Refund and Reparation

The personality of an individual actually is composed of concentration on one particular valence, on good structure and on other factors. For instance, take a fellow who is a golf champ: his structure for coordination and his general muscular structure are excellent. He has a certain talent, in other words. His nutrition will have a bearing on his personality, again by having a bearing on his structure. His early training—we include under training what the whole environment has done to him—will lodge certain charges on the bank, one way or the other.

Then there is his experience. In other words, we have a genetic factor, we have a nutritional factor and we have an experience-educational factor—three sets of factors there which regulate what the particular personality will be. This personality can vary greatly from person to person because these things are very different amongst people.

But there is a constancy when it comes to the amount of enturbulence, or the amount of pain energy, there is on a bank as compared to the amount of pleasure energy there is on a bank.

That is quite solid.

There is evidently another endowment which is very interesting, and that is the life-force endowment. One organism is apparently less or more alive than another organism. It is somehow or other a quantitative thing.

I looked in Thomas Jefferson’s writings to make sure that I was right about this; he said, “All men are created with equal rights.” All men are a long way from equal, but some are more equal than others. We have tremendous differences in the endowments of individuals—not only the structural endowment and the experience endowment, but there seems to be a life-force endowment.

A person can drive down the street never seeing a stop light, never paying any attention to what he is doing, but doing it well because an attention unit is sitting right there, watching what he is doing and in communication with the other attention units. In case of an emergency it goes click! bang! and in come 50 attention units to take care of the situation. In extreme emergency, practically all there are come right in to the learned training pattern center in the somatic mind, wham! Sometimes they come in so quickly and are there such a brief time that a person gets minimal recording. A man learns the house is on fire, rushes up five flights of stairs, picks up two 90-pound kids under each arm, balances the player piano on his chin and runs down five flights. He isn’t operating on engrams.

That’s what we call necessity level, where an attention unit can send out an SOS that pulls out attention units even from the bank. That’s why a man should every now and then have a nice, high emotional crisis. One ought to come within an ace of getting killed regularly, about every ten days, because this high emergency  priority automatically pulls attention units into the center and not all of them would get back to the engrams again.

One could get a catatonic schiz to jump up by walking up, carefully cocking a pistol and saying, "Well, the poor guy, he will never be any use to himself or to anybody else. I guess we might as well kill him. Close the door so the shot won’t be heard. We’ll tell everybody he committed suicide."

About that time, he will jump out of bed and say, "No, no!" And this guy hasn’t moved for five years. He doesn’t relapse into being a catatonic schiz immediately.

The great bulk of patients will be found in the apathy band. Close to zero is insanity. That is the catatonic schizophrenic, the person with fear paralysis. Near this range is the person who looks out of the corner of his eye with his lip curled as if he would like to tear one’s guts out, meanwhile being so "nice," even servile.

He is extremely dangerous because he can’t dramatize directly, so he dramatizes circuitously. And as long as one is talking to this person, he is completely unable to dramatize it all the way because the presence of another human being has maybe tended to lower his tone. His tone will come up just a little bit when he is off by himself, and he will think, "How do I get even with him?" although he is not quite sure why he has to get even, but perhaps some fancied statement gives him an idea there is something wrong.

This is the phenomena of covert hostility. It is easily broken as an engram, but it’s broken on the tone scale.

It is an effort to make somebody else be very self-controlled. These things go in as demon circuits. The demon circuit is "You control yourself," whereas "I" as a single aberration just tries to align itself with "I."

Psychosis seems to occur because one of these demon circuits says to what is left of poor "I" after a big engram charge has gotten in there and lopped off part of the analyzer, "Damn it, control yourself, you’ve got to be logical," with the person installing the demon circuit himself becoming increasingly more hysterical, while giving out all this "good advice."

I have studied the human animal in some remarkably strange places, and in a bar one day I saw a drunk who had his buddy up against the wall and he was banging his head against it saying, "Damn you, I’ll teach you to be reasonable. Be reasonable, damn you, be logical like I am! "

There was a demon circuit going in right at that moment.

This is the aberration which permits a person to take himself out of the auditor’s hands. There is an "I" demon circuit inside the mind busily running "I."

Undoubtedly some of these demon circuits are going to start picking up Dianetic terminology some day and it is possible that an incipient schizophrenic who is almost ready for a break could, with some very stupid and careless auditing, get a demon circuit set up in the mind.

It would have to be a huge break of the Auditor’s Code, with the "auditor" kneeling with his knee in the preclear’s chest, holding him by the throat and banging his head against the floor, saying, "Control yourself. Now, damn it, you’ve got to go over these engrams. You know you can do it. You can make yourself do it. And I’m not going to put up with any more of your nonsense. Now, go back to basic-basic and I’m not kidding you, go back to it!"

This is nothing against Dianetics because such behavior would definitely be off the line on Standard Procedure. But some psychiatrist may try this.

The magnitude of installation has got to be very high before this sort of thing could happen, or it could be very slight but lock up on some earlier demon circuit which would then become vocal.

Start to work psychotics and nothing will show up quite as clearly as "Control yourself." It is quite aberrative. Any organization in the society which seeks to exert control upon members in that society by force is to some degree an aberrative factor on the society.

If you don’t believe this, go back and check up totalitarianism in the history of those
governments which worked most sharply with force and you will find that their social order deteriorated afterwards and became more psychotic than most social orders are.