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[Plaintext version 1.1, May 25, 1998]

THE PROBLEMS OF WORK

by L. Ron Hubbard

SCIENTOLOGY $r APPLIED TO THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD

THE AMERICAN SAINT HILL ORGANIZATION


Published by
The American Saint Hill Organization
(A branch of the Church of Scientology of California,
a non-profit corporation in the U.S.A.
Registered in England)

2723 West Temple Street
Los Angeles, California 90026

Copyright (c) 1956, 1972
by L. Ron Hubbard
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

1st Printing January, 1957
2nd Printing March, 1957
3rd Printing July, 1957
4th Printing April, 1959
5th Printing September, 1965
6th Printing February, 1967
7th Printing January, 1968
8th Printing May, 1968
9th Printing July, 1971
10th Printing June, 1972
11th Printing September, 1972
12th Printing January, 1973
13th Printing 1973
14th Printing 1974
15th Printing 1974

Dianetics is the trademark of L. Ron Hubbard in respect of his
published works.
ISBN 0-88404-007-0
Printed in the United States of America
by Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, Los Angeles


CONTENTS

PAGE
CHAPTER ONE

On What Does Holding a Job Depend? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

CHAPTER TWO

Handling the Confusions of the Work-a-day World . . . . . . . 19

CHAPTER THREE

Is Work Necessary? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

CHAPTER FOUR

The Secret of Efficiency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

CHAPTER FIVE

Life as a Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

CHAPTER SIX

Affinity, Reality and Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

CHAPTER SEVEN

Exhaustion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Man Who Succeeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103


IMPORTANT NOTE

In studying Scientology be very, very certain you never go past
a word you do not fully understand.

The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused
or unable to learn is that he or she has gone past a word or
phrase that was not understood.

If the material becomes confusing or you can't seem to grasp it,
there will be a word just earlier that you have not understood.
Don't go any further, but go back to BEFORE you got into
trouble, find the misunderstood word and get it defined.

INTRODUCTION

Scientology, the broad science of life, has many applications.

If you knew what life was doing, you would know what many
sciences and activities were doing.

Here, we have Scientology assisting the worker and the
executive in helping Man to be more competent and more able,
less tired and more secure in the work-a-day world.

Scientology is already being applied in many of the larger
businesses of Earth. They have found they could use it.

The Editors

Chapter One

ON WHAT DOES HOLDING A JOB DEPEND?

On what does holding a job depend?

Familial connections? Who you know? Personal charm? Luck?
Education? Industry? Interest? Intelligence? Personal ability?

To one grown old and even somewhat cynical in the world of
work, the first several seem to have dominance. Only the young
appear to be left with the illusion or delusion that Personal
Ability, Intelligence, Interest, Education and Industry have
anything to do with it; and the very, very cynical would have us
believe that indeed these are only the symptoms of being very
young.

We have too often seen the son become the foreman, the
new son-in-law, yesterday the shipping clerk, soar to board
membership, and we all too often have known that the son and
son-in-law not only had no aptitude in the first place but that
with no fear of discipline they act more carelessly of the
firm than the worst employee present. Familial connection is
something dependent upon the accident of birth.

But, leaving familial connection until some other day, what
have we left? There is Who You Know. Personal connection
plays a dominant part in obtaining, keeping

9

and improving a position, there can be no doubt of this. One
has a friend who works for the Jim-Jambo Company; the friend
knows of an opening; the friend has other friends and these still
other friends and so into the Jim Jambo Company one can settle
down and work with some security and hope of rise.

And then there is the matter of personal charm. How often have
we seen the young stenographer who couldn't spell "cat" suddenly
soar, with her typing fingers still all thumbs, to the post of
the executive secretary to the boss, wherein, while she can't
spell "cat" any better, she can certainly spell raise and raise
again and perhaps even "supper club" or diamond necklace. And we
have also seen the young man with a good "front" soar above his
elders because he could perhaps tell the right joke or play a
slightly worse game of golf.

We have seen, too, the factor of Education all gone awry in
firms and governments and the trained man, at how much cost of
eyesight become learned beyond credit, yet passed over for some
chap who didn't have a degree to his name beyond a certain
degree of push. We have seen the untutored madly ordering the
millions and the wise advising a score.

Industry as well seems to have scant place to those cynical few
of us who have seen it all. The eagerness of the young to slave
is all too often braked by the older head who says, "Why get in
a sweat about it, young'un? It'll all come out the same." And
perhaps we've stayed after hours and daubed ourselves with ink,
or lingered at our post beyond all demand of duty, only to watch
in times to

10

come the lazy one we scorned draw the better pay. And we've
said it isn't justice -- something less than that.

And Interest, too, we've seen come all to naught. When our
absorption in the deadly game of firm or unit with its rivals
made us lay aside neglected our own wife, or life, and when we've
burned the night and leisure time to work out solutions gauged
to save our firm, and have sent them in, and have had them come
back, neglected, and soon have beheld our fellow worker, whose
total interest was a man or stamps and not the firm at all, go
up to higher posts, we had some cause to be less interested,
we thought. And Interest in our work became condemned by those
around us who, not understanding it, became tired of hearing it
in our mouths.

Intelligence, against this hard beaten parade of broken
illusions, would seem to have no bearing whatever upon our fates.
When we see the stupid rule the many, when we see the plans and
decisions passed which would have been condemned even by the
children of the workers, we wonder what Intelligence could have
to do with it. Better to be dumb, we might come to think, than
have our own wits continually outraged by the stupidities which
pass for company planning.

Personal ability, against this torrent, this confusing chaos
of random causes for promotion and better pay, would seem a
wasted item. We have seen our own wasted. We have seen the
abilities of others scorned. We have seen the unable rise while
the able remained neglected or even unemployed. So personal
ability would not seem the factor it might once have been to
us, small cogwheels in

11

the clashing gears of business fate. It must then certainly be
luck and nothing but luck the whole way down.

And so it seems to appear even to an "experienced" eye that
the obtaining, the holding, and the improving of a job are all
dependent upon a chaos of causes, all of them out of our control.
We accept, instead of orderly expectancy, a tumbling mass of
accidentals as our fate.

We try a little. We dress well and cleanly in order to apply for a
position, we take ourselves to the place of work daily, we shuffle
the papers or the boxes or the machinery parts in a fashion we
hope will pass, we leave by crowded transport to our homes and
expect another day's dull toil.

Occasionally we start up a correspondence course to give us a
small edge on our fellows -- and often drop it before it is done:
it seems that we cannot even do this little to help us on our way
against this flood of accidentals.

We become ill. We run out of sick leave. Still but hardly
recovered we now have no job. We become the victims of an
accidental cabal or slander and we have no job. We are thrust
up against jobs we cannot do and then again we have no job. We
grow too old, our time is spent in remembering how fast we once
were, and one day we have no job.

The lot of the man in the work-a-day world is Uncertainty. His
goal is Security. But only few attain this goal. The rest of us
worry from day to day, from year to

12

year, about our ability to get work, hold work, improve our lots.
And all too often our worst fears take place. Once we had the
rich to look toward and envy, but now the taxes which we bear
have reduced, despite their clever accountants, even their
number. States and governments rise and promise us all Security
and then give us restrictions which make that seem shaky too.

From day to day new threats impose themselves on our
consciousness. A world where the machine is king makes Man a
cog, and we are told of new developments which do the work of
thousands of us and so we starve.

The advertisements thrust at us in our transports, newspapers,
streets, radios and TV all manner of things to own. And no
matter how delightful they are to own, WE the men who make
them can't own them - not on our pay. And Christmases leave
us a little ashamed at how little we can buy and we make the
coat do just another year. And the years advance and we grow
no younger. And each hour confronts us with the accidents which
might make or break our futures. No wonder we believe in luck
alone.

Well, there is the problem.

To eat we must have a job. To live we must continue to be
acceptable on our jobs. To better ourselves we must hope for
the breaks. And it all appears a huge, disheartening confusion
composed of accidents, good luck and bad luck, or drudgery with
nothing to win at the end of it.

What would you give for something to lift you out of such ruts?
Perhaps you are not in them but if not you're

13

one of the lucky ones. Men, to escape these ruts, have perpetrated
the bloodiest wars and revolutions of history. Whole dynasties
have been cut to the dust in an overpowering convulsion born
from despair. Jobs get few. Holding them becomes more and
more accidental. At last none can longer stand the strain of
insecurity and the answer is raw, red revolution. And does this
come to anything? No. Revolution is that act of displacing a
tyranny with a tyranny ten times more despotic than the old.
Changing governments, not even changing firms can change
basic security.

The quest for security is a quest for constancy and peace. A
worker deserves these things. He creates the goods. He should
have the wherewithal to live. Instead, he has a chaos.

But where is this chaos? Is it in the worker's family? Some say
so. Is it in the character of capital? Some say so. Is this chaos
born of bad government? Many have said so. Is it in the
worker himself? Some would like him to think that.

No, it is not in any of these things. The chaos of insecurity
exists in the chaos of data about work and about people. If you
have no compasses by which to steer through life, you get lost.
So many recent elements - of the Industrial Age - have entered
into life that life itself needs to be better understood.

Work and security are parts of life. If life is not understood
then neither will these parts of life be understood. If all life
seems chaotic, a matter of guess and

14

chance, then certainly work will seem chaotic.

But the role of work in existence is a greater role than any
other. Some say we spend a third of our lives in bed and therefore
beds are important. But we spend more than a third of our lives at
work and if we don't work we don't have a bed, so it seems that
work is more important by far. If you add up the various parts
of life, love or sports or entertainment, you will find that the
majority of concentration is not on any of these but upon WORK.
Work is the major role of our existences whether we like it or
not. If we don't like it we don't like life.

If we find a man a bit insane, old time "ologies" would have
had us look up his love-life or his childhood. A newer idea and a
better one is to look up his security and conditions of work. As
Security goes bad in a nation, insanity rises. If we were to
attack national insanity problems and conquer them we wouldn't
build better insane asylums - we would better the conditions of
work.

Life is seven-tenths work, one-tenth familial, one-tenth political
and one-tenth relaxation. Economics - the paycheck, struggle for
- is seven-tenths of existence. Lose a man his income or his job
and you find him in bad mental condition, usually. If we're going
to find proofs of this anywhere, we'll find them everywhere.
Worry over security, worry over worth, worries about being able
to do things in life for others, are the principal worries of
existence. Let's be very simple. People with nothing to do,
people without purpose most easily become neurotic or mad. Work,
basically, is not a drudgery, it is something to do. The pay-check
tells us we are worth something. And

15

of course it buys us what we have to have to live. Or almost
does.

All right. Work-security, then, is important. But security
itself is an understanding. Insecurity is UNKNOWNNESS. When one
is Insecure, he simply doesn't know. He is not sure. Men who
KNOW are secure. Men who don't know believe in luck. One is
made insecure by not knowing whether or not he is going to be
sacked. Thus he worries. And so it is with all insecurity.
INSECURITY EXISTS IN THE ABSENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. All security
derives from knowledge.

One KNOWS he will be cared for no matter what happens. That
is a security. In the absence of certain knowledge it could
also be a fallacy.

Luck is chance. To depend upon luck is to depend upon
not-knowingness.

But in truth how could one have knowledge about life when life
itself had not been brought, as knowledge, into order. When the
subject of life itself was a chaos, how could work, as a part of
life, be anything but a chaos?

If LIVINGNESS is an unknown subject, then WORKINGNESS and all
pertaining to work must be an unknown subject, exposed to cynicism,
hopelessness and guesses.

To obtain, hold and improve a job, one would have to know the
exact, precision rules of life if one were to have a complete
security. It would not be enough to know, fairly

16

well, one's job. That would not be a security, for as time went on
we would see, as we have listed, too many chances entering into
it.

Knowledge of the general underlying rules of life would bring
about a security of life. Knowledge of the underlying rules of life
would also bring about a security in a job.

Scientology is a science of life. It is the first entirely
Western effort to understand life. All earlier efforts came from
Asia or Eastern Europe. And they failed. None of them gave greater
security. None of them could change human behavior for the
better. None of them - and they bragged about it - could change
human intelligence. Scientology is something new under the sun,
but young as it is, it is still the only completely and thoroughly
tested and validated science of existence. It doesn't demand
twenty years of sitting on spikes to find out one is mortal.
It doesn't demand a vast study of rats to know that Man is
confused.

Scientology can and does change human behavior for the better.
It puts the individual under the control of himself - where he
belongs. Scientology can and does increase human intelligence.
By the most exact tests known it has been proven that Scientology
can greatly increase intelligence in an individual. And
Scientology can do other things. It can reduce reaction time
and it can pull the years off one's appearance. But there is no
intention here to give a list of all it can do. It is a science
of life and it works. It adequately handles the basic rules of
life and it brings order into chaos.

17

A science of life would be, actually, a science of good order.
Such things as accidents and luck would, if you could but
understand their underlying principles, be under your control.

As we have seen here, even those who aren't cynical can see
that many chances enter into obtaining, holding and improving
one's job. Some of these chances seem so wide and out of control
that nothing at all could be done about them. If we could but
reduce the chanciness of a job. If we could make the right friends
and be sure that our education would count and have some slight
security that our interest and intelligence and native ability
would not go all to waste, why then, things would be better,
wouldn't they?

Well, we'll see what Scientology can do to reduce the
chanciness of the work-a-day world - for you and for those you
know. What's life all about anyway?

18

Chapter Two

HANDLING THE CONFUSIONS OF THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD

We have seen how one might be led to believe there was
something confusing about navigating one's career in the world
of work. And confusion there is to one who is not equipped with
guides and maps.

Basically, it all seemed very simple, this thing called work,
getting a job. One was educated into some skill and one read
an ad, or was sent by a friend and was interviewed for a job.
And one got it and then reported every day and did the things
assigned and as time went on, hoped for a raise in pay. And
time going even further on brought one to hope for a pension
or a governmental regime that would pay old age benefits. And
that was the simple pattern of it.

But times change and simple patterns have a habit of being
deranged. The various incidents and accidents of fate entered into
the picture. Completely aside from personal factors, larger views
alter things. The government in sweeping economy fails to grant
adequate pension. The business for which one works is shattered
by a time of depression. Or one's health fails inexplicably and
one is left on charity.

The worker in his work-a-day world is no towering giant
amongst his many foes. The tinsel path sketched so

19

happily by rabble-rousers, the great affection held for the worker
by this or that ideology or political figure, do not reflect fact.
A man working at a job is faced by difficulties large enough to
him, no matter how small they might seem to a successful
industrialist. A few percent rise in taxes may mean that he
thereafter goes without tobacco. An entrance upon bad times for
the business may result in lessened pay, and there may go any
and all luxuries and even some necessities, or the job.

The effect of international currents, governments, business
trends and markets all usually beyond his concern, the worker is
perfectly entitled to believe that his fate is not quite entirely
predictable. Indeed, he might even be entitled to be confused.

A man can starve to death in a few days. Few workers have
many days of margin in their pockets if the currents change.
Thus many things which would be no vast problem to the very
secure are watched as menaces by the worker. And these things
can become so many that all life seems too confused to be borne
and one sinks into an apathy of day-to-day grind, without much
hope, trusting that the next storm, by luck, will pass over him.

As one looks at the many factors which might derange his life
and undermine his security, the impression is, confusion seems
well founded and it can be said with truth that all difficulties
are fundamentally confusions. Given enough menace, enough
unknown, a man ducks his head and tries to swing through it
blindly. He has been overcome by confusions.

20

Enough unsolved problems add up to a huge confusion. Every
now and then, on his job, enough conflicting orders bring the
worker into a state of confusion. A modern plant can be so poorly
managed that the entire thing appears to be a vast confusion to
which no answer is possible.

Luck is the usual answer one resorts to in a confusion. If the
forces about one seem too great, one can always "rely on his
luck". By luck we mean "destiny not personally guided". When
one turns loose of an automobile wheel and hopes the car will
stay on the road, by luck, he is often disappointed. And so it
is in life. Those things left to chance become less likely to work
themselves out. One has seen a friend shutting his eyes to the bill
collectors and gritting his teeth while he hopes that he will win
at the races and solve all his problems. One has known people
who handled their lives this way for years. Indeed, one of
Dickens' great characters had the entire philosophy of "waiting
for something to turn up". But luck, while we grant that it
IS a potent element is only necessary amid a strong current of
confusing factors. If one has to have LUCK to see him through
then it follows that one isn't any longer at his own automobile
wheel and it follows, too, that one is dealing with a confusion.

A confusion can be defined as any set of factors or
circumstances which do not seem to have any immediate
solution. More broadly, a confusion in this universe is
RANDOM MOTION.

If you were to stand in heavy traffic you would be likely to
feel confused by all the motion whizzing around

21

you. If you were to stand in a heavy storm, with leaves and
papers flying by, you would be likely to be confused.

Is it possible to actually understand a confusion? Is there any
such thing as an "anatomy of confusion"? Yes, there is.

If, as a switchboard operator, you had ten calls hitting your
board at once, you might feel confused. But is there any answer
to the situation? If as a shop foreman you have three emergencies
and an accident all at the same time, you might feel confused.
But is there any answer to that?

A confusion is only a confusion so long as ALL particles are in
motion. A confusion is only a confusion so long as no factor is
clearly defined or understood.

Confusion is the basic cause of stupidity. To the stupid all
things except the very simple ones are confused. Thus if one
knew the anatomy of confusion, no matter how bright one might
be, he would be brighter.

If you have ever had to teach some young aspirant who was not
too bright, you will understand this well. You attempt to explain
how such-and-so works. You go over it and over it and over it.
And then you turn him loose and he promptly makes a complete
botch of it. He "didn't understand", he "didn't grasp it". You
can simplify your understanding of his misunderstanding by saying,
very rightly, "he was confused".

Ninety-nine percent of all education fails, when it fails, on the
grounds that the student was confused.

22

And not only in the realm of the job, but in life itself,
when failure approaches, it is born, one way or another, from
confusion. To learn of machinery or to live life, one has to be
able either to stand up to confusion or to take it apart.

We have in Scientology a certain doctrine about confusion. It
is called the Doctrine of the Stable Datum.

If you saw a great many pieces of paper whirling about a room
they would look confused until you picked out one piece of paper
to be the piece of paper by which everything else was in motion.
In other words, a confusing motion can be understood by
conceiving one thing to be motionless.

In a stream of traffic all would be confusion unless you were to
conceive one car to be motionless in relation to the other cars and
so to see others in relation to the one.

The switchboard operator receiving ten calls at once solves the
confusion by labelling, correctly or incorrectly, one call as the
first call to receive her attention. The confusion of ten calls
all at once becomes less confusing the moment she singles out one
call to be answered. The shop foreman confronted by three
emergencies and an accident needs only to elect his FIRST target
of attention to start the cycle of bringing about order again.

Until one selects ONE datum, ONE factor, ONE particular in a
confusion of particles, the confusion continues. The ONE thing
selected and used becomes the STABLE DATUM for the remainder.

23

Any body of knowledge, more particularly and exactly, is
built from ONE DATUM. That is its STABLE DATUM. Invalidate it
and the entire body of knowledge falls apart. A stable datum
does not have to be the correct one. It is simply the one that
keeps things from being in a confusion and on which others are
aligned.

Now, in teaching a young aspirant to use a machine, he failed
to grasp your directions, if he did, because he lacked a
stable datum. ONE FACT had to be brought home to him first.
Grasping that, he could grasp others. One is stupid, then, or
confused in any confusing situation until he has fully grasped
ONE FACT or one item.

Confusions, no matter how big and formidable they may seem,
are composed of data or factors or particles. They have pieces.
Grasp one piece and locate it thoroughly. Then see how the
others function in relation to it and you have steadied the
confusion and, relating other things to what you have grasped,
you will soon have mastered the confusion in its entirety.

In teaching a boy to run a machine, don't throw a torrent of
data at him and then point out his errors; that's confusion to
him, that makes him respond stupidly. Find some entrance point
to his confusion, ONE DATUM. Tell him, "This is a machine." It may
be that all the directions were flung at someone who had no real
certainty, no real order of existence. "This is a machine," you say.
Then make him sure of it. Make him feel it, fiddle with it, push
at it. "This is a machine," tell him. And you'd be surprised how
long it may take but you'd be surprised as well how his certainty
increases. Out of all the complexities he

24

must learn to operate it, he must know ONE DATUM first. It is
not even important WHICH datum he first learns well beyond
that it is better to teach him a SIMPLE BASIC DATUM. You
can show him what it does, you can explain to him the final
product, you can tell him why HE has been selected to run this
machine. BUT you MUST make one basic datum clear to him or
else he will be lost in confusion.

Confusion is uncertainty. Confusion is stupidity. Confusion
is insecurity. When you think of uncertainty, stupidity and
insecurity, think of confusion and you'll have it down pat.

What, then, is Certainty? Lack of confusion. What then is
Intelligence? Ability to handle confusion. What then is Security?
The ability to go through or around or to bring order to confusion.
Certainty, Intelligence and Security are lack of or ability to
handle confusion.

How does luck fit into confusion? Luck is the hope that some
uncontrolled chance will get one through. Counting on luck is an
abandonment of control. That's apathy.

There is GOOD control and BAD control. The difference
between them is Certainty and Uncertainty. Good control is
certain, positive, predictable. Bad control is uncertain, variable
and unpredictable. With good control one can be certain, with
bad control one is never certain. A foreman who makes a rule
effective today but not" tomorrow, who makes George obey but
not James, is exercising bad control; in that foreman's wake will
come uncertainty and insecurity, no matter what his personal

25

attributes may be.

Because there can be so much uncertain, stupid control, some of
us begin to believe that all control is bad. But this is very far
from true. Control is necessary if one would bring any order into
confusions. One must be able to control things, his body, his
thoughts at least to some degree, to do anything whatever.

A confusion could be called an UNCONTROLLED RANDOMNESS. Only
those who can exert some control over that randomness can handle
confusions. Those who cannot exert control actually breed
confusions.

The difference between good and bad control then becomes
more obvious. The difference between good and bad here is
DEGREE. A thorough positive control can be predicted by
others. Therefore it is good control. A non-positive, sloppy
control cannot be predicted; therefore it is a bad control.
Intention also has something to do with control. Control can be
used for constructive purposes or destructive purposes; but you
will discover that when destructive purposes are INTENDED,
bad control is used.

Thus there is a great deal to this entire subject of
CONFUSION. You may find it rather odd for confusion itself to
be used here as a target. But you will find that it is an excellent
common denominator to all that we consider evil in life. And if
one can become master of confusions, his attention is freed
for constructive activity. So long as one is being confused by
confusions, all he can think about are destructive things - what
he wants to do most is to destroy the confusion.

26

So let us then learn first how to destroy confusions. And this,
we find, is a rather simple thing. When ALL particles seem to be
in motion, halt one and see how the others move according to it
and then you will find less confusion present. With one adopted
as a STABLE DATUM others can be made to fall in line. Thus an
emergency, a machine, a job or life itself can be viewed and
understood and one can be free.

Let us take a glance at how this works. In the first chapter
we listed a number of things which might influence obtaining,
holding and improving a job. One can handle this entire
problem, as people most often do, by entering into the problem
the single datum, "I can get and hold a job." By clutching to
this as a single belief, the confusions and insecurities of life
become less effective, less confusing.

But suppose one has done this: suppose that without further
investigating the problem, one, when young, gritted his teeth and
shut his eyes and said, "I can get and hold a job, come what may.
Therefore I am not going to worry about the economics of
existence any more." Well, that was fine.

Later on, without warning, one got fired. One was out of work
for ten weeks. He felt then, even when he did get a new job, less
secure, less confident. And let us say that some accident occurred
and one was out of a job again. When once more unemployed, he was
once more even less confident, less secure. Why?

Let us take a look at the opposite side of this Doctrine of the
Stable Datum. If we do, we learn that confusions

27

are held ineffective by stable data and that, when the stable
datum is shaken, the confusion comes into being again.

Let us envision a confusion as stopped. It is still scattered
but it is stopped. What stopped it? The adoption of a stable datum.
Let us say that one was bothered badly in the home by a
mother-in-law. One day, after a quarrel, one stalked out and by
inspiration, said to himself, "All mothers-in-law are evil." That
was a decision. That, rightly or wrongly, was a stable datum
adopted in a confusion. At once one felt better. He could
deal with or live with the problem now. He knew that "all
mothers-in-law" were evil. It wasn't true, but it was a stable
datum. Then one day, when he was in trouble, his mother-in-law
stepped forward, true-blue, and paid not only the rent but the
other debt too. At once he felt very confused. This act of kindness
should not have been a thing to bring in confusion. After all,
hadn't she solved the problem? Then why does one feel upset
about it? BECAUSE THE STABLE DATUM HAS BEEN SHAKEN. The entire
confusion of the past problem came into action again by reason of
the demonstrated falsity of the stable datum.

To make anyone confused, all you have to do is locate their
stable data and invalidate them. By criticism or proof it is only
necessary to shake these few stable data to get all a person's
confusions back into action.

You see, stable data do not have to be true. They are simply
adopted. When adopted, then one looks at other data in relation
to them. Thus the adoption of ANY stable datum will tend to
nullify the confusion addressed. BUT

28

if that stable datum is shaken, invalidated, disproven, then one
is left again with the confusion. Of course, all one has to do is
adopt a new stable datum or put the old stable datum back in
place, but he'd have to know Scientology in order to accomplish
this smoothly.

Let us say one has no fears of national economy because of an
heroic political figure who is trying his best. That man is the
stable datum to all one's confusions about national economy.
Thus one "isn't worried". But one day circumstances or his
political enemies shake him as a datum. They "prove" he was
really dishonest. One then becomes worried all over again about
national economy. Maybe you adopted some philosophy because
the speaker seemed such a pleasant chap. Then some person
carefully proves to you that the speaker was actually a thief
or worse. One adopted the philosophy because one needed some
peace from his thoughts. Invalidating the speaker would then
at once bring back the confusion one faced originally.

All right. We looked at the confusion of the work-a-day world
when we were young and we held it all back by stating grimly, "I
can get and keep a job." That was the stable datum. We did get
a job. But we got fired. The confusion of the work-a-day world
then became very confusing. If we have only the one stable datum,
"I can get and keep a job," as our total answer to all the
various problems listed in the first chapter, then, assuredly, one
is going to spend some confusing periods in his working life. A
far, far better stable datum would be, "I understand about life
and jobs. Therefore I can get, hold and improve them." And that's
where we are going in this book.

29

Chapter Three

IS WORK NECESSARY?

An understanding of life is necessary to the living of it.
Otherwise life becomes a trap. To so many of us in the
work-a-day world this trap takes the form of WORK.

If only we didn't have to work, how many delightful things
could we do! If only we had some other way of getting money...
Travel, vacations, new clothes... what a host of things would be
ours if only we didn't have to work!

It is almost an educational factor of our society that work,
duress of, is the root of our unhappiness. We hear unions and
welfare states as well as individuals basing all their plea upon
a reduction of work. Getting rid of work by virtue of reduced
hours and the introduction of automatic machinery has become the
by-word of the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the most disheartening thing which could happen to most
of us would be the loss of all future jobs. To be denied the right
to work is to be denied any part of the society in which we live.

The rich man's son, the moneyed dowager, neither of them
works. Neither is sane. When we look for neurosis and folly in
our society we look toward those who do not or cannot work.
When we look over the background of a

30

criminal we look at "inability to work". Somehow the right to
work seems to be bound up in happiness and the zest of living.
And demonstrably the denial of work is bound up with madness
and insanity.

As the amount of automatic machinery increases in our society,
so increases the percentile of our people who are insane. Child
labor laws, injunctions against overtime, demands for many
papers and skills and conditions of being alike combine to
reduce the amount of work that can be done by an individual.

Have you ever seen a retired man who pined for his desk?
Today "the doctrine of limited work" educates us to believe
that at such and such an age we must stop work. Why is this so
popular when we can see for ourselves that the end of work is
the end of life in most cases?

Speaking politically for a moment, from the standpoint of
sanity. Man more dearly needs the Right to Work than he does
an endless number of pretended freedoms. Yet we carefully
discourage in our children and in our society those people who
MAKE work. Unless work is made there will be no work to do.
Work is not something which springs ready-made into our sight.
Work is something that is created. New inventions, new markets,
new systems of distribution must be created and brought into
existence as times change and old methods, old markets, old
systems become inadequate and wear out. Somebody created the
jobs we do. When we work we either do a job created by
ourselves or by another.

It is not enough to coast along in a job. The job, day by

31

day, has to be made by us, no matter who created it in the first
place.

To work is to participate in the activities of our society. To
be refused a part in the activities of our society is to be cast
out by it.

Somebody invented the difference between work and play. Play
was seen to be something that was interesting and work was
seen to be something that was arduous and necessary and
therefore not interesting. But when we have our vacations and
go and "play" we are usually very glad to get back to the "daily
grind". Play is almost purposeless. Work has a purpose.

In truth, only the constant refusal on the part of the society
to give us work results in our distaste of work when it exists.
The man who cannot work was forbidden the right to work. When we
go back in the history of the notoriously unable-to-work criminal,
we find that he was first and foremost convinced that he must not
work - he was forbidden to work whether by his father or mother
or school or early life. Part of his education was that he
must not work. What was left? Revenge upon the society which
refused to let him take part in its activities.

Let us re-define work and play. Play should be called "work
without a purpose". It could also be called "activity without
purpose". That would make work be defined as "activity with
purpose".

Where we have fault to find with working, it grows out of our
own fear that we will not be permitted to continue work.

32

There is nothing wrong with automation, with all this
installation of machines to do our work, so long as the
powers-that-be remember to create ADDITIONAL WORK for us.
Automation could be a blessing to the whole world, PROVIDING as
many new jobs are invented as were disposed of by machinery.
THEN we'd have production And if the powers-that-be didn't
fumble their basic economics and created enough money for us
to buy all the new products, THERE would be prosperity indeed.
So it isn't automation that is at fault; if automation leaves
people unemployed, SOMEBODY wasn't permitted to invent new jobs
for us. Of course, if every new business is flattened by
restriction and if every man who would invent work was
prohibited from doing so, then and only then would automatic
machinery bring about our down, fall.

Despite the much-advertised joys of vacations and endless play,
such things have never been other than a curse for Man. The
earliest mention of it was by Homer in the Lotus Isles. And
didn't that crew go to pieces.

No, definitely there is more to work and working than having
to have a pay-check. Of course there are jobs more interesting
than other jobs. Of course there are positions which are more
remunerative than other positions. But when one contrasts the
right to have a position with NO right to have one, then one
will choose even the less interesting and poorer paid tasks.

Did you know that a mad person could be made well simply by
getting him convinced that he has some purpose in life? Well,
that can happen. It doesn't matter how thin

33

or artificial that purpose may be, mad people can be made sane
with it. One instance comes to mind of a crazy girl for whom
nothing could be done. That was the point in her case - nothing
could be done for her. But one night near the asylum an auto
accident occurred and an overworked doctor, seeing her near,
ordered her to do some things for the victims. She became well.
She became a staff nurse. She was never insane thereafter.

Now, no-one pretends that we are all mad if we don't work. But
it is an astonishing thing that we drift in that direction when
we are forbidden to labor.

Great revolutions occur out of a mass inability to work. The
crowds rebel not because they are angry over privileges, which
they always say, but because they have gone mad, having no work.
It is truth that revolutions cannot occur when people are
all employed. And it doesn't matter how arduously they are
employed either. Revolutions occur when people have been too
often forbidden to work. They go up in madness and the state
often comes down in ruins. NO revolution ever won anything.
Life evolves into a better condition by means of hard work,
not by threats.

If automatic machinery threw enough people out of work -
even though the machines were producing a plenty - there
would be a revolution. Why? Because by robbing them of work,
people have been robbed of a purpose in life. When that goes,
all goes.

A good purpose, a bad purpose, it does not matter, so long
as a purpose exists. WHY?

34

Now, do not think we have strayed very far from the last
chapter. We haven't. Here is an understanding of life. Life has
certain stable data that ARE the stable data of livingness. Once
grasped, then life - and that part of it called work - can be
understood.

Life is basically a created thing. But it has many elements in
it creating against many other elements in it. A confusion occurs
whenever two or more things start creating against each other.
Thus life, viewed impartially, can seem to be a confusion.

If one were to sit amongst all this livingness, all this
creatingness, all this warfare, without any purpose - such an
existence in its entirety would be fatal. To be part of a universe,
a civilization, and yet to have no purpose, is the route to madness.

The exertion of energy, the exercise, the time spent, the
things done are all of a lower order of importance. Just to have
Something To Do and a Reason To Do It exerts a control over
life itself. If you have no purpose, you have no purchase on the
small first particle necessary to make the whole understandable.
Thus life can become a terrible burden.

In the United States a quarter of a century ago, and in other
lands as well, there was something called a depression. It came
out of a lack of understanding of economics during a period of
transition into a machine age. During it a great president saw
that work had been denied to his people. He created work. He
thought he did it to get money into circulation to buy all the
things the

35

country could now make. Therefore he did not really rescue the
bulk of his people from despair. For the work he gave them was
to be carelessly done, poorly done. All that was being demanded
was time spent on the job. He had a wonderful opportunity to
turn a country into a beautiful thing. But the work given had
no purpose.

Men who detest one job or another detest it because they
can't see where it is going or can't believe they are doing any
important thing. They are "working", that is to say, they report
and go through motions and draw a pay-check. But they aren't
truly a part of the scheme of things. They don't feel they have
anything to win.

In our civilization the Stable Datum to the confusion of
existence is WORK. And the Stable Datum of work is Purpose.
Even if the purpose is just getting a pay-check, it is still
purpose.

Any of us, probably, could do more important things than we
are doing. Any of us could use some changes in our tasks. But
none of us, and still stay alive and sane, could do without
something to do.

When we grow timid in the face of circumstance it is because
our Purpose, our Stable Data, have been invalidated.

It is, as we have shown, rather easy to knock a person into a
state of confusion. All you have to do is locate his Stable Datum
on any subject and shake it. This is a trick we all use. For
instance, we are arguing about economics with a friend: we don't
agree with him. We ask him where

36

he got such an idea. He says somebody wrote it in such-and-so.
We attack the writer or the paper and discredit it. In other
words, we win our argument by shaking his Stable Datum as nearly
as we can find it.

Life is competitive. Many of us forget we are part of a team
called Man, in contest with who knows what else to Survive. We
attack Man and attack our friends. In the course of holding a job,
it seems only natural that here and there in the organization
would be people who were so insecure in their own tasks that
they seek to spread insecurity around them.

Having drunk of confusion too deeply, having too few Stable
Data, a person can begin to dramatize confusion, to spread it,
to consciously try to make everything and everybody confused.
One of the favorite targets of such people is the Stable Datum
of Work. Although usually such people cannot even do their own
jobs they are very anxious to make others tired of theirs. They
"cut down the competition" by carving up the Stable Data of
others.

Beware these people who come around and inquire "sympathetically"
about your health because you look "overworked". It is almost
easier to get "overloafed" than overworked. Beware these people
who want you to sign a petition to shorten the hours to be spent
on the job. The end product of that is no job. And beware, too,
the fellow who is always taking it "out of the firm" because the
firm can afford it. Remember, that firm is part yours, no matter
if they fire you tomorrow. Such people are trying to pull out
from under you the Stable Datum of Work.

37

If you are afraid of losing your job, it is because you suffer
already from too many forbiddings to work. The only way to hold
a job is to make it every day, to create it and keep it created.
If you have no wish to create and continue that job then there must
be something at cross-purposes with purpose. There is something
wrong between what you think would be a good purpose and what
purpose your job has.

Government jobs are an interesting example because, so often,
nobody seems to care really whether the job has purpose or not.
Too often the purpose of having a government job is just to have
a government job. Here in particular one has to understand about
life and work itself, for a government job has to be created
continually to continue. And if it seems to have no purpose then
one should look over government itself and get at its purpose,
for the purpose of the government as a whole, in some part, would
be the purpose of the job held, no matter how small.

Anyone suffering from a distaste for work must basically have
a feeling that he isn't really allowed to work. Thus work is
not a stable datum in life. And he must have, as well, some
cross-purpose about the purposes of his job. And, too, he usually
is associated with people in his job who are trying to make work
into something less than tasteful. But he is to be pitied because
he is unhappy. He is Unhappy because he is confused. Why is he
confused? Because he has no Stable Datum for his life. And a
Stable Datum for life itself is the basis of good living as well
as good job orientation.

38

Chapter Four

THE SECRET OF EFFICIENCY

What is control?

Whether one handles a machine of the size of a car or as small
as a typewriter or even an accounting pen, one is faced with the
problems of control. An object is of no use to anyone if it cannot
be controlled. Just as a dancer must be able to control his body,
so must a worker in an office or a factory be able to control his
body, the machines of his work and to some degree the
environment around him.

The primary difference between "the worker" in an office or a
factory and an executive is that the executive controls minds,
bodies and placement of communications, raw materials and
products, and the worker controls in the main his immediate
tools. However, it is far too easy for those anxious to agitate
labor into measures not necessarily good for it, and for
executives who themselves are anxious for control and anxious
about it, to forget that the worker who does not control his
materials of work and who is himself a controlled factor only,
is practically useless to the plant itself. Both management and
labor must be able to control their immediate environment. The
most apparent difference between an executive and a "worker" is
that the executive controls more environment than the "worker". T
o that degree, then, the executive must be more capable than the
"worker" or the plant or business is doomed to difficulty if not
failure.

39

What is a good workman? He is one who can positively control
his equipment or tools of trade or who can control the
communication lines with which he is intimately connected.

What is a bad worker? A bad worker is one who is unable to
control the equipment he is supposed to control or the
communication lines he is supposed to handle.

People who wish to control others, but who do not wish others
to control anything bring us into a difficulty by establishing a
fallacy. That fallacy is that there is such a thing as "bad"
control. Control is either well done or not done. If a person
is controlling something he is controlling it. If he is
controlling it poorly he is not controlling it. A machine
which is being run well is controlled. A machine which is
not being run well is not being controlled. Therefore we see
that bad control is actually a not-control.

People who tell you that control is bad are trying to tell you
that automobile accidents and industrial accidents are good.

Attempted control for bad or covert purposes is harmful and it
carries with it the ingredient of unknowingness. The person who
is attempting control is actually not controlling. He is simply
seeking to control and his efforts are in the main indefinite
and unpositive, which of course are characteristics which
control does not countenance. When unknowingness is entered into
control, control can become antipathetic, but it does not become
a fact. If you have ever covertly controlled your car you will
understand what is meant. If you handled your steering wheel in

40

such a way that the car would not "know" which way it was then
supposed to go you would soon be involved in difficulties. You
must handle the steering wheel of a car in such a way that the
car then turns the proper turns and remains on a straight course
on a straight road. There is nothing hidden about your intention
of controlling the car and there is nothing unknown about the
response of the car. When a car fails to respond to your handling
of the steering wheel control has ceased to exist.

In other words, one either controls something or he does not.
If he does not we have developed a misnomer. We have developed
the idea that there is such a thing as bad control.

People who have been "badly controlled", which is to say, who
have been merely shaken up and have not been controlled at all,
begin to believe that there is something bad about control but
they would really not know what control is since they have not
been controlled in actuality.

To understand this further one would have to know one of the
very basic principles of Scientology which is the anatomy of
control. In part this principle consists as follows: Control
may be subdivided into three separate parts. These parts are
START, CHANGE and STOP.

Start, change and stop also comprise a cycle of action. The
CYCLE OF ACTION is seen in the turning of a simple wheel. The
wheel starts and then any given spot on it changes position
and then the wheel is stopped. It does not matter how long the
wheel is in motion, it still follows this cycle of action. A man
walking a short distance starts,

41

changes the position of his body and stops his body. He has,
if he does this, completed a cycle of action. On a longer span a
company starts, continues and at some date, early or late, ceases
to exist. In change we get change of position in space or change
of existence in time. In start we have simple start and in stop
we have simply stop. Things may start slowly or rapidly, things
may stop slowly or rapidly, things may change very rapidly while
they are going. Thus the rate of start, the rate of change and the
rate of stop have little to do with the fact that a cycle of action
does consist of start, change and stop.

The ancients referred to this cycle of action in a much more
detailed fashion. We find the Vedic Hymns talking about a cycle
of action in this wise: First there is chaos, then from the chaos
something emerges and can be said to have been born, it grows,
it persists, it decays and dies and chaos ensues. Although this
in essence is an inaccurate statement it is the earliest example
of a cycle of action.

A modern Scientology example of a cycle of action is much
more simply stated and is much more accurate. A cycle of action
is start, change and stop. This parallels another cycle of action
which is that of life itself. The cycle of action of life is
CREATION, SURVIVAL and DESTRUCTION. Survival could be said to
be any change, whether in size or in age or in position in
space. The essence of survival is change. Creation is of course
starting, destruction is of course stopping. Thus we have in
Scientology two very useful cycles of action, the first of them
being start, change and stop and the more detailed one being
create, survive, destroy.

42

Start, change and stop imply the conditions of a being or an
object. Create, survive, destroy imply the intention of life toward
objects.

Control consists entirely of starting, changing and stopping.
There are no other factors in positive control. If one can start
something, change its position in space or existence in time and
stop it, all at will, he can be said to control it, whatever it
may be. If one can barely manage to start something, can only with
difficulty continue its change of position or existence in time,
and if one can only doubtfully stop something, he cannot be said to
control it well, and for our purposes he would be said to be able
to control it poorly or dangerously. If he cannot start something,
if he cannot change its position in space, if he cannot stop
something, then he is definitely not in control of it. If he is
trying to start, change and stop something or somebody without
positively doing so he has entered unknowingness into the
activity and the result will be questionable to say the least.

Thus there is such a thing as good control. Good control would
consist of knowingness and positiveness. A girl who can start a
typewriter, continue its motion and then stop it could be said
to be in control of the typewriter. If she had difficulties in
starting it, in continuing its action and in stopping it she
would not only be in "bad control" of the typewriter, she would
be a bad stenographer.

Where "bad control" enters in, so enter incompetence,
accidents, difficulties, inefficiency and, not the least,
considerable misery and unhappiness. As we define bad control
as not-control, or as an unknowing attempt at control

43

without actually effecting control, it can be said that
unpositiveness results in a great many difficulties.

To give you some idea of how far this might go in life,
you might get the idea of being moved around in a room by
somebody. This somebody would tell you to go to the desk, then
would tell you to go to a chair, then would tell you to go to the
door. Each time he tells you to go somewhere, you of course have
to start yourself, change your body's position and stop yourself.
Now oddly enough you would not mind this if you knew that
somebody was telling you to do it and you were capable of
performing the action and you were not receiving orders in such
a wise as to interrupt your obedience of the command before you
completed it. Let us say, for instance, that somebody told you to
go to the desk, but before you arrived at the desk he told you to
go to a chair, but before you arrived at the chair told you to go
to the door and then claimed you were wrong in not having gone
to the desk. You would be, at that time, confused. This would be
"bad control" since it does not permit you to finish any cycle of
action before another cycle of action is demanded of you. Thus
your cycles of action become involved and a confusion results.
But this in essence would not be control since control must
involve an understandable or knowing positiveness. Good control
would not change the order before you had a chance to arrive at
the desk. It would let you arrive at the desk before you were
asked to start again for the chair. It would let you arrive at
the chair before you were asked to start again for the door. Now
you would not mind the positive control but it is certain that you
would be quite upset by the broken series of orders which did not
permit you to finish any cycle of action. Now, to give you some

44

idea of how this could influence one's life - which would you
rather have give you a series of orders such as above, to move
around a room: your father or your mother? It is certain that you
had the most trouble with the parent you would not have chosen
to have given you those orders.

Control is so far from being bad that a person who is sane and
in very good condition does not resent good, positive control and
is himself able to administer good, positive control to people
and objects. A person who is not in very good condition resents
even the most casual directions and is actually not capable
of controlling people or objects. The latter person is also
inefficient and has many difficulties with work and with life.

When a person cannot control things or when he resists things
controlling him he involves himself with difficulties not only
with people but with objects. It is also apparent that people with
control difficulties more readily become ill and fail in other
ways.

When a person is incapable of controlling a piece of machinery
it often occurs that the machinery reverses the matter and begins
to control him. As an example, a driver who cannot exert positive
control on a car is quite likely eventually to be controlled by
that car. Instead of a driver driving a car down the street we
have a car taking a "driver" down the street and sooner or later
the car, not being very expert at control, winds its driver up
in a ditch.

Even mechanical failures are attributable to a lack of control.
It will be discovered that an individual who cannot easily control
a machine is quite likely to have

45

considerable difficulties with that machine. The machine itself
suffers sometimes in nearly inexplicable ways. Motors run
for some men and do not run for others. Some machinery will go
on for years in the hands of a mechanic, but when the mechanic
leaves it and another takes his place who is not adept, the
machine may be found to break down and experience difficulties
never before noticed in it. It is stretching things a little bit
to infer that a person who cannot control things needs only to
look at a piece of machinery to have something go wrong with it,
and yet there are cases on record where this has happened. The
factor involved is more easily understood in, for instance, an
accounting department. A person who cannot control figures of
course sooner or later involves the books he is keeping in
complexities and intricacies which not even an expert accountant
can straighten out.

The cycle of action of this universe is start, change and stop.
This is also the anatomy of control. Almost the entire subject of
control is summed up in the ability to start, change and stop
one's activities, body and one's environment.

A habit is simply something one cannot stop. Here we have an
example of no control whatever and we have the step beyond the
last extremity of entirely lost control. Control begins to dwindle
when one is able to change things and stop things but is not still
capable of starting them. Once a thing is started, such a person
can change and stop it. A further dwindling of control, if one
can now call it such, would be the loss of an ability to change
something or continue its existence in time. This would leave one
simply with the ability to stop things. When one

46

finally loses the ability to stop something, that thing has to some
degree become his master.

In the stop of start, change and stop we see in essence the
entirety of the stable datum. If one can stop just one particle or
datum in a confusion of particles or data one has begun a control
of that confusion. In the matter of a mass of calls coming into a
switchboard simultaneously, each call insistently demanding the
attention of an operator, control is asserted on the switchboard by
the operator's stopping just one demand. It does not particularly
matter which demand is stopped. Handling just one call permits
one then to handle another call and so forth until one has
changed the condition of the switchboard from a total confusion
to a handled situation. One feels confused when there is nothing
in a situation which he can stop. When he can at least stop one
thing in a situation he will then find it is possible to stop others
and finally will recover the ability to change certain factors
in the situation. From this he graduates into an ability to change
anything in the situation and finally is capable of starting some
line of action.

Control is then found to be very intimate to confusion. A worker
who is easily confused is a worker who cannot control things.
An executive who is frantic in the face of an emergency is an
executive who even in good times does not feel that he has any
ability to actually start, change and stop situations in which
he is involved as an executive.

Franticness, helplessness, incompetence, inefficiency and other
undesirable factors in a job are all traceable to inabilities to
start, change and stop things.

47

Let us say that a plant has a good manager. The manager can
start, change and stop the various activities in which the plant
is involved; can start, change and stop the various machinery of
the plant; can start, change and stop the raw materials and the
products of the plant; and can start, change and stop various
labor activities or difficulties. But let us say that this plant
is unfortunate enough to have only one person in it who can start,
change and stop things. Now unless the executive is going to
handle all the incoming raw materials, turn on and off all the
machinery, process every piece of material in the place and ship
the finished products himself, he will be unable to run the plant.
Similarly an office manager who himself can start, change and stop
any of the activities of an office or handle them, if he were the
only one in the office who could, would be powerless actually to
run a very large office.

In a plant or in an office it is then necessary for an executive,
no matter how good he may be, to be supported by subordinates
who themselves are not unwilling to be started, changed and
stopped by him, but who can themselves start, change and stop
the activities or personnel in their own immediate environment in
the plant.

Now given a good executive in a plant or office and given good
subordinates (defining as good, their ability to start, change
and stop things), we would yet have difficulty if we reached
lower down on the command chart and discovered that we did not
have any working people who themselves were capable of starting,
changing and stopping their own particular jobs. We would have
a condition here where the executive and the foreman would then
be forced to do everything that was really being done in the

48

plant. To actually have a good plant we would have to have
an executive, foreman and workers, all of whom in their own
environment were capable of starting, changing and stopping
things and who were at the same time (including the executives)
not unwilling to be started, changed and stopped in their
duties, providing positive and understandable orders were used.

As we look this over we see less and less the picture we
have been uniformly presented with in plants and offices of
the "management" and "laborers". As soon as we discover one
worker in a plant who does not have to start, change or stop
himself or anything else we would then have somebody who would
justify this title of "laborer". It is apparent that from the
topmost member of the board down to the lowest worker on the
payroll, each and every one of them is involved with starting,
changing and stopping people, materials, machinery, products
and pieces of the environment. In other words, each and every
one of them present in a plant or an office is actually managing
something. As soon as an executive realizes this he is then
capable of running a far more efficient business since he is
capable then of selecting out from amongst them, people who are
best at starting, changing and stopping things, and these by
example can bring others into a state of mind where they too
are willing to positively start, change and stop things.

We have people in the work-a-day world, whether managers or
janitors, who are for instance fixated (stuck) on starting. These
people can start all day and all night but they never get going.
Such people talk about big schemes and big deals; such people
talk a lot of enthusiasm about

49

getting going but never themselves seem to move.

Others, no matter what their class or classification, get
fixated on change. These manifest this usually by insisting that
everything "keep running". They talk all the time about "keeping
things going" but they will not listen to any new ideas or will
not receive any new machinery, since that would necessitate
stopping some old machinery and starting some new machinery.
Thus we get antiquated plants and systems continued on forever,
long past their usefulness or economic value. A subdivision of
this is the person who must change everything all the time.
This is actually another manifestation of trying to keep things
running, but instead of keeping things running, these people shift
everything there is to be shifted all the time. If an order is
issued they change the order. If they receive the word to go they
change it to stay. But this, it will be seen, is an unbalanced
condition where these people are actually unwilling to keep
anything running anywhere and are in reality on an obsessive stop.

Plants, businesses, factories, ships and even the government
are victimized particularly by people who can only stop things.
No matter how well some unit may be running, some order is issued
that stops whatever it is doing. It is enough for such people to
discover that something is going to do something to cause it to
stop. Usually one gets around this by failing to inform such
people that something is running.

Thus we can see that there are people who abuse the cycle of
action of start, change and stop and who are themselves fixated
upon one or another factor in the cycle

50

of action or who are incapable of withstanding any factor in it,
which means, of course, that they are in a continuous and
arduous confusion.

It is noteworthy that those people who can only start things are
normally creative. The artist, the writer, the designer is looked
upon to start things. He actually might also be capable of
continuing them or stopping them but his purest function is
creation.

There are amongst very rational and good men those whose
greatest ability is continuing things. They can also start things
and stop things if they can really continue things. It is upon
these men that we depend for the survival of a business or an
operation.

Then there is the class that is used by the society to stop
things. Such people have normally a police function. Certain things
are declared to be bad and these things so designated are then
turned over to people to stop them. Imperfect production is stopped
by inspectors. Bribery, corruption or crime is stopped by police.
Other nationally aggressive persons are stopped by the military.
And it should occasion no surprise that these specialists in stop
are of course specializing in destroy. It should occasion no
further surprise that when one looks at the element in the society
most likely to decay the society, one looks for those whose job it
is to specialize in stops. These people in the main, while serving
a very good function for the society at large, if they became fully
in charge, as in a police state, would only destroy the state and
its people, as has been noted since the days of Napoleon. The
most recent nation which turned over the entire function of the

51

state to police was Germany and Germany was stopped very
thoroughly. Germany also effected nothing but destruction.

When we have a society which is very good at starting we have
a creative society. When we have a society which is very good at
keeping things running we have a society that endures. When we
have a society that is only capable of stopping things we have
a society which is destructive or which is itself destroyed.
Therefore we must realize that a balance amongst these three
factors of start, change and stop is necessary, not only in an
individual, but in a business, and not only in a business but in
a nation. When one can only do one of these one is considerably
limited in his usefulness. The optimum condition would be for
everyone from manager down to janitor to be capable of starting,
changing and stopping and to be able to endure being started,
changed and stopped. Thus we would have a balanced and relatively
unconfused business activity.

No business can succeed unless it has been properly started,
unless it is progressing through time or changing position in
space and unless it is capable of stopping harmful practices and
even competitors.

As it is with a nation or a business so it would be with an
individual holding down a single job. He should be able to start,
change and stop anything under his immediate control. If he is
running a machine he should be able to start the machine, to
keep it turning (changing) and to stop it, and this should be
under his own determinism. His machine should not be started
by some engineer and stopped at some period of the day without
any attention

52

from himself. Furthermore, if he felt the machine should be shut
down and oiled he should have the authority to do so and should
not have to withstand the pummeling of some machine foreman
who, without understanding the situation, simply observed that a
machine was stopped which according to his lights ought to be
running.

Even a janitor, to have any efficiency at his job and thus to
have a clean set of offices or a plant, would have to be able to
start, change and stop the various objects having to do with his
particular job. He should not have to keep on sweeping after the
floor is clean and he should not have to stop sweeping before he
has cleaned the floor and he should be able to start sweeping the
floor when he believes it ought to be swept. Naturally if he is
able to do these things he is also able to co-operate with his
fellow workers, and himself be stopped or started or altered in
his activity, so as to execute his job while making it possible
for them to do their jobs.

Here, however, we envision a nation or a plant or an office or
a small section or department running without any supervision at
all, whereas there would be executives and foremen and workers.
It is doubtful if supervision of others would occupy much of
anyone's time. As the ability of the worker and foreman and
executive to start, change and stop those things which they
should handle and control declines, it will be discovered that
supervision enters it. The less capable people are of starting,
changing and stopping the people or objects under their
immediate control, the more supervision they require. When
supervision gets up to 80 percent of the plant's activities it
is certain that the confusion will be so great that inefficiency

53

will result in such magnitude as to ruin the activity.

Supervision then is actually a criticism of the junior. It
implies that a junior does not know or is not able in the field
of control.

Co-operation and alignment of activity is different than
supervision. Where one has a chain of command one does not
necessarily have supervision. One does have, however,
co-ordinated planning for an entire operation which is then
relayed to others in the operation so that coordination can
take place. If everybody is agreed on the worthwhileness of any
activity and if everybody in that activity were capable of actually
controlling those items or persons which were in his immediate
sphere of action, it would be found that planning would not have
to engage in much supervision in order to effect the execution
of the ideas involved. This is a very high order of dream. Only
where Scientology has been thoroughly at work could such a
thing occur - that an organization could run in agreement with
itself without supervision or punitive action.

One is able to gauge those workers around him by the amount
of confusion in which they are involved. That confusion tells one
at once the degree of inability to control things. That inability
to control things may not be entirely the fault of the worker. There
are two things which can be psychotic: one is the surroundings
and the other is the person. A sane man has difficulty in insane
surroundings. An insane man has difficulty in even the sanest
and most orderly surroundings. Thus there are two factors
involved in any operation: the person and the

54

surroundings. It could also be said there are two factors involved
in any business: the surroundings of the business itself and
the business. One sane business trying to operate in a world of
madmen would have a very great difficulty getting along. One
way or another the inability of the madmen to start, change and
stop things would infect the business and deteriorate its
efficiency.

Thus it is not enough that an individual himself be capable of
controlling his job. He must also be able to tolerate the confusion
of those around him who cannot control their jobs, or he must be
able to tolerate sane and steady control from those around him.

Insanity is contagious. Confusion is contagious. Have you ever
talked to a confused man without yourself, at the end of the
conversation, feeling a little confused? Thus it is in work.
If one is working with a great many men who are incapable, one
begins, himself, to feel incapable. It is not enough to live
alone. It is impossible to work alone. Realizing this one also
understands that his ability to control the immediate machinery
or work tools with which he is involved would also include an
ability to assist others in his vicinity to control those things
with which they are involved.

Many a good worker has been lost to a factory because the
good worker could not make his own work good enough to satisfy
himself, being faced in his job with so many confused elements
and orders that he at last rebelled. Thus good workers can be
spoiled. In any department it is possible to spot the people
who spoil good workers. They are the people who cannot start,

55

change and stop such things as communication or machinery and
who are themselves most liable to franticness and confusion.
These are the people who would rather have solutions thrown in
the waste-basket and problems posted on the bulletin board.

What could one do if he were surrounded by people who were
confused and incapable of starting, changing and stopping their
various activities? He could himself become sufficiently capable
at his own job that he would set a fine example for others and
thus himself be a stable datum in the confusion of that area.
He could do even more than this. He could understand how to
handle them and, so understanding, could bring orderliness
into the minds and activities of those men so as to balk their
inabilities as they might affect him. But in order to do the
latter he would have to know a great deal about Scientology and
its various principles, and that is somewhat beyond the scope
of this particular volume.

For the individual worker who wishes to do a good job and to
go on having a job and to rise in his position it is almost
enough that he understand his job thoroughly so that no part of
it confuses him and so that he can start, change or stop anything
with which he is connected in that job and that he himself can
tolerate being started, changed and stopped by his superiors
without himself becoming unsettled. In other words, the greatest
asset and greatest job insurance a worker could have would be
a calmness of mind concerning what he was doing. A calmness of
mind is derived from the ability to start, change and stop the
objects and activities with which he is involved and to be able
to be started, changed and stopped

56

by others without himself being as confused as they are.

Thus the secret of doing a good job is the secret of control
itself. One not only continues to create a job, day by day, week
by week, month by month, he also continues the job by permitting
it to progress, and he is also capable of stopping or ending any
cycle of work and letting it remain finished.

Workers are most often victimized by bosses, juniors, or marital
partners who are not themselves capable of controlling anything,
yet who will not be controlled and who in some peculiar way are
obsessed on the idea of control. A worker who is thus intimately
connected with something that he himself cannot control and which
is incapable of actually or really controlling him, performs his
work in a confused state which can only lead to difficulties and
distaste for work itself.

It can be said that the only thing bad about working is that it
is so very often associated with inabilities to control. When
these are present then the work itself seems tiresome, arduous
and uninteresting, and one would rather do anything else than
continue that particular work. There are many solutions to this.
First amongst them is to regain control of the items or functions
which one is most intimately connected with in doing his job.

However, control in itself is not an entire answer to everything,
for if it were one would have to be able to control everything, not
only in his own job, but in an office or on earth, before he could
be happy. We discover in examining control that the limits of
control should be

57

extended only across one's actual sphere of operation. When an
individual attempts to extend control far beyond his active
interest in a job or in life he encounters difficulty. Thus there
is a limit to the "area of control" which, if violated, violates
many things. There is almost a maxim that if an individual
consistently seeks to operate outside his own department he will
not take care of his own department. As a matter of fact, in
Scientology organizations it has been discovered that a person
who is consistently involving himself with things far beyond his
actual scope of interest is not covering his actual scope of
interest. Thus there is obviously another factor involved than
control. This factor is willingness not to control and is fully
as important as control itself.

58

Chapter Five

LIFE AS A GAME

It is quite obvious that if anyone controlled everything he
would have no game. There would be no unpredictable factors, no
surprises in life. This might be said to be a Hell of considerable
magnitude.

If one could control everything absolutely he would of course
be able to predict everything absolutely. If he could predict the
course and action of every motion in the entirety of existence he
would of course have no real interest in it.

We have already looked at the necessity of controlling the
immediate objects of work, but remember it is necessary, if one
controls these immediate objects, to have other objects or
environments which one does not absolutely control. Why is this?

It is because life is a game.

The word "game" is used here advisedly. When one is mired
down in the sometimes titanic struggle of existence he is apt
to discount the fact that there is joy in living. He is apt to
disbelieve that such a thing as fun can exist. Indeed people,
when they reach into their thirties, begin to wonder what happened
to their childhood when they actually could enjoy things. One
begins to wonder if pleasure of living isn't itself some sort
of trap, and one

59

begins to believe that it is not a good thing to become too
interested in new people and new things, since these will only
lead to heartbreak. There are men who have decided that in view
of the fact that loss brings so much pain, they had better not
acquire at all. It is far superior according to these to live a
life of only medium privation than to live a life of considerable
luxury, since then if they lost what they had the pain would be
much less.

Life, however, is a game. It is very easy to see a game in terms
of cricket or football. It is not so easy to see life as a game when
one is forced to rise before the sun and reach his home only after
it sets, after a day of arduous and relatively unthanked toil.
One is likely to dispute that such an activity could be a game at
all. Nevertheless it is obvious in various experiments which have
been made in Scientology that life, no matter what its emotional
tone or lack of it, is in essence a game and that the elements of
life itself are the elements of games.

Any job is a game.

A game consists of freedoms, barriers and purposes. There are
many more complicated factors involved in games, but these are
all listed in Scientology.

Primary amongst these is the necessity in a game to have an
opponent or an enemy. Also a necessity is to have problems.
Another necessity is to have sufficient individuality to cope
with a situation. To live life fully, then, one must have, in
addition to "something to do", a higher purpose, and this purpose,
to be a purpose at all, must have counter-purposes or purposes
which prevent it from

60

occurring. One must have individualities which oppose the
purpose or activities of one, and if one lacks these things it
is certain that he will invent them.

This last is very important. If a person lacks problems,
opponents and counter-purposes to his own, he will invent them.
Here we have in essence the totality of aberration. But more
intimately to our purposes we have the difficulties which arise
from work.

If we had a foreman who capably controlled everything in his
area and did nothing else, and if that foreman were not entirely
mentally balanced in all ways (which is to say if he were human),
we would find that foreman inventing personalities for the
workers under him and reasons why they were opposing him and
actual oppositions. We would find him selecting out one or more
of his workmen to chastise, with, according to the foreman, very
good reason, but in actuality without any further reason than
that the foreman obsessively needed opponents. Now very many
involved classifications can be read into this by ancient mental
analyzes but none of these need to be examined. The truth of the
matter is that a man must have a game and if he does not have
one he will make one. If that man is aberrated and not entirely
competent he will make an intensely aberrated game.

Where an executive finds all running far too smoothly in his
immediate vicinity he is likely to cause some trouble just to have
something to do - unless that executive is in very good mental
condition indeed. Thus we have management pretending, often
without any actual basis in fact, that labor is against it.
Similarly, we occasionally

61

have labor certain that management, which is in fact quite
competent, is against labor. Here we have invented a game
where no game can actually exist.

When men become very shortsighted they cannot look actually
beyond their own environment. There is in any office, plant, or
activity the game of the office, plant or activity itself versus
its competitors and versus its outer environment. If that office,
plant or activity and all the personnel within it are conducting
themselves on a wholly rational and effective basis they choose
the outside world and other rival concerns for their game. If they
are not up to par and are incapable of seeing the real game they
will make up a game and the game will begin to be played inside
the office and inside the plant.

In playing games one has individuals and teams. Teams play
against teams; individuals play against individuals. When an
individual is not permitted to be fully a part of the team he
is apt to choose other members of the team as his opponents for,
remember, man must have a game.

Out of all these complexities come the various complexities of
work and the problems of production and communication.

If everybody in a plant were able to control his own sphere of
interest in that plant and if everybody in the plant were doing
his own job, there would actually be no lack of game, for there
are other plants, other activities in the outside world and these
always furnish game enough for any rational organization. But
supposing the people in an organization cannot control their own
sphere, cannot

62

control their own activities, and are obsessively attempting to
create aberrated games all about them. Then we would have a
condition whereby the plant, office or concern would not be able
to effectively fight its environment and would produce poorly, if
not collapse.

Aberrated or not aberrated, competent or not competent,
remember, life is a game and the motto of any individual or team
alive is, "There must be a game." If individuals are in good
mental and physical condition they actually play the game which
is obvious and in plain sight. If they are not in good condition
and if they are themselves incapable of controlling their own
immediate environment, they will begin to play games with their
tools. Here the machinist will find his machine suddenly incapable
of producing. One would not go so far as to say that he will
actually break the machine so that he can have a game with it,
but he will be in a mild state of fury regarding that machinery
continually. The bookkeeper, unable to control his immediate
tools of trade and not well-fitted into his concern, will begin
to play a game with his own figures and will fail to get balances.
His adding machine will break down, his papers will get lost
and other things will occur under his immediate nose which never
should happen, and if he were in good shape and could play the
actual game of keeping other people in the plant straight so far
as their accounts and figures are concerned, he would be efficient.

Efficiency, then, could be defined as the ability to play the
game to hand. Inefficiency could be defined as an inability to play
the game to hand, with a necessity to invent games with things
which one should actually be

63

able to control with ease.

This sounds almost too simple, but unfortunately for the
professors that try to make things complicated, it is just that
simple. Of course there are a number of ways men can become
too aberrated. That is not the subject of this book. The subject
of this book is work.

Now realizing that life must be a game, one should realize that
there is a limit to the area one would control and still retain an
interest in life. Interest is mainly kindled by the unpredictable.
Control is important. Uncontrol is, if anything, even more
important. To actually handle a machine perfectly one must be
willing to control it or not to control it. When control itself
becomes obsessive we begin to find things wrong with it. The
individual who absolutely has to control everything in sight is
upsetting to all of us and this individual is why we have begun to
find things wrong with control. It sounds very strange to say that
uncontrol must also be under control, but this is, in essence,
true. One must be willing to leave certain parts of the world
uncontrolled. If he cannot, he rapidly drops downscale and gets
into a situation where he is obsessively attempting to control
things which he never will be able to control and thus renders
himself unhappy, begins to doubt his ability to control those
things which he actually should be able to control and so at
length loses his ability to control anything. And this, in essence,
is what in Scientology we call the dwindling spiral of control.

There are mental factors which we will not discuss here, which
tend to accumulate the failure to control to a point where one is
no longer confident of his ability to control.

64

The truth of the matter is an individual actually desires to have
some part of life uncontrolled. When this part of life hurts
him sufficiently he then resigns himself to the necessity of
controlling it and so makes himself relatively unhappy if he
never will be able to do so.

A game consists of freedom, barriers and purposes. It also
consists of control and uncontrol.

An opponent in a game must be an uncontrolled factor.
Otherwise one would know exactly where the game was going
and how it would end and it would not be a game at all.

Where one football team would be totally capable of controlling
the other football team, we have no football game. This is a
matter of no contest. There would be no joy or sport in playing
that game of football. Now if a football player has been seriously
injured playing football, a new unknowing factor enters into
football for him. This injury lodges in what we call the "reactive
mind". It is a mind which is unseen and which works all the time.
One normally works on what we call the "analytical mind" and
this we know all about. Anything that we have forgotten or
moments of unconsciousness and pain become locked away in
the reactive mind and are then capable of reacting upon the
individual in such a way as to make him refrain from doing
something which was once dangerous. While this is a rather
technical subject it is nevertheless necessary to understand that
one's past has a tendency to accumulate and victimize one in the
future. Thus, in the case of the football player, while he plays
football he is apt to be restimulated or react from the old

65

injury received in football and so feels less than a spirit of
fun while playing football. He becomes anxious. He becomes very
grim on the subject of football and this is expressed by an effort
to actively control the players on another team so that they will
not injure him again.

In a motorcycle race a famous motorcycle rider was injured.
Two weeks later in another race we find this motorcycle rider
falling out on the fifth lap without injury or incident but
simply pulling over into the pits. He did this immediately after
a motorcycle swerved close to him. He recognized at once that he
was unable to control that motorcycle. He felt then incapable of
controlling his own motorcycle and so knew one thing - he had
to get out of that race. And just as this motorcycle rider
abandoned that race, so all of us at one time or another have
abandoned sections of life.

Now, up to the time he had that accident the motorcycle rider
was perfectly willing to not control any other motorcycle on
the track save his own. He did not worry about these other
motorcycles since they had never injured him and the motorcycle
racing game was still a game to him. However, during the
accident there was a moment when he sought to control another
motorcycle than his own and another rider. He failed in that
effort. Thus in his "reactive mind" there is an actual mental
image picture of his failing to control a motorcycle. Thus in
future racing he is less competent. He is afraid of his own
machine. He has identified his own machine with somebody
else's machine. This is a failure of control.

Now, in order to become a good motorcycle racer again

66

this man would have to resume his attitude of carelessness
regarding the control of the other machines and riders on the
track and reassume his own ability to control his own machine.
If he were able to do this he would become once more a daring,
efficient and winning motorcycle rider demonstrating great
competence. Only a Scientology practitioner could put him back
into this condition - and a Scientology practitioner would be
able to do this probably in a very few hours. This, however, is
not a textbook on how to eradicate former ills, but an explanation
of why men become incompetent in the handling of their immediate
tools of trade. These men have attempted to leave uncontrolled
all the world around them up to the moment when the world around
them hurt them. They then conceived the idea that they should
control more than their own jobs. They failed to control more
than their own jobs and were instantly convinced that they were
incapable of controlling something. This is quite different
than leaving things uncontrolled. To be capable of controlling
things and to be capable of leaving things uncontrolled are
both necessary to a good life and doing a good job. To become
convinced that one cannot control something is an entirely
different thing.

The whole feeling of self-confidence and competence actually
derives from one's ability to control or leave uncontrolled the
various items and people in his surroundings. When he becomes
obsessed with a necessity to control something rather beyond his
sphere of control, he is disabused of his ability to control those
things close to him. A person eventually gets into a state of mind
where he cannot pay any attention at all to his own job but can
only reach out into the outer environment and seek,

67

effectively or otherwise, to stop, start or change things which
have in reality very little to do with his own job. Here we have
the agitator, the inefficient worker, the individual who is going
to fail. He is going to fail because he has failed at some time
in the past.

This is not quite as hopeless as it looks because it takes actual
physical injury and very heavy duress to make an individual
feel that he is incapable of controlling things. The day-to-day
handling of machinery is not what deteriorates one's ability to
work or handle life. It is not true that one gets old and tired
and his ability to do things wears out. It is true that one
becomes injured in sudden, short moments and thereafter carries
that injury into his future work and the injury is what causes
him to deteriorate. The eradication of the injury brings him
back to an ability to control his own environment.

The entire subject of work, then, brings us to the value of
uncontrol. A machinist doing a good job should be able to relax
as far as his machine is concerned. He should be able to let it run
or not let it run, to start it or not to start it, to stop it or
not to stop it. If he can do these things, all with confidence
and a calm state of mind, he can then handle that machine and it
will be discovered that the machine will run well for him

Now let us say the machine bites him, he hurts his hand in
it, some other worker jostles against him at the wrong moment,
some tool given to him is defective and shatters. An actual
physical pain enters into the situation. He tends to fall away
from the machine. He tends then to concentrate much more heavily
on the machine than he

68

should. He is no longer willing to leave it uncontrolled. When he
is working with that machine he must control it. Now as he has
entered duress into this situation and as he is already anxious
about it, it is fairly certain that the machine will hurt him again.
This gives him a second injury and with this injury he feels an
even stronger urge to control the machine. You see, during the
moments of injury the machine was out of control. Now while
out-of-control is a game condition, it is not desired or welcome
to this particular machinist. Eventually, it is certain he will
look upon this machine as some sort of a demon. He will, you might
say, run the machine all day and at night while asleep run it too.
He will spend his week-ends and his holidays still running that
machine. Eventually he will not be able to stand the sight of
that machine and will flinch at the idea of working it a moment
longer.

This picture becomes slightly complicated by the fact that it
is not always the injury delivered to him by his own particular
machine which causes him to feel anxious about machinery. A
man who has been in an automobile accident may return to the
working of a machine with considerable qualms about machines
in general. He begins to identify his own machine with other
machines and all machines become the same machine and that is
the machine that hurt him.

There are other conditions which enter into lighter phases of
work. In the matter of a clerk we may have a circumstance where
he is ill from some other area than his area of work and yet,
because he has little time off, is forced to work, sick or not.
The tools of his own work, his

69

filing cabinets or his pens or his books or the very room, become
identified with his feeling of sickness and he feels that these,
too, have bitten him. Thus he becomes obsessed in his control of
them and actually degenerates in his ability to control them just
as the machinist does. Even though these tools have not actually
injured him he associates them with being injured. In other
words, he identifies his own sickness with the work he is doing.
Thus even a clerk whose tools of trade are not particularly
dangerous can become upset about his tools of trade and can first
exert enormous control over them on an obsessed basis and at
length abandon any control of them and feel he would rather be
beaten than do an instant's more work in his particular sphere.

One of the ways of getting over such a condition is simply to
touch or handle one's various tools of trade and the surroundings
in which he works. If a man were to go all the way around an
office in which he had worked for years and touch the walls
and window ledges and the equipment of tables and desks and
chairs, ascertaining carefully the feel of each one, carefully
locating each one with regard to the walls and other items in the
room, he would feel much better about the entire room. He would
be, in essence, moving himself from a moment of time where he
was sick or injured, up to present time. The maxim here is that
one must do one's work in present time. One must not continue
to work in old moments of injury.

If acquaintance with one's tools, or touching one's tools of
the trade and discovering exactly where and how they are, is so
beneficial, then what would be the

70

mechanism behind this? We will leave until later in this book
some drills and exercises calculated to rehabilitate one's ability
to work, and look for a moment at this new factor.

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Chapter Six

AFFINITY, REALITY AND COMMUNICATION

There are three factors in Scientology which are of the utmost
importance in handling life. These three factors answer the
questions, How should I talk to people? - How can I sell people
things? - How can I give new ideas to people? - How can I find
what people are thinking about? - How can I handle my work
better?

We call these three factors in Scientology the A-R-C triangle.
It is called a triangle because it has three related points. The
first of these points is Affinity. The second of these points is
Reality. The third of these points and the most important is
Communication.

By Affinity we mean emotional response. We mean the feeling
of affection or lack of it, of emotion or misemotion connected
with life. By Reality we mean the solid objects, the real things
of life. By Communication we mean an interchange of ideas
between two terminals. Without affinity there is no reality
or communication. Without reality there is no affinity or
communication. Without communication there is neither affinity
nor reality. Now these are sweeping statements but are
nevertheless very valuable and are true.

Have you ever tried to talk to an angry man? An angry man's
communication is at a level of misemotion which

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repels all terminals from him. Therefore his communication
factor is very low, even though very loud. He is attempting to
destroy something or some other terminal, therefore his reality
is very poor. Very likely what he is being angry about apparently
is not what has made him mad. An angry man is not truthful. Thus
it could be said that his reality, even on the subject he is
attempting to voice, is poor.

There must be good affinity (which is to say affection) between
two people before they are very real to each other (and reality
must here be used as a gradient, with things being more real than
other things). There must be good affinity between two people
before they can talk together with any truth or confidence.
Before two people can be real to each other there must be some
communication between them. They must at least see each other,
which is in itself a form of communication. Before two people
can feel any affinity for each other they must, to some degree,
be real.

These three terms are interdependent one upon the other, and
when one drops the other two drop also. When one rises the other
two rise also. It is only necessary to improve one corner of this
very valuable triangle in Scientology in order to improve the
remaining two corners. It is only necessary to improve two
corners of the triangle to improve the third.

To give you some idea of a practical application of this,
there is the case of the young girl who had run away from home
and whose parents would no longer talk to her. The girl, as a
clerk in an office, was quite despondent and was

73

doing very bad work. A Scientologist whose attention had been
directed to her by the office manager, gave her an interview and
discovered that her parents were intensely angry with her and
would no longer communicate with her at all. They had been so
upset at her refusal (actually her inability) to follow a career
as a concert pianist for which they had her studying at great
expense that they had "washed their hands of her", and the
unpleasantness had forced her to run away to a distant point.
Since that time they had not communicated with her but had
spoken to people she had known in her home neighborhood in very
bitter terms concerning her. In such a state of mind, since
she was intimately involved with her parents and wished to be
on the best possible terms with them, she could not work. Her
failure to perform her work was jamming communication lines in
her own office. In other words, her affinity was very low and her
reality on things was quite low since she might be said to have
been elsewhere most of the time, and thus the communication
lines which passed through her hands were equally low and
successfully jammed other communication lines in the office, at
which time this matter became of intense interest to the office
manager. Now ordinarily in the work-a-day world the office
manager would have dismissed her and found another girl. But
employment was critical at the time and this office manager
knew the modern thing to do. He sent for a Scientologist.

The Scientologist knowing well this A-R-C triangle did a very
ordinary thing - to a Scientologist - which apparently worked
magic as far as the girl was concerned. He told the girl that
she must write to her parents - regardless of

74

whether they replied or not she must write - and she did so.
Naturally there was no reply. Why was there no reply from the
parents? Well, the girl, having disobeyed them and having moved
out from underneath their control, was apparently no longer in
contact with them. These parents did not consider her as real.
She did not actually exist as far as they were concerned.
They had actually said this to themselves. They had actually
tried to wipe her out of their lives since she was such a
disappointment. Therefore they had no emotion about her whatsoever
except perhaps a sort of apathy. They had been unable to control
her and so they were apathetic about her since they had failed
to control her. At this stage the parents were glumly apathetic
about the girl and she was not very real to them at all. As a
matter of fact, as they had started her on a career she could not
complete, the girl could not have been very real to them in the
first place since the career was undoubtedly beyond the girl's
capabilities. So the Scientologist had her write a letter. This
letter was, as we say in Scientology, entirely "good roads and
good weather". The girl said that she was working in this other
city, that the weather was good, that she was getting along well,
and hoped that they were both well and sent them her love. The
letter carefully did not take up any of the problems or activities
immediately behind her leaving home. The A of the letter, the
affinity, was quite high; the C was present. What the Scientologist
was trying to do was establish R, reality: the reality of the
situation of the girl's being in another city and the actual
reality of her existence in the world. He knew that she was
sufficiently involved with her parents that if they did not
consider her real, she was not even real to herself. Of course
the parents did not answer this first letter but the Scientologist
had

75

the girl write again.

After four letters, all of which said more or less the same
things and entirely ignored the idea that there had been no reply,
there was a sudden letter from the mother to the girl which was
angry, not with the girl but with one of her old playmates. The
girl, coached, was held in line by the Scientologist and was not
permitted to explode back through the communication line but
was coaxed into writing a surprised, pleasant letter expressing
her happiness at having heard from her mother. After this two
letters came, one from the father and one from the mother, both
of them were very affectionate and hoped the girl was doing well.
The girl of course replied to these very joyously but would have
been completely propitiative if the Scientologist had permitted
her to do so. Instead, a happy letter went back to each of
them, and in return two more letters came, both of them very
congratulatory to the girl at having found a job and found
something that she was interested in doing in life, with requests
as to where her clothes should be sent and actually a small draft
of money to help her along in the city. The parents had already
begun to plan the new career of the girl which was in exact line
with what the girl could do in life - stenographic work.

Of course the Scientologist knew exactly what was going to
happen. He knew that their affinity and reality would come up
and the girl's reality, affinity and communication in the office
itself would rise as soon as this situation was remedied. He
remedied with communication, expressing affinity from the girl
and this of course, as it always does, produced reaction. The
girl's work came

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up to par, the girl began to progress and now that her feeling of
reality was sufficiently high actually became a very valuable
office worker.

Probably the reason why the A-R-C triangle went so long
undiscovered was the fact that a person in apathy rises through
various tones. These tones are quite uniform; one follows the
next and people always come up through these tones one after the
other. These are the tones of affinity, and the Tone Scale of
Dianetics and Scientology is probably the best possible way of
predicting what is going to happen next or what a person actually
will do.

The Tone Scale starts well below apathy. In other words, a
person is feeling no emotion about a subject at all. An example
of this was the American attitude concerning the atomic bomb;
something about which they should have been very concerned was
so far beyond their ability to control and so likely to end
their existence that they were below apathy about it. They
actually did not even feel that it was very much of a problem.
Americans processed on this particular subject had to be worked
with for some little time until they began to feel apathetic
about the atomic bomb. This was really an advance over the
feeling of no emotion whatsoever on a subject which should have
intimately concerned them. In other words, on many subjects and
problems people are actually well below apathy. There the Tone
Scale starts, on utter, dead null far below death itself. Going
up into improved tones one encounters the level of body death,
apathy, grief, fear, anger, antagonism, boredom, enthusiasm and
serenity, in that order. There

77

are many small stops between these tones, but one knowing
anything about human beings should definitely know these
particular emotions. A person who is in apathy, when his tone is
improved, feels grief. A person in grief, when his tone improves,
feels fear. A person in fear, when his tone improves feels anger.
A person in anger, when his tone improves feels antagonism. A
person in antagonism, when his tone improves feels boredom.
When a person in boredom improves his tone, he is enthusiastic.
When an enthusiastic person improves his tone, he feels serenity.
Actually the below apathy level is so low as to constitute a
no-affinity, no-emotion, no-problem, no-consequence state of
mind on things which are actually tremendously important.

The area below apathy is an area without pain, interest,
beingness or anything else that matters to anyone, but it is an
area of great danger since one is below the level of being able
to respond to anything and may accordingly lose everything without
apparently noticing it. A workman who is in very bad condition
and who is actually a liability to the organization may not be
capable of experiencing pain or any emotion on any subject. He
is below apathy. We have seen workmen who would hurt their
hand and think nothing of it and go right on working even
though their hand was very badly injured. People in dispensaries
working in industrial areas are quite amazed sometimes to
discover how little attention some workmen pay to their own
injuries. It is an ugly fact that people who pay no attention
to their own injuries and who are not even feeling pain from
those injuries are not and never will be, without some attention
from a Scientologist, efficient people. They are liabilities to
have around. They do not

78

respond properly. If such a person is working a crane and the
crane suddenly goes out of control to dump its load on a group
of men, that sub-apathy crane operator will simply let the crane
drop its load. In other words, he is a potential murderer. He
cannot stop anything, he cannot change anything and he cannot
start anything and yet, on some automatic response basis, he
manages some of the time to hold down a job, but the moment a
real emergency confronts him he is not likely to respond properly
and accidents result. Where there are accidents in industry they
stem from these people in the sub-apathy tone range. Where bad
mistakes are made in offices which cost firms a great deal of
money, lost time and cause other personnel difficulties, such
mistakes are found rather uniformly to stem from these sub-apathy
people. So do not think that one of these states of being unable
to feel anything, of being dumb, of being incapable of pain or
joy is any use to anyone. It is not. A person who is in this
condition cannot control things and in actuality is not there
sufficiently to be controlled by anyone else and does strange
and unpredictable things.

Just as a person can be chronically in sub-apathy, so a person
can be in apathy. This is dangerous enough but is at least
expressed. Only when we get up into apathy itself do we have the
A-R-C triangle beginning to manifest itself and become visible.
Communication from the person himself, not from some circuit
or training pattern is to be expected. People can be chronically
in grief, chronically in fear, chronically in anger, or in
antagonism, or boredom, or actually can be "stuck in enthusiasm".
A person who is truly able is normally fairly serene about things.
He can, however, express other emotions. It is a

79

mistake to believe that a total serenity is of any real value.
When a situation which demands tears cannot be cried about one
is not in serenity as a chronic tone. This sub-apathy can be
mistaken rather easily for serenity, but of course only by a very
untrained observer. One glance at the physical condition of the
person is enough to differentiate. People who are in sub-apathy
are normally quite ill.

Just as we have a range of the Tone Scale thus covering the
subject of affinity, so do we have one for communication. On the
level of each of the emotions we have a communication factor.
In sub-apathy an individual is not really communicating at all.
Some social response or training pattern or, as we say, "circuit'
is communicating. The person himself does not seem to be there
and isn't really talking. Therefore his communications are
sometimes strange to say the least. He does the wrong things
at the wrong time. He says the wrong things at the wrong time.
Naturally when a person is stuck on any of the bands of the
Tone Scale, sub-apathy, apathy, grief, fear, anger, antagonism,
boredom, enthusiasm, or serenity, he voices communications
with that emotional tone. A person who is always angry about
something is stuck in anger. Such a person is not as bad off as
somebody in sub-apathy, but he is still rather dangerous to have
around since he will make trouble, and a person who is angry
does not control things well. The communication characteristics
of people at these various levels on the Tone Scale are quite
fascinating. They say things and handle communication each in a
distinct characteristic fashion for each level of the Tone Scale.

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Just as in affinity and communication, there is a level of reality
for each of the affinity levels. Reality is an intensely interesting
subject since it has to do in the main with relative solids. In
other words, the solidity of things and the emotional tone of people
have a definite connection. People low on the Tone Scale cannot
tolerate solids. They cannot tolerate a solid object. The thing
is not real to them; it is thin or lacking weight. As they come
upscale, the same object becomes more and more solid and they
can finally see it in its true level of solidity. In other words,
these people have a definite reaction to mass at various points on
the scale. Things are bright to them or very, very dull. If you
could look through the eyes of the person in sub-apathy you would
see a very watery, thin, dreamy, misty, unreal world indeed. If
you looked through the eyes of an angry man you would see a world
which was menacingly solid, where all the solids posed a brutality
toward him, but they still would not be sufficiently solid or
sufficiently real or visible for a person in good condition. A
person in serenity can see solids as they are, as bright as they
are, and can tolerate an enormous heaviness or solidity without
reacting to it. In other words, as we go up the Tone Scale from
the lowest to the highest, things can get more and more solid and
more and more real.

Affinity is most closely related to space. In fact affinity
could be defined as the "consideration of distance" since terminals
which are far apart or close together have different affinity
reactions one to another. Reality, as we have seen, is most
intimately connected with solids. Communication consists of
the flow of ideas or particles across space between solids.

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While these definitions may seem very elementary and would not
at all satisfy an M.I.T. professor, they actually outreach and
encompass an M.I.T. professor's whole field of activity. Truths
do not have to be complicated.

There are, as described at considerable length and studied with
considerable depth in Scientology, many interrelations of spaces
and solids, and ideas or particles, since these are the most
intimate things to livingness itself and comprise the universe
around us. But the most basic thing we should know about A-R-C
is simply emotional tone which is affinity, the actuality of
things which is reality, and the relative communication ability
concerning them.

Men who can do things are very high on affinity, very high in
terms of reality and are very capable in terms of communication.
If you wish to measure their various capabilities you should
study the subject much further. A whole book has been written
about this triangle called Science of Survival.*

Then how would you talk to a man? You cannot talk adequately
to a man if you are in a sub-apathy condition. In fact you would
not talk to him at all. You would have to have a little higher
affinity than that to discuss things with anyone. Your ability to
talk to any given man has to do with your emotional response to
any given man. Anyone has different emotional responses to
different

* Science of Survival, with the Chart of Human Evaluation, by L.
Ron Hubbard, is available from the Hubbard Scientology
Organizations listed in back pages.

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people around him. In view of the fact that two terminals, or, that
is to say, two people, are always involved in communication, one
could see that someone else would have to be somewhat real. If
one does not care about other people at all one will have a great
deal of difficulty talking to them, that is certain. The way to
talk to a man then would be to find something to like about him
and to discuss something with which he can agree. This is the
downfall of most new ideas. One does not discuss subjects with
which the other person has any point of agreement at all and we
come to a final factor with regard to reality.

That with which we agree tends to be more real than that with
which we do not agree. There is a definite co-ordination between
agreement and reality. Those things are real which we agree are
real. Those things are not real which we agree are not real. On
those things upon which we disagree we have very little reality.
An experiment based on this would be an even jocular discussion
between two men of a third man who is present. The two men agree
on something with which the third man cannot agree. The third man
will drop in emotional tone and will actually become less real
to the two who are discussing him.

How do you talk to a man then? You establish reality by finding
something with which you both agree. Then you attempt to maintain
as high an affinity level as possible by knowing there is
something you can like about him. And you are then able to talk
with him. If you do not have the first two conditions it is fairly
certain that the third condition will not be present, which is to
say, you will not be able to talk to him easily.

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You should realize in using the A-R-C triangle that, once
more, the emotional tones are progressed through as one begins
to develop communication. In other words, somewhere up the line
somebody who has been totally apathetic about us is liable to
become angry at us. If one can simply persevere up through this
anger, he reaches only antagonism, then boredom and finally
enthusiasm and a perfect communication level of understanding.
Marriages fall apart simply because of a failure of communication,
because of a failure of reality and affinity. When communication
starts failing the affinity starts dropping. People have secrets
from each other and the affinity starts out the bottom.

Similarly, in an office or a business it is perfectly easy to
establish those people who are doing things which are not to the
best interests of the firm, since these people go gradually and
sometimes not so gradually out of communication with the firm.
Their emotional tone towards their superiors and those around
them starts dropping and finally goes out the bottom.

As can be seen the A-R-C triangle is intimately bound up with
an ability to control and an ability to leave uncontrolled. When
an individual attempts to control something and fails to do so
he then experiences an antipathy toward that thing. In other
words, he has not been right, he has been wrong. His intention
has failed. His intention has, you might say, backfired upon him.
Thus as one attempts to control things and then fails to control
them he is likely to drop down Tone Scale about those things.
Thus an individual who has been betrayed by the tools of his
own trade is apt to treat them with a lowering

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affinity level. He becomes bored with them, he becomes antagonistic
toward them, he becomes angry with them (and at this stage the
machinery begins to break up) and finally he becomes afraid of
them, he becomes sad about them, he becomes apathetic about them
and no longer cares about them at all. At this stage he certainly
cannot use them at all. Actually from the level of boredom down
the ability to use one's tools of the trade is consistently lowered.

Now, how could one knowing this raise his ability to control
the tools of the trade without even going to a Scientologist?
Naturally if a Scientologist took over in this situation the
entirety of control of tools or an area or of life could be
regained, but, lacking this, how could one simply handle the
exact articles with which he is right now and immediately
associated?

By using A-R-C he could regain in some measure both his
control of the tools and his enthusiasm for work. He would do
this by communicating and discovering his willingness for these
and the people around him to be real or solid. An individual
could regain his ability over his immediate tools simply by
touching them and letting them go. This might seem rather
pointless and he is apt to reach the level of boredom and become
bored with the process. Just above this level is the pay of
becoming enthusiastic. It sounds very strange that if one simply
touched his automobile and let go and touched it and let go and
touched it and let go and touched it and let go, possibly for
some hours, he would regain not only his enthusiasm for the
automobile but a tremendous ability to control the car which
he had never suspected in himself

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at all. Similarly with people, since these often object to being
touched, one can communicate. If one really communicates and
communicates well to these people, listens to what they have to
say and acknowledges what they say and says what he has to say
to them gently enough and often enough so that it is actually
received by them, he will regain to a very marked degree his
ability to associate and co-ordinate the actions of those people
with whom he is immediately surrounded. Here we have A-R-C
immediately adjusted to work. It sounds strange that if we made
a bookkeeper pick up and lay down his pencil or pen for a couple
of hours he would regain his ability to handle it and would
improve in his ability to make figures; and that if we got him
to touch and let go of his ledger for a considerable length of
time he would be more capable of handling that ledger and would
make far fewer mistakes with it. This sounds like magic. It is
magic. It is Scientology.

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Chapter Seven

EXHAUSTION

To work or not to work, that is the question. The answer to that
question in most men's minds is exhaustion.

One begins to feel, after he has been long on a job and has been
considerably abused on that job, that to work any more would be
quite beyond his endurance. He is tired. The thought of doing
certain things makes him tired. He thinks of raising his energy or
of being able to force his way along a little bit further, and if
he does so he is thinking in the wrong channels since the answer
to exhaustion has little if anything to do with energy.

Exhaustion is a very important subject, not only to an individual
involved in earning his own living but to the state as well.

Scientology has rather completely established the fact that the
downfall of the individual begins when he is no longer able to
work. All it is necessary to do to degrade or upset an individual
is to prevent him from working. Even the police have now come
to recognize the basic Scientology principle that the primary
thing wrong with a criminal is that he cannot work, and police
have begun to look for this factor in an individual in establishing
his criminality.

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The basic difficulty with all juvenile delinquency is the
one-time apparently humane program of forbidding children to
labor in any way. Doubtless it was once a fact that child labor
was abused, that children were worked too hard, that their
growths were stunted and that they were, in general, used. It
is highly doubtful if the infamous Mr. Marx ever saw in America
young boys being pulled off machines dead from work and thrown
onto dump heaps. Where there was an abuse of this matter,
there was a public outcry against it, and legislation was
enacted to prevent children from working. This legislation
with all the good intention of the world is, however, directly
responsible for juvenile delinquency. Forbidding children to
work, and particularly forbidding teenagers to make their own
way in the world and earn their own money, creates a family
difficulty, so that it becomes almost impossible to raise a
family, and creates as well, and particularly, a state of mind
in the teenager that the world does not want him and he has
already lost his game before he has begun it. Then with something
like universal military training staring him in the face so that
he dare not start a career, he is of course thrust into a deep
sub-apathy on the subject of work, and, when he at length is
faced with the necessity of making his own way in the world, he
rises into an apathy and does nothing about it at all. It is
highly supportive of this fact that our greatest citizens worked,
usually when they were quite young. In the Anglo-American
civilization the highest level of endeavor was achieved by boys
who, from the age of 12, on farms, had their own duties and had
a definite place in the world.

Children in the main are quite willing to work. A two, three,
four year old child is usually to be found haunting

88

his father or her mother trying to help out either with tools or
dust rags, and the kind parent who is really fond of the children
responds in the reasonable, and long ago normal, manner of being
patient enough to let the child actually assist. A child so
permitted then develops the idea that his presence and activity
is desired and he quite calmly sets about a career of
accomplishment. The child who is warped or pressed into some
career, but is not permitted to assist in those early years, is
convinced that he is not wanted, that the world has no part of
him. And later on he will come into very definite difficulties
regarding work. However, the child who at three or four wants
to work in this modern society is discouraged and is actually
prevented from working, and after he is made to be idle until
seven, eight or nine, is suddenly saddled with certain chores.
Now this child is already educated into the fact that he must
not work and so the idea of work is a sphere where he "knows
he does not belong", and so he always feels uncomfortable in
performing various activities. Later on in his teens he is actively
prevented from getting the sort of a job which will permit him to
buy the clothes and treats for his friends which he feels are
demanded of him and so he begins to feel he is not a part of the
society. Not being part of the society, he is then against the
society and desires nothing but destructive activities.

The subject of exhaustion is also the subject of prevented work.
In the case of soldiers and sailors hospitalized during any one of
these recent wars, it is found that a few months in the hospital
tends to break the morale of the soldier or sailor to such a point
that he may become a questionable asset when returned to his
service.

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This is not necessarily the result of his lowered abilities. It
is the result of injury compounded by inactivity. A soldier who is
wounded and cared for in a field hospital close to the front and
is returned to duty the moment he can possibly support such duties
will be found to retain, in a large measure, his morale. Of course
the injury received has a tendency to repel him from the level of
action which he once thought best but, even so, he is in better
shape than a soldier who is sent to a hospital in the rear. The
soldier who is sent to the hospital in the rear is being told,
according to his viewpoint, that he is not particularly necessary
to the war. Without actually adding up these principles, the word
"exhaustion" began a general use coupled with neurosis. This was
based on the fact that people with a neurosis simply looked
exhausted. There was no more co-ordination to it than that.
Actually a person who has been denied the right to work,
particularly one who has been injured and then denied the right
to work, will eventually encounter exhaustion. Technically in
Scientology it is discovered that there is no such thing as
gradual diminishing by continuing contact of the energy of the
individual. One does not become exhausted simply because one has
worked too long or too hard. One becomes exhausted when he has
worked sufficiently long to restimulate some old injury. One
of the characteristics of this injury will be exhaustion.
Chronic exhaustion, then, is not the product of long hours
and arduous application. It is the product of the accumulation
of the shocks and injuries incident to life, each of them
perhaps only a few seconds or a few hours long and adding up
perhaps to a totality of only fifty or seventy-five hours. But
this accumulation - the

90

accumulation of injury, repulsion and shock - eventually mounts
up to a complete inability to do anything.

Exhaustion can then be trained into a person by refusing to
allow him as a child to have any part in the society, or it can
be beaten into a person by the various injuries or shocks he
may receive incident to his particular activities. Clear up
either of these two points and you have cleared up exhaustion.
Exhaustion, then, is actually the subject of a Scientology
practitioner since only a Scientologist can adequately handle it.

There is a point, however, which is below exhaustion. This is
the point of not knowing when one is tired. An individual can
become a sort of hectic puppet that goes on working and working
without even realizing that he is working at all, and suddenly
collapses from a tiredness he was not experiencing. This is our
sub-zero or sub-apathy Tone Scale again.

And again we have the subject of control. Here the individual
has failed to control things, has tried and then gone down
Tone Scale about them into the sub-zero band. Eventually he is
incapable of handling anything even resembling tools of the trade
or an environment of work and so is unable to inhabit such an
environment or handle such tools. The individual can then have
many hard words cast in his direction. He can be called lazy, he
can be called a bum, he can be called criminal. But the truth of
the matter is he is no more capable of righting his own condition
without expert help than he is capable of diving to the center of
the earth.

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There are some means of recovering one's verve and enthusiasm
for work short of close work with a Scientology practitioner.
These are relatively simple and very easy to understand.

We have in Scientology something we call Introversion and
something else we call Extroversion.

Introversion is a simple thing. It means looking in too closely.
And Extroversion is also a simple thing. It means nothing more
than being able to look outward.

It could be said that there are introverted personalities and
extroverted personalities. An extroverted personality is one who
is capable of looking around the environment. An introverted
personality is only capable of looking inward at himself.

When we examine the A-R-C Tone Scale we see at once that an
introverted personality is shying away from solids. In other
words he is not confronting reality. Reality is agreement in
the mental plane and is solids in the physical plane.

A person who is capable of looking at the world around him and
seeing it quite real and quite bright is of course in a state of
extroversion. He can look out, in other words. He can also work.
He can also see situations and handle and control those things
which he has to handle and control, and can stand by and watch
those things which he does not have to control and be interested
in them therefore.

The person who is introverted is a person who has

92

probably passed exhaustion some way back. He has had his
attention focused closer and closer to him (basically by old
injuries which are still capable of exerting their influence upon
him) until he is actually looking inward and not outward. He is
shying away from solid objects. He does not see a reality in
other people and things around him.

Now let us take the actual subject of work. Work is the
application of attention and action to people or objects located
in space.

When one is no longer able to confront people or objects or the
space in which they are located, he begins to have a lost feeling.
He begins to move in a mistiness. Things are not real to him and
he is relatively incapable of controlling those things around him.
He has accidents. He has bad luck. He has things turn against
him simply because he is not handling them or controlling them
or even observing them correctly. The future to him seems very
bad, so bad sometimes that he cannot face it. This person could
be said to be severely introverted.

In work his attention is riveted on objects which are usually at
the most only a few feet from him. He pays his closest attention
to articles which are within the reach of his hands. This puts his
attention away from extroversion at least to some spot in focus in
front of his face. His attention fixes there. If this is coincident
with some old injury incident or operation, he is likely to fix
his attention as well on some spot in former times and become
restimulated, so that he gets the pains and ills and the feeling
of tiredness or apathy or sub-apathy which

93

he had during that moment of injury. As his attention is
continuously riveted there he of course has a tendency to look
only there, even when he is not working.

Let us take an accountant. An accountant's eyes are on books
at fixed distances from his eyes. At length he becomes
"short-sighted". Actually he doesn't become short-sighted, he
becomes book-sighted. His eyes most easily fix on a certain point
in distance. Now as he fixes his attention there he tends to
withdraw even from that point until at length he does not quite
reach even his own books. Then he is fitted with glasses so that
he can see the books more clearly. His vision and his attention
are much the same thing.

A person who has a machine or books or objects continually at
a fixed distance from him leaves his work and tends to keep his
attention fixed exactly where his work was. In other words, his
attention never really leaves his work at all. Although he goes
home he is still really sitting in the office. His attention is
still fixed on the environment of his work. If this environment
is coincident with some injury or accident (and who does not have
one of these at least) he begins to feel weariness or tiredness.

Is there a cure for this?

Of course only a Scientology practitioner could clear up this
difficulty entirely. But the worker does have something which he
can do.

Now here is the wrong thing to do regardless of whether

94

one is a bookkeeper, an accountant, a clerk, an executive or a
machinist. The wrong thing to do is to leave work, go home, sit
down and fix attention on an object more or less at the same
distance from one as one confronts continually at work. In the
case of a foreman, for instance, who is continually talking to men
at a certain distance away from him, the wrong thing for him to
do is to go home and talk to his wife at the same distance. The
next thing she knows, she will be getting orders just as though
she were a member of the shop. Definitely the wrong thing to do
is to go home and sit down and read a paper, eat some dinner
and go to bed. If a man practiced the routine of working all day
and then sitting down "to rest" with a book or a newspaper in the
evening, it is certain that sooner or later he would start to feel
quite exhausted and then after a while would fall even below that
and would not even wonder at his unwillingness to perform tasks
which were once very easy to him.

Is there a right thing to do? Yes there is. An individual who
is continually fixed upon some object of work should fix his
attention otherwise after working hours.

Now here is a process known as "Take a Walk". This process is
very easy to perform. When one feels tired on finishing his work,
no matter if the thought of doing so is almost all that he can
tolerate without falling through the floor, he should go out and
walk around the block until he feels rested. In short, he should
walk around the block and look at things until he sees the things
he is walking near. It does not matter how many times he walked
around the block, he should walk around the block until he feels
better.

95

In doing this it will be found that one will become a little
brighter at first and then will become very much more tired. He
will become sufficiently tired that he knows now that he should
go to bed and have a good night's sleep. This is not the time
to stop walking since he is walking through exhausted. He is
walking out his exhausted. He is not handling the exhaustion by
physical exercise. The physical exercise has always appeared
to be the more important factor to people but the exercise is
relatively unimportant. The factor that is important is the
unfixing of his attention from his work to the material world
in which he is living.

Masses are reality. To increase one's affinity and communication
it is actually necessary to be able to confront and tolerate
masses. Therefore walking around the block and looking at
buildings will be found to bring one upscale. When one is so
tired that he can barely drag himself around, or is so tired that
he is hectically unable to rest at all, it is actually necessary
that he confront masses. He is simply low on the Tone Scale. It
is even doubtful if there is such a thing as a "fall of physical
energy". Naturally there is a limit to this process. One cannot
work all day and walk around the block all night and go to work
the next day again and still expect to feel relieved. But one
should certainly spend some time extroverting after having
introverted all day.

"Take a Walk" is, within reason, a near cure-all. If one feels
antagonistic towards one's wife, the wrong thing to do is to beat
her. The right thing to do is to go out and take a walk around the
block until one feels better, and make her walk around the block
in the opposite direction until

96

an extroversion from the situation is achieved. It will be
discovered that all domestic quarrels, particularly amongst
working people, stem from the fact that, having been overfixed
(rather than overstrained) on one's work and the situations
connected with it, one has failed to control certain things in
his working environment. He then comes home and seeks to find
something he can control. This is usually the marital partner or
the children, and when one fails even there he is apt to drop
down scale with a vengeance.

The extroversion of attention is as necessary as the work itself.
There is nothing really wrong with introverting attention or with
work. If one didn't have something to be interested in he would
go to pieces entirely. But if one works it will be found that an
unnatural tiredness is apt to set in. When this is found to be the
case then the answer to this is not a drop into unconsciousness
for a few hours as in sleep, but in actually extroverting the
attention and then getting a really relaxing sleep.

These principles of extroversion and introversion have many
ramifications and, although "Take a Walk" is almost laughable
in its simplicity, there are many more complicated processes in
case one wished to get more complicated. However, in the main
"Take a Walk" will take care of an enormous number of difficulties
attendant to work. Remember that when doing it one will get more
tired at first and will then get fresher. This phenomenon has
been noted by athletes. It is called the second wind. The second
wind is really getting enough environment and enough mass in
order to run out the exhausted of the last

97

race. There is no such thing as a second wind. There is such a
thing as a return to extroversion on the physical world in which
one lives.

Similar to "Take a Walk" is another process known as "Look
Them Over". If one has been talking to people all day, has
been selling people all day or has been handling people who are
difficult to handle all day, the wrong thing to do is to run away
from all the people there are in the world. You see, the person
who gets over-strained when handling people has had large
difficulties with people. He has perhaps been operated upon by
doctors, and the half-seen vision of them standing around the
operating table identifies all people with doctors, that is to
say, all people who stand still. This, by the way, is one of
the reasons why doctors become so thoroughly hated in a society
since they do insist on practices known as surgery and anaesthesia
and such incidents become interlocked with everyday incidents.

Exhaustion because of contact with people actually necessitates
that the "havingness" (another Scientology term for reality) of
people has been reduced. One's attention has been fixated upon
certain people while his attention, he felt, ought to be on other
people, and this straining of attention has actually cut down the
number of people that he was observing. Fixed attention, then,
upon a few people can actually limit the number of people one
can "have", which is to say, limits one's reality on people in
general.

The cure for this is a very simple one. One should go to a place
that is very well populated such as a railroad

98

station or a main street and should simply walk along the street
noting people. Simply look at people - that is all. It will be
found after a while that one feels people aren't so bad and one
has a much kinder attitude towards them and, more importantly,
the job condition of becoming overstrained with people tends to
go away if one makes a practice of doing this every late afternoon
for a few weeks.

This is one of the smartest things that a salesman can do, since
a salesman, above and beyond others, has a vested interest in
being able to handle people and get them to do exactly what he
wants them to do, that is, buy what he has to sell. As he fixes
his attention on just one too many customers, he gets tired of
the whole idea of talking to people or selling and goes down
Tone Scale in all of his activities and operations and begins to
consider himself all kinds of a swindler and at length doesn't
consider himself anything at all. He, like the others, should
simply find populated places and walk along looking at people.
He will find after a while that people really do exist and that
they aren't so bad. One of the things that happens to people in
high government is that they are being continually "protected
from" the people and they at length become quite disgusted with
the whole subject and are apt to do all manner of strange things.
(See the lives of Hitler and Napoleon.)

This principle of extroversion and introversion could go much
further in a society than it does. There is something that could
be done by the government and by businesses in general which
would probably eradicate the idea of strikes and would increase
production quite

99

markedly. Workers on strike are usually discontented not so
much with the conditions of work, but with work itself. They feel
they are being victimized, they are being pressed into working
at times when they do not want to work, and a strike comes as an
actual relief. They can fight something. They can do something
else than stand there and fiddle with a piece of machinery or
account books. Dissatisfied workers are striking workers. If
people become exhausted at work, if people are not content
with work, if people are upset with work, they can be counted
upon to find a sufficient number of grievances to strike. And, if
management is given enough trouble and lack of co-operation on
the part of the people on the lower chains of command, it can be
certain that management sooner or later will create situations
which cause workers to strike. In other words, bad conditions of
work are actually not the reason for labor troubles and disputes.
Weariness of work itself or an inability to control the area and
environments of work are the actual cause of labor difficulties.

Any management given sufficient income to do so, if that
management is not terribly aberrated, will pay a decent working
wage. And any workman given half a chance will perform his
duties cheerfully. But once the environment itself becomes
overstrained, once the company itself has become introverted by
overt acts on the part of the government, once the workers have
been shown that they have no control over management, there
can be after that labor disputes. Underlying all these obvious
principles, however, are the principles of introversion and
extroversion. Workers become so introverted at their tasks
that they no longer are capable of affinity

100

for their leaders and are no longer capable actually of viewing
the environment in which they work. Therefore someone can come
along and tell them that all the executives are ogres, which is
obviously not true, and on the executive level someone can come
along and tell the executives that all the workers are ogres,
which is obviously, on that side, not true either.

In the absence of broad treatment on individuals, which is a
gargantuan task, a full program could be worked out that would
handle the principle of introversion. It is certain that if workers
or managers get introverted enough they will then find ways
and means of inventing aberrated games such as strikes, and so
disrupt production and decent relationships and living conditions
within the factory, the office, or the concern.

The cure would be to extrovert workers on a very broad scale.
This could be done as one solution by making it possible for all
workers to have two jobs. It would be necessary for the company,
or related interests such as the government, to make available a
sufficient number of public works projects to provide work for
workers outside the sphere of exact application. In other words,
a man who is made to work continually inside and at a very fixed
task would find a considerable relief at being able to go outside
and work, particularly at some disrelated task. As an example, it
would be a considerable relief to an accountant to be able to dig
ditches for a while. A machinist running a stationary machine
would actually find it a very joyful experience to push around a
bulldozer.

101

Such a plan then would actually take introversion and
extroversion with a large hand and bring it about. Workers who
are working in fixed positions with their attention very close
to them would then be permitted to look more widely and to handle
things which tended to extrovert them. Such a program would be
very ambitious but it would be found, it is certain, to result
in better labor-management relations, better production and a
considerable lessening of working and public tension on the
subjects of jobs and pay.

In short, there are many things that could be done with the
basic principle of extroversion-introversion. The principle is
very simple: when an individual is made too introverted things
become less real in his surroundings and he has less affinity
for them and cannot communicate with them well. Furthermore,
what does communicate is apt to communicate at his lowered
Tone Scale so that even good news will be poorly received by
him. In such a condition he becomes tired easily. Introversion
results in weariness, exhaustion and then an inability to
work. The remedy for it is extroversion, a good look at and
communication with the wider environment, and unless this is
practiced, then, in view of the fact that any worker is subject
to injuries or illnesses of one kind or another, a dwindling
spiral will ensue which makes work less and less palatable until
at length it cannot be performed at all and we have the basis
of not only a non-productive, but a criminal society.

102

Chapter Eight

THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS

The conditions of success are few and easily stated.

Jobs are not held consistently and in actuality by flukes of
fate or fortune. Those who depend upon luck generally experience
bad luck. The ability to hold a job depends in the main upon
ability. One must be able to control his work and must be able to
be controlled in doing his work. One must be able, as well, to
leave certain areas uncontrolled. One's intelligence is directly
related to his ability. There is no such thing as being too smart.
But there is such a thing as being too stupid.

But one may be both able and intelligent without succeeding. A
vital part of success is the ability to handle and control, not
only one's tools of the trade, but the people with whom one is
surrounded. In order to do this one must be capable of a very
high level of affinity, he must be able to tolerate massive
realities and he must also be able to give and receive communication.

The ingredients of success are then: First an ability to confront
work with joy and not honor; a wish to do work for its own sake,
not because one "has to have a pay-check". One must be able to
work without driving oneself or experiencing deep depths of
exhausted. If one experiences these things there is something
wrong with him. There is some element in his environment that he

103

should be controlling that he isn't controlling, or his accumulated
injuries are such as to make him shy away from all people and
masses with whom he should be in intimate contact.

The ingredients of successful work are: training and experience
in the subject being addressed, good general intelligence and
ability, a capability of high affinity, a tolerance of reality,
and the ability to communicate and receive ideas. Given these things
there is left only a slim chance of failure. Given these things a
man can ignore all of the accidents of birth, marriage or fortune,
for birth, marriage and fortune are not capable of placing these
necessary ingredients in one's hands. One could have all the
money in the world and yet be unable to perform an hour's honest
labor. Such a man would be a miserably unhappy one.

The person who studiously avoids work usually works far
longer and far harder than the man who pleasantly confronts it
and does it. Men who cannot work are not happy men.

Work is the stable datum of this society. Without something to
do there is nothing for which to live. A man who cannot work is
as good as dead and usually prefers death and works to achieve it.

The mysteries of life are not today, with Scientology, very
mysterious. Mystery is not a needful ingredient. Only the very
aberrated man desires to have vast secrets held away from him
Scientology has slashed through many of the complexities which
have been erected for men and has

104

bared the core of these problems. Scientology for the first time in
Man's history can predictably raise intelligence, increase ability,
bring about a return of the ability to play a game, and permits
Man to escape from the dwindling spiral of his own disabilities.
Therefore work itself can become a game, a pleasant and happy thing.

There is one thing which has been learned in Scientology which
is very important to the state of mind of the workman. One very
often feels in his society that he is working for the immediate
pay-check and that he does not gain for the whole society
anything of any importance. He does not know several things.
One of these is how few good workmen are. On the level of
executives, it is interesting to note how precious any large
company finds a man who can handle and control jobs and men
really is. Such people are rare. All the empty space in the
structure of this work-a-day world is at the top.

And there is another thing which is quite important, and that
is the fact that the world today has been led to believe, by
mental philosophies calculated to betray them, that when one is
dead it is all over and done with and that one has no further
responsibility for anything. It is highly doubtful if this is
true. One inherits tomorrow what he died out of yesterday.

Another thing we know is that men are not dispensable. It is a
mechanism of old philosophies to tell men that if they think they
are indispensable they should go down to the graveyard and take
a look - those men were indispensable too. This is the surest
foolishness. If you really looked carefully in the graveyard you
would find the

105

machinist who set the models going in yesteryear and without
whom there would be no industry today. It is doubtful if such
a feat is being performed just now. A workman is not just a
workman. A laborer is not just a laborer. An office worker is
not just an office worker. They are living, breathing, important
pillars on which the entire structure of our civilization is
erected. They are not cogs in a mighty machine. They are the
machine itself.

We have come to a low level of the ability to work. Offices
depend very often on no more than one or two men, and the
additional staffs seem to add only complexity to the activities
of the scene. Countries move forward on the production of just a
few factories. It is as though the world were being held together
by a handful of desperate men who by working themselves to
death may keep the rest of the world going, but again they may
not. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

The End

106


FIRST AID

If somebody is injured, you can assist in many ways. Recovery
from a burn or bruise or even sprains or breaks is much swifter
with SCIENTOLOGY assists.

The most elementary assist is easily done. For ages Man has
known that "laying on of hands" or Mother's kiss was effective
therapy. Even gripping, in pain, an injured member, seems to
help. But Man neglected the most important part of "laying on
of hands". This follows.

Do this exactly and do it with a minimum of talk.

Place your index finger or fingers or palm on the injured
member, very lightly, and say to the person, "Put your attention
on my hand". Now change the position of your finger or palm
and have the person do it again.

It is best to touch the individual on spots which are further
from his head than the injury.

Do not talk excessively. But coax him, as you touch, briefly,
spot after spot, to put his attention on your finger or fingers or
palm.

Change the spot every moment or two. Be calm. Be reassuring.

If the person experiences pain or trembling as a result, keep
on, for the assist is working.

Continue in this fashion for many minutes or half an hour if
necessary, until pain or upset is gone.

During this assist the person has his eyes closed.

It is not power from your finger which is aiding him. It is power
he generates by "looking" at your finger down through his body.
You are putting him into communication with the injury. His
communication with it brings about the recovery.

Ordinarily injuries, sprains, burns, scalds, broken bones,
headaches and colds heal slowly because the individual is
avoiding this area with his own energy.

L. Ron Hubbard






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