18 November 19671
All right. On the subject of Ethics, and the pursuit of an investigation, there’s a couple of data which you must know, and know it well. And the first is the actual point between psychosis and insanity has been established. Some little time ago – well actually, for about fifteen, sixteen years – I’ve been trying very very hard to isolate this exact point. I didn’t think it was a gradient, and it isn’t a gradient. The actual point between where a person who was sane goes thereafter insane is a very precise point. And it’s when he begins to stop something. And at that moment he is insane.
Now, he is insane on that one subject at first, and then he can get another idee fixé and become insane on another subject, and you do get cumulative insanity. But there is no doubt of his insanity on that one subject. And that is the precise point. And it is so hair-trigger, it is so exact, that if you allow yourself much consideration of this, reasonability, so forth, why, you’ll come a cropper as an Ethics Officer.
Now this is important. Because when things won’t go, they’re being stopped. When there is any effort to push something along and make it go, any effort to do this, it will move – unless there’s counter-effort. By the nature of things, unless you get an effort against the effort you’re applying, the effort you are applying will make something go. Do you see this? So if you can’t make something go, then it is being stopped. The degree that it is being stopped… it’s not being hindered – see, there is no effort to hinder, you can skip hinder, there’s an effort to stop – and if you want to measure how much effort to stop there is, all you have to do is measure the amount of effort being applied to making something go. Because the counter-effort must be at least that great to stop it. Very elementary.
All right. Now, if you get this, if you get this down right, then you will recognise that if there are no efforts merely to hinder, but there must be then a concentrated effort to stop. And that effort is commensurate to the amount of force being applied to make it go. It must be that great or greater. Now if something is folding up, like an organisation, a ship, it is less and less and less able to make things go, then the effort to stop things is greater than the effort to make them go. Do you see that?
All right. This being the case, and it being the case that one is dealing with this insanity, any effort to find reasonable explanations will fail. So, at once, you’re only looking for things which are totally unreasonable. Because you’re dealing with an insanity, and an insanity is this total unreasonability. So therefore an Ethics examination must proceed along the lines of “What don’t you understand?” And all you’ve got to do is follow the line of “What you don’t understand”, and you will arrive with the stopper. Now, that is very condensed, but that is it.
Now, there are two things you can do with somebody who is stopping things: you can process him, or you can remove him from the vicinity of what he’s trying to stop. Now, in view of the fact that processing is the award of a down statistic, you mustn’t do it. That’s an award. If you start awarding down statistics without compensation, you’ve had it. Every organisation which does not charge for its services goes downhill at once. It just goes to pieces. You think this is great, and so forth, but actually the formula it is violating is awarding a down statistic. You want to know why these western civilisations are outward bound right know, why they’re going down the chute: well, their social security is to award everyone who isn’t working, and penalise for the money to award them with, everyone who is working. So by definition, a suppressive action is to award a down statistic, and penalise an up statistic. So with all of the other traits that you find in suppression, that is one of them – so therefore you mustn’t practice it; because every time you award a down statistic in an organisation, you are subtracting service from up statistics. Do you see?
So it’s all very well to say “Well, all we’ve got to do is process up this fellow and leave him on post, and he will be all right.” Yes, even if you could process him up, and you undoubtedly could, it is not all right. So all processing must be at his expense, all review must be at his expense, and all of your orders must contain the fact that anybody ordered to review, it is to review at his expense. But processing them from the viewpoint of an Ethics Officer does not in actual fact enter your perimeter except on S and D’s on preclears and students who are of course going to pay for them.
We’re not talking about an outright investigation to find out who is stopping this organisation, who is stopping the mail department, who is this, who is that, don’t you see? Why isn’t this organisation going forward? Why aren’t its stats up? These are the first questions you’re asking. Why aren’t its stats up? Obviously if its stats aren’t up, and everyone along the line is pushing to get its stats up, and the stats don’t come up, it’s quite obvious that somebody is pushing against the organisation to prevent its stats from coming up. Now, you don’t see that with the naked eye at first, so it becomes neglected.
Now, if you don’t find this as an Ethics Officer, then you will penalise the entire staff. Every time an Ethics Officer doesn’t do his job, it winds up as a penalty for everyone aboard. Everyone in the organisation is penalised every time the Ethics Officer doesn’t do his job. And there are many ways of preventing the Ethics Officer from doing his job. Many, many ways. Probably they dream up far more than these, but I could just give you some offhand:
Inhibit keeping of good Ethics files; and of course you can’t trace the people who have no Ethics change because they don’t have good files. Make the Ethics Officer guilty every time he tries to do his duty; every time he makes a mistake, magnify it out of all proportion. Subject the Ethics Officer to continuous discipline.
So when you start to get Ethics into an organisation, the first thing that will occur is effort to stop the Ethics Officer. So if you simply investigated who is stopping the Ethics Officer, you would wind up with your number one tiger. So people are saying, “Investigate why Qual stats aren’t going up.” Now, you have a bad time trying to investigate this. Well, that’s because you have avoided investigation number one. Investigation number one is “Who is trying to stop the Ethics Officer?”. The dynamics, if you’ve noticed, are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. When you start investigations, why, you start with number one.
Now, earlier than this, than the Ethics Officer, why, you would have to have someone on the post who was himself not being stopped by his own personal environment. Because he would therefore be very easy to stop when you made him the Ethics Officer. And then efforts to stop the Ethics Officer would compound the felony, and it would be very easy to stop indeed, don’t you see?
All right, now we move out from who is trying to stop the Ethics Officer, to who is trying to stop HCO. Now we could move out from there to who’s trying to stop the HCO Exec Sec. Then, who is trying to stop the Org Exec Sec. And then, who is trying to stop things in Division Three. And then, who is trying to stop things in Division Four, Division Five, and Division Six. By the time you carried out all these investigations, you would have a cleared Org.
But you would only really be successful if you kept them going in that order. And naturally, new elements spring up, and you have to go the cycle all over again. But the burning question – the first question – is: The Ethics Officer himself must be rid of elements in his vicinity, where his personal life is being stopped. Next up is “Who is trying to stop the Ethics Officer?”. Then, “Who is trying to stop HCO?”, and so on up the line. That is your normal action, when you first take over post to come into existence as an Ethics Officer, you would actually have to follow that course of investigation, regardless of what was going on in the Org. But every now and then, this is unsettled by some screaming emergency, and the screaming emergency, you must investigate. You must investigate it from the point of view of : “Who started the screaming emergency, so as to distract the whole Org?”.
Now your viewpoint, then, is always: “What is the counter-effort that is trying to stop?” Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that you are only interested in trying to stop things that are trying to stop, do you follow? The only thing you’re trying to do is, you’re not trying to stop anything, you’re just trying to open the road. You’re just trying to pull the logs off the road. I’m telling you the exact character of the log. It is: the point where a thetan goes insane is that point when he begins to stop things.
And your in-Ethics investigation then always carries out “What don’t you understand?”. Two facts don’t jibe. So you try to rationalise these two facts and interrogate on these two facts: you will get another point you don’t understand. Now, when you try to get this point understood, you will now find another fact that you don’t understand, and along about that way someplace, pulling on this string, you’ll find a General Sherman tank, and that is simply somebody who is trying to stop things.
Now don’t go into a sweetness and light attitude that nobody is doing anything to anybody, anyplace. Though I point out that this sector of this universe is in remarkably bad condition. Well, it must have been put there one way or the other; it didn’t just happen. So therefore, an Ethics Officer must be able to confront evil. And this, you will find, is the lowest ability of a humanoid. Or even a Scientologist: is the ability to confront evil. So you get these sweetness and light characters that have fixed it up so there is no evil to confront anywhere. Man is basically good, but he goes out of valence into an evil image, and thereafter is evil. And that is exactly how it works. And now, how evil is evil? Well, this whole Sector was done in some 75 million years ago, one of the most evil operations anybody ever heard of.
Now, that being the case, to clean it up, you run into a lot of psychos. And these psychos are simply trying to stop. Now, we’re not much interested in what else they’re trying to stop, when they try to stop Scientology, try to stop the Ethics Officer, try to stop the Executives of the organisation; how many ways can they do this? Well, there are probably hundreds of thousands of even millions of ways in which they could do this. But it’s only when they are doing this that we become interested. And the Ethics Officer is a sort of a bulldozer who is opening the road, and he’s just getting the stops off the line and that’s all he’s doing.
Now, the measures and tools of Ethics are all adapted to accomplish those actions. If they’re used for anything else, they won’t work. So what we have here, then, in Ethics, is a system for removing the counter-effort to the forward push. And that’s all an Ethics Officer is supposed to do. Very elementary. In investigating, you’re always investigating toward a psychosis. And that psychosis is trying to stop. It’s most remarkable. At first, you’ll become so intrigued, in looking this over, that you’ll find stops all over the organisation. You yourself will get so dispersed, you don’t know what you’re investigating. So the way to start, is start with yourself, and then move on to the post of Ethics Officer, and find out who’s trying to stop the Ethics Officer. And then move it on upward on that gradient, and sort an organisation out. And it will boom. It can’t help but boom, because then all the residual forward pressure all of a sudden starts to bite. And it will move on up the line very nicely indeed. From an Ethics Officer point of view, that’s all he’s trying to do, to bulldoze the stops off the line.
So, there are many ways in which this can be done, many ways in which stops can take place, but there are also many ways of detecting psychosis. Now I should say at once that there probably is not a member of the human race who isn’t trying to stop something. But he’s not cumulative. Do you follow? He’s not cumulative in this. He’s trying to stop something, but he’s not in actual fact… ahh… dedicated. So if you just took everybody out of an organisation who was trying to stop something, why, you would go mad and you’d have an empty organisation entirely, including the Ethics Officer, because he’s probably trying to stop something too. But it’s only when these points that they’re trying to stop mount up, up, up, that you get an insane personality. True enough, the person is insane at that point where he’s trying to stop: he’s not rational.
And when you carry out an investigation, you’ll hear something like this: “They didn’t have any heat in the academy. The students have been freezing to death. And somehow or another the Director of Training and the Tech Sec, they can’t seem to get the heat on, and the Org Sec, or Exec Sec, can’t seem to get the heat on, and so on; you may or may not be called in, but you should notice this, sooner or later, that there’s an awful lot of effort here of trying to get the heat on in the academy, and it won’t come on. Right away, this is a typical situation.
In the first place, you don’t understand why the heat can’t come on, because of the good reason that there’s methods of heating the place. There are people who are being paid to heat the place. So therefore, the place should be heated. That’s the first thing you don’t understand. But how is the organisation investing all this money, and fuel, and pay, and the responsibility on somebody’s part to heat the place, do you see, and it doesn’t get heated? Well, you don’t understand how this could be. So you start investigating, and you start asking pertinent people around, who are in charge of this, and so on, and finally you find out this fact: that one person says that there’s a 24 hour watch, actually, on the heating, and they look it over, but the fellow who does this is really a gardener, and was originally hired as a typist… And you say, “Wait a minute, what’s this? Now how could this fellow be on a 24 hour watch, and he’s supposed to be… but he’s really a gardener, but his qualifications are… what the devil is all this?” You don’t dig any part of that.
So let’s go a little bit further in our investigation, see? And we’ll find another point that is equally baffling: how could anybody put a typist in charge of… do you follow? And as your investigation proceeds along the line, you will get another point that you don’t understand: how was this person hired? Because there were specific orders some place or another forbidding his being hired. Well, you think at that moment you’ve got your tiger, but somebody must have over-ridden this… and that’s the person you’re looking for.
And you keep going back along this line, more and more understoods, you see… you didn’t misunderstood. You can’t find… You yourself, see, you just have to investigate along the line of “I don’t dig this.” Now, when you say “I don’t dig this”, and you dig further into it, you will strike one of two kinds of actions: either it’s a dead end, and it doesn’t go any further – at which time you return to the main line of the investigation – or it produces further material. If it produces further material, you will find further misunder… things you can’t understand. Not misunderstoods, but things you can’t understand. Do you follow? All you do is ride to the misunderstoods, and you’ll eventually wind up with the psychosis of stop. You’ll get the person who has the psychosis.
As soon as you’ve got him, you’ll know you’ve got him. Isn’t much doubt about it. Now if you were at that moment to take him over, and put him on a meter, and run a process by listing: “Who or what are you trying to stop?” you would get, quite innocently, every kind of thing there was around the place, including you, and he’d simply sit down and list these things, quite earnestly and seriously, with a rather stuck meter, and he’d tell you “Yes, well, I’m trying to stop the Academy, and I’m trying to stop…” He’s not being sarcastic. You’d think at first glance that he was being, but of course this is an insanity itself. Why is he confessing to something that is going to get him shot? We just ran an investigation of this character, and I don’t think there was one thing in the whole vicinity that this person wasn’t trying to stop before we finally caught up with him.
Now the thing to do is get him off… certainly, get him off those lines. Park him over to the side where he can’t do any damage. Do you follow what I’m talking about? Well, that is what you’re investigating for. You’re investigating for the person who’s gone sufficiently down the line that he has a psychosis, and he’s trying to stop. You know he is there, by the counter-effort. Things do not go, so therefore such a person is there. Your task is simply to find him. And the road that leads to him is a series of things you don’t dig, because insanity, of course, is irrational. And these various points that you don’t understand will eventually just centre right straight in to the guy and there he is. And that is the simplicity of it. And an Ethics Officer is simply a bulldozer that’s opening up the lines.
At least 80, 90 per cent of a staff is trying like mad to make the show go. But they get dispersed, they get driven off their posts, they’re told about the unimportance of it all, they’re slowed down in various ways, and so on… well, who do you take out? You take out the people trying to stop things. And all of a sudden, there you go: everything will be very calm, and orderly, and fine.
Then you’ll have problems… the next problem after you’ve cleaned up things is Personnel. So you’re telling me something very standard when you say “Well, there aren’t enough people on mimeograph now.” Yes, that’d be true; after you’ve taken off a stopper or two, why, the lines have got to be rearranged because several points in the organisation were beefed up to keep them running anyway in spite of everything! Now those people aren’t needed on those posts. You see, those posts really probably don’t need to exist. Do you follow? Because they were “push posts”: that was beefing up the line, trying to get more people on the line, trying to shove through this thing… well, you’ve taken the guy off the other end of the line, you’ve taken off the counter-effort.
So of course it requires a staff re-organisation. After a big Ethics clean-up, you always have to reorganise the staff. That’s natural. One-two. So I know there’s been an Ethics clean-up at Saint Hill because he tells me the staff has to be reorganised. Do you see? And of course after you take off three or four people there were camouflaged holes to begin with, and they were also getting counter-effort, and so what all this amounts to is the fact that you can [gap of the tape] reorganisation. So an Ethics clean-up is always followed by a staff re-organisation. Inevitably. So never feel that an Ethics clean-up has failed because things are kind of scrambled now.
They will go forward, but the re-organisation must take place rather rapidly. As soon as you’ve got your tiger, and that is your tiger, and so on, and you’ve taken him out of the line-up, then at once an Ethics Officer should get in touch with Personnel and say “All right, let’s rearrange it now, quick, I have these people in the files right here who aren’t Ethics bait, we’d just better make sure they’re shoved right on up, now that we’ve taken the Ethics bait out of here.” Do you follow?
Well, that is the way you do an in-Ethics investigation. That is the reason why Ethics exists: it’s simply to get the show on the road. The Ethics Officer is not really a cop, he’s not really punishing people because they’re crazy, he’s not measuring up to some weird sense of justice somebody has; none of these things. You could say he was a thousand things, but actually all he is is a bulldozer to open up the road and get the stops off the line. If he does his job, the organisation will roll, stats will go right on up, and all will be well. If he doesn’t do his job, it’ll not only slow down, but it’ll cave in.
And remember, there are a tremendous number of wogs out there who are stark, staring mad. There are also, the greater percentage of them, are very much all right. Now, to protect the guys who are very much all right, you’ve got to remove the guys from the line-up that are seeking to stop one and all.
Now, I have beefed up the technology that an organisation requires. An Academy to move people forward, and an HGC to move people forward, and an Ethics Officer, actually – minor, from an Ethics Officer’s point of view – because he’s not trying to cure people; he’s just trying to move them out of the way.
The key processes of an Academy, or an Organisation, are: Remedy A, misunderstood words in Scientology; Remedy B, misunderstood prior subjects; and S and D’s, the search and discovery of suppressives. So I have just spent a considerable amount of time on the investigation of these three processes, since they are the key processes, and I’ve beefed them up a great deal! I’ve undercut and undercut and undercut again, and refined the ways of doing them, and the questions asked on them, until they will bite very hard. So that if you can get Ethics in, then Technology will now roll faster as far as the Organisation is concerned. It is the Grade Processes which puts the PCs someplace, but it is these three I have mentioned, Remedy A, Remedy B and S and D, that get the Organisation someplace as far as the Tech in the Organisation – out of the Organisation – and then what gets the Organisation up to a point where it can apply these things is the Ethics Officer.
Well, the Ethics Officer is really the launching pad. He’s right on the launching pad. If he doesn’t function, and move it up the line, and so on, then nothing else will function. The sequence by which Scientology occurs is: first, Ethics. If you get ethics in, you can get in Tech. Then, Tech. If you can get in Tech, you can get in Admin. And it requires these three things. It requires Ethics, Tech and Admin to push us across the line.
Well, the Ethics Officer comes first along the line; therefore we’re taking a great deal of interest in Ethics Officers, and the Sea Organisation is there to back up the Ethics Officers of Scientology Organisations. So you’re backed up; you do not stand alone. Okay? Are there any questions?
All right. Very well, as soon as you have worked this out on tape, to the full… with clay (28.20), listened to this tape again, worked this out in clay to the full satisfaction of the Second Mate, and so on, why, you are free to return to Saint Hill.
All right? A little bit later, why, we’ll beef up this training, do a few commando tactics and a few other things to make you feel better, but right now this is the lot. Okay? All right.
Thank you very much.
Hubbard, L. (1967, 18 November) A Talk To Saint Hill and Worldwide Ethics Officers. Sea Org. Lecture conducted aboard the Apollo.
Notes
- Document studied on DSA Investigations Officer Full Hat. ↩
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