A person can drive himself mad with Dianetics without any trouble. What you have concentrated on in your study of Dianetics has been the process of making people well. That is your emphasis line. But don’t think for a moment that that is any more than half of it. There is as much data on how to make people insane, uncomfortable, sick or dead as there is on how to make them well. We ordinarily do not handle that side of the data; we ordinarily do not look at it. But once in a while, in order to learn something, it is necessary to look at it.

Knowing the potentialities which are inherent in Dianetics, one is rather aghast to look into the field and see the wild abandon with which somebody will put out what he calls the “lollipop technique,” which will wind a person up in a spinbin about as quick as scat!

This is something like the fellow who goes out and shoots oil wells. There is a hole in the ground and something has happened down in this hole that they don’t know anything about, so the way they fix up the hole is by dropping some nitroglycerin in it. The nitroglycerin goes down the hole and explodes down there, and after that maybe the hole is all right and maybe it isn’t.

Now, the oil-well shooter will take a flask of nitroglycerin and put it inhis pocket. He mixes up his nitroglycerin at home on his stove, and- he doesn’t care about that. He will tell you, “Dynamite is safe; you can light a cigar from dynamite.” As a matter of fact, I had one of these fellows demonstrate to me one time that it was possible to light a stick of dynamite and then light a cigarette from it. Nothing to it!

What he was overlooking was that other people can’t do that. It isn’t that familiarity breeds contempt but that he knows exactly how far he can go; he knows what he can do with this stuff. He knows that you don’t drop nitroglycerin on concrete. He also knows that when he picks up a notebook, for instance, and puts it in his pocket, his chances of dropping that notebook are very slight. So he picks up the nitroglycerin and puts it in his pocket; he knows his chances of being hit in the side are very slight. So he just says, “Those are the odds against it,” and life is all very comfortable and he goes on.

Now, the funny part of it is, the oil-well shooter would say, “Well, dynamite will burn! Ten percent dynamite will burn. You touch a match to ten-percent  dynamite and it will burn just like sawdust, and you can light a cigarette with it.” Then you start to do it and the dynamite blows up and they pick your head up someplace else.

Part of his technology is that you can always burn fresh dynamite. He just left out one adjective. And the dynamite you picked up was a couple of years old and all the nitroglycerin had settled in one end of it. That was the end you lit.

There is a case of familiarity with a subject. These shooters very seldom kill themselves, very seldom have accidents.

It is the same with a Dianetic auditor: He has looked at engrams, he has looked at preclears, he has looked at screamers; he knows what he is going after, what he can do with it and what he can’t do with it, more or less. So he throws his preclears on the couch and runs them into this and out of that and maybe sticks them up in something; then he says, “Well, that’s all right, they don’t go nuts—not for twenty-four hours. I’ll get that tomorrow.” In short, he shows a wild abandon with the subject. But he is operating within known limits. Even a fair knowledge of Dianetics lets you operate within those known limits.

[...]

As long as you practice something remotely resembling Standard Procedure, as long as you know there is a time track, as long as you know you ought to keep chasing the preclear through the incident until it finally desensitises, as long as you know enough never to lose your nerve, you can’t do anybody very much damage—unless you go over onto the side of complete Black Dianetics.

With Black Dianetics, you could tailor-make any kind of insanity you wanted to. The person might not manifest this the next day, maybe not the next week or maybe not for thirty days. Maybe three months later he is walking down the street and feeling a little bit tired when somebody honks an auto horn just right or something of the sort, and all of a sudden he goes crazy, and there he is—insane! Or terribly sick and uncomfortable.

So they take him off and put him in a spinbin and put electrodes on him and then they push big levers and he goes into a convulsion and breaks his spine, breaks his jaw, and so forth. In other words, one can expect the maximum of cooperation from psychiatry in Black Dianetics. They will bury what has already been planted, and they will bury it deeply. This is rather brutal, isn’t it?

You could put a little book down in Czechoslovakia called “How to Drive People Insane: PDH” filled with various kinds of insanity and how to plant it to really make it good. You could drop this book into the hands of a thousand people in Czechoslovakia and a thousand people in Poland, and you could go in on the other side and make sure some copies were in Chinese, and then hire a private jet pilot and have him go over at seventy thousand feet and drop a few on
Moscow.

Sooner or later, some muzhik who has seen the little book is going to watch Colonel Umphbumski come down the steps of the beer hall full of vodka and very drunk. Maybe this little muzhik is the carriage driver, and as he drives along he notices that the colonel is asleep.  “Well, what do you know. The colonel is asleep. This is too good to miss—Hap! ‘Stalin is against me . . .”’ and so on.

In other words, no high-ranking officer and no political entity is safe in a world where a technique of this character exists. You couldn’t wipe out the Foundation now and stop this technology from existing and you couldn’t wipe me out and stop it from existing; it is already out! You couldn’t go around and propagandise against it because that would just popularize it. You can’t stop an idea with sixteen-inch armor plate.

Unfortunately, Black Dianetics is inherent in Dianetics. In 1945, this was all the Dianetics there was—how to drive people crazy, how to foul up political systems, how to restimulate individuals just by talking to them—without planting engrams—and in addition to this, how to interrupt life force in an individual. We haven’t gone into that very much. It is a wonderfully smooth way of committing murder.

I am mentioning this because somebody may ask you, “What could possibly be dangerous about Dianetics?” I am telling you what could be dangerous about it.

That was all it had risen to back in 1945. It became absolutely necessary in 1948 and 1949, when these techniques were released to psychiatry and to medicine, to release them much more widely.