SelfDefinition.Org
The Brainwashing Manual
(1955)
L. Ron Hubbard
Chapter IV State Goals for the Individual and Masses
Just as we would discover an individual to be ill, whose organs, each one, had a different goal from the rest, so we discover the individuals and the State to be ill where goals are not rigorously codified and enforced.
There are those who, in less enlightened times, gave Man to believe that goals should be personally sought and held, and that, indeed, Man's entire impulse toward higher things stemmed from Freedom. We must remember that the same people who embraced this philosophy also continued in Man the myth of spiritual existence.
All goals proceed from duress. Life is a continuous escape. Without force and threat there can be no striving. Without pain there can be no desire to escape from pain. Without the threat of punishment there can be no gain. Without duress and command there can be no alignment of bodily functions. Without rigorous and forthright control, there can be no accomplished goals for the State.
Goals of the State should be formulated by the State for the obedience and concurrence of the individuals within that State. A State without goals so formulated is a sick State. A State without the power and forthright wish to enforce its goals is a sick State.
When an order is issued by the Communist State, and is not obeyed, a sickness will be discovered to ensue. Where obedience fails, the masses suffer.
State goals depend upon loyalty and obedience for their accomplishment. When one discovers a State goal to be interpreted, one discovers inevitably that there has been an interposition of self-willedness, of greed, of idleness, or of rugged individualism and self-centred initiative. The interruption of a State goal will be discovered as having been interrupted by a person whose disloyalty and disobedience is the direct result of his own misalignment with life.
It is not always necessary to remove the individual. It is possible to remove his self-willed tendencies to the improvement of the goals and gains of the whole. The technologies of Psychopolitics are graduated upon the scale which starts somewhat above the removal of the individual himself, upward toward the removal only of those tendencies which bring about his lack of cooperation.
It is not enough for the State to have goals. These goals, once put forward, depend for their completion upon the loyalty and obedience of the workers. These, engaged for the most part, in hard labours, have little time for idle speculation, which is good. But, above them, unfortunately, there must be foremen of one or another position, any one of whom might have sufficient idleness and lack of physical occupation to cause some disaffecting independency in his conduct and behaviour.
Psychopolitics remedies this tendency toward disaffection when it exceeds the common persuasions of the immediate superiors of the person in question.