Scientology: The Race Against Man’s Savage Instincts

or fifty thousand years man has been faced with the enigma of himself and his fellows. Man has been victimized by brutal instincts and impulses which have caused him to erect, in self-protection, prisons, legal codes and complex social systems. Man has not felt safe from man, and indeed, the conduct of man down the ages has not much justified belief or faith: wars, murder, arson, treachery and betrayals, cynicism and destruction have marred his progress, until history itself is a long montage of battles, murders and running blood.

Confronted with this aspect in himself and his fellows, man has long searched for an answer to the riddle of his own behavior, for ways to remedy that behavior. Long before Diogenes, man was searching for such answers to his questions. In Babylon, Chaldea, India, and even in the distant primitive times, those men who could think found concern in the antisocial and unreasonable conduct of their fellows.

Man's search for the answer to his own riddle was quickened during the last century by two things: the first was the energy and curiosity of Sigmund Freud, and the second was the mathematics of James Clerk Maxwell and his studies of energy in the physical universe. These two things came up almost simultaneously.

Freud worked without knowledge of the physical universe, which was developed in the years which followed his initial efforts. Freud was not a physical scientist. If anything, he was a mystic.

According to Freud, man had buried within him certain brutal and sometimes overmastering instincts which caused him to act as he did. Freud said that man's trouble stemmed from these instincts and the effort of man to repress them. I wish you to mark that theory very well. It was given without proof or the phenomena of observation necessary to prove it. It was given as a lucky guess, maybe, but it was given. Freud never handled or measured one of these instincts. He said they were there. That is all he said. That theory was added to the bulk of data already accumulated about the human mind.

Suppose I were to tell you that the basic savage instincts of man — the instincts which make him kill and murder and engage in war — existed in such a state that they could be handled, measured, experienced, with a clarity and precision never before attained in this field. That would be a good science, wouldn’t it?

Techniques of application exist very adequate to handle these basic and savage instincts, because that is what they are.

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