SelfDefinition.Org
The Brainwashing Manual
(1955)
L. Ron Hubbard
Chapter III Man as an Economic Organism
Man is subject to certain desires and needs which are as natural to his beingness as they are to that of any other animal. Man, however, has the peculiarity of exaggerating some of these beyond the bounds of reason. This is obvious through the growth of leisure classes, pseudo-intellectual groups, the "petite bourgeoise", Capitalism, and other ills.
It has been said, with truth, that one-tenth of a man's life is concerned with politics and nine-tenths with economics. Without food, the individual dies. Without clothing, he freezes. Without houses and weapons, he is prey to the starving wolves. The acquisition of sufficient items to answer these necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, in reason, is the natural right of a member of an enlightened State. An excess of such items brings about unrest and disquiet. The presence of luxury items and materials, and the artificial creation and whetting of appetites, as in Capitalist advertising, are certain to accentuate the less-desirable characteristics of Man.
The individual is an economic organism, in that he requires a certain amount of food, a certain amount of water, and must hold within himself a certain amount of heat in order to live. When he has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he needs to protect him, he then enters upon a certain idleness which dulls his wits and awareness, and makes him prey to difficulties which, in a less toxic state, he would have foreseen and avoided. Thus, we have a glut being a menace to the individual.
It is no less different in a group. Where the group acquires too much, its awareness of its own fellows and of the environment is accordingly reduced, and the effectiveness of the group in general is lost.
The maintaining of a balance between gluttony and need is the province of Economics proper, and is the fit subject and concern of the Communist State.
Desire and want are a state of mind. Individuals can be educated into desiring and wanting more than they can ever possibly obtain, and such individuals are unhappy. Most of the self-willed characteristics of the Capitalists come entirely from greed. He exploits the worker far beyond any necessity on his own part, as a Capitalist, to need.
In a nation where economic balances are not controlled, the appetite of the individual is unduly whetted by enchanting and fanciful persuasions to desire, and a type of insanity ensues, where each individual is persuaded to possess more than he can use, and to possess it even at the expense of his fellows.
There is, in economic balances, the other side. Too great and too long privation can bring about unhealthy desires which, in themselves, accumulate if left alone more than the individual can use. Poverty itself, as carefully cultivated in Capitalist States, can bring about an imbalance of acquisition. Just as a vacuum will pull into it masses, in a country where enforced privation upon the masses is permitted, and where desire is artificially whetted, need turns to greed, and one easily discovers in such states exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.
If one, by the technologies of Psychopolitics, were to dull this excesssive greed in the few who possess it, the worker would be freed to seek a more natural balance.
Here we have two extremes. Either one of them is an insanity. If we wish to create an insanity we need only glut or deprive an individual at long length beyond the ability to withstand and we have a mental imbalance. A simple example of this is the alteration of too low with too high pressures in a chamber, an excellent psychopolitical procedure. The rapidly varied pressure brings about a chaos wherein the individual will cannot act and where other wills then, perforce, assume control.
Essentially, in an entire country one must remove the greedy by whatever means, and must then create and continue a semi-privation in the masses in order to command and utterly control the nation.
A continuous hope for prosperity must be indoctrinated into the masses with many dreams and visions of glut of commodity, and this hope must be counter-played against the actuality of privation and the continuous threat of loss of all economic factors in case of disloyalty to the State in order to suppress the individual wills of the masses.
In a nation under conquest such as America, our slow and stealthy approach need take advantage only of the cycle of booms and depressions inherent in Capitalistic nations in order to assert more and more strong control over individual wills. A boom is as advantageous as a depression for our ends, for during prosperity our propaganda lines must only continues to point up the wealth the period is delivering to the select few to divorce their control of the state. During a depression one must only point out that it ensued as a result of the avarice of a few and the general political incompetence of the national leaders.
The handling of economic propaganda is not properly the sphere of psychopolitics, but the psychopolitician must understand economic measures and Communist goals connected with them.
The masses last come to believe that only excessive taxation of the rich can relieve them of the "burdensome leisure class" and can thus be brought to accept such a thing as income tax, a Marxist principle smoothly slid into Capitalistic framework in 1909 in the United States. This even though the basic law of the United States forbade it and even though Communism at that time had been active only a few years in America. Such success as the Income Tax law, had it been followed thoroughly could have brought the United States and not Russia into the world scene as the first Communist nation. But the virility and good sense of the Russian peoples won. It may not be that the United States will become entirely Communist until past the middle of the century but when it does it will be because of our superior understanding of economics and of psychopolitics.
The Communist agent skilled in economics has as his task the suborning of tax agencies and their personnel to create the maximum disturbance and chaos and the passing of laws adapted to our purposes, and to him we must leave this task. The psychopolitical operator plays a distinctly different role in the drama.
The rich, the skilled in finance, the well informed in government are particular and individual targets for the psychopolitician. His is the role of taking off the board those individuals who would halt or corrupt Communist economic programmes. Thus every rich man, every statesman, every person well informed and capable in government must have brought to his side as a trusted confidant a psychopolitical operator.
The families of these persons are ofen deranged from idleness and glut, and this fact must be played upon, even created. The normal health and wildness of a rich man's son must be twisted and perverted and explained into neurosis and then, assisted by a timely administration of drugs or violence, turned into criminality or insanity. This brings at once some one in "mental healing" into confidential contact with the family, and from this point on the very most must then be made of that contact.
Communism could best succeed if, as the side of every rich or influential man these could be placed a psychopolitical operator, an undoubted authority in the field of "mental healing" who could then, by his advice or guided opinions, or through the medium of a wife or daughter, direct the optimum policy to embroil or upset the economic policies of the country and, when the time comes to do away forever with the rich or influential man, to administer the proper drug or treatment to bring about his complete demise in an institution as a patient or his death by suicide.
Planted beside a country's powerful persons the psychopolitical operator can also guide other policies to the betterment of our battle.
The Capitalist does not know the definition of war. He thinks of war as attack with force performed by soldiers and machines. He does not know that a more effective if somewhat longer war can be fought with bread or, in our case, with drugs and the wisdom of our art. The Capitalist has never won a war in truth. The psychopolitician is having little trouble winning this one.