Very often a student or a preclear of the HASI wonders why he is paying what he does to be trained. Actually it costs about half the sum he pays to train or process him. The remainder is devoted to research. When a person buys a membership of whatever classification, almost all of that money goes into research or financing the dissemination of the material. Although it costs quite a bit to keep the skeletal framework of an organization as big as the HASI running, it is yet capable of continuing on the funds it receives. Very few people, even students and preclears, realize this, but here is what is being done (and it’s time you took a good square look at this, when people out in the bulrushes start whining about the HASI): every dime spent with the HASI is guaranteeing the continued freedom of Dianetics and Scientology. These subjects have been lucky enough not to get into such financial straits that they could not extricate themselves from ownership and control of persons who would have utilized them to the detriment of Man. Dianetics and Scientology have not depended upon large donations from personally interested persons. It is highly doubtful if the HASI would accept a colored donation which was meant in actuality to guide or steer the policy of develop and disseminate. Although various materials of Dianetics and Scientology have occasionally been tendered to official and private agencies, any effort on the part of these to monopolize or to classify (under security headings) this data would not only have been resisted, it would have been defeated. Because Dianetics and Scientology and the existing organizations have been financed in this fashion, Dianetics and Scientology are free and will not be used in the direction of some George Orwellian nightmare.

If you find something wrong with the organization of the HASI, its personnel or people, and if you criticize this weakly or strongly, remember you are criticizing your own organization. It’s not somebody else’s organization – it’s yours. And if you criticize constantly and continually about the various ills to which any human organization is subject, allowing of course that the HASI is a human organization, you’re making it just that much tougher to get this job done. Actually, flatly, there is nothing wrong that cannot be corrected with any part of the organization of Dianetics and Scientology anywhere in the world. The HASI is far more efficient than most modern businesses. But rubbing elbows as it does with the human race day after day, it is subject to breaks and omissions. The difference is that when it becomes aware of them, it repairs them. If you think this level of efficiency should be raised, then why don’t you come down to Phoenix or London or any other central office and get to work? It’s your organization.

Or why don’t you do a better job of dissemination right where you are? The HASI today on the local scene is cutting a very deep swath into the society where it is immediately centered. Its main job, of course, is an international job and it pays most attention to this. It is actually doing a very great deal these days right here in Phoenix. It is working on very friendly terms with most of the civic organizations in town. And it is now working with the probation officers on juvenile delinquency and criminal problems.

Maybe one of the first things people should learn about Dianetics and Scientology is that there is nothing selfish in its forward thrust and the only toes it ever steps on are the inefficient or the vicious ones. If the HASI makes an error or some auditor makes an error, it should be put down to inefficiency or lack of time or too much to do. And from my experience, exempting of course those few auditors whose certificates have been yanked for very good and ample reason, the heart with which people in Scientology work is a good heart. They may make mistakes, but they don’t make them knowingly and, what is most important, they correct them when they have made them.

I hear a lot of whining and moaning here and there about how bad it is over here. But I notice it is always from people who are totally incompetent and who depend for their communication line on their imagination and with as little recourse to fact as possible.

It is quite interesting that almost any influential person who is interested in Dianetics and Scientology sooner or later will begin to be the target of squirrel publications. These publications are uniformly run by people who will not accept processing. None of these squirrel publications are written or published by personnel trained in Dianetics and Scientology and most of the people back of these squirrel publications are MDs or psychologists. Now, it is a remarkable thing that influential people receiving this literature believe they are receiving material from Dianeticists or Scientologists. The moment I became aware of the fact that this was going on and that poorly informed people actually did believe that Dianeticists and Scientologists trained in the subject were the authors of this barrage of nutty literature, I began to take action on a punitive level. And I can solemnly guarantee you that in a relatively short space of time none of these squirrel publications written by unlettered and untrained goofballs will be in existence. For it has been clearly indicated to me that they have very often impeded the organization and made the HASI struggle in order to get this job of research done. If one of these publications prevented just one desperate preclear from seeking and obtaining the help he needed from the HASI, then, frankly, I can promise a short circuit. We have begun to act very punitively in this direction – as a minor endeavor, to be sure, but nevertheless as an effective one. For remember that we have never done anything that is not eventually effective. That is a very awesome record. I would also like to point out to you that each and every one of the squirrels of yesteryear have met disaster. The biggest squirrel in Great Britain, Derricke Ridgway, was recently to be found in bankruptcy court. I wonder how he got there? We wouldn’t know anything about that, of course!

Recently we tackled California, where half a dozen people have been keeping several million from having any respect for or interest in Dianetics and Scientology. These people would call a vast number of potentially interested public in and then tell them things which were calculated to disgrace and discredit the subject. The auditors in California sat around supinely and thought there must be some very good reason why these people kept on doing this. Of course, the amazing thing is the apathy of the auditor himself who would permit this sort of thing to go on. I know if anybody were operating in my area with a media-media type of attitude toward Scientology (who sent out vast numbers of postcards to mailing lists and got all the people in so that he could make an ass out of himself about how awful Scientology really was and how bad the organization really was and how it was all wild and flighty anyhow), I would have had a good fight on my hands. And somebody would have lost and I don’t think it would have been me. Personally, if I were an auditor and found my area being muddied up to that extent, I would have a definite feeling, if I permitted it to go on, that I was not doing all I could do to spread Scientology in my area. I would have taken such a screwball out of the running so fast he would have thought he had been hit by a Mack truck, and I don’t mean thoughtwise. But then the difference between me and an apathetic auditor is that I fight and I get things done.

Of course there is always liability in attacking a source of entheta. One always gets a certain amount rubbed off on himself, but I am not so scared of this stuff that I won’t contact it. Right after we found that the CADA in California was trying to put out of the running any and all Dianetic auditing in the entire state by having legislation passed to forbid it, and after we pulled the certificates of the ringleaders for this entheta activity, a great many things happened – very strange things.

I don’t intend to stop anybody’s communication line as long as it has a shadow of truth in it. But when a communication line is woven from totally self-interested lies, I will not only cut the line, I will make it bounce.

Now the only real trouble with Dianetic and Scientology organizations in the past is because of this matter of research. We have not been very alert to people working their ill will from whatever reasons or causes in our own ranks. We just haven’t been interested. The important thing was to get the material researched and to get people trained. When we had that job done and when it was done very, very well, the spread of Dianetics and Scientology in the society would be inevitable. We need five thousand trained auditors. That is our first step toward this dissemination. For, believe me, what we are doing with cases today wasn’t done last year and has never before been done in the history of the human race. We need a clear public presence and so we are taking a bulldozer to the communication perverters. We are putting ourselves in solid on every front where we can be effective. It is interesting that the American Psychological Association lost, hands down, a bill which was directly aimed at the HASI in Arizona. It lost so badly that it is doubtful that it will ever recover. We are not even vaguely propitiative toward medicine or psychiatry and we are overtly intent upon assimilating every function they are now performing. We have great belief in the value of a well-trained doctor and the psychiatrist is certainly welcome to the psychotic. We do not believe that the organizations of these people should have any bearing or influence in the world at large, for they have used their influence in the past to impede research. We get terribly amused when some auditor writes in and says he has managed to address the local medical association and when we hear that somebody is now calling himself a psychologist. These shortsighted people believe that the labor union called the AMA or the APA is worth propitiating and will be there long enough to influence anything. The general attitude among the Powers That Be in these organizations has definitely changed toward Dianetics and Scientology.They now regard these as a very serious and deadly menace. These people are getting scared. We know this because we had a recent reaction at a very high echelon. There is no real danger in these organizations. There is more danger in our own stupidity and in an apathy which would permit our fields to be plowed by any untrained fool who wants to tell us all how bad it is over there.

We’ve been told how bad it is over there for 76 trillion years. It’s about time somebody said how good it can be somewhere. And that’s what we are doing.

I am telling you this because I want you to know how I feel about this. And maybe knowing how I feel about it and knowing how inevitable I feel about the success of Dianetics and Scientology in this society of Man, you will be better able to understand what we have been doing, what we are doing and what we are going to do in Dianetics and Scientology.

– L. Ron Hubbard

From Professional Auditor’s Bulletin 53

“Ownership: Special PAB”

March 1955