THE OVERT-MOTIVATOR SEQUENCE
A lecture given on 3 April 1962

Thank you.
What is this?
Audience: April the 3rd. The 3rd of April.
3 April? By golly, you're right. One lecture Saint Hill Briefing Course, 3 April AD 12, and I haven't got anything to lecture you about because I got a withhold.
Female voice: What is it?
Male voices: Tell us. Well?
Yeah, I got a withhold.
Male voice: What's it—what's it about?
Are you—are you interested?
Audience: Yes!
Well, I haven't prepared it or revved it up, but I—I've been taping a Class IV.
Audience: A-a-hhhh.
And I finally just tipped it over—just tipped it over on Class IV, and so forth, and now I got it taped. I've been fooling with this for some time—what do you do with 3D Criss Cross items and that sort of thing.
And what do you know? (This is all I'm going to tell you. This isn't a lecture on the subject.) The only thing I was withholding is that the solution to what you do with 3D Criss Cross items, of course, is the resolution of what makes the overt-motivator sequence; and I've suspected this for some time. And I just got some processes and so forth, here, which undo the overtmotivator sequence. I think it's absolutely fascinating And the withhold in this lecture would be the fact that I, out of my own interest and so forth, would normally talk to you garrulously about this particular action, because I'm terrifically interested in it—the overt-motivator sequence. How the hell did it ever get that way, you know? And can it be undone? I've been asking that question for ages. Instead of having to run it, can't you undo it? Because I know it'd be a junior phenomenon, see? And sure enough, apparently, you can undo it. And so that's a good piece of news.
So anyhow, I'm not going to give you any more about that particular right now. End of withhold. I—I'm delighted, you see, because if you think of running out all the things which you have done and from which you are suffering at the present time, you see, when you run these out one by one, and selectively on the whole track, it becomes one of these things like running out every engram on the whole track. It's just an impossible action; it's so long and arduous.
You take Jim over there, for instance, or you take Dick or somebody like this, and you get all of these overts—you get the idea? We won't even mention Peter. You get these fantastic numbers of overts. And if you're going to suffer from every overt you have ever committed—see, that's impossible. I mean, mathematically, on one lifetime, you'd be dead a dozen lives over, don't you see? And if you got a motivator for every overt, for instance, and so forth, how could you live?
So I've been fooling around with a lot of combinations that have to do with energy and MEST universe ideas, and ideas and that sort of thing, and it's—comes out rather well. And apparently, it's a very junior idea to prevent people from attacking.
And I have now told you about all there is to know about it even though I would love to go on discussing it for a long time. It's just a mechanism to do just that one thing—nothing else. That's it. Well, end of withhold.
I'm terrifically interested in the Class IV. You have no idea. This has practically laid me in my grave trying to get this thing done, because you start going over the top of the whole Goals Problem Mass, and just not-is the lot, and sit around and look it square in the teeth, and reserve aplomb in one way or the other—it's something on the order—it's something like living in the middle of the living lightning, don't you know? And like got my head kicked off on this one. But that's about all it amounts to. It's fascinating, isn't it?
And it's just—it's just a mechanism. It is not even an axiom. See, it's nothing Because every way you look at it, it can't be. It'd be impossible. And there wouldn't be any way by which this could be.
You see, if the only thing that ever affected anybody was you, in the final analysis—you get this now—then you would have a perfect alibi for everything you had ever done to anybody. Don't you see that at once you have never done anything to anybody? You see? So therefore, looking at that, that makes it look pretty specious, you know? You say, "Well, that's . . ."
Female voice: Yeah.
". . . that's kind of a gag"
And now, if nobody ever was affected by anything except what they themselves did, do you realize you have never talked to anybody anyplace?
Audience: Hm-mm. Yeah.
See? So from all these sides.... You know, I've told you for years, the overt act-motivator sequence was limited. I knew it was limited, but I couldn't find the entrance point of how the hell you ran it out. And I imagine I must have tried at least, oh, I don't know, fifteen hundred, two thousand combinations, trying to blow this thing down just as itself, so that—that is— that would run—that would run on a case. Just nothing would—except itself.
You look at it from numerous other angles, and it becomes impossible. If only you have ever affected you, and nobody else has ever affected you, numerous things then apply. And amongst those things, you wouldn't even be able to keep the same time track. See, there's a lot of things wrong with the overt-motivator sequence. I've known that these things weren't reasonable, but I knew at the same time that everybody had fallen for this malarkey and that everybody responded to it.
Well, if everybody responds to it and everybody has fallen for it and it processes—you ask a fellow what he's done, and this immediately relieves things. And his withholds and all that sort of thing—these things are all pertinent to this. And they all relieve, don't you see? I mean, you can work with this; you can operate with this.
So it doesn't wipe out all processes which do things with it. Don't— doesn't wipe out Prepchecking. You can sit down and prepcheck somebody, you know. That's fine. But how about just knocking the whole ruddy computation in the 'ead? And now I have just opened up a nice, wide-open, twelvepass express highway that does. It is just a mechanism to prevent people from attacking That's all.
And handled in that fashion in processing, why, it all becomes very explicable—runs, in other words. Like to kill you, running it. But I don't wish to leave you in mystery. I'll give you a specific process.
"What shouldn't A attack?" "What shouldn't you attack?" That should carry you well enough. Of course, to keep in communication with the subject, why, you have to add "attack," you know? And then because that won't be explicit to some people, you will have to get synonyms for "attack." These are the usual complications which arise when you release a process.
So if you do an overt assessment of the Overt Secondary Scale, it'll probably give you a better word for your one particular pc. But it would be on the basis of "should" and "shouldn't." But this, of course, could be expected to be modified to "could" and "couldn't" and "have" and "haven't." You see, the variations. These are the normal variations through which a process goes.
But if you just got somebody to list, who was sitting in a whole bunch of motivators and overts and so forth—just list what they shouldn't attack, just is as easy as that.... That, you should remember, was the lead-in. It might not be the final process that you run, but that was the lead-in on the research level which gave the result and made, all of a sudden, the overt-motivator phenomena look, of course, as corny as Christmas tinsel. It's just a mechanism by which people have dreamed up ways and means to prevent other people from attacking. That is all.
Of course, you don't want people attacking you, so of course you tell them that you shouldn't be attacked. And you tell them how you shouldn't be attacked, and then you tell them what they shouldn't attack, don't you see? And what you overlook is, at the same time, they're teaching you what you shouldn't attack—the same time you're doing this. So eventually it looks like you have an overt-motivator sequence.
See, the most sensible thing in the world is, is there's certain things which you, in a human body, shouldn't attack. And the lesson which you learn from the physical universe, that if you attack these things you get hurt. And that is the basic mechanism and the learningness which underlies all the overt-motivator phenomena. See?
Well, then, if you don't believe me, take your fist sometime and start a buzz saw up, and—oh, and let's not be quite that violent—lawn mower will do—and hit the lawn mower in the blades while it is running Well, as far as that's concerned, just find a nice rough stone wall and haul off and hit it, and you are immediately taught this lesson: that you shouldn't attack it. Because it reduces your havingness, of course.
So you teach yourself the lesson that you shouldn't attack, and then this goes into a philosophic wingding. And the philosophic wingding comes after this fact. you see, after you've learned that you shouldn't stick your paws into lawn mowers or—and shouldn't kick paving blocks, and various things— when you've learned all these things—why, of course you've learned the remainder: that is, what you do unto others will happen to you. 
That's not true at all. That's a philosophic extrapolation from the fact of what you do you get recoils from. And it comes back to the basic law of inertia—Newton's law of inertia. It's a physical universe law—is: what you hit hits back. It's as simple as that.
Now, you can build this up philosophically, that if you say something critical of Joe, Joe is going to say something critical of you. And if you say something critical of Joe, why, then you can be hurt by Joe's criticism.
But a withhold is basically nothing more than your unwillingness to attack, or your unwillingness to be attacked. And that's all a withhold is.
You can take any withhold a person's got—if he gives you this withhold, you could ask him, "Well, what shouldn't attack you about that?" and run that off. And then, "What shouldn't you attack in this particular way?"—any phraseology you care to lose [use]. Your withhold is going to evaporate.
And your withhold system also takes care of it, but there it is. It's quite—it's just—it's quite fascinating.
I'm sure you will excuse my absorption with this particular scene in view of the fact that it is the single complication that makes your case awfully complicated. You get so that you won't bawl out cops and you go around being good, and all kinds of wild things accumulate as a reason for this.
Personally, I've never learned this too well. It's not that I've been particularly bad in that particular thing, but I—nobody has ever really taught me I shouldn't attack. I mean, it's been rather hard to grapple with the thing. People have tried. People have tried.
But I'll give you a little hyster—historical note—a little hysterical note— here, which you might find amusing Hasn't anything to do with the price of fish.
One of the points where this broke down was, I was examining what on the track I felt worst about. I wasn't getting audited; I was trying to find out what I felt worst about, see—you know, that I had done. I was trying to bracket this thing, this overt-motivator sequence, you see? And it was necessary that I do this and get studying it, and I've been very reticent about this recently for this reason, is, it looked for a while that doing anything to anybody's mind was the most destructive thing you could possibly do. That's quite interesting. I was studying that, you know, and I got the bad auditor, and so forth. And I went and looked at this even further, and taking responsibility for somebody else's mind, and that sort of thing, it looked like it was a pretty bad show, see? So that looked awfully bad for auditors.
Well, I wasn't trying to disprove this, and you can get quite a jolt out of this by running it on somebody—"Whose mind have you helped?" or something like that, you know? And you would think offhand that this would be what tangled up your wits, you see—would be helping somebody or doing something with their mind.
And I went through a little period there of looking this thing over, and it had a limited workability, and it did make some sense one way or the other, and fortunately proved to be not true at all. It is the energy involved. It's the attack on the energy involved. It's the attacking of energy. And it's not even bad to attack energy. It's just that you have tried to convince people, and people have tried to convince you, that it was very bad to attack energy. So you become allergic to energy.
The definition of being good—as long as I find myself talking about this—the definition of being good is the definition of being overwhelmed, you see? A person who is good is overwhelmed. 
I first began this study nautically in this life. It was a naval study with me. And one thing, I—I'll hold something that bugs me, that I don't understand and I'll put it in a bullpen. And I'll put it over on the side. And I'll say, "This green puzzle doesn't fit with these pink pieces, you know? What is this thing, you know?"
Well, one of those things was the fact that every fighting man I ever had under me was always in bad with other people at a time when they needed fighting men. And the only people that were getting any pats on the back with the shore patrols, and so forth, were people who weren't worth a damn. I mean that—just weren't worth a damn. There was definitely something wrong here.
I'd have six or seven sailors out of a couple of hundred, you know, and they'd—man, action be engaged, one of those fellows—I don't think the period could have been longer than about a minute or thirty seconds, or something like that—he was at the wheel correcting the course, he was up on the gunnery platform correcting the training of the guns, he was down studying the chemical recorder, and he was handling the engine room telegraphs; and while he was doing all this, he was carrying on a conversation with me. And on almost any ship I ever had in action, there'd not be more than four or five people on the ship that would help me fight her.
You had this enormous supernumerary, you see, out there. That always bugged me, because these boys were the boys who were always in trouble. The people didn't like these fellows. They were always in bad. They weren't particularly bad people, but they were just always in trouble.
I've seen it now, you know. Some fellow, he'd—God, he'd have hash marks, and he'd have gold chevrons and eagles, you know, clear up to his shoulder, and he'd come aboard, you know, reading Horace or something, you know? He'd walk aboard with his package of laundry or something or other— romantic thing, you know—and check himself in at the gangway and go below and put away his book and his nice clean uniform. And his record would be beautiful and he'd always say, "Yes, sir," and everything would be so nice. And he was a very pleasant fellow and not very obtrusive. Nice man, you know, and so forth. And he'd have all of the bonuses, you know? And he'd have all of the stuff that anybody ever awarded anybody. Service record, you know: "laudable," "terrific," "marvelous," you know, and you—just rave notices in this damn thing.
And in action you would just have to knock him out of your road. That was all. Always be in your damn road. "Go on up forward someplace, and," you know, "stand down there with the damage control party. Don't get in the road." you know, some totally ineffective function. Get him out of the road. Ammunition passer—maybe you'd get the ammunition there and maybe you wouldn't, you see? But there'd just—gawd—there'd just be dozens of these guys, see, just dozens of these birds, drawing all the pay, getting all the pats on the back.
And then here would be these madmen—always in trouble, always upset. When the ship was engaged, it would have sunk without them. See? Well, there's something here, see?
These weren't necessarily bad men. Looking them over, they weren't criminals, nothing like that, but just nobody liked them. This fact used to stick in my craw. I used to study this. I did an awful lot of studying of men and life and things like this, and it's something I didn't quite understand. But the shore patrol just loved these other fellows. I never knew what to do with them—use them for spare anchors or something like that? It wasn't that I didn't have their loyalty and affection; I did. But action would be engaged—they would be just as calm as they always were.
Now you study men under stress and men in various guises and men under various actions of this particular character, and you find out that the world has built up a series of superstitions about people. And they're not facts, they're superstitions. They hardly even are dignified as findings.
Your animal psychologist has categorized the whole lousy lot. I mean, he's got them all. His textbooks are nothing else but the mirage of "ought to be," see? There's no facts in there. It's just a bunch of "ought to be."
He tells you—everybody, "Beware of anybody who is active." Isn't that interesting? "Beware of anybody who is active." You will find in the civil defense manuals of the United States government, in that area delegated to— ha—psychology, that the whole provision that they have made is for anybody who gets active. And if a citizen were to start flying around and talking about what should be done or what shouldn't be done or blaming the government or saying anything like this, he is the one you have the butterfly nets for. And this is why you have psychological units in civil defense teams. They're the butterfly-net people, and they're supposed to pick up these guys who get active. And that's exactly what it says.
I'm not minimizing this or I'm not stretching it or—I don't have to. I mean, it's a marvelous example of "Be good." you see, the whole US civil defense system is based on the idea that there is a thing called the government which is composed of people (which already is silly) and they're going to take over the country at the moment of an attack, see? They aren't there now. They're not part of the people, and they're not human, you see? And they're parked up someplace in Canada along the DEW line or down in Mexico or out on some island—and they don't exist there now. And at the moment of an attack, nobody is supposed to do anything but be taken over by the government. That's what you're supposed to do in an attack.
Consider it absolutely fascinating! It's just as bad as Eisenhower's design for the Normandy landing. I mean, there was nothing worse than that. I didn't know this until the other day. I'm going to write a book on it. I'm going to call it The Great Myth. You see, I was a Pacific amphibious warfare officer before these Normandy landings occurred. And there's certain ways you're supposed to make landings. Well, they didn't make them that way at Normandy—ha-ha! They killed men instead.
So anyhow, I didn't know it was that bad. But this is some more of your "the government knows all" sort of a situation and "no individual is going to do anything." You got that? No individual—we're not going to count on any individuals. The government is going to do these things. You get the idea? The government is going to. Somehow or another, can—totally disassociated from anything that is made out of skin and blood, see, this is all going to be attended to.
So the government teams are going to take over in certain zones of the city, and so on. And it's all worked out. And the only thing they've overlooked is these people are people, and apparently, looking over the Normandy beachhead landing schedule, there weren't going to be any people involved and there was going to be no war involved. I think this was interesting, those two oversights that they made.
As early as 1941 I noticed something that probably nobody has noticed, that I might comment on. And—that war is the antithesis of organization. 
And if you organize in some dim hope that when battle is joined that organization is going to prevail, you're going to lose your war, because then it breaks down to the being, the person, the man on the job; and the other schedules never go off right. They just never, never go off right.
The fellow who is supposed to be there at 5:61—well, I can tell you from experience that he is never there till five hundred and sixty-one, if he appears at all. And if the whole intricate machinery depends utterly upon this man pushing a button at 5:61, man, you've had it. Because this—look, this fellow is flesh and blood. This fellow is die-able. And war is the antithesis of organization. War is chaos. And the only thing that you can organize for is chaos. And if you're going to organize it, organize for chaos; and that's the only way you can organize.
And if you're going to organize for chaos, there's one thing that you must count on utterly: the individual. There can be no great third-dynamic shadow which suddenly spreads out across the land and makes everything all right. Who are these beings that are going to take over the middle of these huge cities and set it all to rights after the bombs have landed? See? Who are they? Well, they're human beings. Well, by that very fact, you can count on the fact that some of them are going to be missing
Now, in space opera we very often tape this better than they do on planets. Very often, very often they have relatively indestructible dolls, relatively indestructible robots. But they're forced into building these things by this other factor: the extreme destructibility of individuals and beings in areas of disaster. And even in space opera these fellows disappear. Oh, I love one of these. It's like the—I don't know what battle that was; I don't know what the Union called it. It was one of the first battles that Grant fought. The Confederate general was Johnston—very early, out in the West someplace or another.
But the only thing the poor Confederates did wrong was draw up a wonderful plan of battle; the most marvelous, intricate plan of battle you ever saw. At these times these regiments were going to be there, and this was going to be there, and everything was going to be there, and it was all going to be marked out this way.
And of course, they do all this for a battlefield nobody has been on yet, don't you see? They lost. We got clobbered.
This Normandy beachhead: Demolition teams had twenty minutes to knock out all the underwater obstacles on the whole of the Normandy beach. Pfft! 	In the Pacific we used to spend three days and use certain tools, but they didn't do it over there. They had a schedule, and it ran off—bzzzzzt! And for seven minutes this happened and then seven minutes this happened. No part of this schedule is pinned to an actual event, don't you see? No part of this schedule is pinned to anything having happened. It's only pinned to the clock. Do you see that?
You get how mad this will get after a while, see? Unless you pin something to an event and say "Seven minutes after this happens or has occurred, then you start the next event." Well, you can do that, but you for sure can't say, "At 6 o'clock this happens, and then at 7 minutes after 6 this happens, and at 15 minutes after 6 this happens, and at 6:30 this happens." Well, you can count, you see, on whatever is happening at 6:15 has probably not quite arrived and is probably taking place at 6:35. So the team that is en route to do this thing at 6:30 runs into the team that hasn't done what it was supposed to do at 6:35, and uh—oooooh!
Don't you see what happens? A confusion is an untimed, uncontrolled area. Well, you've only got one—one guy. You've only got one guy. I don't care how many textbooks you write or how many psychologists you give degrees to, you've, in the final analysis, only got one thing. And that is a being, an individual being. That's the only thing you've got.
Now, he have—may have responsibilities, and he may have dynamics and he may have a lot of other things, but that's all you've got and don't forget it.
You know, I can see some South American reformer, some Simon Bolivar. Great guy, Simon Bolivar. No doubt about it whatsoever. And this is not what he did, but I can see some lofty, ivory-towered character, and he says, "Now, let's see. our people should do this. And our people should do that. And the government should do this. And the government should do that. And then all will work out to a marvelous utopia. Yes. So here is the schedule."
Well, man, I'd let that poor fellow in on something: He is working with the individuals he is working with, and he is working with nobody else.
Now, every once in a while somebody runs an "ought to be" on me on organizations. And I noticed from an essay Peter wrote one day over a telex spontaneously—oh, it's a snide piece of thing. You can't mock up a thetan. But they run it on other people besides me.
And people are always saying to me, "Well, why don't you get some 'good people' in Central Organizations?" That's a hell of a slam, isn't it? People on the outside, "Why don't you get some 'good people' in Scientology?" you see? Where's this fantastic reservoir called "good people"? Where is it?
Well, I can tell you the last one to have a monopoly on it is the United States government or any other government. They don't even know that it might exist.
But all of their actions are based on the fact that in some mysterious way, "good people" are suddenly going to occur without anybody doing anything about it, you know. Just—just from somewhere, "good people." It's as pathetic as the Greeks sitting down at a battle one time, as it talks about in Plutarch's Lives, sacrificing and making auguries until the right moment to repel the attack, you know? Greeks are just falling in windrows on all sides of this dumb bunny, and he's busy slitting the guts of birds to find out if it's all right to make the attack, you see? "No, that liver isn't all right. Give me another bird." Slit him up. "No, that liver isn't all right." Man.
It's what's known as being auguried to death. Even a private commented on it and went down into history.
No, there isn't any such reservoir. There isn't any such reservoir, and that's basically what everybody's got on automatic at this particular time. They've basically got it all on automatic. "Good people." That's what they got on automatic. Ever—all the systems are geared for "good people."
Government selection. Military selections. Schoolteachers. Everything else. Any—anybody that you can think of—it's all geared to the fact that from some mysterious reservoir someplace, some "good people" are going to come along and pass some examinations, and it'll all be all right. Brother, one of these fine days, St. Louis or Chicago, or somebody.... The rest of their atomic plan, by the way, depends utterly on the fire engines coming from Chicago to take care of St. Louis, and the fire engines from St. Louis going to Chicago to take care of Chicago.
It never occurred to these dumb—that—never occurred to them that any elementary atomic planning would cause the bombing of St. Louis and Chicago simultaneously.
So anyway, they got it all figured out that from some mysterious reservoir, why, these minutemen of steel, impervious to all excitement, are going to show up. And what are they going to do? What's their first instruction with regard to people? That to take anybody who is doing anything—see, any private citizen that isn't duly authorized, you know, isn't wearing the magic badge, Fifth Fire Brigade or something, or the Royal Atomic Defenders of the Gasworks, or something If he hasn't got the right badge and he's trying to say to people, "Go down that street there, because it's still open," if he's standing there at the corner doing this, then the butterfly squad has orders to pick him up. He's the man they want in the nearest hoosegow, quick.
And that is what the psychologist in an atomic war is being trained to do: to pick up the active person. I consider this fabulous, you know? I studied civil defense in the United States, and then my stomach gave out. Actually, there are probably only about five thousand people in the United States that know anything about disaster relief, and not one of those people has ever been called to the civil defense department, which I consider very, very interesting They were the people who handled civil defense in the various war theaters under chaos, and so forth.
But these beautiful organizations, man. Yeah, "George, Bill and Pete will go in Joe's car three and a half minutes after the first alarm, from the south entrance of the building" oh, no, you know? You can see it now: They never get out of the car park. Just one of the things that happened: Bill didn't bring his car to work that morning. See?
You're dealing with beings, you're not dealing with punched-tape card systems and that sort of thing. You're dealing with individuals. And I don't care whether you're trying to make a perfect government or if you're trying to make a perfect civilization or a more livable world or anything else, the basic building block with which you build is an individual, and there is no other building block. God isn't a building block; government isn't a building block; the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Uniformed Cats isn't a building block. None of these things are building blocks. It all comes down to the individual.
Is he any good or isn't he? And that's the other question. Is he competent or incompetent? United States today—not roasting the United States, particularly—recently passed a rule that no officer could be promoted until his wife had been passed on by the admiral.
Well, I suppose I've been an admiral a few times in my past lives, but I never went that far to make a person... Honest—I never had to go that far. I didn't. I never had to go that far. you just look around: There's this pretty girl; it's a pretty girl. All right. And you used to say "Whhst!" you know, like that. You never had to pass a law under Congress that part of an officer's fitness report was the availability—I mean, excuse me—the niceness of his wife.
I can just see that wife now out there on the bridge of the destroyer steering like mad during the battle, can't you? I can see it now.
Oh, man, how decadent can you get? What's that got to do with it? And yet I've seen officers and officials and organizational people promoted simply because they could slap better on the back, and hold more liquor more asininely than anybody else around. So of course they get promoted.
No, it's competence. If you want to get something done, you depend on the competence of an individual, not his socialness or whether he's a good fellow. It's "Can he do his job?" That is all. can he do his job?
Now, yes, it is true that an individual can be so mean and so vicious and so something or other that he gets in the road of doing his own job. Never met one myself, but I'm sure that can exist. 
No, an individual is either competent or incompetent.
Now, when an individual ceases to be able to run his own life, you always can have communism. You can always have these group idiocies which take responsibility for conduct out of the hands of the individual and place it in the hands of some God-awful, God-help-us monster, whereby everybody decides this. Everybody decides what he's supposed to do and what he isn't supposed to do, and whether he can spit, and whether he can breathe, and—and so forth.
But let me ask the burning question: Who's going to tell him? See? You get the point. This is the—this is the idea they never think. They never think this one other step. After you've destroyed all the individuals, who's going to tell them? They never think of that one.
It's a fascinating point. It's the automaticity of competence—the automaticity of this vast reservoir of competence, which somehow or another is always going to rise up someplace.
One of the ways they meet this is they've got everything all geneticized. You know, you raise good horses. You know, if you breed the right mares with the right stallions, why, you get an intelligent horse. I don't think anybody has ever been able to make animal husbandry work, but it's still a popular superstition. If you make being a horse so uncomfortable that no thetan—no self-respecting thetan—will have anything to do with it, you'll have a bunch of creep horses. You will, too! You can see them at the horse show now, misbehaving.
All right. Now, the basis of the individual is his ability to observe and make decisions and to act. And that is ability: his ability to observe, to make decisions, and to act. He has to be able to inspect and know what he is looking at—what he is looking at. He has to be able to make a sensible summary of what he is looking at, and he has to be able to act in accordance to what he's inspected.
Now, I don't care if you go into the field of study. This is true of a student, this is true of a soldier, this is true of anybody: if he can't observe and can't make decisions about what he observes, why, he's in bad shape. He's in a bad way. Very promptly.
Well, he couldn't help but be. I mean, if you—if you knock out any one of those points—all right, he can observe and he can make a decision, but he is— can't act—in any way, shape or form cannot act on his data—you've got a fool.
Now you take somebody who can observe all right and see what he's looking at, but is unable to make a decision before he acts. He's a nut.
Now you've got somebody that's perfectly competent to make a decision—perfectly competent to make a decision—and perfectly competent to act, but always does so without observing anything. You've got a catastrophe, man! That's a catastrophe. 	You got Congress. Congress is always building a man-of-war. You know, in 1896 they were building a square-rigged, line-of-battle, wooden man-of-war. They actually appropriated money enough to build that thing. They couldn't observe where they were. They kind of slipped on the time track. So anyhow, you got these various things.
Now, the only way you could have a good country, from my point of view.... Well, you can have all kinds of systems. Doesn't matter how many systems you have. The world is system-happy right now. My God, the one thing we don't need is one more governmental system. They haven't got a good one, but—and they probably could use one—but actually they haven't got the fundamental on which you would build a system.
And the fundamental you'd build a system on would be an individual. I don't care how many communisms or Engelsisms, or something, that you dream up, you're never going to have a utopia. You can Plato-ize day and night for years and never come up with a utopia that would work unless you have individuals who are able to observe, to decide and to act.
I'm sure that Mussolini, taking people who were—they had been pretty badly knocked around over a long period of time—he was making his way, but he was still having to make all the decisions in Rome. All the decisions had to be made in Rome. And the only trouble with a fascist government in a small town was they could maybe observe and they could maybe act, but they had to telephone Rome for the decision.
Well, the funny part of it is, you see, Rome wasn't there to observe and Rome wasn't there to act. So this got pretty—looking pretty weird, and their—a government like that gets pretty unwieldy. Nevertheless, they were making their way forward until they finally got knocked in the head. They got knocked in the head because, individually, they hadn't come up along the line into enough determinism yet to actually stand on their own two feet.
The main—the main thing I'm trying to say is here, is just the—if you haven't got the individual, you have nothing! And if you go in the direction of a system, if that system isn't designed to eventually make individuals, then it's a system which will fail. It's the only kind of a system that you dare embark upon.
You embark upon any other system that ends up in slavery or ends up in the total subjugation of individual ability to observe, ability to decide and ability to act—if you impede any one of those three things, you're going to find yourself with a slave society on your hands. I don't care how many labels the thing has. So the only—only system that is justified is any stopgap system which pushes people forward in this direction.
I know I myself am rather proud of the fact that the despatch traffic to me from any Central Organization of five years ago consisted easily of five hundred pieces of paper for every one I get today. Isn't that interesting
The volume used to be fantastic! You know, "Ron, can I spit?" Man, I'd— it'd just be about that bad. And that has just cut down and cut down and cut down and cut down, because all the time we're working in the direction—we have this tremendous advantage. Of course, individuals are becoming more independent and more capable of observation, and so forth. I don't go on the basis that it's all right for them to make terrible blunders and knock everybody in the head, before they learn how to walk. But I would incline slightly in that direction, that it was better for them to make a few mistakes than to be guided every minute of the time.
Their cases are coming up the line; everything is coming up. From where I sit, we're making it just this way. We're getting more and more autonomy. Our communication lines are longer and longer. We are acting, oddly enough, more and more in concert, which is rather fantastic, you know? I mean, the further apart we seem to be moving, the more in concert we are seen to be acting; and the more we get good individuals, the more coordination and agreement we have. Isn't that peculiar?
The reason you have an organizational form and the reason I lay down organizational forms is basically, one, on experience, and, two, to get agreement amongst organization members so that they can move forward.
But I myself, in the early days, was the first one to scoff at any need of organizational form, as any old-time staff member can tell you. I used to say, "Oh, for Christ's sakes, you're not going to make me define that!"
Well, yeah. So there's an interim in which a system can exist, but that system gradually goes out of the way to the degree that individuals are brought up to being able to observe, to decide and to act. And it's the only way you can make any progress from my point of view.
Now I dare say, if I were to talk to some professor of "learnedology" in "Spinbin U." who had a socialist penchant about it all, I imagine that I wouldn't talk this way. I would probably talk to make my point with him, because I amuse myself with those jokers. And he would be selling me the great value of the system, and I possibly would never even dare tell him what I thought or the truth, because his realm is in the never-never land of nowhere.
I well remember one debate that I had with such a character. He was one of the leading socialists of New York. And before the evening was over, in front of a bunch of intellectuals, he had admitted and declared, and had now begun to stand up for this one interesting fact. He had progressed from "socialism is wonderful" down to this—this interesting fact: that the only way that you could make socialism work was to kill every man, woman and child in the world. I finally got him to agree to this and was all set to go on forward on a program to put it into effect, when he suddenly found the garden path down which he had been led. But he still had agreed that this was correct.
How he got there was, of course, just by total specious spuriousness; you know, making him agree by shades, to agree by this, to agree by that. But it was all on this basis, that you couldn't have an individual. See?
Obviously, you see, you have a socialism, why, then obviously you couldn't have an individual. If you had to have the socialism, socialism must exist because you couldn't have an individual. And then, of course, I led him on, on this gradient scale, and then finally he realized that the only way it would really work was to kill every man, woman and child in the world. And then it would really work. you might really have a socialism. And he was quite sold on the program. That's known as brainwashing by gradients.
But you see whereof I speak here.
Now, if we have systems which depend utterly on making people good, we can never get out of the soup. But we can't have systems which make everybody good, if we mean by this, blind acceptance of a now-I'm-supposed-to without inspection, without decision, but only by action. If we totally concentrate on an action—an automatic action—and if we call that automatic action "being good"—see, you see an old lady crossing the street, so you're being good, you must help the old lady cross the street. "So now I'm supposed to help the old lady across the street." You get the idea?
She just got through shooting her daughter-in-law in the guts, you know, and she's carrying the .45 in the bag But that's beside the point.
"Now I'm supposed to," you see? Without observation, you're supposed to act in certain set patterns. That is what they call being good. And the only way that is achieved is by overwhelming a person with energy. You overwhelm a person. You show him that he will get into too much action—more action than he can stand—if he does not concur with this action. In other words, he chooses to have this minor act or actingness, see; he chooses this minor actingness in lieu of all of this rwooooooooowrwooooowr, see, of krwow, see?
You know, the way to make little Johnny eat his peas-is to take a whip, don't you see, and to whirl it around in the air a few times and hit him across in the behind and scream at him real loud. Well, that is action he cannot confront, isn't it? So you get him to not confront this action in order to do the action of eating his peas. see how that works?
There are other ways you go about this, of total loss, total ostracism: "You're going to be expelled from school if you don't study—if you don't study,"—oh, I don't know what they study in a school. I've never been able to find out, but, "If you don't study it, why, you're going to be expelled, and your father and mother will never speak to you again and they won't feed you, and you'll be thrown into the gutter, and socially you will be totally ostracized." And that's what an E, F or G grade would mean when you're in the fourth or fifth grade, see? You're ostracized.
As a matter of fact, this even works on you, see. I use it simply on the basis of, you better get a rush on, or something of the sort. you don't take it that way. you take it on ostracism—"Ron is mad at me," and so on. I never feel that way at all.
No, it's the out-create of action which brings about the fixed actingness that we know as being good. See, "We can create more action and energy than you can, so therefore your only choice is to fit into this small actingness and energyness pattern." You got the idea? Well, you get into this on the basis of coordination. You coordinate the actions of quite a few people. Yeah, you can snarl them into line and so forth; it has a certain workability. But it only works up to the basis where they know it works or where they know it should work that way, or something.
In other words, it'll only work in the direction of consulting their observation of things. They—if they can now observe that this is workable, or that they would do it anyhow, and they would have decided to have done it anyhow, and got on this actingness, then perhaps you would be justified for a while in saying, "Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra, and I'm going to out-create you until you do so-and-so, and so forth." You get the idea? "I can shout louder than you can, so therefore you're going to do this actingness." You get the—you get that?
Ah, but that is not the road the world follows. The world follows a total different one. It's regardless of whether this is reasonable or unreasonable or anything else, man, you're going to do it and you're going to be blind to everything else from there on. We call it "faith." We call it "discipline."
They used to take a soldier who deserted from his post and stand him out in front of the rest of the troops and shoot him down, or spread-eagle him on a wheel and beat him to death, or hang a sailor over the gangway and slash him to death, or just, you know, something like this. On Sunday—you never go to church on Sunday three hundred years ago but what you didn't pass some guy in the stocks who had been doing something or other, been drinking beer or something like that on a Saturday night, or some other criminal action.
In other words, there were various actions by which more energy was thrown at the individual than he thought he could confront. This is the idea of making people good, do you see?
So therefore, he fixed in this pattern of action because it was a choice of either fixing in this pattern of action or trying to face all of this unfaceable and unconfrontable energy. Do you follow me?
That's being good.
Now, when you have a totally disciplined nation, you have a total failure. A nation which would make everybody good and sacrifice every individual characteristic in it, sacrifice everybody's observingness, everybody's decidingness —you got a complete end product: complete failure. That's what you'd wind up with—a complete flop. And there's where every old civilization goes, and that is why they become old civilizations. That is why they decay, that is why they become decadent. Because people just become gooder and gooder and gooder, by which we mean they observe less and less and they decide less and less.
You have this fellow walking down the middle of the street taking a certain mincing gait, and so forth, not because he thinks it's anything, but because he's supposed to do it because his ancestors did it.
Oh, you can think of thousands of examples of this sort of thing. And when you finally get a totally decadent, totally gone society, it gets licked up by any chaos that hits it. It can be overwhelmed. By what?
Well, if everybody in it was trained to be good by being trained that they couldn't confront certain energy masses, then of course any hostile energy mass that shows up can conquer it.
So an old civilization is set up by its own premises to become conquered, and you have the cycle of civilizations And that is how they age and that is how they die.
Now, the way an individual ages, the way he dies, is to give up his power of observation and his power of decision, and acts on the basis that he cannot do as much as he used to be able to do, he can't stand as much as he used to be able to stand. And he attributes this to advancing age. He never attributes it to being able to stand less. The source of advancing age is being able to stand less. Advancing age is not the cause of being able to stand less.
In other words, aging is caused by a lessening ability to confront action. That is all. It's not because the person can't, but he merely ages because he believes that he can't. Do you see how that goes?
It's a reverse look. Well, if the way age is regarded at the present time doesn't solve old age, which is that an individual gets less and less active the older he gets—do you see that one, the less he is active—you know, the older he gets the less active he is—if they follow that through uniformly, let me point out to you that this does not result in a knock-out of old age. So it couldn't possibly be true. If everybody believes this implicitly, it couldn't be true. Because, boy, they really believe that one. The medicos and everybody else believes that one.
The reverse is true: that a person gets as old as he is incapable of confronting energy, whether it's a civilization or an individual or anything else.
You hear of somebody coming off the beaches at Dunkirk with his hair turned white as snow. Yes, well, he aged. Well, why did he age? Well, he looked at a lot of fury and ran away from it. see why? See how that is?
Well now, the age of the individual is established by his ability to regard action.
The concern of an individual with action is co-action or attack of action. You can act with or you can attack an action, or you can avoid the attack of an action.
In other words, you even—either have a lot of energy which you are merely utilizing, or you're attacking energy or being attacked by energy. See, I mean, turning the band saw on and off and sawing up some lumber probably never made anybody insane yet. But attacking everybody because they saw up lumber with band saws and going on a considerable vendetta on the subject, and then shooting all those people, or something like that, or being shot at in return—that will cause an aberration, because it singles one out from his natural ownership and responsibility of the universe.
An individual is first as big as the universe, and then he selects out half of it to fight, and so becomes half the size of the universe; and then selects out half of the u—the remaining universe to fight, and so becomes one quarter the size of the universe; and then selects out half of the remainder to fight, and so becomes one-eighth the size of the universe. And I could go on and enumerate these steps, but why should I when here you are?
Your size in relationship to the universe is directly determined by only one thing: is the amount of randomity you care to confront in the universe, or the amount of attack you think you're subjected to or care to subject the universe to. That determines your thetan size. That's how big you are as a thetan. It's how much you feel you can take on, or how much you feel may take you on.
Now, let's look at the mathematics of a civilization. We have 100,000 people in this particular civilized strata—let's take some ancient civilization of no great size—100,000 people in this civilization. And at first we say to these 100,000—these 99,999 people, other than self—we say to these fellows, "Well, I am as good as any of you and can take any one of you on. And maybe even take on two or three of you, or six or eight or twelve or fourteen. Who knows? In fact, I'm liable to take on anybody who messes me up." And they think this way equally, see? And they're liable to take it out on you, too, you see? But—so on.
And then one day somebody breaks his neck or breaks his brain or something—some other vital part—and he can't fight. So he invents justice. He gets—and then he gets some other—some other fellows that are pretty weak, and they band together, and they invent this thing called "justice." And that is—justice consists only of this: that when the one individual—when the one individual errs, all other individuals in the society are banded together against him. And in the final analysis, that is justice.
You go out here and you lay your hand on a man's shoulder: that's an assault. So you have every member of the entire British Isles, collectively called "the government," issuing a summons for your arrest. That makes you versus the government. Right?
Female voice: Right.
Now, look. you were willing to take on one or two or three or four, or five or six, or when you were feeling good one morning, maybe ten or twelve. But now you're opposed with the idea of some tens of millions.
I love this gimmick: "The people versus John Jones." Where the hell are these people?
Well, they're a collective nonsense that was dreamed up by a bunch of birds who couldn't fight. That's about the only thing you can say about it.
Now, we expect in a group of men you will get a leading order of hens. I'm sorry to mix the metaphor, but—we expect this. We expect this.
You turn a bunch of knights loose in a tourney, and they're all going to wind up with a champion and a bird who disgraced himself; and between the rest of them, the rest are going to be stretched out on a gradient scale of who can lick who. But they very, very seldom form a council to go against all the knights of the realm this way, until they get into an order of knighthood or something like that. And they only get into orders of knighthood when a lot of them have been licked. And then you get orders of knighthood. Up to that time, nobody bothers, see? Do you see how this works?
But think over this proposition called civilization. It's rigged so that the individual, if he commits a fault, finds himself pitted against every other being in that whole realm.
And that, he conceives—I don't know really why he conceives this, by the way—but he conceives this a "too-manyness." So he is overwhelmed and he is good and he obeys the law of the realm—not because he thinks it's a good law, not because he observes that it is right or not because he's decided upon it; but he just obeys the law of the realm.
I used to always be able to put this into effect. You race out down the highways and you're trying to bring law and order to an area; you hang a bunch of guys to the nearest trees. See, you just catch some birds that are— been cutting purses or burning farms, or something like that or—it doesn't matter much where you get the bodies. But hang them up on some scaffolds and trees, very visibly, you see? And law and order spreads in all direction.
That's because you and maybe four or five men at arms are more than any robber band. And you are law and order. You get the idea? And it's just simply the matter—it's this equation: "You rob somebody—without any reason, we will hang you as soon as we can catch you." you see, that's—it's simple, a simple equation, simple arithmetic. So they stop robbing people. See, people who would rob people tend not to rob people because they figure that guy, and so forth, will overwhump us. you get the idea?
Now, when you get old and you get creaky, and the climate of France and England has at last entered your bones to the point of arthritis, you of course subscribe to justice, and you invent this thing. Instead of you there with a strong right arm, you see, you say, "Well, look, 'the people' will get after you." See, a considerable police force. But it's "the people" who will get after you, and you're being hung by "the people."
I never really bought that sort of justice. My—any justice that I ever brought to an area was exactly this other type of justice, as crude as that may be.
"All right, you robbed the coach, we're hanging you."
And guy would say, "Well, my laws and my rights, and the Magna Charta, and so forth," and he'd go right on talking right up to the time when you pulled the rope check.
But I'd always let them know that it hasn't anything to do.... "This is a peculiarity of mine. We have peace in this area. And we're going to have peace in this area. And we're going to have lots of peace in the area, not because you want it and not because the people want it, but just because I say so." And in that way may have escaped a lot of motivators and overts, because it was honest.
I'd always hated this other idea. I knew there was something wrong with this other idea. I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with the other idea.
But isn't it a masterly gimmick? Look it over as a mechanism. You do wrong, and instantly you are going to have as your enemy several tens of millions of people. Isn't that a muchness? Huh?
Well, all goodness is brought about by force, whether individually delivered or delivered collectively. And goodness is never brought about by philosophic persuasion.
Three guys observe that they get a lot of planting and hunting done as long as they don't knock each other's heads off. They observe that one day they knock each other's around, and they don't get so much hunting done the next day, and they say, "That's a stupid idea. Let's have some peace and declare war on somebody else."
Well, all right. That's an incipient and a quite proper civilization, because it's based upon the fact that they have observed, they have decided, and that is the way they act.
"Ah, but, you see, law and order and justice actually are the best things, and they're the best principles, and you should be a very lawful person, and—or your father and I will hate you. And we—now, you see that policeman down the street. Well, he'll arrest you and there are thousands of them." And—I wouldn't say any duress had ever been brought against you to be good.
I mean one of the oddities of it is that man is basically good. This is the oddity. But that he gets a synthetic bad valence. He gets a synthetic valence. He gets a mocked-up "baddy," see? And then he can get into this valence of being bad, and after that you've had bad men. It's quite amazing.
If you don't believe this, process somebody someday on the basis of bad valences. You'll find out these are the wildest synthetic valences you ever saw in your life. They describe to him, they are borrowed from him, they're his concept. You realize every 3D Criss Cross item is either some life that you yourself lived, or its oppterm is merely your ideas of somebody else. There isn't a "somebody else" in the whole bank. Do you see? There's never a "somebody else." It's only you and your ideas of. No oppterms of any kind whatsoever.
Now, what does this all add up to? Well, it adds up to the fact that if man is basically good, the only thing wrong with him is his imprisonment in evil. But the evil is false. This is quite interesting. If the evil is false, what would happen if you set him free? He becomes good.
Ah, then what witchcraft has been worked here? We tell a fellow he is evil, and we convince him one way or the other that he shouldn't attack, because other things are good and he is evil.
Male voice: Hm.
And we just have another civilization mechanism.
And one of the ways of phrasing it is that everything done by you will be revisited upon you. That's karma.
Male voice: Hm-hm.
You'll pay for everything you have ever done, that's karma. And a lot of people get the overt-motivator sequence mixed up with karma. They are not the same thing.
The overt-motivator sequence means that you have to lay yourself open to feeling bad about something, to a motivator, with an overt. That's true, too. But do you know how it's true? It says there's an area you mustn't attack. And that becomes the keynote and the whole swan song of a people: There are things you mustn't attack.
The only reason that wall is stably there for you and can trap you is because somewhere down deep you consider it sacred. Did you know you considered the wall sacred? But you do. you have certain sacred valences; they mustn't be attacked. You've convinced everybody they mustn't be attacked.
The priestess: She walks up the temple steps and turns around to the multitude and she says, "Peace," and they serve her up for stew. She's a religious figure. She shouldn't be attacked.
The toughest valences you are holding onto in 3D Criss Cross are the same woof and warp of this civilized structure. They are merely mechanisms to prevent you from being attacked. And that's why you have withholds. The reason you withhold something is to prevent yourself from being attacked. You've all done something at some time or another, anyone has done something at some time or another in a civilization where this civilization mechanism goes into effect. You would be attacked if it were known, see? You'd be attacked if it were known. You know that.
I can think of dozens of police forces, not only in this galaxy, that would love to have my name and address right now. As a matter of fact, they have it. Well, come to think about it, the shoe is slightly on the other foot.
But we've got a matter here of the—of the sacredness of beingness. You got the idea? A good, nonattackable beingness. Hoohoo! That's the thing, you see?
Only trouble is, we fall for the other unattackable beingnesses around us. People are horrified when they hear me giving the Christian church whatnot. Every once in a while we get fantastic comments on this subject. I—I don't see it myself, although I've had ample ob—I've had ample reason to believe that people get upset about this. See? I believe people get upset about this; I don't believe you shouldn't attack it. I think all mechanisms of slavery should be attacked.
Now, the basic mechanism by which people are persuaded not to attack is to show them that attacking will hurt them. And that is the whole lesson they try to teach in war. you go over a parapet and across an open field up against machine guns, and if you're damn fool enough to have a meat body with you, you're liable to get some holes in it, you know? The air is liable to start going through where the bullets went. you see that? That's a bum thing you're doing, you know? You'll get punished for attacking.
But you kick a stone and you'll get punished for attacking. But why does a stone hurt you? Well, you must consider that it shouldn't be attacked. You must consider that the MEST universe should not be attacked. Well, look-a-here, it's here. Nobody's as-ised it. So, obviously it's under the curse of no attack. See, you mustn't attack. It attacks you though, doesn't it? I think that's fascinating Every once in a while a cliff falls on your head, something like that, but you mustn't attack it. Sounds to me like a wonderful mechanism for keeping a universe going
But now we move into the overt-motivator sequence, having observed that if you attack into the teeth of spitting machine guns, you get your guts full of lead—having observed this—it is very easy, you see, that any evil act you do to others will be visited on you. See, after a guy's had the first lesson—you know, he kicks the stone, the stone hurts him; he's charged the machine gun, and the machine gun has shot him—then—that he will harm himself for knocking somebody's block off.
And the next thing you know, there he is with a withered arm. Didn't even hurt him actually. This bird was a totally defenseless goof, and he walked along and he went pow! you know? And the other guy's head fell right straight off, you know? The next thing you know, the guy's got a withered arm. you want to cure it as an auditor, you run out the knocking off the other fellow's head. Well, I'll be a son of a gun, his arm all of a sudden works! Because you've created a miracle.
There's a further miracle that you could create. How come it got withered just by knocking off somebody's head? Now, it didn't even hurt his hand! Where did that mechanism come from? And that's the overt-motivator sequence. Where did it come from?
It comes from this one mechanism of: "You attack things, you will be hurt." And if you can teach enough people that, you have a civilization. But they will all be enslaved, they will all be trapped; and none of them will be able to clearly observe, to clearly decide or to decisively act. And they will all sooner or later go crazy. 
Now, when I have said these few choice words, I've described everything there is really wrong with the human mind. There isn't anything else. There's no other outstanding phenomena, in the final analysis. Once you know the basic phenomena of Scientology—that is, the as-ising and energy and pictures and what the universe's composed of, and the Axioms and things of this particular character—you get down to that as far as processing is concerned, the only thing that you've got in your thetan bank at the particular moment that is giving you an awful lot of trouble is something you know you had better not attack.
The consequences of attack overweigh you so heavily that you will not attack it. Otherwise it will disappear. If you attack it, it will disappear. That's one penalty, but is the only penalty. There are no other penalties. All other penalties are totally imaginary, and at this stage of development of Scientology can be considered so, wholly and completely.
I'm not now giving you processes to run on this. I'm trying to get you to understand this philosophically—understand it, on the head end, that there is no liability for attacking anything, but there is tremendous liability for not attacking. There's tremendous liability.
That sounds like we're going to make a lot of vicious people. Well, if they all become vicious before they come good again on the other end, I'll just have to live through it, and so will you, because that's the way it is.
But there is obsessive attack—people could no longer control their ability to attack—there's all kinds of species of wildness and gyratingness and upsettedness and so forth. They're all misemotional and none of it under control. Overt attack never got anybody in trouble. Never—really never did.
The only thing that you ever lose when you do that is some havingness or something like that. That's about the only thing. But if it's a havingness you don't want, what's the difference?
Well, that doesn't erase the fact that the overt-motivator sequence, you understand—that doesn't erase the fact that it works. You can take it apart, you can get withholds, you can do all these things which you know how to do. I have just been busily trying to get to the root of the structure and find out exactly how it stood, and so forth, to find out if it could be swept away when we reach into Class IV with 3D Criss Cross items. And I find out that it can be swept away, and the residuals and so forth of the bank have as their common denominator things that must not be attacked, reasons why one shouldn't attack, reasons why one shouldn't be attacked, reasons why one shouldn't attack others, ways and means of restraining oneself from attacking others, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. You understand?
And out of this you get all kinds of minor things, like criticism, and you get all this kind of thing. And you also get overt-motivator sequence. But it's just one phenomena amongst many. Okay?
Audience voices: Yeah, yup.
Thank you very much for staying over. Good night.
Male voice: Thank you. Thank you.