wouldn’t tell you a lie. And that’s why I’m telling you that you ought to go see a psychiatrist.”

That is a typical modus operandi. Any time a person starts talking about how legal and ethical he is, watch out, because he is right there in the fear band.

Now, the angry man thinks in terms of destruction. He is a very easy person to figure out. You come up to this angry man and say, “We’ve got this terrifically enthusiastic project, and we’re going to“

“Who said you could?”

“Well, we got permission from the cops and the mayor and everything.” “God, I wish I hadn’t voted for him this last election!”

“But what about this terrifically enthusiastic project that we’re going into?” “Hrmph! Police chief isn’t any good either.”

You try to get this man into communication, try to talk to him, and somehow or other you can’t convince him that you are in an enthusiastic project. But he will get mad at you after a while because you aren’t listening to what he is mad about. In other words, you are getting more or less of a pattern response there. It is the same way with antagonism.

Now, in boredom, have you ever read the New Yorker magazine? The New Yorker is a sort of an analytical-level nullification. Newsprint has been cut out all over the country, and it is astonishing but the New Yorker is still being printed. If you said to the New Yorker magazine “We’ve got this great, big, enthusiastic project, and we’re going to rebuild. . .” the New Yorker magazine would find a typographical error in your statement. Don’t try to sell them any big, enthusiastic project.

Now, you want to talk to this fellow who is very conservative, and you say, “We’ve got this great, big, enthusiastic project, and we’re going to do so-and-so .”

“Well now, boys, have you thought about this and have you planned this carefully?” By the way, by the time you are through talking to this fellow you wish you had hung yourself, he has so many reasons why you can’t be enthusiastic about this project. Yet he is for it.

Way up at the top is the person you can sell this great, big, enthusiastic project. You come in and say it is a great, big, enthusiastic project — and actually you do have a good project, it is fairly logical — and you lay it down the line and say it is going to be this and this, and you are going to do this, and he says, “Yeah?” and he adds something to it and makes it more of an enthusiastic project. He is the only one that you can sell to that way.

What about the rest of these people? Are they completely out of contact? Let’s take another approach. Let’s take this system whereby you give a big smile and say “You’re going to do all the talking and I’m going to do all the listening, and we’ll name the company in your name,” and we’ll use it on an angry man. (This system doesn’t work, but it is very good!)

So you come in to this angry man with a big smile and he says, “What the hell are you smiling about?!” This system just failed; the book ended right there. You aren’t quite sure what you are supposed to say next, because it doesn’t say anywhere in there “When confronting an angry man . . .”

But is there some kind of a system by which you can sell an International Harvester, a house, a goldbrick, a golf game, or anything? Can you get some agreement and cooperation from a person in apathy? in grief? in fear? in anger? in antagonism? in boredom? in conservatism? Is there some kind of a method by which you can get good agreement so that these people will go along with you? Yes, and it is about as simple as it comes. You just match the person’s tone. That is all.

You get used to this. There is a physiological aspect about it. As a matter of fact, the angry man — the person who is more or less fixed on this tone — has a certain physiology: he looks domineering, commanding, he is the kind of fellow who heads labor unions, or he may be the president of General Motors as far as that is concerned — ”and all workers are dogs!” He is interesting from this aspect.

You want to sell this fellow something that he needs or wants, or you go in to do business with him of one kind or another — you try to get him in on a contract or you even try to play bridge with him — and you say to him, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” That isn’t going to work! You walk in and take a look at him, listen to his voice tones and take a look at his office help. You spot him right there at 1.5 on the tone scale.

The fellow says, “And I think they all ought to be stood up against a wall “ And you say, “And shot!”

He looks at you and says, “Soul mate!”

“Now, who the hell do you think ought to be stood up against a wall?” “Those dogs, that’s who!”

“Well, it’s just like this project! If we had this project in we could shoot ‘em! “ “What project?”

“Good, straight, frontal project — that’ll fix ‘em.” If you are building a city park, the reason you want to build this city park is to get even with those contractors that wanted the land. “That’ll fix ‘em. Probably bankrupt the whole lot of them ! “ You don’t want it for the kids and to let the birds sing in. And you will sell this fellow on a city park. He will write out his check.

It is a sympathetic vibration. Did you ever see the physics-class experiment where you have two tuning forks, and you hit one of them and then damp it out and the other tuning fork is ringing on the same note? That is a sympathetic vibration. You have to talk along a sympathy line. I don’t mean the sympathy of grief; you have to match the tone level that this person normally frequents.

You could be fooled. You could look at this fellow and say to yourself, “Well, he looks like a conservative old man,” and start talking to him more or less conservatively. “We have this large conservative project and it’s going to do a lot of good and it’s going to make some money.” You don’t talk about this project making anybody happy, but you tell him, “It does good and it’s practical and it’s going to make some money,” and so forth. You talk to him like that, and the first thing you know, this fellow says apathetically, “Well, I don’t think anybody would live to use it in these times.” You were wrong.

So, to sell to the apathy fellow, you apathetically tell him, “Of course, it probably won’t do any good anyway, and the stuff we’ve got probably isn’t any good and it may wind up to be a swindle — they usually do — but nobody is really trying to do anything about it and it isn’t very active anyhow. And there’s no effort involved in it, no effort for you involved. Probably the whole thing will wind up in a ruin.”

If you were trying to sell him an International Harvester, you would say, “Most of them around the countryside are all broken; they don’t last very long. Almost any competitor of ours is outselling us anyhow. They don’t work.”

He will sigh, “Well, give me one.”

All too often an individual who is-trying to do business with other individuals, who is trying to work with other individuals, will be so solidly fixed on the tone scale himself that he doesn’t understand the necessity of trying to get into communication with another individual before he tries to do something with him. It is necessary to get into communication. The only way you can get into good, solid communication anywhere along this line is to match the person on the tone scale.

So let’s take an insurance salesman who is fixed at the line of fear. He goes around and tells everybody to be afraid. He tells them to be afraid in various ways, and he goes on selling this idea of “Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid, be afraid.” He is an excellent salesman if the community to which he is selling has a predominance of people at this tone level. But he would completely flop if he were trying to sell this idea to higher-tone-level people. Supposing he were trying to sell it in the offices of the New Yorker magazine. He would go in and say, “Be afraid, be afraid,” and they would put a cartoon in the magazine about somebody being afraid. They would not be impressed and they would not react. This individual who is fixed at the level of fear can only get a reaction at the level of fear.

Now, educationally this person could begin to understand that not everybody was at his tone level — that maybe there was somebody at apathy. You give the person in apathy this pitch, “Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid, be afraid” — standard insurance sales arguments — and this person would like to be afraid. Fear is two rungs up the tone scale! He isn’t afraid. The only way you could sell him anything at all would be to tell him, “This is a recognition of the fact that there is no fear involved anyplace in the world anyhow, and there’s no use in doing this stuff and it doesn’t have any end or purpose. But people would sure think you were dead. It really proves the fact that a man is practically on his way out to have a policy of this size, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does. Where’s my fountain pen?”

But you can’t sell it to him on the basis of “You know, you ought to have this because you’re going to die and your wife is liable to be left penniless.”

Wife? The apathy case has had no emotional response about anybody but himself for so long, you can’t sell him anything about any other part of his environment. You can’t even sell him well on himself. He is way down there.

You can be a little peppier with a grief case, but a fear case trying to sell to a grief case would just stampede him and he would drop into apathy and you can’t sell anything to an apathy case anyhow. The best thing to do would be to try to raise this grief case up to fear, if you were a fear case yourself. But the easiest thing to do is this: The grief case is sitting there saying, “It’s all hopeless. There is no future. I wouldn’t bring a child into this world anyway. Things are pretty horrible over there in Europe anyway. I know when my husband used to beat me, I used to say . . .”

And you just say, “You poor thing. We feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for you. Everybody feels sorry for you. Sign on the dotted line. Everybody feels sorry for you.” That is all a grief case can hear.

It is almost useless to agree with the grief case in your speech: “Yes, I know, when my father used to beat me and I used to feel . . .”

She says, “. . . and he always used to say to me . . .”

Then you say, “. . . and when he took my car away from me, I knew that life was pretty hopeless,” and so forth.

“. . . and he often said to me,” she says, “when we were walking out to the barn . . . You know, I did have a love affair before I met him but I gave him up. I had to be noble. Married my best friend — I thought it was for the best, but it’s all worked out wrong.”

You are trying to match grief. Grief doesn’t listen. It is senseless, when a person breaks down and starts to cry, for you to say “It’s all right. Life is going to be beautiful, life is going to be wonderful. The sun will shine again. There’s no use to be bereaved,” because you can stand there and talk like that for a long time. About the only thing you can do is to pat them on the shoulder and say, “I feel sorry for you. Yes, everybody feels sorry for you. We pity you.” And if you carry along in that line this person will finally simmer down and smooth out very nicely. You can get a communication then because grief is a supplication and plea for pity.

But on a fear level, you can only sell things that prevent death. Here is where the political parties really come in. If they have a populace which is predominantly in a fear state (I don’t mean the populace is specifically afraid of something; they are just in a fixed state of fear — they have been up against politicians a long time and they are scared stiff), somebody talking along the line of “Be happy and cheer up because all is well tomorrow” is not going to win the election.

The fellow who is going to win the election from this populace is the fellow who says, “This is a time of emergency! The most stringent and terrible methods are necessary. We need price controls and so on.” In other words, the country has to be saved! “This has to be a great emergency because we are being attacked from all sides by enemies, and the subversives are coming in underneath and prying us apart and the planes are coming over on top of us and somebody is surrounding us with submarines, but I’ll save you from all this!”

The anger case will take care of the fear cases. Then the fear cases will eventually wind up by shooting the anger leader. This is wonderful. Did you ever hear of the snake that ate himself up — he just grabbed hold of his tail and swallowed his tail and disappeared? That is what happens. This is a standard dictatorship setup. The populace is afraid, they think there is an emergency, so they elect somebody in an anger level and then everybody passes in his checks. Germany, Italy — how much proof do you need? Russia is on its way right now.

I wonder that somebody doesn’t really evaluate that situation. You hear people talking loudly about “Well, we’ll save you, America. It’s going to cost you $965,762 billion in the next two weeks, but we’ll save you. And because Russia is this and Russia is that, we’ve got to really get in there, and we’ve got to have a 950-wing air force, and . . .”

A very short time ago I was reading that, statistically, this country could not support a 70-group air force and now they have postulated a 163-group air force. We haven’t got enough oil and iron to build a 70-group air force, so now we are going to have a 163-group air force. This should give you some kind of an idea that this nation is drifting down the tone scale.

Now, fear is best appealed to by arguments about things to be afraid of. Anger is best appealed to by things to be angry about. But something else happens here: Domination is on the basis of about one skipped tone. In other words, boredom can more or less damp out antagonism, anger can control fear. Fear can play on down to grief a little bit. If we are acting in terms of two people, side by side, the one who will more or less be in command of the other will be the one who is a grade up from the other one.

Conservative people, uniformly throughout the society, depend almost exclusively upon the dreamer and the happy individual to provide the ideas and so forth which provide conservatism with its action. You have noticed that. Actually, to the conservative, there is a necessity to put something together well. However, there is no reason why practicality can’t be happy.

But there is this domination. A populace which is at 2.5, which is just bored, can be ruled by a conservative government — a reasonable, practical, conservative government. However, a society which is at 1.1 cannot be ruled by a conservative, practical government; it can only be ruled by an angry or an antagonistic government.

There is a behavior pattern for each one of these moods.

Now, there is a thing called volume on this tone scale. Where is terror? Terror is just more fear. Where is rage? It is just more anger. Where is sorrow? It is just less grief. There is a gradient scale of these emotions, and we are just using other words that fit on the scale.

We say that an individual gets fixed at a position on this scale. His pattern behavior will be at one of these levels if he more or less gets fixed on one of these levels. How is it, then, if anger is only destructive, that an angry person ever makes any effective progress? The fact of the matter is, his overall average shows that he doesn’t make effective progress. He gives an apparent solid reaction to life in general. He will say, “We are going to make a great Germany! We are constructive!” Look at Germany now: it has really been constructed! You will get a lot of constructive talk and constructive justification anywhere along this lower tone band. But the overall average endeavor of an individual or society lying at the level of fear will be whatever it is that groups with fear as a fear reaction, and a lot of things group with fear as a fear reaction.

Now, we also have something else at work. Although from 2.0 down an individual tends to succumb more than he tends to survive, there is still an element in him which compels him to survive. One of the things that happens is that an individual is surrounded by others who are higher on the tone scale than he is and they insist that he survive. They can’t understand why he wants to die. This is silly! So they pass a law against suicide.

These higher-toned people say, “Obviously people who commit suicide . . . would you commit suicide?”

“No, I wouldn’t commit suicide. It’s impractical.”

“It’s a crime against the state, then, to commit suicide.” So they put a law in the books and say it is against the law to commit suicide.

Now, an apathy case isn’t active enough to commit suicide. If a fellow who is below 2.0 dives suddenly to grief, he is liable to commit suicide. And a grief case is liable to sit right in front of you and pleasantly tell you, “Yes, I feel fine, I feel fine. I’m all right. I’m much better today. Would you go get me a magazine? I’d like to read.” You walk out and get the magazine axed then come back in and find the corpse.

James Forrestall was never more pleasant than when he sent the hospital corpsman away from his door so he could jump thirteen stories to the skylights below. Some of the doctors in charge of his case had walked in and found him in a rather antagonistic and angry mood, and they had been able to suppress him down into this lower band. They left him there and walked out, and they thought they had done a good job. Nobody encouraged his anger or his revolt.

He was the best brains the navy ever had. The navy has practically lost its identity since Forrestal went out. But nobody encouraged his anger, nobody tried to bring him up the tone scale; they just gave him a shove to cheer him up and he went out the window.

So, if you get anybody in this lower band and give them a quick impact of loss, they are liable to die or commit suicide. They have many ways of committing suicide besides just blowing their brains out. There is the slow route, such as getting sick and dying of an infection. There is the slow route of starvation; not eating the proper food or the right food eventually will result in malnutrition, which is another name for a partial suicide. Or they will drive down the road in an automobile on Sunday and commit suicide in that fashion — although it is a terrific “accident.” They wouldn’t be able to explain it to you any other way than that it was an accident. If you met them up at the Pearly Gates and asked, “What happened to you?” they would say, “Accident.”

“Well, it’s very funny. Why did you have an accident? You knew that you had a soft tire day before yesterday — you saw the nail in the tire. You knew you had this tire and you knew that the kingbolts on the front end were practically ready to fall out. Last week the mechanic told you that.”

“Let me see, did he?”

“Why didn’t you have them repaired?”

He wouldn’t have anything repaired like that which was such a beautiful suicide trap. He would leave them, and then there would be no blame to having committed suicide. That is a source of accidents.

When you look at this scale, you realize that it is very funny that these things apparently line up and can be extrapolated from so many observational sources. There is actually an energy behavior involved here. There is a life energy which becomes highly enturbulated as it gets lower on the scale. Up at the top it is very smooth, then lower down it gets very jagged. And by the time it gets down to the bottom it is nulled; its wavelength is such that it isn’t operating. It is kicking out of the material universe. You get death — separation. And this is the mechanism of death.

At the top this life energy is very smooth and aligns itself very easily with the material universe so that you can have a nice, smooth-running organism. Down at the bottom the mechanism of death has set in, and this life energy gets kicked back out of the MEST by this jagged vibration.

Actually, you can measure the vibration level, I am very sure. I wish I had had just a few days on some testing equipment to get its proper wavelengths. These wavelengths exist. But you can watch it in its operation. These are just descriptive words which might better be stated in terms of .03 centimeters vibration or wavelength, or something of the sort. There is a gradient scale in operation here.

Now, if you look at a general class of behavior on which a man could operate — for instance, the class of behavior involving marriage, the class of behavior involving the care of machinery, the class of behavior involving ethics and law, or any one of these things — you can compare this to the individuals concerned in that class of behavior.

You can put this to the test in handling machinery; you can go out and look at a man’s car. You find out it has a dented front fender, the car looks sort of muddily unhappy and it is not in very good mechanical condition. Now, this fellow is obviously active enough to have a car, isn’t he? That normally will place him to some extent, and by looking at this other data you can locate him to that degree on the tone scale.

What will this man do to some machinery in a plant? You put this man on a machine in the plant; this machine has been running and having a happy time of it, sitting there purring along contentedly, punching holes in a big piece of iron, going chomp, chomp, chomp. You shift jobs and this man with the messed-up car takes over that machine. For a day it sits there and continues to punch holes in the iron. And then a funny thing happens: a cold chisel happens to be lying on one of the pieces of steel that is being fed into the machine. This is strange, but of course it is pure “coincidence.” So the machine comes down — it can cut the soft iron but it hits this cold chisel and goes crunch! Pieces of cold chisel fly in all directions, and the chomper is broken.

You ask the fellow, “What happened?”

“Well, nothing, it’s just . . . as a matter of fact, somebody else put it on there.” You are not going to get the straight story from this fellow. So you have another chomper fitted on this machine, but the machine is out of operation for a day. That throws out the assembly line all the way down the line.

So the next day the machine is sitting there going chomp, chomp, chomp, punching holes. The superintendent comes by and he notices that for some strange reason the floor in this particular area is dirtier than it ordinarily is. There are more scraps on it. He doesn’t think very much about it but it seems to stay that way; it doesn’t get swept. There is a perfectly logical explanation for this: Every time the floor sweeper comes along, this fellow says, “You’re makin’ too much dust!” and the sweeper just doesn’t sweep under that machine.

Now, this machine with the new chomper is going along punching its holes, the stuff is being fed to the assembly line, and it goes down through the assembly line and there an inspector says, “Whoa! “ What happened? It so happened that when this fellow turned the machine on again he set the dial at fifty-two millimeters, whereas the dial was supposed to be set at seventy-five millimeters, and all the holes that have been punched are too small. But they can’t be punched again because the machine won’t take them that way anymore and you have to throw away that metal. So it goes.

It is very funny what else you can do with this fellow. You can take a look at his machine, look at the record of breakage of the machine, take a look at the floor under the machine, and then know what his wife looks like. She hasn’t been messed up, but she will have been driven down the tone scale ordinarily. He has succeeded in putting her down the line.

In other words, the care of physical things and possessions — the physical universe — deteriorates as a person drops down the tone scale. When a person gets down below 2.0 he starts into the band where there is breakage and so on. Here there is destruction at work.

By the way, this is not just on my say-so. I can walk into a plant and look over somebody’s equipment and say, “How long has it been since he had an automobile accident?”

“Oh, about three weeks. You know this guy?”

“No, I don’t know him. Was he elected in the local union election the last time?” “Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. Don’t you know this guy?”

“No, I don’t know this fellow. But tell me this: his locker downstairs is just crammed from top to bottom with junk, isn’t it?”

“Yes, as a matter — what are you trying to pull around here?”

This just follows; it is sequitur. Also, this fellow’s health record will demonstrate that he has arthritis. Sometimes you miss on that one, and actually he has a collection of lime or a sedimentary deposit in the kidneys or he has tumors; it is some disease. But it is sedimentary, it is collective. This fellow is still attacking the environment around him, but he will hold, sort of frozen and tensed up, some of the fluid flows of his body, and he will get these depository illnesses. You can spot these fellows, one right after the other. You can tell such things as he went to the bank and borrowed some money and he meant to pay it back — honesty was the best policy — but he didn’t.

At school his kids aren’t doing well. You can look at this fellow and practically tell what his children’s grades are. They are not doing well at all.

You know what his machinery is like. You know what his attitude toward sex is. You know what his attitude toward children is. You know what he will be in the group. The group will always mistake a person who has some horsepower at this level for a leader, but this person will inevitably destroy a group. Labor has been sitting around like little sheep about to be driven to slaughter and this fellow stands up and says, “I’m going to save you now from these managers, this company management. I’m going to save you.”

And they all say, “I vote yes. He’s got to be the chairman.” And he will talk. He really looks like force and power.

There is another interesting thing. The body is part life energy and part physical universe. Life energy is rational; physical universe has force. When someone gets down below 2.0, he starts running on more force than life energy. Down in this anger band the individual starts to believe in force, punishment-drive theory and so on.

Above this band you get enlightenment.

Down below 1.5 is the political subversive, by the way. This fellow doesn’t run the union, he runs the man who runs the union. He is covert.

In short, with this lineup of emotions it is possible to extrapolate various behaviors on the parts of individuals for various headings. You have on the full Chart of Human Evaluation an extrapolation for many kinds of behavior. But this chart could be extended a great distance and would still be found to hold true.

Now, I have told you more or less the theory behind it and the workability of it. In this highly scientific and practical and conservative world, the only reason for existence or value that a thing would have would be how useful it was — whether or not it worked, and whether or not it were useful. This material definitely is useful on such an application.

A salesman, knowing it well, can size up a prospect. A salesman who is too neat, for instance, won’t sell people below 2.0. But it says right there in all those books on salesmanship, “The salesman must be neat.” Not if he is selling to people below 2.0! A salesman who wants to sell to an angry man had better look like one. In other words, he gets an agreement somewhere on the scale. He actually can sell a person at this level something that will break and cause an accident faster than he can sell a practical machine. He doesn’t have to paint it up that way very far, but if he just gives a few hints, that machine will be bought. And yet the salesman is taught-to say “My product is the best product, it lasts the longest, it is the safest.” He has his sales talk all lined up. But there is a sales talk for each one of these levels.

The sales talk at fear is “This machine keeps the pebbles from coming up under the seat. In the McCormick, as a matter of fact, they don’t have this guard, and the pebbles. . .” There has never been a pebble come up through a seat and this person has never seen it, but this is something new to be afraid of. That is the way you sell to him.

Also, you might say, “When this thing breaks down it is almost impossible to diagnose the trouble.” He will buy that quick. This sounds strange, but it is something that one learns with experience how to put into use.

Are there any questions?

“At what point is high-toned behavior postulated? What point is the behavior of a 3.5 postulated, or have you observed this behavior?”

Yes, I have observed this behavior. As a matter of fact, you have too. We get cynical with this chart. Everybody has a certain number of aberrations, and almost anybody can be enturbulated. But when a person is coasting along fairly cheerfully and happily and life is going fairly well for him — he has in his vicinity those things which he needs to survive, and he has absent from him those things which aren’t survival — he doesn’t enturbulate down to his chronic level. He will ride consistently at a high level. Don’t hit him with a straw, though, because he will dive down the scale. You can watch him riding at this upper level, but if he gets the least bit enturbulated — you come in and tell him the price of postage stamps has gone up one cent per million — that is all it takes to break the beautiful crystal of his day and spin him in. Three minutes before that, if you had given him a letter and asked “Would you mail this for me?” he would have said, “Why, sure, I’d be very happy to,” and gone ahead and mailed it.

But if you tell him that the price of postage stamps has been raised one cent per million, he will dive on the tone scale. Then ask him “Would you mail this letter?” and he will just growl “Sure,” and that will be the end of that letter. In other words, there are these two levels of behavior.

Let’s not overlook the fact that individuals have been known to be happy, even though aberrated.

Completely aside from this point, I have seen individuals well enough swamped up on the one hand, and I have seen individuals so unaberrated on the other hand, that they behaved along this 3.5 band constantly and consistently. You give them a letter, they mail it. The low bands interrupt communication. But with these upper-level people, you say good morning to them with a happy smile on your face and they say good morning right back with a happy smile on their faces. You say, “I made an extra twentyfive dollars yesterday,” and this lower-level person says, “Well, are you sure it isn’t counterfeit?” The upper-level person doesn’t say “You know, Bill made twenty-six”; they say, “Gosh! That’s good!” This is a strange human reaction, I know, but these people exist. I have observed this behavior.

The extrapolation, however, holds good all the way along the line. I worked on this chart rather constantly — actually not knowing what I had my hands on — for about three years until I finally crystallised the thing, and then it was under observation for about four months with a lot of people. Of course, I will admit that it was much better observed at the bottom of the tone scale than the top.

“Will you expand just a little bit on the point that an angry man seems to get pleasure from being angry?”

There is a fancy term for that; it is called “abreaction of one’s hostilities.” The only trouble with the term abreaction of one’s hostilities is the fact that one doesn’t just abreact hostilities. So it is a limited concept.

The point is that a person at 2.5 experiences his pleasure by being 2.5. A person who is a 1.1 gets a big kick out of inflicting some fear on somebody; he is making somebody afraid and he thinks this is funny. And you can get laughter off the levels where the person is.

This is humor, and the field of humor lies rather wide open when you take a look at it. For instance, humor at anger is the good old German humor of “Haw-haw-haw! Good joke!

Mother was standing at the top of the stairs and somebody gave her a swift kick, and she fell clear to the bottom and fractured her skull!” Hilarious! This is comic-strip humor. I wonder why it has such a wide appeal?

They don’t have that humor anymore. There isn’t any humor in comic strips anymore — I have been studying them. They are all about Flash Gordon shooting Hopalong Cassidy or something. They are all dramatic and they are all named after movie heroes, the last I have seen. How far can we go with commercialism?

It is interesting to watch a person who rides at 0.5. He is not crying all the time, he is just kind of sad and hopeless. You can watch a person at 0.5 extract humor from the fact that he has occasioned sympathy or grief.

“Well, how did she feel about it?”

“Oh — ha-ha! — she cried; she cried for a long time. Didn’t do her any good, though, of course. Tears ran — ha-ha! — the tears ran down her cheeks. Yeah.” It is wonderful to watch humor taking place down there.

You may know these people I have talked about. You probably know the conservative man, the general conservative attitude — a slight reservation toward everything. You certainly know the New Yorker — this general sort of sniping antagonism continually. And you know the fellow who went around and told the boss that you had been fired from your last job, but you didn’t want the boss to know about it; that is what he told the boss. And he said that you were a good fellow after all. Then he stood up for you because “he is your friend”: he said that somebody told him you weren’t fit to eat with pigs, and he said you were!