THE
PROBLEMS
      OF
   WORK

              by

     L. Ron Hubbard

                                  TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One........................................................................................ 1

         ON WHAT DOES HOLDING A JOB DEPEND?................................... 1

Chapter Two....................................................................................... 5

         HANDLING THE CONFUSIONS OF THE WORK- A- DAY WORLD.......... 5

Chapter Three...................................................................................... 10

         IS WORK NECESSARY?.............................................................. 10

Chapter Four....................................................................................... 14

         THE SECRET OF EFFICIENCY...................................................... 14

Chapter Five ....................................................................................... 22

         LIFE AS A GAME....................................................................... 22

Chapter Six......................................................................................... 27

         AFFINITY, REALITY AND COMMUNICATION................................. 27

Chapter Seven ..................................................................................... 33

         EXHAUSTION .......................................................................... 33

Chapter Eight ...................................................................................... 39

         THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS......................................................... 39

         FIRST AID................................................................................ 41

                                               Chapter One

                           ON WHAT DOES HOLDING A JOB DEPEND?

         On what does holding a job depend?

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

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

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

         But, leaving familial connection until some other day, what have we left? There is Who
You Know. Personal connection plays a dominant part in obtaining, keeping and improving a
position, there can be no doubt of this. One has a friend who works for the Jim- Jambo
Company; the friend knows of an opening; the friend has other friends and these still other
friends and so into the Jim Jambo Company one can settle down and work with some security
and hope of rise.

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

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

         Industry as well seems to have scant place to those cynical few of us who have seen it
all. The eagerness of the young to slave is all too often braked by the older head who says,
“Why get in a sweat about it, young’un? It’ll all come out the same.” And perhaps we’ve
stayed after hours and daubed ourselves with ink, or lingered at our post beyond all demand of
duty, only to watch in times to come the lazy one we scorned draw the better pay. And we’ve
said it isn’t justice -- something less than that.

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

         Intelligence, against this hard beaten parade of broken illusions, would seem to have no

                                                       1

bearing whatever upon our fates. When we see the stupid rule the many, when we see the
plans and decisions passed which would have been condemned even by the children of the
workers, we wonder what Intelligence could have to do with it. Better to be dumb, we might
come to think, than have our own wits continually outraged by the stupidities which pass for
company planning.

         Personal ability, against this torrent, this confusing chaos of random causes for
promotion and better pay, would seem a wasted item. We have seen our own wasted. We
have seen the abilities of others scorned. We have seen the unable rise while the able remained
neglected or even unemployed. So personal ability would not seem the factor it might once
have been to us, small cogwheels in the clashing gears of business fate. It must then certainly
be luck and nothing but luck the whole way down.

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

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

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

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

         The lot of the man in the work- a- day world is Uncertainty. His goal is Security. But
only few attain this goal. The rest of us worry from day to day, from year to year, about our
ability to get work, hold work, improve our lots. And all too often our worst fears take place.
Once we had the rich to look toward and envy, but now the taxes which we bear have reduced,
despite their clever accountants, even their number. States and governments rise and promise
us all Security and then give us restrictions which make that seem shaky too.

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

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

         Well, there is the problem.

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

         What would you give for something to lift you out of such ruts? Perhaps you are not in
them but if not you’re one of the lucky ones. Men, to escape these ruts, have perpetrated the

                                                       2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         One KNOWS he will be cared for no matter what happens. That is a security. In the
absence of certain knowledge it could also be a fallacy. Luck is chance. To depend upon luck is
to depend upon not- knowingness.

         But in truth how could one have knowledge about life when life itself had not been

                                                       3

brought, as knowledge, into order. When the subject of life itself was a chaos, how could
work, as a part of life, be anything but a chaos?

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

         To obtain, hold and improve a job, one would have to know the exact, precision rules
of life if one were to have a complete security. It would not be enough to know, fairly well,
one’s job. That would not be a security, for as time went on we would see, as we have listed,
too many chances entering into it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                       4

                                               Chapter Two

              HANDLING THE CONFUSIONS OF THE WORK- A- DAY WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         Luck is the usual answer one resorts to in a confusion. If the forces about one seem
too great, one can always “rely on his luck”. By luck we mean “destiny not personally
guided”. When one turns loose of an automobile wheel and hopes the car will stay on the road,
by luck, he is often disappointed. And so it is in life. Those things left to chance become less
likely to work themselves out. One has seen a friend shutting his eyes to the bill collectors and
gritting his teeth while he hopes that he will win at the races and solve all his problems. One
has known people who handled their lives this way for years. Indeed, one of Dickens’ great
characters had the entire philosophy of “waiting for something to turn up”. But luck, while we

                                                       5

grant that it IS a potent element is only necessary amid a strong current of confusing factors. If
one has to have LUCK to see him through then it follows that one isn’t any longer at his own
automobile wheel and it follows, too, that one is dealing with a confusion.

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

         If you were to stand in heavy traffic you would be likely to feel confused by all the
motion whizzing around you. If you were to stand in a heavy storm, with leaves and papers
flying by, you would be likely to be confused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         Until one selects ONE datum, ONE factor, ONE particular in a confusion of particles,

                                                       6

the confusion continues. The ONE thing selected and used becomes the STABLE DATUM for
the remainder.

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

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

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

         In teaching a boy to run a machine, don’t throw a torrent of data at him and then point
out his errors; that’s confusion to him, that makes him respond stupidly. Find some entrance
point to his confusion, ONE DATUM. Tell him, “This is a machine.” It may be that all the
directions were flung at someone who had no real certainty, no real order of existence. “This is
a machine,” you say. Then make him sure of it. Make him feel it, fiddle with it, push at it.
“This is a machine,” tell him. And you’d be surprised how long it may take but you’d be
surprised as well how his certainty increases.
         Out of all the complexities he must learn to operate it, he must know ONE DATUM
first. It is not even important WHICH datum he first learns well beyond that it is better to teach
him a SIMPLE BASIC DATUM. You can show him what it does, you can explain to him the
final product, you can tell him why HE has been selected to run this machine. BUT you
MUST make one basic datum clear to him or else he will be lost in confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

         The difference between good and bad control then becomes more obvious. The

                                                       7

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

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

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

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

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

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

         When once more unemployed, he was once more even less confident, less secure.
Why? Let us take a look at the opposite side of this Doctrine of the Stable Datum. If we do, we
learn that confusions are held ineffective by stable data and that, when the stable datum is
shaken, the confusion comes into being again.

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

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

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

                                                       8

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

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

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

                                                       9

                                              Chapter Three

                                        IS WORK NECESSARY?

         An understanding of life is necessary to the living of it. Otherwise life becomes a trap.
To so many of us in the work- a- day world this trap takes the form of WORK. If only we
didn’t have to work, how many delightful things could we do! If only we had some other way
of getting money... Travel, vacations, new clothes... what a host of things would be ours if
only we didn’t have to work!

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

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

         The rich man’s son, the moneyed dowager, neither of them works. Neither is sane.
When we look for neurosis and folly in our society we look toward those who do not or cannot
work. When we look over the background of a criminal we look at “inability to work”.
Somehow the right to work seems to be bound up in happiness and the zest of living. And
demonstrably the denial of work is bound up with madness and insanity.

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

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

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

         It is not enough to coast along in a job. The job, day by day, has to be made by us, no
matter who created it in the first place.

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

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

         In truth, only the constant refusal on the part of the society to give us work results in

                                                      10

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

         Let us re- define work and play. Play should be called “work without a purpose”. It
could also be called “activity without purpose”. That would make work be defined as “activity
with purpose”. Where we have fault to find with working, it grows out of our own fear that we
will not be permitted to continue work.

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

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

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

         Did you know that a mad person could be made well simply by getting him convinced
that he has some purpose in life? Well, that can happen. It doesn’t matter how thin or artificial
that purpose may be, mad people can be made sane with it. One instance comes to mind of a
crazy girl for whom nothing could be done. That was the point in her case -- nothing could be
done for her. But one night near the asylum an auto accident occurred and an overworked
doctor, seeing her near, ordered her to do some things for the victims. She became well. She
became a staff nurse. She was never insane thereafter.

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

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

         If automatic machinery threw enough people out of work -- even though the machines
were producing a plenty -- there would be a revolution. Why? Because by robbing them of
work, people have been robbed of a purpose in life. When that goes, all goes.
A good purpose, a bad purpose, it does not matter, so long as a purpose exists. WHY?

         Now, do not think we have strayed very far from the last chapter. We haven’t. Here is
an understanding of life. Life has certain stable data that ARE the stable data of livingness.

                                                      11

Once grasped, then life -- and that part of it called work -- can be understood.

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

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

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

         In the United States a quarter of a century ago, and in other lands as well, there was
something called a depression. It came out of a lack of understanding of economics during a
period of transition into a machine age. During it a great president saw that work had been
denied to his people. He created work. He thought he did it to get money into circulation to buy
all the things the country could now make. Therefore he did not really rescue the bulk of his
people from despair. For the work he gave them was to be carelessly done, poorly done. All
that was being demanded was time spent on the job. He had a wonderful opportunity to turn a
country into a beautiful thing. But the work given had no purpose.

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

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

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

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

         It is, as we have shown, rather easy to knock a person into a state of confusion. All
you have to do is locate his Stable Datum on any subject and shake it. This is a trick we all use.
For instance, we are arguing about economics with a friend: we don’t agree with him. We ask
him where he got such an idea. He says somebody wrote it in such- and- so. We attack the
writer or the paper and discredit it. In other words, we win our argument by shaking his Stable
Datum as nearly as we can find it.

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

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

                                                      12

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

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

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

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

                                                      13

                                              Chapter Four

                                    THE SECRET OF EFFICIENCY

         What is control?

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

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

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

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

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

         Attempted control for bad or covert purposes is harmful and it carries with it the
ingredient of unknowingness. The person who is attempting control is actually not controlling.
He is simply seeking to control and his efforts are in the main indefinite and unpositive, which
of course are characteristics which control does not countenance. When unknowingness is
entered into control, control can become antipathetic, but it does not become a fact. If you have
ever covertly controlled your car you will understand what is meant. If you handled your
steering wheel in such a way that the car would not “know” which way it was then supposed to
go you would soon be involved in difficulties. You must handle the steering wheel of a car in
such a way that the car then turns the proper turns and remains on a straight course on a
straight road. There is nothing hidden about your intention of controlling the car and there is
nothing unknown about the response of the car. When a car fails to respond to your handling
of the steering wheel control has ceased to exist.

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

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

                                                      14

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

         Start, change and stop also comprise a cycle of action. The CYCLE OF ACTION is
seen in the turning of a simple wheel. The wheel starts and then any given spot on it changes
position and then the wheel is stopped. It does not matter how long the wheel is in motion, it
still follows this cycle of action. A man walking a short distance starts, changes the position of
his body and stops his body. He has, if he does this, completed a cycle of action. On a longer
span a company starts, continues and at some date, early or late, ceases to exist. In change we
get change of position in space or change of existence in time. In start we have simple start and
in stop we have simply stop.

         Things may start slowly or rapidly, things may stop slowly or rapidly, things may
change very rapidly while they are going. Thus the rate of start, the rate of change and the rate
of stop have little to do with the fact that a cycle of action does consist of start, change and
stop.

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

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

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

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

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

         Where “bad control” enters in, so enter incompetence, accidents, difficulties,
inefficiency and, not the least, considerable misery and unhappiness. As we define bad control
as not- control, or as an unknowing attempt at control without actually effecting control, it can
be said that unpositiveness results in a great many difficulties.

                                                      15

         To give you some idea of how far this might go in life, you might get the idea of being
moved around in a room by somebody. This somebody would tell you to go to the desk, then
would tell you to go to a chair, then would tell you to go to the door. Each time he tells you to
go somewhere, you of course have to start yourself, change your body’s position and stop
yourself. Now oddly enough you would not mind this if you knew that somebody was telling
you to do it and you were capable of performing the action and you were not receiving orders
in such a wise as to interrupt your obedience of the command before you completed it.

         Let us say, for instance, that somebody told you to go to the desk, but before you
arrived at the desk he told you to go to a chair, but before you arrived at the chair told you to go
to the door and then claimed you were wrong in not having gone to the desk. You would be, at
that time, confused. This would be “bad control” since it does not permit you to finish any
cycle of action before another cycle of action is demanded of you. Thus your cycles of action
become involved and a confusion results.

         But this in essence would not be control since control must involve an understandable
or knowing positiveness. Good control would not change the order before you had a chance to
arrive at the desk. It would let you arrive at the desk before you were asked to start again for
the chair. It would let you arrive at the chair before you were asked to start again for the door.
Now you would not mind the positive control but it is certain that you would be quite upset by
the broken series of orders which did not permit you to finish any cycle of action. Now, to
give you some idea of how this could influence one’s life -- which would you rather have give
you a series of orders such as above, to move around a room: your father or your mother? It is
certain that you had the most trouble with the parent you would not have chosen to have given
you those orders.

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

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

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

         Even mechanical failures are attributable to a lack of control. It will be discovered that
an individual who cannot easily control a machine is quite likely to have considerable
difficulties with that machine. The machine itself suffers sometimes in nearly inexplicable
ways.

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

         The cycle of action of this universe is start, change and stop. This is also the anatomy

                                                      16

of control. Almost the entire subject of control is summed up in the ability to start, change and
stop one’s activities, body and one’s environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

         Now given a good executive in a plant or office and given good subordinates (defining
as good, their ability to start, change and stop things), we would yet have difficulty if we
reached lower down on the command chart and discovered that we did not have any working
people who themselves were capable of starting, changing and stopping their own particular
jobs. We would have a condition here where the executive and the foreman would then be
forced to do everything that was really being done in the plant. To actually have a good plant
we would have to have an executive, foreman and workers, all of whom in their own
environment were capable of starting, changing and stopping things and who were at the same
time (including the executives) not unwilling to be started, changed and stopped in their duties,
providing positive and understandable orders were used.

                                                      17

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

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

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

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

         Thus we can see that there are people who abuse the cycle of action of start, change and
stop and who are themselves fixated upon one or another factor in the cycle of action or who
are incapable of withstanding any factor in it, which means, of course, that they are in a
continuous and arduous confusion.

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

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

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

                                                      18

and its people, as has been noted since the days of Napoleon. The most recent nation which
turned over the entire function of the state to police was Germany and Germany was stopped
very thoroughly. Germany also effected nothing but destruction.

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

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

         As it is with a nation or a business so it would be with an individual holding down a
single job. He should be able to start, change and stop anything under his immediate control. If
he is running a machine he should be able to start the machine, to keep it turning (changing)
and to stop it, and this should be under his own determinism. His machine should not be
started by some engineer and stopped at some period of the day without any attention from
himself. Furthermore, if he felt the machine should be shut down and oiled he should have the
authority to do so and should not have to withstand the pummeling of some machine foreman
who, without understanding the situation, simply observed that a machine was stopped which
according to his lights ought to be running.

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

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

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

         Co- operation and alignment of activity is different than supervision. Where one has a
chain of command one does not necessarily have supervision. One does have, however, co-
ordinated planning for an entire operation which is then relayed to others in the operation so
that coordination can take place. If everybody is agreed on the worthwhileness of any activity
and if everybody in that activity were capable of actually controlling those items or persons
which were in his immediate sphere of action, it would be found that planning would not have
to engage in much supervision in order to effect the execution of the ideas involved. This is a

                                                      19

very high order of dream. Only where Scientology has been thoroughly at work could such a
thing occur -- that an organization could run in agreement with itself without supervision or
punitive action.

         One is able to gauge those workers around him by the amount of confusion in which
they are involved. That confusion tells one at once the degree of inability to control things. That
inability to control things may not be entirely the fault of the worker. There are two things
which can be psychotic: one is the surroundings and the other is the person. A sane man has
difficulty in insane surroundings. An insane man has difficulty in even the sanest and most
orderly surroundings. Thus there are two factors involved in any operation: the person and the
surroundings. It could also be said there are two factors involved in any business: the
surroundings of the business itself and the business. One sane business trying to operate in a
world of madmen would have a very great difficulty getting along. One way or another the
inability of the madmen to start, change and stop things would infect the business and
deteriorate its efficiency.

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

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

         Many a good worker has been lost to a factory because the good worker could not
make his own work good enough to satisfy himself, being faced in his job with so many
confused elements and orders that he at last rebelled. Thus good workers can be spoiled. In
any department it is possible to spot the people who spoil good workers. They are the people
who cannot start, change and stop such things as communication or machinery and who are
themselves most liable to franticness and confusion. These are the people who would rather
have solutions thrown in the waste- basket and problems posted on the bulletin board.

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

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

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

                                                      20

and letting it remain finished.

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

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

         However, control in itself is not an entire answer to everything, for if it were one
would have to be able to control everything, not only in his own job, but in an office or on
earth, before he could be happy. We discover in examining control that the limits of control
should be extended only across one’s actual sphere of operation. When an individual attempts
to extend control far beyond his active interest in a job or in life he encounters difficulty. Thus
there is a limit to the “area of control” which, if violated, violates many things. There is almost
a maxim that if an individual consistently seeks to operate outside his own department he will
not take care of his own department. As a matter of fact, in Scientology organizations it has
been discovered that a person who is consistently involving himself with things far beyond his
actual scope of interest is not covering his actual scope of interest. Thus there is obviously
another factor involved than control. This factor is willingness not to control and is fully as
important as control itself.

                                                      21

                                               Chapter Five

                                            LIFE AS A GAME

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

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

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

         It is because life is a game.

         The word “game” is used here advisedly. When one is mired down in the sometimes
titanic struggle of existence he is apt to discount the fact that there is joy in living. He is apt to
disbelieve that such a thing as fun can exist. Indeed people, when they reach into their thirties,
begin to wonder what happened to their childhood when they actually could enjoy things. One
begins to wonder if pleasure of living isn’t itself some sort of trap, and one begins to believe
that it is not a good thing to become too interested in new people and new things, since these
will only lead to heartbreak. There are men who have decided that in view of the fact that loss
brings so much pain, they had better not acquire at all. It is far superior according to these to
live a life of only medium privation than to live a life of considerable luxury, since then if they
lost what they had the pain would be much less.

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

         Any job is a game.

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

         Primary amongst these is the necessity in a game to have an opponent or an enemy.
Also a necessity is to have problems. Another necessity is to have sufficient individuality to
cope with a situation. To live life fully, then, one must have, in addition to “something to do”,
a higher purpose, and this purpose, to be a purpose at all, must have counter- purposes or
purposes which prevent it from occurring. One must have individualities which oppose the
purpose or activities of one, and if one lacks these things it is certain that he will invent them.

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

         If we had a foreman who capably controlled everything in his area and did nothing else,
and if that foreman were not entirely mentally balanced in all ways (which is to say if he were
human), we would find that foreman inventing personalities for the workers under him and
reasons why they were opposing him and actual oppositions. We would find him selecting out
one or more of his workmen to chastise, with, according to the foreman, very good reason, but

                                                      22

in actuality without any further reason than that the foreman obsessively needed opponents.
Now very many involved classifications can be read into this by ancient mental analyzes but
none of these need to be examined. The truth of the matter is that a man must have a game and
if he does not have one he will make one. If that man is aberrated and not entirely competent he
will make an intensely aberrated game.

         Where an executive finds all running far too smoothly in his immediate vicinity he is
likely to cause some trouble just to have something to do -unless that executive is in very good
mental condition indeed. Thus we have management pretending, often without any actual basis
in fact, that labor is against it. Similarly, we occasionally have labor certain that management,
which is in fact quite competent, is against labor. Here we have invented a game where no
game can actually exist.

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

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

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

         If everybody in a plant were able to control his own sphere of interest in that plant and
if everybody in the plant were doing his own job, there would actually be no lack of game, for
there are other plants, other activities in the outside world and these always furnish game
enough for any rational organization. But supposing the people in an organization cannot
control their own sphere, cannot control their own activities, and are obsessively attempting to
create aberrated games all about them. Then we would have a condition whereby the plant,
office or concern would not be able to effectively fight its environment and would produce
poorly, if not collapse.

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

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

         This sounds almost too simple, but unfortunately for the professors that try to make
things complicated, it is just that simple. Of course there are a number of ways men can

                                                      23

become too aberrated. That is not the subject of this book. The subject of this book is work.

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

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

         The truth of the matter is an individual actually desires to have some part of life
uncontrolled. When this part of life hurts him sufficiently he then resigns himself to the
necessity of controlling it and so makes himself relatively unhappy if he never will be able to
do so. A game consists of freedom, barriers and purposes. It also consists of control and
uncontrol.

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

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

         Thus, in the case of the football player, while he plays football he is apt to be
restimulated or react from the old injury received in football and so feels less than a spirit of fun
while playing football. He becomes anxious. He becomes very grim on the subject of football
and this is expressed by an effort to actively control the players on another team so that they
will not injure him again.

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

         Now, up to the time he had that accident the motorcycle rider was perfectly willing to
not control any other motorcycle on the track save his own. He did not worry about these other
motorcycles since they had never injured him and the motorcycle racing game was still a game
to him. However, during the accident there was a moment when he sought to control another

                                                      24

motorcycle than his own and another rider. He failed in that effort. Thus in his “reactive mind”
there is an actual mental image picture of his failing to control a motorcycle. Thus in future
racing he is less competent. He is afraid of his own machine. He has identified his own
machine with somebody else’s machine. This is a failure of control.

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

         The whole feeling of self- confidence and competence actually derives from one’s ability
to control or leave uncontrolled the various items and people in his surroundings. When he
becomes obsessed with a necessity to control something rather beyond his sphere of control,
he is disabused of his ability to control those things close to him. A person eventually gets into
a state of mind where he cannot pay any attention at all to his own job but can only reach out
into the outer environment and seek, effectively or otherwise, to stop, start or change things
which have in reality very little to do with his own job. Here we have the agitator, the
inefficient worker, the individual who is going to fail. He is going to fail because he has failed
at some time in the past.

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

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

         Now let us say the machine bites him, he hurts his hand in it, some other worker jostles
against him at the wrong moment, some tool given to him is defective and shatters. An actual
physical pain enters into the situation. He tends to fall away from the machine. He tends then to
concentrate much more heavily on the machine than he should. He is no longer willing to leave
it uncontrolled. When he is working with that machine he must control it. Now as he has
entered duress into this situation and as he is already anxious about it, it is fairly certain that the
machine will hurt him again. This gives him a second injury and with this injury he feels an
even stronger urge to control the machine. You see, during the moments of injury the machine
was out of control. Now while out- of- control is a game condition, it is not desired or welcome
to this particular machinist. Eventually, it is certain he will look upon this machine as some sort
of a demon. He will, you might say, run the machine all day and at night while asleep run it
too. He will spend his week- ends and his holidays still running that machine. Eventually he
will not be able to stand the sight of that machine and will flinch at the idea of working it a

                                                      25

moment longer.

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

         There are other conditions which enter into lighter phases of work. In the matter of a
clerk we may have a circumstance where he is ill from some other area than his area of work
and yet, because he has little time off, is forced to work, sick or not. The tools of his own
work, his filing cabinets or his pens or his books or the very room, become identified with his
feeling of sickness and he feels that these, too, have bitten him. Thus he becomes obsessed in
his control of them and actually degenerates in his ability to control them just as the machinist
does. Even though these tools have not actually injured him he associates them with being
injured. In other words, he identifies his own sickness with the work he is doing. Thus even a
clerk whose tools of trade are not particularly dangerous can become upset about his tools of
trade and can first exert enormous control over them on an obsessed basis and at length
abandon any control of them and feel he would rather be beaten than do an instant’s more work
in his particular sphere.

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

         If acquaintance with one’s tools, or touching one’s tools of the trade and discovering
exactly where and how they are, is so beneficial, then what would be the mechanism behind
this? We will leave until later in this book some drills and exercises calculated to rehabilitate
one’s ability to work, and look for a moment at this new factor.

                                                      26

                                               Chapter Six

                         AFFINITY, REALITY AND COMMUNICATION

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

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

         By Affinity we mean emotional response. We mean the feeling of affection or lack of it,
of emotion or misemotion connected with life. By Reality we mean the solid objects, the real
things of life. By Communication we mean an interchange of ideas between two terminals.

         Without affinity there is no reality or communication. Without reality there is no
affinity or communication. Without communication there is neither affinity nor reality. Now
these are sweeping statements but are nevertheless very valuable and are true.

         Have you ever tried to talk to an angry man? An angry man’s communication is at a
level of misemotion which repels all terminals from him. Therefore his communication factor is
very low, even though very loud. He is attempting to destroy something or some other
terminal, therefore his reality is very poor. Very likely what he is being angry about apparently
is not what has made him mad. An angry man is not truthful. Thus it could be said that his
reality, even on the subject he is attempting to voice, is poor.

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

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

         To give you some idea of a practical application of this, there is the case of the young
girl who had run away from home and whose parents would no longer talk to her. The girl, as
a clerk in an office, was quite despondent and was doing very bad work. A Scientologist
whose attention had been directed to her by the office manager, gave her an interview and
discovered that her parents were intensely angry with her and would no longer communicate
with her at all. They had been so upset at her refusal (actually her inability) to follow a career as
a concert pianist for which they had her studying at great expense that they had “washed their
hands of her”, and the unpleasantness had forced her to run away to a distant point. Since that
time they had not communicated with her but had spoken to people she had known in her home
neighborhood in very bitter terms concerning her. In such a state of mind, since she was
intimately involved with her parents and wished to be on the best possible terms with them, she
could not work. Her failure to perform her work was jamming communication lines in her own
office. In other words, her affinity was very low and her reality on things was quite low since
she might be said to have been elsewhere most of the time, and thus the communication lines
which passed through her hands were equally low and successfully jammed other
communication lines in the office, at which time this matter became of intense interest to the

                                                      27

office manager. Now ordinarily in the work- a- day world the office manager would have
dismissed her and found another girl. But employment was critical at the time and this office
manager knew the modern thing to do. He sent for a Scientologist.

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

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

         Of course the Scientologist knew exactly what was going to happen. He knew that their
affinity and reality would come up and the girl’s reality, affinity and communication in the
office itself would rise as soon as this situation was remedied. He remedied with
communication, expressing affinity from the girl and this of course, as it always does,
produced reaction. The girl’s work came up to par, the girl began to progress and now that her
feeling of reality was sufficiently high actually became a very valuable office worker.

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

         The Tone Scale starts well below apathy. In other words, a person is feeling no
emotion about a subject at all. An example of this was the American attitude concerning the

                                                      28

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

         A person who is in apathy, when his tone is improved, feels grief.

         A person in grief, when his tone improves, feels fear.

         A person in fear, when his tone improves feels anger.

         A person in anger, when his tone improves feels antagonism.

         A person in antagonism, when his tone improves feels boredom.

         When a person in boredom improves his tone, he is enthusiastic.

         When an enthusiastic person improves his tone, he feels serenity.

         Actually the below apathy level is so low as to constitute a no- affinity, no- emotion, no-
problem, no- consequence state of mind on things which are actually tremendously important.

         The area below apathy is an area without pain, interest, beingness or anything else that
matters to anyone, but it is an area of great danger since one is below the level of being able to
respond to anything and may accordingly lose everything without apparently noticing it. A
workman who is in very bad condition and who is actually a liability to the organization may
not be capable of experiencing pain or any emotion on any subject. He is below apathy. We
have seen workmen who would hurt their hand and think nothing of it and go right on working
even though their hand was very badly injured. People in dispensaries working in industrial
areas are quite amazed sometimes to discover how little attention some workmen pay to their
own injuries. It is an ugly fact that people who pay no attention to their own injuries and who
are not even feeling pain from those injuries are not and never will be, without some attention
from a Scientologist, efficient people. They are liabilities to have around. They do not respond
properly. If such a person is working a crane and the crane suddenly goes out of control to
dump its load on a group of men, that sub- apathy crane operator will simply let the crane drop
its load. In other words, he is a potential murderer. He cannot stop anything, he cannot change
anything and he cannot start anything and yet, on some automatic response basis, he manages
some of the time to hold down a job, but the moment a real emergency confronts him he is not
likely to respond properly and accidents result. Where there are accidents in industry they stem
from these people in the sub- apathy tone range. Where bad mistakes are made in offices which
cost firms a great deal of money, lost time and cause other personnel difficulties, such mistakes
are found rather uniformly to stem from these sub- apathy people.

         So do not think that one of these states of being unable to feel anything, of being dumb,
of being incapable of pain or joy is any use to anyone. It is not. A person who is in this
condition cannot control things and in actuality is not there sufficiently to be controlled by
anyone else and does strange and unpredictable things.

         Just as a person can be chronically in sub- apathy, so a person can be in apathy. This is
dangerous enough but is at least expressed. Only when we get up into apathy itself do we have
the A- R- C triangle beginning to manifest itself and become visible. Communication from the

                                                      29

person himself, not from some circuit or training pattern is to be expected. People can be
chronically in grief, chronically in fear, chronically in anger, or in antagonism, or boredom, or
actually can be “stuck in enthusiasm”. A person who is truly able is normally fairly serene
about things. He can, however, express other emotions. It is a mistake to believe that a total
serenity is of any real value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

         Men who can do things are very high on affinity, very high in terms of reality and are

                                                      30

very capable in terms of communication. If you wish to measure their various capabilities you
should study the subject much further. A whole book has been written about this triangle called
Science of Survival.

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

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

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

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

         You should realize in using the A- R- C triangle that, once more, the emotional tones are
progressed through as one begins to develop communication. In other words, somewhere up
the line somebody who has been totally apathetic about us is liable to become angry at us. If
one can simply persevere up through this anger, he reaches only antagonism, then boredom
and finally enthusiasm and a perfect communication level of understanding.

         Marriages fall apart simply because of a failure of communication, because of a failure
of reality and affinity. When communication starts failing the affinity starts dropping. People
have secrets from each other and the affinity starts out the bottom.

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

         As can be seen the A- R- C triangle is intimately bound up with an ability to control and
an ability to leave uncontrolled. When an individual attempts to control something and fails to
do so he then experiences an antipathy toward that thing. In other words, he has not been right,
he has been wrong. His intention has failed. His intention has, you might say, backfired upon
him. Thus as one attempts to control things and then fails to control them he is likely to drop
down Tone Scale about those things. Thus an individual who has been betrayed by the tools of
his own trade is apt to treat them with a lowering affinity level. He becomes bored with them,
he becomes antagonistic toward them, he becomes angry with them (and at this stage the
machinery begins to break up) and finally he becomes afraid of them, he becomes sad about
them, he becomes apathetic about them and no longer cares about them at all. At this stage he
certainly cannot use them at all. Actually from the level of boredom down the ability to use

                                                      31

one’s tools of the trade is consistently lowered.

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

         By using A- R- C he could regain in some measure both his control of the tools and his
enthusiasm for work. He would do this by communicating and discovering his willingness for
these and the people around him to be real or solid. An individual could regain his ability over
his immediate tools simply by touching them and letting them go. This might seem rather
pointless and he is apt to reach the level of boredom and become bored with the process. Just
above this level is the pay of becoming enthusiastic. It sounds very strange that if one simply
touched his automobile and let go and touched it and let go and touched it and let go and
touched it and let go, possibly for some hours, he would regain not only his enthusiasm for the
automobile but a tremendous ability to control the car which he had never suspected in himself
at all. Similarly with people, since these often object to being touched, one can communicate. If
one really communicates and communicates well to these people, listens to what they have to
say and acknowledges what they say and says what he has to say to them gently enough and
often enough so that it is actually received by them, he will regain to a very marked degree his
ability to associate and co- ordinate the actions of those people with whom he is immediately
surrounded. Here we have A- R- C immediately adjusted to work. It sounds strange that if we
made a bookkeeper pick up and lay down his pencil or pen for a couple of hours he would
regain his ability to handle it and would improve in his ability to make figures; and that if we
got him to touch and let go of his ledger for a considerable length of time he would be more
capable of handling that ledger and would make far fewer mistakes with it. This sounds like
magic. It is magic. It is Scientology.

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                                               Chapter Seven

                                              EXHAUSTION

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

         One begins to feel, after he has been long on a job and has been considerably abused on
that job, that to work any more would be quite beyond his endurance.

         He is tired. The thought of doing certain things makes him tired. He thinks of raising
his energy or of being able to force his way along a little bit further, and if he does so he is
thinking in the wrong channels since the answer to exhaustion has little if anything to do with
energy.

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

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

         The basic difficulty with all juvenile delinquency is the one- time apparently humane
program of forbidding children to labor in any way. Doubtless it was once a fact that child
labor was abused, that children were worked too hard, that their growths were stunted and that
they were, in general, used. It is highly doubtful if the infamous Mr. Marx ever saw in
America young boys being pulled off machines dead from work and thrown onto dump heaps.
Where there was an abuse of this matter, there was a public outcry against it, and legislation
was enacted to prevent children from working. This legislation with all the good intention of
the world is, however, directly responsible for juvenile delinquency.

         Forbidding children to work, and particularly forbidding teenagers to make their own
way in the world and earn their own money, creates a family difficulty, so that it becomes
almost impossible to raise a family, and creates as well, and particularly, a state of mind in the
teenager that the world does not want him and he has already lost his game before he has begun
it. Then with something like universal military training staring him in the face so that he dare
not start a career, he is of course thrust into a deep sub- apathy on the subject of work, and,
when he at length is faced with the necessity of making his own way in the world, he rises into
an apathy and does nothing about it at all. It is highly supportive of this fact that our greatest
citizens worked, usually when they were quite young.

         In the Anglo- American civilization the highest level of endeavor was achieved by boys
who, from the age of 12, on farms, had their own duties and had a definite place in the world.
Children in the main are quite willing to work. A two, three, four year old child is usually to be
found haunting his father or her mother trying to help out either with tools or dust rags, and the
kind parent who is really fond of the children responds in the reasonable, and long ago normal,
manner of being patient enough to let the child actually assist.

         A child so permitted then develops the idea that his presence and activity is desired and
he quite calmly sets about a career of accomplishment. The child who is warped or pressed into
some career, but is not permitted to assist in those early years, is convinced that he is not
wanted, that the world has no part of him.

         And later on he will come into very definite difficulties regarding work. However, the
child who at three or four wants to work in this modern society is discouraged and is actually

                                                      33

prevented from working, and after he is made to be idle until seven, eight or nine, is suddenly
saddled with certain chores. Now this child is already educated into the fact that he must not
work and so the idea of work is a sphere where he “knows he does not belong”, and so he
always feels uncomfortable in performing various activities.

         Later on in his teens he is actively prevented from getting the sort of a job which will
permit him to buy the clothes and treats for his friends which he feels are demanded of him and
so he begins to feel he is not a part of the society. Not being part of the society, he is then
against the society and desires nothing but destructive activities.

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

         This is not necessarily the result of his lowered abilities. It is the result of injury
compounded by inactivity. A soldier who is wounded and cared for in a field hospital close to
the front and is returned to duty the moment he can possibly support such duties will be found
to retain, in a large measure, his morale. Of course the injury received has a tendency to repel
him from the level of action which he once thought best but, even so, he is in better shape than
a soldier who is sent to a hospital in the rear. The soldier who is sent to the hospital in the rear
is being told, according to his viewpoint, that he is not particularly necessary to the war.

         Without actually adding up these principles, the word “exhaustion” began a general use
coupled with neurosis. This was based on the fact that people with a neurosis simply looked
exhausted. There was no more co- ordination to it than that. Actually a person who has been
denied the right to work, particularly one who has been injured and then denied the right to
work, will eventually encounter exhaustion.

         Technically in Scientology it is discovered that there is no such thing as gradual
diminishing by continuing contact of the energy of the individual. One does not become
exhausted simply because one has worked too long or too hard. One becomes exhausted when
he has worked sufficiently long to restimulate some old injury. One of the characteristics of
this injury will be exhaustion. Chronic exhaustion, then, is not the product of long hours and
arduous application. It is the product of the accumulation of the shocks and injuries incident to
life, each of them perhaps only a few seconds or a few hours long and adding up perhaps to a
totality of only fifty or seventy- five hours. But this accumulation -- the accumulation of injury,
repulsion and shock -- eventually mounts up to a complete inability to do anything.

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

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

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

                                                      34

         There are some means of recovering one’s verve and enthusiasm for work short of
close work with a Scientology practitioner. These are relatively simple and very easy to
understand. We have in Scientology something we call Introversion and something else we call
Extroversion.

         Introversion is a simple thing. It means looking in too closely. And Extroversion is also
a simple thing. It means nothing more than being able to look outward. It could be said that
there are introverted personalities and extroverted personalities. An extroverted personality is
one who is capable of looking around the environment. An introverted personality is only
capable of looking inward at himself.

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

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

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

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

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

         In work his attention is riveted on objects which are usually at the most only a few feet
from him. He pays his closest attention to articles which are within the reach of his hands. This
puts his attention away from extroversion at least to some spot in focus in front of his face. His
attention fixes there. If this is coincident with some old injury incident or operation, he is likely
to fix his attention as well on some spot in former times and become restimulated, so that he
gets the pains and ills and the feeling of tiredness or apathy or sub- apathy which he had during
that moment of injury. As his attention is continuously riveted there he of course has a
tendency to look only there, even when he is not working.

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

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

                                                      35

least) he begins to feel weariness or tiredness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

         “Take a Walk” is, within reason, a near cure- all. If one feels antagonistic towards one’s
wife, the wrong thing to do is to beat her. The right thing to do is to go out and take a walk
around the block until one feels better, and make her walk around the block in the opposite
direction until an extroversion from the situation is achieved. It will be discovered that all
domestic quarrels, particularly amongst working people, stem from the fact that, having been
overfixed (rather than overstrained) on one’s work and the situations connected with it, one has
failed to control certain things in his working environment. He then comes home and seeks to
find something he can control. This is usually the marital partner or the children, and when one
fails even there he is apt to drop down scale with a vengeance.

         The extroversion of attention is as necessary as the work itself. There is nothing really
wrong with introverting attention or with work. If one didn’t have something to be interested in

                                                      36

he would go to pieces entirely. But if one works it will be found that an unnatural tiredness is
apt to set in. When this is found to be the case then the answer to this is not a drop into
unconsciousness for a few hours as in sleep, but in actually extroverting the attention and then
getting a really relaxing sleep.

         These principles of extroversion and introversion have many ramifications and,
although “Take a Walk” is almost laughable in its simplicity, there are many more complicated
processes in case one wished to get more complicated. However, in the main “Take a Walk”
will take care of an enormous number of difficulties attendant to work. Remember that when
doing it one will get more tired at first and will then get fresher. This phenomenon has been
noted by athletes. It is called the second wind.
         The second wind is really getting enough environment and enough mass in order to run
out the exhausted of the last race. There is no such thing as a second wind. There is such a
thing as a return to extroversion on the physical world in which one lives.

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

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

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

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

         This principle of extroversion and introversion could go much further in a society than
it does. There is something that could be done by the government and by businesses in general
which would probably eradicate the idea of strikes and would increase production quite
markedly. Workers on strike are usually discontented not so much with the conditions of
work, but with work itself. They feel they are being victimized, they are being pressed into
working at times when they do not want to work, and a strike comes as an actual relief. They
can fight something. They can do something else than stand there and fiddle with a piece of

                                                      37

machinery or account books.

         Dissatisfied workers are striking workers. If people become exhausted at work, if
people are not content with work, if people are upset with work, they can be counted upon to
find a sufficient number of grievances to strike. And, if management is given enough trouble
and lack of co- operation on the part of the people on the lower chains of command, it can be
certain that management sooner or later will create situations which cause workers to strike. In
other words, bad conditions of work are actually not the reason for labor troubles and disputes.
Weariness of work itself or an inability to control the area and environments of work are the
actual cause of labor difficulties.

         Any management given sufficient income to do so, if that management is not terribly
aberrated, will pay a decent working wage. And any workman given half a chance will perform
his duties cheerfully. But once the environment itself becomes overstrained, once the company
itself has become introverted by overt acts on the part of the government, once the workers
have been shown that they have no control over management, there can be after that labor
disputes. Underlying all these obvious principles, however, are the principles of introversion
and extroversion. Workers become so introverted at their tasks that they no longer are capable
of affinity for their leaders and are no longer capable actually of viewing the environment in
which they work. Therefore someone can come along and tell them that all the executives are
ogres, which is obviously not true, and on the executive level someone can come along and tell
the executives that all the workers are ogres, which is obviously, on that side, not true either.

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

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

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

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

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                                              Chapter Eight

                                     THE MAN WHO SUCCEEDS

         The conditions of success are few and easily stated.

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

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

         The ingredients of success are then: First an ability to confront work with joy and not
honor; a wish to do work for its own sake, not because one “has to have a pay- check”. One
must be able to work without driving oneself or experiencing deep depths of exhausted. If one
experiences these things there is something wrong with him. There is some element in his
environment that he should be controlling that he isn’t controlling, or his accumulated injuries
are such as to make him shy away from all people and masses with whom he should be in
intimate contact.

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

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

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

         The mysteries of life are not today, with Scientology, very mysterious. Mystery is not a
needful ingredient. Only the very aberrated man desires to have vast secrets held away from
him Scientology has slashed through many of the complexities which have been erected for
men and has bared the core of these problems. Scientology for the first time in Man’s history
can predictably raise intelligence, increase ability, bring about a return of the ability to play a
game, and permits Man to escape from the dwindling spiral of his own disabilities. Therefore
work itself can become a game, a pleasant and happy thing.

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

                                                      39

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

         Another thing we know is that men are not dispensable. It is a mechanism of old
philosophies to tell men that if they think they are indispensable they should go down to the
graveyard and take a look -- those men were indispensable too. This is the surest foolishness.
If you really looked carefully in the graveyard you would find the machinist who set the
models going in yesteryear and without whom there would be no industry today. It is doubtful
if such a feat is being performed just now. A workman is not just a workman. A laborer is not
just a laborer. An office worker is not just an office worker. They are living, breathing,
important pillars on which the entire structure of our civilization is erected. They are not cogs in
a mighty machine. They are the machine itself.

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

                                                      40

                                                 FIRST AID

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         During this assist the person has his eyes closed.

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

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

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