Let me put it this way: have you ever had a friend that you tried to give advice to, who then took it and went along fine, or have you had friends that when you gave advice to them and so on, why they rather resented it, and didn’t take it?
Well, let’s put this on a much broader basis. If we take a man and we keep giving him advice and giving him help and pushing him along and so on, we don’t necessarily wind up with the resolution of his problems; but if, on the other hand, we put him in a position where he had higher intelligence, where his reaction time was better, where he could confront life better, where he could identify the factors in his life more easily, then he’s in a position where he can solve his problems, so he looks around, he starts solving his own problems and so he betters his own life. That is the difference between Scientology and other efforts to help man.
Scientology is for an able guy like you, or like me, able to function in life, able to make his own way, does his work. All right, that’s the man that should be helped, because that fellow is having a hard time and he’s got his problems.
Now if you put him in a position where his intelligence is up to handling his problems, where his ability to confront life is increased, you’ll find out that he is bettered, he can better his environment, he can take care of his family better, he can do his job better, he can live better.
The reason Scientology’s assumptions can be considered to be true is because they work, and Scientology is totally a workable science. We’re not interested in ultimates or absolutes. We’re interested in what produces results. And if you know certain things and you apply them and that then increases a man’s IQ, increases his ability to handle the world around him, why he naturally then is able to do better, and to do more, to make more money, to be happier in his environment and so forth.
And if you approach it as though he were a spirit, then you succeed. If you approach it as though he were just a mechanical monster of some kind or another, ten stones of flesh or something like that, why you don’t increase his IQ and so on. So we of course prefer — maybe we are novel in this — but we prefer the tactics which work, not the tactics which are merely stylized or which we’re supposed to have.
The average man is up against certain problems, he’s asking himself certain questions, “How can I make more money? How can I make my wife faithful to me? How can I make my children grow up? How can...” In other words, “How can I live a better life? How can I make things more even, more stable for my family, how can...” you know, he’s “How? How? How?” and “What am I up against? What is happening to me in my life? What is my purpose in life?” and so forth.
These questions, in actual fact, absorb a tremendous quantity of his energy, and he himself is not able to go out and do anything very progressive about it.
In Scientology processing he resolves these questions, he understands what he’s doing, he knows what he wants to do, he makes up his mind and he goes ahead and does it. And he turns from a man who is simply a puzzled static being into somebody who is more dynamic, who is able to accomplish something.
From the video interview An Introduction to Scientology
