A fellow offered me a job one time. He said, “All you have to do is walk in here, leave your gun at the gate, walk in here and you’re supposed to walk around for eight hours a day, and do so-and-so and so-and-so.”
And I said, “In where?”
He said, “In that enclosure there.”
And I said, “What’s the difference between that and a prison camp?”
“Oh,” he says, “you’re nonsense. You get paid in there.”
That was the first and only time the government offered me a post as a nuclear physicist. That was the end of that. The government offered me that post. They tried to kidnap me on another one, by the way.
They said, “You know you’re still in the reserves and we can call you back to active duty on research in the field of the mind.”
“You’re still in the service,” this admiral said. “Ha-ha. You change your mind any time, you know, about coming in. You can volunteer. Of course, I can put you back on active duty at any time, so you’d better volunteer. You’d probably feel better in there making seventy-five hundred dollars a year” — rather than whatever officers get these days — twenty-five cents an hour or something.
And I said, “Well,” I said, “if you put it that way,” I said, “I’m overwhelmed.” I said, “There’s nothing much I can do.”
Here is actually a proposition of a person being seized because of his own knowledge, just the way you might seize a fellow who carved ivory well, back in the Dark Ages. He carved ivory well so he was seized. He was taken away and put into a position that he couldn’t object to and he was made to work at a trade that he was good at but didn’t particularly like. What’s the difference? What’s the difference?
Not very much. Except maybe I walk with faster feet sometimes. Of course, it was impossible at that time to resign from the service. A reserve officer had to continue as a reserve officer from there on out. But I was down to the Potomac River Naval Command, and I was through Bureau of Naval Personnel. It was Monday when he came to see me, and he was going to come back and see me Thursday. And when he came back and saw me Thursday he said, “Well,” he said, “you’ve decided to come into the service as a civilian?”
And I said, “No, I haven’t. I decided not to.”
And he said, “Well,” he said, “I’ll have to call you back to active duty.”
And I says, “Try and do it,” and handed him my resignation, accepted. He was crushed.
But do you know that immediately predated, by one week, the opening of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation of Elizabeth, New Jersey. There would have been no Dianetics, there would have been no Scientology, and there would have been no publications on the subject anywhere had this succeeded. Interesting, isn’t it?
They didn’t want to prevent Dianetics. They didn’t want to prevent Scientology, the publications of books. All they wanted to do was get a piece of research done which they in their tyrannical fashion had decided was far more important than any other research that could be done. They wanted me to work on a project to make men more suggestible. Can you imagine me working on such a project? You can imagine me working on admirals to make them more suggestible, but not on people.
No, even in myself or any other scientist, in any engineer today, there is this background, there is this tradition: That man has a right to his own opinions, has a right to study them, has a right to know his government and his duties as a citizen, and to exercise himself in performing those duties. And he has a right to contribute to the society. And this we’ve known for twenty-three hundred years, and so today call ourselves a civilized race.
But in only the last six years have we known why. Only in the last six years have we actually directly contributed to this stable datum to make it more stable. Only in the last six years have we found the methods and modus operandi by which to make this future culture come true; the future culture in which men are actually all permitted to do this.
Men can become so depressed that they are not themselves capable of exerting their own self-determinism, because it doesn’t exist. We can give it back to them. We can give them that thing which twenty-three hundred years ago, it was stated they must have in order to continue to be free. Therefore, we have a stake in the game, too.1; 2
