What This World Needs Now Is a Practical Science

— L. Ron Hubbard

 

If anybody is trying to do anything or is being active, he is therefore being dangerous.  Did you know that? That’s behavior; policing of behavior.

It’ll get to a point finally where if you have a belief or if you behave in a certain way – they used to call them eccentrics — now they call them crazy.

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You’re getting to a point where you don’t dare relax because behavior is being policed; because nobody has an idea of what right behavior is or what wrong behavior is.  Somebody gets an opinion that something is wrong behavior and that’s what’s policed.

 

This country, by the way, is one of the great sinners on the idea of trying people in public opinion.  They throw it into the newspapers, and the guy’s done.  He’s not tried in courts.  He’s tried by public opinion. That’s policing of behavior.

 

But do they find out if the fellows who are policing him are sane or insane; if these people themselves are psychotically critical or anything?  Do they ever find out about these fellows?  No.  Because they don’t know anything about that field.

 

Now look, for a people to be free, they must be free to behave as they think proper,  so long as that behavior is not injurious to the – a greater number of dynamics. You got the idea?  As soon as they tell you that this is wrong and that’s wrong and that’s wrong and that’s wrong, ask them sometime, “Well, what’s right?” and stop them in their tracks.

 

No, when the whole of the humanities gets summed up into this figure-figure thing called behavior, based on something nobody knows anything about, the rightness and wrongness of existence goes by the boards. And people become slaves just on this one thing alone.

 

They are slaves because they are ignorant. What man in the society is right? What man in the society is decent?  These are questions that can’t be asked.

 

Well, look, what’s a government going to do, run totally blind?  Well, as long as you don’t know anything about human beings, what else is there to do but drive totally blind and hope for the best. Think of that.

 

How would you like to be somebody in charge of this government right here at this moment with no more knowledge of the human mind and human existence than a government official at this time does have? You’d go mad because you couldn’t tell whose heart was in the right place and whose heart wasn’t; who did a job – who would do a job and who wasn’t; what anybody’s motives were or what they weren’t. All you could do is guess.

 

You wouldn’t know whether your own party was supporting you or not if you didn’t know anything about the mind.  Now when it all goes into opinion and when it all goes into theory and when you’re behavior is all totally policed, you are no longer free and you can no longer govern and people can no longer live happily.

 

You have to have a practical science, not a science that is a good science because some philosopher with a long, grey beard in some ivory tower has said, “This is wisdom.”  Whole nations have gone by the boards – whole nations –because they had a bunch of wisdom, none of which made any sense. India, China, these are countries which right now are almost gone. They’re in total tumult.  They have been upset with all manner of political flurries. They had great wisdom didn’t they?

 

I knew, as little boy in my teens, I saw their great wisdom. And I was disgusted with it because it always went with poverty and dirt, and that to me is not wisdom. Yes, anybody in his right mind should be able to tolerate having a dirty face for awhile, but not be proud of it!  Not have as one of the primary requisites of being a commissar, the fact that one can have filthy, dirty fingernails at all times and bite them.

 

No, no. We have in – on earth here today, a great many woes and difficulties and a great many unhappy people, a great many starving people, a great many people who can’t make it, and they all stem out of the fact of ignorance.  They don’t know.

 

They have no literacy about the mind at all.  They’re living in a total darkness.  And having no literacy, they can’t understand their fellows and they don’t know which man means them well and which man means them badly.  They know none of the rules of the human mind.

 

What this world needs is a practical science, the parts of which are clearly visible. And if you can see this, then you can see into men’s hearts and know them and live.  That might not make sense to you at this moment. But it will.  It will.

~

From Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress, Lecture: The Things of Scientology 31 December 1960