HCO BULLETIN OF 31 DECEMBER 1959R
REVISED 9 FEBRUARY 1989(Also issued as HCO PL 31 Dec. 59R, same title)1
Mission Holders
HCO Secs
Assoc Secs
HASI Dept HeadsBLOW-OFFS
Scientology technology recently has been extended to include the factual explanation of departures, sudden and relatively unexplained, from sessions, posts, jobs, locations and areas.
This is one of the things man thought he knew all about and therefore never bothered to investigate. Yet this amongst all other things gave him the most trouble. Man had it all explained to his own satisfaction and yet his explanation did not cut down the amount of trouble which came from the feeling of “having to leave.”
For instance, man has been frantic about the high divorce rate, about the high job turnover in plants, about labor unrest and many other items, all stemming from the same source—sudden departures or gradual departures.
We have the view of a person who has a good job, who probably won’t get a better one, suddenly deciding to leave and going. We have the view of a wife with a perfectly good husband and family up and leaving it all. We see a husband with a pretty and attractive wife breaking up the affinity and departing.
In Scientology we have the phenomenon of preclears in session or students on courses deciding to leave and never coming back. And that gives us more trouble than most other things all combined.
Man explained this to himself by saying that things were done to him which he would not tolerate and therefore he had to leave. But if this were the explanation, all man would have to do would be to make working conditions, marital relationships, jobs, courses and sessions all very excellent and the problem would be solved. But on the contrary, a close examination of working conditions and marital relationships demonstrates that improvement of conditions often worsens the amount of blow-off, as one could call this phenomenon. Probably the finest working conditions in the world were achieved by Mr. Hershey of chocolate bar fame for his plant workers. Yet they revolted and even shot at him. This in its turn led to an industrial philosophy that the worse workers were treated the more willing they were to stay, which in itself is as untrue as the better they are treated the faster they blow off.
One can treat people so well that they grow ashamed of themselves, knowing they don’t deserve it, that a blow-off is precipitated, and certainly one can treat people so badly that they have no choice but to leave, but these are extreme conditions and in between these we have the majority of departures: The auditor is doing his best for the preclear and yet the preclear gets meaner and meaner and blows the session. The wife is doing her best to make a marriage and the husband wanders off on the trail of a tart. The manager is trying to keep things going and the worker leaves. These, the unexplained, disrupt organizations and lives and it’s time we understood them.
People leave because of their own overts and withholds. That is the factual fact and the hard-bound rule. A man with a clean heart can’t be hurt. The man or woman who must must must become a victim and depart is departing because of his or her own overts and withholds. It doesn’t matter whether the person is departing from a town or a job or a session. The cause is the same.
Almost anyone, no matter his position, can remedy a situation no matter what’s wrong if he or she really wants to. When the person no longer wants to remedy it, his own overt acts and withholds against the others involved in the situation have lowered his own ability to be responsible for it. Therefore, he or she does not remedy the situation. Departure is the only apparent answer. To justify the departure, the person blowing off dreams up things done to him, in an effort to minimize the overt by degrading those it was done to. The mechanics involved are quite simple.
It is an irresponsibility on our part, now that we know this, to permit this much irresponsibility. When a person threatens to leave a town, post, job, session or class, the only kind thing to do is to get off that person’s overt acts and withholds. To do less sends the person off with the feeling of being degraded and having been harmed.
It is amazing what trivial overts will cause a person to blow. I caught a staff member one time just before he blew and traced down the original overt act against the organization to his failure to defend the organization when a criminal was speaking viciously about it. This failure to defend accumulated to itself more and more overts and withholds, such as failing to relay messages, failure to complete an assignment, until it finally utterly degraded the person into stealing something of no value. This theft caused the person to believe he had better leave.
It is a rather noble commentary on man that when a person finds himself as he believes, incapable of restraining himself from injuring a benefactor he will defend the benefactor by leaving. This is the real source of the blow-off. If we were to better a person’s working conditions in this light, we would see that we have simply magnified his overt acts and made it a certain fact that he would leave. If we punish, we can bring the value of the benefactor down a bit and thus lessen the value of the overt. But improvement and punishment are neither one answers. The answer lies in Scientology and processing the person up to a high enough responsibility to take a job or a position and carry it out without all this weird hocus-pocus of “I’ve got to say you are doing things to me so I can leave and protect you from all the bad things I am doing to you.” That’s the way it is and it doesn’t make sense not to do something about it now that we know.
A recent Secretarial Executive Directive to all Central Organizations states that before a person may draw his last paycheck from an organization he is leaving of his own volition he must write down all his overts and withholds against the organization and its related personnel and have these checked out by the HCO Secretary on an E-Meter.
To do less than this is cruelty itself. The person is blowing himself off with his own overts and withholds. If these are not removed, then anything the organization or its people does to him goes in like a javelin and leaves him with a dark area in his life and a rotten taste in his mouth. Further, he goes around spouting lies about the organization and its related personnel, and every lie he utters makes him just that much sicker. By permitting a blow-off without clearing it we are degrading people, for I assure you, and with some sorrow, people have not often recovered from overts against Scientology, its organizations and related persons. They don’t recover because they know in their hearts even while they lie that they are wronging people who have done and are doing enormous amounts of good in the world and who definitely do not deserve libel and slander. Literally, it kills them, and if you don’t believe it I can show you the long death list.
The only evil thing we are doing is to be good, if that makes sense to you. For by being good, things done to us out of carelessness or viciousness are all out of proportion to the evil done to others. This often applies to people who are not Scientologists. Just this year I had an electrician who robbed HCO of money with false bills and bad workmanship. One day he woke up to the fact that the organization he was robbing was helping people everywhere far beyond his ability to ever help anyone. Within a few weeks he contracted TB and is now dying in a London hospital. Nobody took off the overts and withholds when he left. And it’s actually killing him—a fact which is no fancy on my part. There is something a little terrifying in this sometimes. I once told a bill collector what and who we were and that he had wronged a good person, and a half-hour later he threw a hundred grains of Veronal down his throat and was lugged off to the hospital, a suicide.
This campaign is aimed straightly at cases and getting people cleared. It is aimed at preserving staffs and the lives of persons who believe they have failed us.
Uneasy lies the head that has a bad conscience. Clean it up and run responsibility on it and you have another better person. And if anybody feels like leaving, just examine the record and sit down and list everything done to and withheld from me and the organization and send it along. We’ll save a lot of people that way.
And on our parts we’ll go along being as good a manager, as good an organization and as good a field as we can be and we’ll get rid of all our overts and withholds too.
Think it will make an interesting new view?
Well, Scientology specializes in those.
L. RON HUBBARD
Founder
Hubbard, L. R. (1959R, 31 December). Blow-Offs. The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology (1991 ed., Vol. V, 260-2). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc.
Notes
- Published in OEC Volume 1 (1991 ed., pp. 724-6). ↩
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