Introduction: Principle of Dangerousness: An extremely interesting aspect that Ron discusses in this article has fascinated me ever since I read The Creation of Human Ability.
Dear Friends,
An extremely interesting aspect that Ron discusses in this article has fascinated me ever since I read The Creation of Human Ability.
Elsewhere, he writes that Scientology does not aim to create "good people." However, one should not assume that "bad" is the opposite of "good." Rather, Ron defines a "good person" as someone who blindly obeys and does everything they are told. The processes described in the book, on the other hand, promote independent thinking and empower individuals. From my own experience—both as an Auditor and as a Preclear – I can fully confirm this.
I believe that someone who has achieved self-determinism knows for themselves what is "good."
Much love.
Max Hauri
Principle of Dangerousness
Excerpt from the lecture "The Role of Laughter in Processing", given by L. Ron Hubbard on July 5, 1954.
There's principle in processing: The principle of dangerousness. We find that an individual declines at length into a state of mind whereby he believes that the only way he can occupy a space or continue to occupy a space or be permitted to go out of a space that he is occupying is by the passport of his own dangerousness. And when an individual is no longer dangerous, when he is no longer dangerous he then conceives the environment to be dangerous to him to such a degree that he has to stay where he's put and that he can't be where he wants to be.
Things are too dangerous and therefore he cannot move himself around freely and as the definition of self-determinism is moving things around at will, we of course find this individual intimately overcome because he cannot move himself around at will. Why? He isn't sufficiently dangerous to guarantee an open passage on the courses he would like to take. On the other hand, the environment itself is sufficiently dangerous to him that he can be stopped or chased out. So we have this ratio in progress as almost a total therapy in itself. See, we talked about laughter as a total therapy.
All right. Now something a little more serious, a little more down scale, you see, than laughter is this item of dangerousness. So if the sanity of your preclear could be said to depend upon any self determinism, could be said to depend upon the ratio of his own dangerousness compared to the dangerousness of his environment. When the environment is total danger, and an individual is no danger, you have somebody who is in very bad shape indeed. A badness of shape which is impossible to conceive, even to an auditor. Simply because it's never totally existed. It's an absolute.
And let's get the other extreme – an individual who is totally dangerous to his environment and where nothing in his environment is dangerous to him. Also a totality which an auditor would find very difficult indeed to see. In the first place he would go out of the band of dangerousness before he would achieve that level. It would go on a 50-50 basis. He's just as dangerous to the environment as the environment is to him and then he would go up to being able to reject the environment at will. And so we would have him passing out of the band of dangerousness. Just like that – he'd go right on out of it. You see that?
All right. This ratio of dangerousness is an interesting principle. It was first written up in Excalibur in 1938 and the rule which was written up and which underlies this observation is: – a man's ability is dependent upon his belief in his dangerousness to his environment.
It is only when an army man or a part of a military unit is convinced that he is no longer dangerous to the enemy that he falls apart. Beware having anything to do with a company, regiment, or division that has had any part in a rout. They will steal you blind and cut your throat in the dark no matter who you are or what. Their pride in self is gone. It's the most fantastic deterioration which you've ever witnessed in your life.
Troops, they say, have to be seasoned but let's say it better than that. Troops have to have watched the enemy run under fire before they are really cocky troops. Now that's seasoning and they found out that they didn't run under fire. They have to find out these things before they are good.
But there is dangerousness to the environment and you will find out any preclear that comes to you who's case is hard to handle has this as a basic factor in the case. This case believes the entire environment to be dangerous and no part of it to be safe. And a little higher on the tone scale than that believes that laughter is very dangerous, deadly and impossible.
Assist
It might have better been expressed as capability but that was the way it was expressed in Excalibur in 1938. Says many, many workable principles. One of the earliest times you will run into it is when you have somebody who is out of communication and you're trying to get them to strike at your hand. We can administer to a cat, to a dog, to a horse, psychotherapy in this degree. And what do you know, it's very workable, very certain, sure fire psychotherapy. We get the animal to take a push or a little movement forward toward us at which moment taking great care not to be too rapid and so frighten this beast, we withdraw and we find the next time the person or beast is more willing to move overtly and then we withdraw more rapidly.
We can do this with a hand. We can put our hand down alongside of a sick person who is almost totally out of communication, and they move their hand as though to push against our fingers and we retreat a little bit with our fingers. We find out they get a little bit more overt – this is curious to them and they'll get a little bit more overt and we retreat again a little harder. And the first thing you know, we find them picking up in consciousness and picking up in general activity and they then begin to conceive themselves as being at least slightly dangerous to their environment.
I have brought children out of tantrums and cats out of neurosis and preclears into communication with this type of an activity. Get them to make a slight forward move at which moment I permit my hand to retreat. To give you some idea how early this can be worked. It worked on my little boy when he was about a month and a half old. He was not doing well.
So, I was a little bit concerned with him and started to think about I wonder what the dickens I could do. All of a sudden it occurred to me – this fact of dangerousness and so I let my hand retreat – this is the youngest I ever worked, I worked it on other babies older than this but not on a month and a half for heaven sakes and I let my hand retreat from him a few times and he all of a sudden found out this was happening and this little boy hadn't done much in the way of laughing, he'd been very serious indeed, you see, and all of a sudden he broke out into a smile and we did this a few more times and I acted very terrified indeed and he broke out into a roaring laughter through the whole thing. It was the finest thing he ever saw and so on and then he became, as they quite ordinarily do, very affectionate and so on. It just raises them up unbelievably and that was the end of his real stomach trouble. There was no further stomach trouble after that. This was about 15 minutes of processing. The results are fast and they're good.
L. Ron Hubbard
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