Refund and Reparation

There is the interesting point. A group is thought. You might say a group has a soul. A group is its own soul. It is a thought, and it has a body. The body is its perpetuating or perpetuated ideas, its ethic, customs, precedents—all of these various things—and its understanding of its own goals (ideas again). That is the body of the group.

Now, the heartbeats of the group are the ideas on which it runs from day to day, the interplay’s as it resolves the major ideas and problems and thoughts. The heartbeats are the small ideas that go along in the midst of it. A group has a survival potential, then, which is theoretically infinite.

The group’s size has to do with the size of its idea. This is not that it has got a big idea that it is going to do something or other; we are talking now about the fact that the idea is good, that the goals of this group are good. If the ideas which perpetuate those goals are good and it is following along the line set up on these seven dynamics, that group is a body. It is a thought which has taken on an actual body. It exists as such to a theoretical point where you could, for instance, strip half of the individuals out of it or put ten times as many individuals into it and it would carry on.

The finest groups in terms of morale, esprit, ideas, goals and futures have been made in the past out of criminals, psychotics and aberrees beyond aberrees! The individual aberration state is only a minor influence upon the group, actually, because there is such a small part in each one. But the group influence upon the individual is tremendous. Man is so thoroughly evolved, he is so constructed and he exists to such a degree as a group person that he is lost and doesn’t exist actually at all unless he is part of that body of ideas. Exile from a group is actually tantamount to death to an individual. Exile from all groups would be the most hideous thing that could happen to an individual.

We see this when we go down to any prison. What is the worst curse we throw against these people? We say they are antisocial. We could say they are against the third dynamic . They are individuals that the third dynamic has kicked out. They are not permitted to contribute and the third dynamic doesn’t contribute to them—they are out, they are dead, and they act like it, too.