HUBBARD COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, SussexHCO POLICY LETTER OF 2 NOVEMBER 19701
Issue IIIRemimeo
RESPONSIBILITY
Note: This policy is extracted verbatim from HCOB 4 Feb. 60 I, THEORY OF RESPONSIBILITY PROCESSING. Certain paragraphs have been omitted where they applied specifically to auditing.
In order to make up one’s mind to be responsible for things it is necessary to get over the idea that one is being forced into responsibility.
The power of choice is still senior to responsibility. What one does against his will operates as an overt act against oneself. But where one’s will to do has deteriorated to unwillingness to do anything, lack of will is itself an aberration.
There is nothing wrong, basically, with doingness. But where one is doing something he is unwilling to do, aberration results. One does, in such a case, while unwilling to do. The result is doingness without responsibility.
In the decline of any state into slavery as in Greece, or into economic strangulation of the individual as in our modern Western society, doingness is more and more enforced and willingness to do is less and less in evidence. At length people are doing without being responsible. From this results bad workmanship, crime, indigence and its necessities for welfarism. At length there are so many people who are unwilling to do that the few left have to take the full burden of the society upon their backs. Where high unwillingness to do exists, democracy is then impossible, for it but votes for the biggest handout.
Where high unwillingness to do exists then we have a constant restimulation of all the things one is really unwilling to do such as overt acts. Forcing people who do not want to work to yet work restimulates the mechanism of overt acts with, thereby, higher and higher crime ratio, more and more strikes and less and less understanding of what it is all about.
The individual who has done something bad that he was not willing to do then identifies anything he does with any unwillingness to do—when of course he has done this many times. Therefore all doingness becomes bad. Dancing becomes bad. Playing games becomes bad. Even eating and procreation become bad. And all because unwillingness to do something bad has evolved and identified into unwillingness to do.
The person who has done something bad restrains himself by withholding doingness in that direction. When at length he conceives he has done many many bad things, he becomes a total withhold. As you process him you encounter the recurring phenomenon of his realization that he has not been as bad as he thought he was. And that’s the wonderful part of it. People are never as bad as they think they are—and certainly other people are never as bad as one thinks they have been.
The basic wonder is that people police themselves. Out of a concept of good they conceive themselves to be bad, and after that seek every way they can to protect others from self. A person does this by reducing his own ability. He does it by reducing his own activity. He does this by reducing his own knowingness.
Where you see a thetan who sleeps too much and does too little, where you see a person who conceives bad doingness on every hand, you see a person who is safeguarding others from the badness of himself or herself.
Now there is another extreme. A person who must do because of economic or other whips, and yet because of his own concept of his own badness dares not do, is liable to become criminal. Such a person’s only answer to doingness is to do without taking any responsibility and this, when you examine the dynamics, falls easily into a pattern of dramatized overt acts. Here you have a body that is not being controlled, where most knowledge is obscured and where responsibility for others or even self is lacking. It is an easy step from criminality to insanity, if indeed there is any step at all. Such people cannot be policed since being policed admits of some obedience. Lacking control there is no ability to obey, and so they wind up simply hating police and that is that.
Only when economic grips are so tight or political pressure is so great as it is in Russia do we get high criminality and neurotic or psychotic indexes. Whenever doing is accompanied by no will to do, irresponsibility for one’s own acts can result.
Basically, then, when one is processing a pc, one is seeking to rehabilitate a willingness to do. In order to accomplish this one must rehabilitate the ability to withhold on the pc’s own determinism (not by punishment) further bad actions.
Only then will the pc be willing to recover from anything wrong with the pc since anything wrong with the pc is self-imposed in order to prevent wrongdoing at some past time.
Responsibility can be rehabilitated on any case.
L. Ron Hubbard
Founder
Notes
- Document studied on the How to Confront and Shatter Suppression PTS/SP Course. (2001 ed.) ↩