How to spot and handle the 1.5
An article by L. Ron Hubbard, from the Special Course in Human Evaluation Lectures
Another thing is, the society is always taking a very, very strange look at your 1.5s. Your 1.5s are thought to be forceful, leaders, this, that. A bunch of people in fear will elect a 1.5 up. And yet his actual worth to society compared to apparent worth: he's insincere, heavy liability, possible murderer. Even when intentions avowedly good, will bring about destruction.
Now, his ability to handle responsibility is what's very interesting, because this fellow is forceful, you understand, this fellow can handle men. Obviouslythey're afraid of him! And yet he's very respectful to you, too. Very often your 1.5 is very respectful. Because, you see, there's always some fear and a direction toward succumb in this. He won't, however, respect anybody lower on the Tone Scale than he is. But he'll sometimes respect people higher. This is almost a caste system, by the way. Yeah, there's the leading order of hens. And this fellow will do almost anything to get responsibility, if you've really got a good solid 1.5 with a lot of volume, so on. And he'll be respectful to you and he'll toady youup to you and he'll flatter you, and so forth, but he'll get some responsibility"He'll fix them"because he wants aid and assistance in carrying forward destruction.
Thehowever, when you start to give this fellowwhen you start to give this fellow orders, you get some interesting things. You say, "Now, how about going and building thatstringing that telephone line, and so forth." And he's got this crew of men and a truck. And he goes out there to string the telephone line. You understand that if he's been well educated you could have indoctrinated him into stringing telephone linesthere's no doubt about thisor even indoctrinated him into ordering men to string telephone lines. And you'll only get this stuff filtering through slightly. But you'll get it through. He'll express it, regardless.
And you talk to him about it: "You know that's a terrific telephone line we're stringing there. There's a swell way to go about this. It's a very important line and the best way to go about this is we've got a special truck that'll take care of this and so forth. And you get this special truck and string that line and..."
So you drive out the next day to find out how he's doing on this line and you'll find out the special truck isn't there. "Well, why isn't the special truck there?"
"Umdid you tell me to bring the special truck out?"
"Yes! Sure I did!"
"Well, oh yes, I think I remember now. But it was much better, and so forth. Couple of other thingssideuhI didwe didn't bring it."
He didn't hear you. That's the truth of the matterhe stood right there in front of you and nodded and he didn't hear you.
If you'd have said, "You know, this truck that we've got is very dangerous. The last two times it went out, men fell from the tower on it. They were killed. It's a very dangerous truck. I want you to be careful of this truck."
"Oh, yes, sir, I'll be careful of the truck."
You go on out there the next day, he's got the truck out there.
Not because, really, you told him it was dangerous, it was because you put in a communication on a line that he'd understand: Death, destruction, knock it apart, "It's dangerous," "It's a terrific emergency," "A lot of people are dying," "A lot of people will die unless this is done," "You've got to act to save this situation; it's almost gone." This is stuff he will listen to.
You can get the most fantastic twists of communication from athrough a 1.5 that I know of. It's fabulous what happens. You tell them one thingand when you ask a 1.5 to act as a communications relay point, an executive takes his life and his sanity in his hands, because it'll go some other way.
L. Ron Hubbard
Excerpted from the lecture MOTION AND EMOTION (continued)
This lecture is available in the Special Course in Human Evaluation Lectures.
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