Lecture: Organization and Ethics (1965)

Over the years I found out that when you cancel somebody’s certificates–bang!–within two or three years he was back, straightened out and doing fine. At the absolute outside, two or three years. But when you didn’t cancel his certificates, he wandered off and you never heard of him again and he went to hell. Now, there’s an interesting one for you. That’s simply an empirical datum.

For instance, the other day. . I’m now checking off all mailings that go out from organizations, and the other day I was quite fascinated to see a name as the featured Scientology lecturer at a big open evening that was being advertised every place–a name. And five, six years ago, at least that, he went around in one small circle, and he was pounding and screaming and howling and that sort of thing, and he was going to do this and that and the other thing, and so forth. So I just told him, “Well, your certificates are canceled, son. And by the time you see fit”–the way we did it in those days–”to get yourself five hundred hours of auditing at your own expense,” I think it was, “why, we’ll entertain giving them back to you.”

Well, what do you know. At the time we used to do that, they always used to put on they didn’t care. They didn’t care. But it’s very interesting how glad they always were to get their certificates back. That was what was remarkable. About two years went by and, by George, he did get his auditing.

He did get straightened out. He’s been doing fine ever since. And here he is, I noticed him the other day, and so forth (just checking through literature), why, he’s the organization’s featured lecturer at an open evening and so forth. In other words, everybody has forgotten about this until I’ve reminded you. Do you understand?

When, in other words, you have exerted an orderly disciplinary action in some direction where somebody is wrecking people and trying to smash up the org and trying to push things around, for some reason or other putting a label on them brings them back. And if you don’t do anything about them at all, not only does the enturbulation continue, but they go off and get lost and go to hell in a balloon. Isn’t that an interesting thing?

So my data is quite positive in that direction that it is a very unkind thing to do not to try to bring order into a Scientology area. And it’s an extremely unkind thing to do not to give somebody a hard knock when he’s trying to knock down everybody else around him, and say, “Quiet, fellow. Let’s quit it now.” See? It’s very interesting.

Now, man, of course, has a tremendous reaction to something called justice and–what he laughingly calls justice. But of course, man has no understanding with which to back up any of these hangings that he commits himself to. In other words, he doesn’t have real justice because it has no end product. Its total end product is punishment. Its total end product is doing something. Now, that it doesn’t straighten out the community is manifest because–well, it does some good perhaps–but it’s manifest in the fact that crime continues to rise across the world. And the crime statistics of the world today are going up much higher and faster than the population is increasing. And it’s such a worry to law enforcement officers today that those that I have spoken to, just within the last year, were in a very apathetic frame of mind, and they just wanted to lie down and quit. That’s a funny frame of mind for the world’s best police force to be in, isn’t it? Well, that’s because there’s no end product.

Well, you put somebody in prison. So you put them in prison. So when you let them out of prison they go steal another car and you put them back in prison. Do you see? Worse than that they are incapable of doing more than worsening an individual with the type of disciplinary action which they employ. So it has no end product but punishment, so it’s just old-time, MEST-universe “Punish everybody. Down with everybody,” don’t you see?

Well now, you try to bring in an ethics system across this line, of course you jar a lot of people’s banks¹ And that is quite easy to do, because of course those words are to be found in the reactive mind as end words². So as a result you’ll get a considerable reaction. But it’s very interesting that a much greater proportion of people in Scientology today favor a decent ethic level and favor ethics actions, weirdly enough, than are batting back against it, because they see that this will square things up.

Well actually, what it eventually does is get them better training, better processing, a better organization and a better grip on the subject of Scientology and less abuse with it. That’s the exact end product of an ethics action.

And people will have to learn this along these lines in Scientology: that the total extent of an ethics action is to get technology in. That’s all it’s for– and not for anything else.³

Notes