Refund and Reparation

It is very common to find, in an insane asylum, a patient who claims to have a secret which will save all mankind. This has been considered very bad, pre-Dianetically. The same psychiatrist who would hammer a psychotic into believing everything that had happened to him was imaginary—and psychiatry has long been listening and calling “imaginary” actual prenatal engrams just because “authorities,” with no data and clumsy research, had said such things were imaginary, all the while holding forth about “memories of the womb”—would and does pound hard against any patient who says he wants to “save mankind.” It is a peculiarity that this is a particularly condemning point, that anybody wants to do anything but be a sheep and very tractably and “well-adjustedly” eat grass.

The patient who is fond of being “God” has an engram impinged solidly against the self dynamic. The one who conducts himself abnormally in matters of sex or children has an engram impinged against the second dynamic. Any of these dynamics and any of their portions can be stopped or colored by engrams. But not one can be speeded up by an engram or rendered more forceful. The engram takes the native analytical ability and by entangling it causes aberrated manifestations of the dynamics. Three dynamics cannot be channeled into one channel by an engram and then become three times as strong as a fixed idea.

If anyone has a strong self dynamic perverted by an engram which says “I am God,” then manifests and acts strongly in his imaginary role as “God,” he will, when that engram is cleared, demonstrate about two or three times the personal force on the self dynamic. Only he won’t be “God,” he will become a powerhouse in some group as himself. If, when insane, he was thoroughly and violently certain that he could save Mankind, when the engram causing that is cleared, he may very rationally but with great force actually set about doing something to further Mankind.

So long as the strange belief was held that a man was only a stimulus-response animal and that his entire being was only a collection of aberrations, that his personality was only a matter of distortions of reality, no individuality or desire was safe from question or condemnation. This was a sort of slave psychology which, accidentally or otherwise, sought to block personal individuality and initiative. Under that philosophy one could be condemned, when he said he wanted to do something to further his name beyond his physical death, as an “egomaniac,” whatever that is.¹ When one had confidence in the ability of a group to sweep all before it, he could be called monomanic. When he enjoyed sex, he could be called a satyr.² And when he wanted to do something for Mankind he could be labeled a “paranoid,” whatever that is. Because he could thus be assailed and pounded by these nonsensical and precisely indefinable terms, and because engrams could here and there distort these natural desires and make them unnatural, the society was pounded down, man by man, into a herd.