Lecture: How We Have Addressed The Problem of the Mind (July 4, 1957)

No, truly enough, in a world where science and scientific secrets are the stock in trade of the militarist, one has to be alert to the fact that developed scientific information such as that in Scientology continue to be free, continue to be available.

It’s too large a temptation for somebody to say, “Oh. hey! we can button this up. We’ve got it made here. We’ve got it absolutely made. All we’ve got to do is take all this technology, brainwash everybody and put up thought police towers in all the towns and it’s all set, we’ve got a government.”

No, they haven’t got a government as long as there are textbooks out there showing how fast you can undo this same thing called brainwashing and thought police. It’s discouraging, you know, to brainwash somebody and then have his friend walk into the nearest bookstore and buy a manual of how to unbrainwash. It would seem sort of pointless, wouldn’t it?

So, as security measures increase and as security tightens across the world on scientific matters, it is of great interest to us that the information we have and which has been developed with your help, your finance, your interest, across a period of seven years, is today free. That hasn’t been just a little bit of doing.

You’re probably not aware of the fact that before the incorporation papers of the HDRF were filed in 1950, the Office of Naval Intelligence right here in Washington, DC, threatened to call me to active duty to use what I knew about the mind. And after that I made sure that the channels were so wide that they were very uninviting.

Nobody wants something that isn’t a secret. There is nothing quite as unwanted by a government as yesterday’s secret known today. A very amusing story connected with that attempt to seize Dianetics, a very amusing story from my standpoint anyway. Months and months and months before I had decided that the Navy and I had come to a crossroads and I had requested permission from the secretary of the Navy to resign my commission – my commission had been hanging fire since the end of World War II – and he had granted permission. Now, that’s the lengthiest amount of time consumed, trying to get a letter into a government office and get an answer to it. See, that’s pretty long.

And I already had that. So this fellow, this officer from the Office of Naval Research, came to see me right here in Washington and he wanted me to go on as a civilian employee in order to use what I knew of the mind to make men more suggestible.

And I smiled a feline smile. And I said, “No.”

And he smiled like something out of Faust, and he said to me, “Well, all you have to do is say ‘No’ and I will call you back to active duty because you still are an officer of the United States Navy.” And with that purr he exited.

So I dived into my briefcase and pulled forth the secretary’s permission. I dashed down here and found out there was actually a naval command in this area – it’s called the Potomac River Naval Command, I don’t know what they run. Once I think they tried to run the battleship Missouri. But there it sat down there, and it had an admiral in charge of it and everything, and I found out that my papers were resident in two places. People thought I belonged in Washington, in Washington, and people in New York thought I belonged in New York, and I had two sets of papers. This admiral that had come to see me thought I was totally out of New York. So I went down here to the Washington Navy Yard, the Potomac River Naval Command, and I got my resignation accepted. And Thursday the admiral came back to see me, and he says, “Well?” And I said, “Well?” Fastest resignation on record. There wasn’t anything he could do about it then. And I went back up to Elizabeth, New Jersey and the HDRF, the first research foundation, was formed, and we went happily on our way just throwing it all over the place.

The Bureau of Naval Personnel still has a form letter. If you want to know what it says, write them sometime and say, “Why don’t you use Dianetics or Scientology? What do you know about these subjects?”

They send you back a form letter, and it’s very polite, and it’s personally written. It’s always the same letter: “We are keeping full records on this and are learning more and more about it. We do not know whether or not it’s applicable to our work at this time. Sincerely yours, So-and-So, Chief of Naval Personnel.” But they’ve got it on file! And meanwhile we go on and use it.¹

Notes