Hubbard lectures about what drives people into Scientology. Says Scientology improves people's "power of choice" to be audited.
Now, if you have this weapon, this tool called auditing, and so forth, what is the limit of its use? Well, I’ve just given you the reason why its use is limited. You can, to some degree, overthrow a person’s protest by reorienting him on his power of choice. He finally, through habit and otherwise, familiarity, recognizes that you are not trying to do him in and therefore comes to want to be audited. Not because he’s overwhelmed; because you’ve changed his ideas on the subject. This is also very possible.
So that really can’t be considered a terrific limiter on the subject of auditing. No, auditing is limited only by communication. It’s the only thing auditing really limits.
You could imagine yourself going on a horrendous sales talk that everybody on planet Zug is worshipping the god Baal, see, and their idea of really doing their family a good favor is make them feed their babies oftener to this idol, see? And why, you say, it would take a long time to bring them around to any particular way of thinking. Oh, I don’t know that it would. You wouldn’t do it by suddenly overwhelming the lot of them, and say, ”Now look, that’s the god Baal, but I happen to be the god Mug, and you’re going to get mugged any minute if you just don’t sit down and go into a co—audit here and straighten yourselves out.”
Well, oddly enough, that might even work too. But you mustn’t get overwhelm completely cancelled out of your catalog of tricks. Remember that. Don’t cancel that out completely. But look on it as an administrative or a political tool, not as an auditing tool. Don’t mix up these tools, you see.
Well, one of the ways to do it would just be to say, ”Well, if you guys don’t stop worshipping Baal and get on the ball and kick its head off and get busy and set up a proper temple here to me, Mug, why, I’m going to scare—ify and scorchify the lot of you. In fact, there goes an acre of wheat right now.” And they’d all say, ”Gaw! Coo! Yessir!” And after you’ve pulled them along a while, why, you might get them into communication and then you could alter this overwhelm, don’t you see.
Force does have its role. Force does have a role. The only trouble is, force has never been a total answer, see. Force is not a total answer. People try to make it a total answer. Right now most of the governments of Earth are conducting themselves on the basis of force. If you don’t believe it, look at the appropriation that is given to weapons. See, that’s their great belief in force. And yet, none of them can fall back on force and force has become absolutely useless in the field of government. It doesn’t settle anything.
One thing I’ve learned on the whole track has been that force is never the whole answer. But I’ve also learned, reverse way to, that a total absence of force is not the whole answer. You just try and build a mountain sometime, ignoring force. Heh—heh! I’m afraid you’re not going to get much mountain built. But that is constructive force.
So the way force is used has an awful lot to do with the value of force. And destructive uses of force has been the basic downfall of one and all. But you’ve got this whole planet that’s feeding its babies to this fire god, and that sort of thing, and you can’t get them into communication—well, you can’t totally rule out destructive force; at least tip a couple of lightning bolts over there to the temple of Baal and blow his silly head off. And you say, ”Oh. You see what happens to the worshipers of Baal, you see.” You might get them in communication.
But driving people toward auditing, that’s a very difficult thing. But they are driven toward auditing. People are driven toward auditing by their somatics, by their illnesses, by their unhappiness, by their unwillingness to be what they are, where they are—and those things drive them toward auditing. So they are driven toward auditing so you almost never get a pc on his own power of choice just to be audited, see. Very, very seldom. He’s driven there, at the best, by his goals, don’t you see?
Now, all of these things, then, sort out, well, what is power of choice? Well, power of choice could be many things, but if you’re auditing a person in the direction of consenting to be audited, and then follow this by pushing him—auditing him in the direction where he isn’t driven to be audited by his own condition and then audit him in the direction, finally, of putting himself in the condition so he can help you smooth things out—this, of course, is a very usable pattern. And I don’t care whether your pattern of auditing is preordained to be only on the pc’s power of choice or not. Remember there’s always something driving the pc.
To restore him to any condition where he’s any—feels any freedom or anything else, or is any value to himself or anybody else—to put him back into such a condition you do have to, however, consult his power of choice. You can always make a person well, oddly enough, with auditing, without consulting his power of choice. Isn’t that interesting? And it is just to that height only that previous mental therapy has reached. And that’s physical therapy too. That’s the height that it reached. It got no further than that. It was all done more or less by force and this thing called ”power of choice” was never consulted. Interesting, isn’t it?
But in your hands, why, you have weapons which improve a person’s power of choice and he finally elects to be audited. You’ve seen that happen, time after time. Well, that’s a very safe route.
So you never, then, find a pure power of choice to be audited. See, it’s always monitored by little tiny factors and these factors are more and more other— determined, the worse off a person is. See? So there is no absolute power of choice with regard to whether a person gets audited or doesn’t get audited.
— L. Ron Hubbard
Lecture 20 June 1963: History of Psychotherapy
Setting the Hook 
