When I was a very young man I spent most of my teens in Asia and
that is an area of the world where human misery and want are
very visible, where man has reached perhaps the lowest states
of degradation. And a young man moving into that scene begins
to ask the questions: “Why? Why all this? What is this?
What depths can man fall to and what is he anyway?”
And I began to ask this question, “What is man?” and I found oddly enough that nobody could tell me what man was, what did he consist of, where was he going, what was he doing? I became very fascinated with this particular line of research and I made it my life’s work.
But the philosopher of course has spent most of his working years in his ivory towers and he was pretty insulated from life. To really know life you’ve got to be part of life; you must get down and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence, you have to rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what he is.
I’ve
slept with bandits in Mongolia and I’ve hunted with pygmies
in the Philippines, as a matter of fact, I’ve studied
21 different primitive races including the white race, and
my conclusions were that man, regardless of his state of culture
and so forth, was essentially the same, that he was a spiritual
being that was pulled down to the material — the fleshly
interests — to an interplay in life that was in fact too
great for him to confront. And I concluded finally that he
needed a hand.
My first effort was to find a common denominator to all men and I had seen him in his more primitive states and I had seen him in highly cultured states and I said, “Somewhere one can isolate a common denominator that embraces all men and perhaps from that we can unlock this riddle.”
Well, I discovered that the common denominator of existence was SURVIVE! Whatever else man was trying to do, whether he was cultured or primitive, he was attempting to survive and then one had to move forward from this point to find out what methods he used to survive, how he adapted himself to environments in his attempt at survival and so on.
And one found out that man advanced to the degree that he preserved
his spiritual integrity, that he preserved his values, that
he remained honest, that he remained decent; and he disintegrated
or deteriorated to the degree that he abandoned these things
and adopted more evil courses.
We live in a world where we have governments and we have societies and so forth, who are desperately trying to help man; they’re trying however to solve his problems for him, and their efforts to solve his problems for him and so forth, have not really resulted in any great advance for man. Now the real work here is to put man in a mental condition where he then can solve his own problems and the aim and goal of Scientology is to take an individual or a group and by taking the individuals in the group, put them in a position where they can confront their own problems and solve their own problems and so bring themselves up by their own bootstraps.
