Ethics

18th July 1966¹

CONFERENCE with The Guardian, LRH Aide, LRH Communicator, Legal WW, Guardian Communicator and the Head of Intelligence Branch 5, Office of LRH

This action has to do with the recent adventure and the current suits on the London Daily Mail; has to do with the Newspaper Proprietors Group or whatever you call that activity and is very short and sweet.

I just reviewed this situation with the Guardian and I find out as follows:  That a criminal act has occurred and that the publications of materials copyrighted and classified materials have been published in this newspaper belonging to this particular group. Now this makes not a civil suit — this is a criminal act and I just thought about this and it seemed to me to be relatively simple to classify the subject and to label the head of the Newspaper Proprietors Group as accessory to crime.

Now exactly what that crime would be is at least receiving stolen goods. Now I’m perfectly prepared to put in a claim to the police that on my return certain classified papers were missing and pursuant to that that these classified papers — which were NOT for public issue and which were para-Scientology and did not represent Scientology and so forth, had been filched and that they were accepted and purchased apparently by these proprietors and that they have published them in first one and then another of their newspapers showing that there is association between those two papers and they are purchasing stolen goods and making use of them for their own profit.

In addition to that, that they sought to bar out the principal witness and plaintiff — not necessarily plaintiff, but an interested party to the libel suit against them, without whom they
thought they might succeed in defending that libel suit.

In view of the fact that their libel has caused a fantastic amount of damage to date in terms of financial recompense and is attempting to build a false image of a man and an activity and an organization, their expenses on this could be considered to be relatively high. So therefore they did undertake to send Younghusband to Rhodesia to get me imprisoned or shot and then if that failed, denied re-entry into the United Kingdom and then vilified and discredited so that the testimony would not count in this suit.

And this is sub justice and it is not intimidation of witnesses — it is the intent to kill one. And that is a criminal offense and Sir William Carr and Cecil King are, at the very least, accessories if not one directors of these crimes. And this is a criminal matter and therefore of great interest to us. Now I think it should be explored on that basis and we do what we can on that basis, and see where we get. Okay?

Now there is one other action here. There is exchange of policy — I have found this to be the case in carrying out investigations of noisome and slanderous remarks — they are very often invented, as one knows, but they come quite commonly from criminal sources.

Now that was the first datum I had on this subject in 1954 — I found out in counting noses that the people who had done the most — twenty-one people — who had done the most to damage Dianetics had criminal records and seventeen of them I verified. I just got tired at seventeen and said this is too many. Now this was very interesting, because subsequent history of these people is also very interesting.

They all came a cropper with fantastic spectacularity before they got through. So I never worried about splinter groups and haven’t since. You notice this thing called “the Prophets” or something like that — well that’s just typical of the splinter group.

You notice we don’t hear anything of this Watson – “Amprinistics” or whatever he was, we don’t hear anything of him any more and so on. I don’t worry about splinter groups. What I worry about is entheta — and this is a change of policy.

Something I’ve just discovered. That in view of the fact that they have criminal backgrounds or in view of the fact that investigation will reveal this, our investigation should therefore go forward on the discovery of crime.

In a case of entheta or enturbulation, that we should go forward on this matter to the discovery of a crime as a first action. That we should act on this crime, not use it as blackmail or make some illegal use of it, but just as a public body and reform organization act on this crime, and then when it is acted upon — then we sue. This is about as malicious and vicious perhaps as one could get but then you are suing a discredited source and this would become hallmarked after a while.

They’d say, “The Scientologists must have done that because first he was jailed and then he was sued.” And so that you could lead to an expectancy that if somebody was very ambitious in spreading malicious gossip and rumour against Scientology or its principles, that they would be investigated with an effort to discover a criminal act; that the organization would then act to have them incarcerated and at that time, when they are discredited in this line, they would then be sued for libel and slander. Now I have had to step up the bargaining of Ethics on the public front — that is to say the duress that we apply because we obviously aren’t applying quite enough pressure to cause the people’s banks to behave while we get on with our job.

Now with Ethics lines you see, you’ve got to apply just enough restraint — you don’t ever apply too much restraint — and you don’t apply too little: you’ve got to apply enough restraint.
Well obviously we have Ethics and we are putting it in a public front — we aren’t putting it in with enough velocity. Now, if we expect to get technology in in the world we must then, first, get in Ethics.

Now Ethics springs up as enturbulence against Scientology — when Ethics comes up with enturbulence against Scientology it makes it impossible for us to get on with the job.

Now this is regardless of any operation which comes up, OT Base or any operation of this kind. It’s obvious to me, after my study of four months, that we will have to get in Ethics on a broad social level before we can ever get in technology because these people are just too crazy and it’s like trying to help a wounded buffalo out of a wallow and that is not the same activity.

We say to this fellow, “You’ve got a lot of worries,” and “You have a lot of family trouble,” and that sort of thing.

“Well, we can make you more clever and if you were a bit more clever you could handle your problems.”

And we say this and instantly we get gored. So it’s a case in point.

So this, I’m officially telling you that this is the new policy; it’s on a broad social basis. We concentrate on getting in Ethics and then we follow that up with tech. And that is the policy. And then where possible — where we have discovered a great deal of entheta coming back at us, then we intend to get this handled by investigating it back to a criminal act by the person.

A criminal act is disassociated from the entheta of course but that’s what they are trying to defend or something and we get that and then we put on the pressure publicly to have that person prosecuted for that particular act and then when they have been prosecuted — or are being prosecuted — or are just beautifully discredited at that particular moment, then we serve them with a summons [?] law and order, assault and battery or whatever they did is not of interest to us except to discredit them and then we serve that with a suit for libel or slander.

That seems to me to be a fairly good work-out of it. Now I’ve been cheek by jowl by the water in the wog world all on my [lonesome]. No barricades, no barriers of anything, and I’ll tell you with this much velocity — how I lasted for four months I will never know — I will never know [?] these people were scared stiff of me, they were scared stiff to do anything else and I probably would have gotten away with it all the way if it hadn’t been for this action here in England. But this is obvious to me that Peter Younghusband came down and now this despatch in the hands of Mrs. Draper of the Salisbury Office in which he reports to me the telephone call of Peter Younghusband and my reply to her to stall him off, tell him to come in next Thursday. Now here — this was a waiting action; he was calling me up in beautiful timing to find out if it had happened to me yet, to get the comment, you see. And this was the rumour line and this caught me before the other — before the actual service of this letter. This letter was just nothing you see; it actually refuses to extend my visa beyond its first extension; it had already been extended once.

And the consequences of that are rather fabulous, but in view of the fact that their action denied me the profit of about a quarter of a million pounds worth of deals and jeopardized some fifty thousand pounds worth of assets and brought damage and widespread dismay so as to destroy another quarter of a million pounds worth of good will, which had been built up during that period. I would say that that is not an actionable thing in Civil Court — I would say it is a criminal act, but more important, that is actionable in a Civil Court but the reason it was done comes under the heading of crime.

So my whole proposal here is that we explore and I leave it to you from here on because I’ve got an Organization to get back together again so all I’m doing is winding up my cycle of action on this and you’ve had press to handle, you’ve got public presence to handle, you are now going into Worldwide Ethics — you know we’ll do it here before we move it into anything like OT Base or something like that.

But unless we get Ethics in very broadly, we won’t ever get technology in on this planet. And all I’m doing is ending this cycle of action and giving you my views — or, if you wish to so consider them, orders and instructions with regard to this.

Now I do not say that you can in actual fact implement this act but you can try and you can explore it with some enthusiasm to see if you can’t possibly do this because, if we can pull this trick off, then I see that without any OT machine guns hanging in mid air firing madly, we might be able to get Ethics in, you see, on a planetary basis.

Now we must go in on a gradient so we’ll take it from where we sit at this moment with the primary principles and more forward on this with some success. I wish to point out to you that the world is in sufficiently bad ethics condition as to make not only Scientology but civilization in peril.

It is a very, very sorry situation whereby you have the United States now encroaching on and treading upon the toes of an atomically armed nation, China. You have Russia about ready to turn around and back up China, even though it’s an enemy. You have at this time three forces involved in Africa. You have the Empire — the old Empire — forces from England. You have the resistive white supremacy population and you have the Communist interests which are going to prevent any reasonable solution if they possibly can until war can occur.

And then when war has occurred, then they will take their chances of getting into power. But if they can just lock the situation up — lock it up good until finally it bursts into flames, then they feel they might have a chance of taking over.

Now the reason they want southern Africa is very obvious–its fantastic quantities of wide-open productive land on which enormous quantities of food can be raised; tremendous labour supply in the Bantu, the Mashombe, the Matabele, these people are very hard-working people and under proper direction are quite productive.

The place has not even been tapped with regard to gold and there is probably oil there, the greatest world supply of chrome — there’s a mountain five miles long with is a sold chrome-owner. There’s all these various things. Now, Brazzaville — up in that area — there’s tungsten and they’ve already made a bite on that end of it.

But here’s this fantastic, wealthy, relatively empty land — perhaps the last great empty land then, and here is this perfectly valid labour supply — the African, who at this time is not being well utilized at all; he’s not being utilized really. I know we think he’s enslaved and is in chains and is working like mad. The fact of the matter is he’s sitting rather hopelessly out on the Reserve wishing somebody would put him to work because he hasn’t got enough to eat and he hasn’t the implements or capital with which to develop his tribal lands and he’s in bad shape. So, and also he’s sort of been blocked out of society, he’s not been permitted to participate with the white society. Now all of this adds up to just this — here’s a very large, wealthy land and, just to give you some background here.

All right, holding this up is just one person who has got this thing tied up in a nut — the person who prevents a settlement with England is Jacky Harman, Minister of Information, Tourism and Immigration. Nothing that has struck me — because it naturally would strike me — now he will neither clear up the security — the insecurity inside the Rhodesian government nor act to alleveiate the British situation, but he fears anybody who is anti-Communist.

All a man has to be is anti-Communist and Jacky fires him. Now this has gone to three stubborn anti-Communist personalities — Ivor Benson, a fellow named Haaker and Nigel Bruce Hankey. These three chaps are very, very good, and are experts on this subject and Harman has fired them.

Now in addition to that, he operates with very poisonous influence upon the Prime Minister and the society itself is utterly controlled by his super-secret police which are entirely different to the normal internal police forces and they just stockade anybody at the drop of a hat, he does anything. He is a Goebbels and a Hess all tied up into one nut — there’s one Suppressive and he’s sitting in the middle of the Rhodesian situation, breaking England’s heart, causing fantastic trouble overseas — there he sits.

Now if Mr. Jacky Harman put himself in stockade, I assure you that the entire situation would be solved.

We used to say “Well, its the White Supremacy people of Southern Africa who are stopping it all.” I think if you counted noses in South Africa and Rhodesia — I think if you counted those noses, I think you would find out that you were probably only dealing with a dozen people in all — or less!

I know that in Rhodesia, the Rhodesian Front, is just dying to settle with England, so are the Africans, so are the Asiatics, so are the Coloureds — these people all want to settle and Ian Smith no longer represents, don’t you see, the will of the people.

So here is an Ethics situation which comes down to an individual. Now I don’t know what we need in order to resolve these situations but we needn’t go out on a far flung world front in order to find trouble because we’ve got trouble we can experiment with already.

But I think that Ethics should not introvert onto Scientologists quite so much as it is doing. I think it should extrovert out into society against people who are really non-Scientologists, who are actively harming Scientology — those are the thoughts I have had in regard to this and whether they bear up in long practice or not we have yet to see, but I have had four months here of cheek by jowl observation of the wog world and I find out that they’re not very smart; that they tell very, very weird tales; that they are extremely suspicious, and in absence of factual information they make it up.

They are very information-happy, and I have an instance where the Number Two — probably Viet Nam is Number One, but probably Number Two international situation today I have now found the guy who has got it blocked into a situation that will not resolve — one man, one man! And everyone thinks it’s Smith, you see, they think it’s the Rhodesian Front. They’ve made this mistake so that’s inadequate –let me point this out — inadequate investigation.

There may be somebody had to be in there inside, cheek by jowl with these people to find out this datum and maybe that insight isn’t given to the normal intelligence operative of England or America’s CIA or something like that, but they depend to a marked degree upon the newspaper reporters who themselves are creating a situation in order to serve other masters or write news about it or something like that.

But anyway, I didn’t want to make a speech about it — just pointing out to you that Ethics situations hang up on individuals and the less we generalize, the more [we] particularize, the
better we are. So there’s always a preliminary investigation as to who is it — now we’ve somewhat taken this in that we’ve found out that there were only two directors of the newspaper syndicate but we in actual fact don’t know which one of those to is the Suppressive — it’s not necessarily true that they are both Suppressive. But nevertheless we will move in that direction.

Now we know that they’ve committed a criminal act because they confess to it by using the material.

So what my contribution to this is — my streak of genius on the matter — is the accessories to receiving stolen goods at least and then if there is some way we can make that stick in some fashion and get them under the gun for that, then we follow right in behind with a civil suit on our libel slander. Then perhaps — and I don’t know of any reason why you can’t follow a criminal suit with a civil suit, I think it’s rather common, istn’t it?

Legal: Yes…..

All right.

Look — now we’ll explore this — probably you’ll have a lot of considering — perfectly all right with me if you hire a seemingly huge […] of barristers or something of the sort — this we couldn’t care less about — understand? Don’t feel that you’re going it alone on this basis, but unless we plough forward on a programme, we will continue to be in some sort of trouble, so let’s test this programme out. Let’s see if we can’t unravel this thing in that way and let’s pilot our way through this thing without any magical occurrences. Okay?

All right — now are there any questions?

Guardian: Well, it’s not a question but I just was thinking that you were saying there that maybe one Suppressive and I would think that would be Cecil King.

Very possibly.

Because it was his newspaper that paid [?] to steal material down here and it is his relative that owned the Daily Mail, so there you’ve got two factors that say that Cecil King might be the one.

Oh — you’ll have to tie it up — I don’t even know the position if where a Company can be sued for a criminal act.

Legal: Yes…

Well this might wrap it up, you see. I think he’s thinking right now in terms of the company.

Any other questions?

Legal: [ ]

Well, if you action needs any further investigation, you should instruct your investigators to do so. Now, I don’t know what your investigators have at this particular time on psychiatry but they in actual fact should find a psychiatrist who had made libelous utterances against Dianetics or Scientology or against me and they should find the crime of which he is guilty — they should get him arrested, just one. They should promptly get him arrested for this and they we should sue him.

Now we can make that a pilot project on the lines and this would tend to [cover?] the general situation.

Now when we first came out with this plan of investigation and so forth, we ran into a liability. I want to point that out. That if we did not carry it forward ambitiously and successfully, it would backfire. Well, it’s backfired so therefore we haven’t carried forward ambitiously enough. We’ve not exerted sufficient pressure.

Now the purpose of Ethics is to exert enough pressure to make the exterior duress slightly greater than the interior duress of obeying the bank. And that is the whole secret of discipline. And they commonly over-discipline.  It’s very, very interesting that any trouble they have with the Africans in Rhodesia has been that they’re disciplining them but they have relatively few internal pressures to overcome so the external pressure is against somebody who is perfectly willing. And that’s what’s causing the trouble.

For instance, my boy Jamble — he smokes dacca, he gambles and he drinks, mostly native beer, and so forth. Now although I’ve seen him a little bit reeling or his eyes describing slight circles when he fixed them, I have never seen at any moment — oh yes, and I’ve suddenly seen him get eloquent — under a bit of native beer after he’d been out in the afternoon — not one single one of these acts got in the road of him doing his job.

So I used to tell him “Yes, I know Jamble — you’re a good boy even though you do drink and smoke dacca and gamble — that has nothing to do with me, you’re still a good boy.”

And you know he came way up tone arm. I noticed he drank less and I think he stopped smoking dacca entirely. But he didn’t stop gambling, because Master used to give him a pound to go out to the race track with and lose.

Now these boys were all willing, but they’re over-disciplined.

Now the Scientologist, not to make a comparison but the Scientologist is perfectly willing and is at this time by Ethics being over-disciplined, so we are over-disciplining the Scientologist and under-disciplining society and we should reverse that — reverse that very definitely. If anything, under discipline the Scientologist and over-discipline the society.

Now in that direction you’d still win but in the direction we are going we won’t. If you under-discipline a society and over-discipline Scientologists, why, we’ve had it. As a Scientologist
normally is very, very willing.

We’ve got to upgrade the idea of what is a Suppressive, as Suppressives really are nuts. They are really damaging, Suppressives and so forth.You only need a few heads on a pike.

Well, I didn’t want this to be a lecture — this is a conference. Any questions?

Guardian-Comm: I have one more: this guy that came over from England to Rhodesia that instigated having you taken out. What was his name?

Peter Younghusband. London Daily Mail.

Guardian-Comm: Oh, I see.

He has a brother, oddly enough, in Rhodesia — so he was the logical choice.

Guardian-Comm: The Daily Mail, then was the source of his coming to …

Oh yes, and it’s obviously [?]. Now he went to Harman and he told Harman a bunch of lies. And Harman avidly, because I was not for the Communists, accepted these lies and stampeded the Prime Minister with them, who then re-uttered them to a Committee of the Rhodesian Front that knew they were lies, that succeeded in discrediting both Harman and the Prime Minister in the face of their own political party and this will have fantastic repercussions.

Although we are playing around the basis that it was political — it was actually an effort on the part of the group to get off the hook because we can throw some damage at them. But this has been my thinking on it, that’s all.

Anything else? All right.

Oh, these are just verbal instructions. I have made a tape, so that you can review it in case of argument. I won’t bother to review unless there’s an argument because I think it’s all pretty
obvious and I wish to tell you that I’m off that line now, don’t you see — I’m definitely offline.

I was snapped off it rather interestingly — Bonwick took me a tour of the branch and what he’d been doing last night and I snapped straight to Saint Hill totally and frankly it’s been like digging in the mud to dictate out the reports and the letters and finish off this other cycle of action because I’m frankly no longer very interested in it.

I’m interested in right now the Organization; I want to see if it’s functioning all right and I’m going around picking things that are quite obvious and we picked up two or three like, like HCO is full of unanswered despatches — the last Division in the place that should be full uf unanswered despatches. But I understand you just transferred the HCO Area Sec, but now I suddenly spot that this new HCO Area Sec hadn’t had time enough — in fact hasn’t had time enough to let that many papers accumulate, so your new ES Comm/HCO should of course go to the Org Exec Sec or the Org Executive Course straight away and should specialize in the policies of HCO because he didn’t read somewhere along the line that HCO’s communications organization and as particles travel with rapidity and he’s Clear so he will pick it up in an awful hurry.

And next action I found the usual — that Letter Registrar didn’t know that she should look for things she could query and get into real communication with the person so that she would get a proper response. I think I’ve spotted also that they are not stuffing information bits –. For instance, right now I would be stuffing Clear Sec EDs into their outgoing Letter Reg mail. Then the guy’d read it. Any current Clear Sec ED, you see: Clear no. 19 — I’d just stick this in, completely noncommittally. That’s an under-sell.

I’d do something like this but it’s interesting that Joan McNocher doesn’t know how to do this, because she was a specialist on it in Jo’burg — she really carried on a – stuffed into those letters like mad, so it may be being done, but probably the wrong stuff is being stuffed.

We have a new book and also we really do need a book that is a very plain basic public-level book, which explains everything — it’s much harder to write though than any other book that you might think of.

I discovered a new gadget that I might tell you about just in passing, to close you off on another note, entirely non-sequitur.

Somebody has been critical of Scientology, you see. You take a copy of  Problems of Work out of your pocket and say, “Here, here’s a book on Scientology. Read that and find out if there’s anything in there to be critical about. Well, go ahead — find something to object to.”

And the guy’s supposed to be looking for something to object to, and of course he starts reading and doesn’t find anything to object to, and he gets interested and it washes it away and that’s a trick — gimmick, but that is also a cousin to getting Ethics in, in general.

Now Ethics WW will undoubtedly be gotten in from OT Base but apparently we’re involved in a problem right this minute and so I think we should get on with it.

Okay, thank you very much for coming in.

Notes