Lecture: Rightness and Wrongness

Neurosis could be defined as an antisocial action or an antisurvival action which is compulsively undertaken by the individual. We just wrapped up the work of Sigmund Freud. It’s as elementary as that. You understand we didn’t – if you don’t intend to make the person happy, and don’t intend to make the person cheerful, don’t intend anything except just to keep the person – fit the person better into the social framework, and if that’s all that mental therapy is for, why, you got it wrapped up. I think it’s faster than implanting.

Now, in the first place, the only condition for this sort of thing is we have to be more capable of communicating, perhaps. We have to be able to communicate to the person in that we would have to listen to the person. We’d have to listen to the person. We’d have to ask the person a question. But we’d also have to get our hands on the person in order to do that. The cowboy in the black hat has to get his hands on the person to implant him too. And they also have to do some communication, too, don’t they.? And then they create a hell of an ARC break, don’t they? I think they get twice as much aberrated behavior afterwards. I don’t think it’s a solution. I don’t think the development of mental technology for the purpose of aberrating people down to a level of powerlessness where they won’t bother us – I don’t think that’s a successful approach.

Well, let’s just be practical. This has nothing to do with decency or overt – motivators or anything else. Let’s just be cold – bloodedly practical, as cold – bloodedly practical as these characters fancy themselves to be. I don’t think that it’s valuable. I don’t think it’s valuable technology. It’s valuable to know about it, of course, from your point of view. But as far as knowing how to implant people and calling that a mental technology, or knowing how to give somebody a transorbital leukotomy and calling that mental healing, knowing how to shoot somebody with some weird powder or something of the sort that makes them bounce about in the middle of the floor for an hour or two, it looks to me like all of those lines of action are unsuccessful. I don’t think they’re successful. They always have a hole in them, and the hole in them is that survival can futurely be threatened.

Suppose anybody ever undid it: I wish I had a nickel for every implant station that’s ever been destroyed. I’ve known thetans to make a career out of it. In fact, I’ve known thetans to tilt a planet ten or fifteen degrees, with the equivalent avalanches and glacial epochs and so forth, or pull the air cover of a civilization just because it went on implanting. In fact, there’s a lot of things happen because of this. Why? Because somebody was implanting. I don’t think it’s a sensible solution at all. In fact, I don’t think it’s a solution. I just think it’s a dramatization of rightness and wrongness. I don’t think there’s any more intention behind it than that.

Look at the amount of time and effort and energy expended. Why, in any given day the appropriation of the US armed forces is probably less than the Marcabian appropriation for the maintenance of implant stations. I think it’s expensive. I just think they do it because they are trying to be right. I don’t see any other reason for it at all. They’re trying to be right and make others wrong. That’s all.

Notes