Lecture: Hubbard on “Combination Valences” (1962)

Hubbard claims that opposing political philosophies, like communism and the US’s capitalist system, inevitably will become a combination and progressively more confusing. He taught that his theories and applications for individuals have parallel applications for groups, and vice versa.  Further, Hubbard taught that his principles and procedures could be employed to proactively generate confusion and damage or destroy enemy targets. ¹

But you watch these evolutions of government, it becomes very amusing. I didn’t mean to give you a talk about it, but you have a world here which is tipping over this way, and tipping over that way, and it’s kind of hard to understand some of these things. What are these fellows after? What are they doing, and so on. You find many communistic principles are safely ensconced now in US law, you know. The principles of taxation, principles of ownership of property and that sort of thing are going more and more and more into US law. And they’re taken straight out of the textbook of Karl Marx.

Not me saying so – I said so one day and the Wall Street Journal picked it up, which is quite interesting – that the tax laws now used by the United States are taken directly from Karl Marx. This is all very, very fascinating, but it gives you the idea of terminal² and oppterm³, how these things then become combination terminals⁴ and mix up in general.

Makes it quite a fascinating picture. Because things won’t get straighter in the political arena. You can forecast that they will become progressively more confused. And it’ll always be that way.

In the absence of processing, in the absence of somebody straightening out people, in the absence of somebody informing people, they will just become more and more tangled up; more and more confused. Lord knows what political philosophy would emerge out of this, but you could predict it. You could take those political philosophies which are opposed to those political philosophies, take the common denominators of the two – probably the worst points of both – and it’ll become the combination terminal which is tomorrow’s politics. If you ever want to forecast it, just take a look at the GPM⁵ and apply it to mankind on the fourth dynamic, and you probably will have a fairly reliable answer.

[…]

We’re the only people who can go up against opposition terminals or masses or something like that and get away with it. Only a Scientologist is safe in his attacks. See that? A hell of a thing, but it actually gives you an unlimited license for overts. You can always run them out. Nobody else can. Interesting, isn’t it?

But here is a basic thing that lies in every pc, whether this pc is a rock slammer⁶ or otherwise, it’s a deteriorated trust. Not only a trust in his fellow man has deteriorated, but also his trust in organizations, in group activities, in any effort whatsoever to do anything for him – he has to some degree or another deteriorated at his level of trust. And he’s sort of nervy about it. He gets very nervous when you start going in that direction, because he knows that’s always been dangerous to him. And you’re reversing his experiential track, so he’s going back into areas that he thinks are dangerous. And thinking these areas are dangerous, he’s sort of nervous.

[…]

So the whole case, anyway, is built on quicksand of distrust, and when it comes up to the fact that we are the oppterm and we’re the cowboys in the black hat and he’s the cowboy in the white hat – the way he looks at it – and to us we’re the cowboys in the white hat and he’s the cowboy in the black hat, you recognize that you can blow this whole thing up rather easily. You realize the rock slammer most consistently goes out and becomes a squirrel, says he practices Scientology while doing psychiatry or something, see. He gets – he makes himself into a combination terminal, promptly, because he realizes instinctively that he’s crazy as a loon to be attacking us. But you can solve this, and it’s pretty easy to do. I hope there’s some data in what I have told you that gives you some assistance in handling cases.
Thank you.⁷; ⁸

Notes