Lecture: Can’t Have, Create – Fundamentals of All Problems (1961)

You’ll go into a community, you’ll arrive here on Earth, it’s a new area to you, and you start looking around, and you see this happening and that happening, and the other happening, and it doesn’t make any sense to you at all. Well, you don’t know what the law has been. So therefore, you can’t read the opposites because your games condition is going to bring into existence the reverse. If you run a can’t have on people, they’re going to create it. It’s very interesting.

You take a district, and you utterly prohibit, one hundred percent crime, and everybody goes just a little bit bugs or crime starts to occur around and about the place, or something like that. It is totally police action that creates crime. Everybody knows this sort of instinctively, but they never quite look it over.

I’ve operated down in parts of Los Angeles, South Alvarado and Main and that sort of thing. It’s as much as your life’s worth to go down there on a weekend. Hang around those bars and gin mills and marijuana joints. They just stack up the bodies like cord wood.

It’s nothing. You pick up some guy on the corner, and he’s cut from ear to ear and bleeding gore all over the pavement. Nobody’s paying a bit of attention to him. That is too usual.

Well, it was very odd in operating in that particular area to look what man was actually doing or what he would accept or what he was trying to do. And it was very peculiar that the police were trying in some measure throughout that area to squash all of this kind of activity. And they were particularly hot in those particular activities.

There is more police per square inch on Main and South Alvarado, and so forth, in Los Angeles than any other place on earth. It’s totally populated by police. And it is the seamiest, lousiest, scummiest skid row in the world. Well, isn’t this fascinating?

Look. Well, you see, reasonability throws you astray. You say the place is rough, therefore they have to have police there. No. You have police there to forbid roughness, so you get roughness. Now, I have actually seen police create roughness. It goes this far.

Here’s a guy minding his own business. A cop walks up to him, turns him around and tells him to get out. Well, what is the fellow doing? He’s doing nothing. Well, that was why he was told to get out. It’s all too calm here for the cops, man. And the next thing you know . . I have actually seen a man beaten till every tooth was knocked out of his head and stamped on and everything else. And there wasn’t going to be a single thing going on. I mean, the fellow didn’t do anything or otherwise. The cops just had to have some trouble.

It was very interesting. One of the cops, after that foray was all done, was all beat up. He was just black and blue, and he was in terrible condition and all this. And this other fellow got away, by the way. And I was standing there explaining to this police officer how I had helped him all I could. I did too.

And he was trying to create trouble; I helped him create trouble . . for himself I was helping him beat the guy up, you see. I was operating as a special police officer myself, you know. Just somehow or other, every time he’d raise his hand to strike, you see, his wrist would hit my arm or something like this. He kept getting in my road. That’s what I kept telling him. It was a very confusing brawl.

He explained to me afterwards over a glass of whiskey, and so forth, he’d never been in quite as confusing a brawl. He’d never . . .

But that it was possible to keep law and order in these places was very, very easy to observe. Because in those areas where I was, they didn’t have any trouble. Now, that wasn’t some special monkey business I was pulling off. In fact, I wasn’t looking for any trouble either way. I wasn’t either trying to make people be good or be bad or try to start fights or otherwise.

Actually there was law and order in that immediate area because nobody was running a can’t-have on anybody. There were no can’t-haves being run. I’d talk to all the guys that came in, and so on.  People kept trying to hire me, by the way, because it was bad for business to have these brawls, and so forth, occur. And I’ve been offered some very fancy sums to keep on with this job. It was very, very amusing and entertaining to me. They took me as the real McCoy, you know. I must have been the real thing. I thought, that . . boy, that’s the biggest fraudulence I ever pulled in my life.¹

Notes