The secrets behind a declining civilization
An article by L. Ron Hubbard,
from The Command of Theta lectures
Oh, yes, it could happen! The greatest empire on the face of the earth went
by the boardsthe greatest empire earth had known went by the boardsbecause
of the miracles produced by thirteen men.* Now remember that. And, boy, it caved
in quick. But it caved in because it was a vile and vicious empire and all it
took was an injection of hope into the multitude. That's all it took. "Something
can happen for us. We are not pinned here forever. We don't have to be in apathy."
And you know what they learned? They learned a very interesting fact and that
interesting datum was this. They knew this inherently, and they learned this,
then, by religious teaching: "We can't die. We don't die; there is life after
death." That's what they learned.
And therefore, you could fly in the teeth of any unreasonable force because
you couldn't be punished simply by having your body cut up to pieces. Now, we've
gone on the opposite side of insanity. They had a body that could die so they
were spared the other, and they learned all of a sudden that the machine guns
of a large and vicious stateit wasn't machine guns in those days, they did
it with arenas and crucifixeswere powerless, because all they could do was
kill them. That's all that could happen to them. They could just be killed.
And, boy, that state which reduced into slavery almost two thirds of its populationtwo
thirds of its populating was living in kennels the like of which you wouldn't
keep a London pet inand they suddenly said, "You're through, boys,"
and Roman Empire was through.
Now, I'm not saying at any moment that there's any great empire to be overthrown.
At the present time, there isn't. We haven't got an empire in this world today.
We just don't have one. There is an anarchy of nations. The family of nations
on earth today live in anarchy, and they go to war because the people are afraid.
You can make a populace afraid so long as the populace believes it can die. And
you can make it so afraid of dying that they will enter into the enterprise of
killing and dying to just throw in the sponge finally and say, "Well, that's
all." That's a fantastic thing, but if you took some of the pressure off,
just took some of the pressure off internationally, it would be very, very difficult
for anybody to get people hot enough so that we would have another war.
If just the people in this room did their job well and spotted their target
where the target should beand you don't have to go out and stand on soapboxes
or anything else. All you have to do is apply some techniques, that's all, and
they're easy techniques to apply. And all of a sudden a bunch of "can't"
cases suddenly "can." And people say, "Hey, what's happening!"
You don't have to have it in the newspapers; the devil with* the newspapers. The
only publicity there is that's worth anything is just word of mouth. It's Uncle
Joe* getting helped and Aunt Agatha hearing about it. And it looks slow at first
and it creeps at first, but then it goes a little faster and a little faster and
a little faster, and with Theta Clearing, they knownobody has to
tell them againthey know they can't be killed. Now, that's fascinating,
isn't it?
You actually can carry a message to the people of the world to the effect that
man is immortal, and that takes all the international pressure offjust that
little fact all by itself.
And let's take a much more important project than insanityinfinitely
more important than insanity. Let's take one, just one: criminals, criminals.
Supposing all the time in the past the psychotherapists have been putting in
on insane people, they put in on criminals. The criminal is kind of bad off, but
he's a criminal because he's in revolt against the society and because he is degraded.
And he's easy to patch up. And the best way to patch up the criminal is to get
the young criminal; and the young criminal is so easy to process, you'd ashamed
of yourself for ever thinking for two seconds that you couldn't handle these techniques.
You get ahold of some young juvenile delinquent and you say, "Just be
a yard back of your head." Bang! You say, "All right, change the postulate
about how you have to get even with everybody," Bang! "Okay, step back
inside. That's fine, Johnny. Next." You'd be ashamed of yourself. If you
were to learn how easy it was to process out of existence the criminal, and you
had spent a thousand hours of auditing time curing up somebody's aunt who believes
that the goblins are going to get her, and curing up Mr. Blow, the notorious alcoholic
just because his family had money, you'd have a feeling of shame and a bad time
investment.
All of a sudden you walk into this big problem, which is a big problem in the
world today. You know why nations go mad? They go mad because of police. And why
do you have to have police? Because you have criminals. And why do they go mad
because of police? Because the police exist as the interconnecting link between
the honest, forthright and constructive citizen and the criminal element of the
society. They carry plague.
You take a police sergeant who has had to be in the midst of criminals for
four or five or six months and you turn him loose amongst a bunch of good citizens,
and he takes days and days to reorient. He has a terrible time reorienting. Awful!
Gosh! It's a very amusing thing. They've found in most police forces now that
you have to take people off the criminal division and put them in the traffic
division regularly every three or six months. And what do they do the first few
days that they are in the traffic division? "Pull over to the curb! Where
do you think you're going? A fire? Well, here's a ticket. We're going to show
you!" A few weeks later the fellow said, "What's the matter, you in
an awful hurry? Well, that's all right, only just don't take it so fast, don't
take it so fastother people on the road, too. Okay, next. Let's go."
Fantastic.
If you don't think the criminal actually is in an aberrated area! But the only
reason it's terrifically aberrated, and terrifically aberrative, is because the
police are applying force to it. Oh, you'd be amazed at how much force the police
force exerts against the criminal. And when that much violence and when that much
lawlessness can exist in a society, that society can be oppressed down the Tone
Scale. The best man in it eventually is no longer free. And was results when freedom
goes.
L. Ron Hubbard, from the lecture STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE.
Excerpted
from The Command of Theta lectures.
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