releases

OFFICE OF SPECIAL AFFAIRS

1 September 2006

OSA Network Order No. 39-3¹

OSA NW
Execs
Invest Staff
Legal Staff
PR Staff

Confidential
GRATUITOUS RELEASES,
MORE ABOUT
(Excerpted from a lecture of 5 April 1962 SACREDNESS OF CASES—DETERMINISM.)²

Every once in a while in administrative activities, some staff member will blink and his jaw will drop. I will give him a piece of paper to sign. Something’s giving us trouble someplace or another. Something’s going over the hills and far away, and I give him a piece of paper to sign. I always take this chance because there’s a possibility it’ll happen. And as a matter of fact, the odds are in favor that it will work out this way, because this person is already doing something very destructive in attacking Scientology.

So you write up a confession or a note or a document taking full responsibility for this, that or the other thing. Just a suicidal legal document.

Write it up and give it to the attorney and he will sit there and be very other-determined about the whole thing: “Nobody would sign this,” and “Very unreasonable. It would be very unfair to the person who’s signing.” Well, they’re being very unfair to us, why not be unfair to them?

But the attorney couldn’t possibly figure this out because it would ruin all attorneying if this principle were broadly known. About eighty percent of their cases would just go pffft.

You set it down in front of the person, and you say, “Sign it.” And the person reads it over. “I hereby guarantee to pay $1,750,000 damages and fully and freely confess that I burned the house down and…”

“Sign it!”

“Is that satisfactory?”

I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s a very high percentage that whenever I’ve done that, the other person signs.

I only have trouble with our own attorneys. They’re always trying to make a fight out of it. And they’ll win the other person’s case for them if you don’t watch them. So you try to bypass them. Because the truth of the matter is that somebody who’s so non-survival as to try some stupid, silly attack against us, can usually be counted upon to be sufficiently nonsurvival they will also commit suicide from a legal viewpoint. And they do. It’s amazing.

In other words, about sixty, seventy percent of the cases that walk into court—if either one of the litigants made up a document: “There’s a £50 debt involved and if somebody would just write up a judgment for £200 at compound interest (you know, £50 and a £150 damages) and a jail penalty or something in it…”—a totally vicious document—and just gave it to the other person to sign, they’d sign it. They would appreciate it because it’s agin them. That’s where they belong.

The world operates on the basis that everybody defends himself and that everybody is on the kick of self-preservation. And this is not so. The people who are causing trouble in this world are not on a kick of self-preservation. They’re on a kick of succumb. And our biggest trouble is they look to an auditor, or they look to an organization, or they look to me to be an executioner.

And we only get in serious trouble when we refuse to fill the role. That is quite amazing. You’ll see this work out in your own activities, I am sure. I think some of you have seen it work out in organizations. But you’re trying to be reasonable. This guy walks up and he says, “The organization is no good, and everybody in it ought to be killed. And you’re bad people,” or something like this. He’s usually not direct like that, he’s usually going around the neighborhood saying, “That’s really a communist organization,” to all the shopkeepers or something like that.

And right away all your legal advice says you sue him for slander. No, you present him with a confession and an award of damages for having slandered. Just draw it up in a legal form and give it to him and he’ll sign it and you’ll execute in court. And that’s all there is to it. You don’t sue him.

The guy has only one enemy: himself, exclusively. He just has one enemy. And he’ll go on and fight until he finds a satisfactory succumb.

You try to make a bargain with this fellow. You keep saying, “Well, all right. You pay $200.” And your ordinary bargaining is, “All right. Well, you won’t pay $200? All right. Pay $150. Oh, well, all right. You won’t pay $150, pay $100.” You’re trying to make a deal and that’s the wrong direction.

You say to this person, “$200.”

The person, “Oh, no, no, no.”

And you say, “Well, $250? $300?” You finally get it up to $790, and that’s how much he thinks he ought to cut his throat for. And he signs at that point.

This principle of other-determinism—I’m not driving it home to you as though we operate this way exclusively, but if some guy goes on a psychotic spin and starts attacking the organizations (which happens rarely enough), legal advice is normally and generally 100 percent wrong, because it is operating on the basis that those people are being self-determined. And if those other people that are attacking you are being other-determined, then they will not settle any reasonable deal that gives them a benefit.

You have to make a deal which is murderous to them. You just keep worsening the deal you make, you see, and they’ll eventually square it up.

L. RON HUBBARD
Founder

Notes