"Hubbard, L Ron - Dianetics" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

THE GOAL OF MAN
and claw" in every sphere. And so have the redwood tree and the shark. Just as a life form, man, like every life form, is "symbiotic."30 Life is a group effort. Lichens" and plankton32 and algae33 may do very well on sunlight and minerals alone, but they are the building blocks. Above such existence, as the forms grow more complex, a tremendous interdependence exists.
It is very well for a forester to believe that certain trees willfully kill all other varieties of trees around them and then conclude a specious34 "attitude" of trees. Let him look again. What made the soil? What provides the means of keeping the oxygen balance? What makes it possible for rain to fall in other areas? These willful and murderous trees. And squirrels plant trees. And man plants trees. And trees shelter trees of another kind. And animals fertilize trees. And trees shelter animals. And trees hold the soil so less well-rooted plants can grow. Look anywhere and everywhere and we see life as an assist for life. The multitude of the complexities of life as affinities35 for life is not dramatic. But they are the steady, practical, important reason life can continue to exist at all.
30. symbiotic: having to do with the living together of similar or dissimilar organisms for mutual benefit.
31. lichens: any of a large group of plants that look somewhat like moss and grow in patches on trees, rocks, etc.
32. plankton: the small animal and plant organisms that float or drift in water, especially at or near the surface. Plankton serves as an important source of food for larger animals, such as fish.
33. algae: a group of plants, either one-celled or many-celled, often growing in colonies. Algae contain chlorophyll (the green coloring matter of plants) and other pigments, but have no true root, stem or leaf. They are found in water or damp places and include seaweed, pond scum, etc.
34. specious: seeming to be good, sound, correct, logical, etc., without really being so; plausible but not genuine.
35. affinities: the attractions which exist between two human beings, or between human beings and other life organisms.
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A redwood tree may be first out for redwood trees and although it does an excellent job of seeming to exist as redwood alone, a closer glance will show it has dependencies and is depended upon.
Therefore, the dynamic of any life form can be seen to be assisted by many other dynamics and combines with them against the suppressive factors. None survive alone.
Necessity has been declared to be a very wonderful thing. But necessity is a word which has been taken rather loosely for granted. Opportunism36 seems to have been read largely into necessity. What is necessity? Besides being the "mother of invention," is it a dramatic, sudden thing which excuses wars and murders, which touches a man only when he is about to starve? Or is necessity a much gentler and less dramatic quantity? "Everything," according to Leucippus,37 "is driven by necessity." This is a keynote of much theorizing down through the ages. Driven: that is the key to the error. Driven, things are driven. Necessity drives. Pain drives. Necessity and pain, pain and necessity.
Recalling the dramatic and overlooking the important, man has conceived himself, from time to time, to be an object of chase by necessity and pain. These were two anthropomorphic (manlike) things which, in full costume, stuck spears at him. It can be said to be a wrong concept merely because it does not work to produce more answers.
Whatever there is of necessity is within him. Nothing is driving him except his original impetus to survive. And he carries that within himself or his group. Within
36. opportunism: the policy or practice, as in politics, business or one's personal affairs, of adapting actions, decisions, etc., to expediency or effectiveness regardless of the sacrifice of ethical principles.
37. Leucippus: Greek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.
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THE GOAL OF MAN
him is the force with which he fends off pain. Within him is the force with which he attracts pleasure.
It chances to be a scientific fact that man is a self-determined organism to the outermost limit that any form of life can be, for he still depends upon other forms of life and his general environment. But he is self-determined. This is a matter which will be covered later. But right here it is necessary to indicate that he is not inherently a determined organism in the sense that he is driven on this wonderful stimulus-response basis which looks so neat in certain textbooks, and works so completely unworkably in the world of man. The happy little illustrations about rats do not serve when we are talking about man. The more complex the organism, the less reliably the stimulus-response equation works. And when one reaches that highest complexity, man, he has reached a fine degree of variability in terms of stimulus-response. The more sentient, the more rational an organism, the more that organism is self-determined. Self-determinism, like all things, is relative. Compared to a rat, however, man is very self-determined indeed. This is only a scientific fact because it can easily be proven.
The more sentient the man, the less he is a "pushbutton" instrument. Aberrated and reduced, he can, of course, in a limited degree, be made to perform like a marionette; but then it is understood that the more aberrated a person is, the closer he approaches the intelligence quotient of an animal.
Given this self-determinism, it is interesting to observe what a man does with it. While he can never escape the "didn't know it was loaded" equation in terms of cataclysm or the unexpected gain of some other life form, he operates in a high zone level of survival potential. But here he is, self-determined, rational, his primary weaponЧhis mindЧin excellent
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working order. What are his necessity instincts?
Necessity, according to that very sentient if rapidly subject-changing article, the dictionary, is "the state of being necessary; that which is unavoidable; compulsion." It also adds that necessity is "extreme poverty," but we don't want that. We are talking about survival.
The compulsion mentioned can be reevaluated in terms of the survival dynamic. That is interior in the organism and the race. And what is "necessary" to survival?
We have seen and can prove clinically that there are two factors at work. The necessity of avoiding pain is a factor because degree by degree, little things, not much in themselves, can amount to large pains which, compounded in that rapid geometric progression, bring on death. Pain is the sadness of being bawled out38 for poor work, because that may lead to being fired, which may lead to starvation, which may lead to death. Run any equation into which pain has entered and it can be seen that it reduces down to possible nonsurvival. And if this were all there were to surviving and if necessity were a vicious little gnome39 with a pitchfork, it seems rather obvious that there would be scant reason to go on living. But there is the other part of the equation: pleasure. That is a more stable part than pain, Stoics40 to the contrary, as clinical tests in Dianetics prove.
There is therefore a necessity for pleasure, for working, as happiness can be defined, toward known goals over not unknowable obstacles. And the necessity for
38. bawled out: (slang) scolded angrily.
39. gnome: (folklore) any of a race of small, misshapen, dwarf-like beings, supposed to dwell in the earth and guard its treasures.
40. Stoics: people who maintain or affect the mental attitude advocated by the Stoics, a Greek school of philosophy, founded by Zeno about 308 B.C. , holding that human beings should be free from passion and calmly accept all occurrences as the unavoidable result of divine will.
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pleasure is such that a great deal of pain can be borne to attain it. Pleasure is the positive commodity. It is enjoyment of work, contemplation of deeds well done; it is a good book or a good friend; it is taking all the skin off one's knees climbing the Matterhorn;41 it is hearing the kid first say "Daddy"; it is a brawl on the Bund42 at Shanghai or the whistle of amour43 from a doorway; it's adventure and hope and enthusiasm and "someday I'll learn to paint"; it's eating a good meal or kissing a pretty girl or playing a stiff game of bluff on the stock exchange. It's what man does that he enjoys doing; it's what man does that he enjoys contemplating; it's what man does that he enjoys remembering; and it may be just the talk of things he knows he'll never do.
Man will endure a lot of pain to obtain a little pleasure. Out in the laboratory of the world, it takes very little time to confirm that.
And how does necessity fit this picture? There is a necessity for pleasure, a necessity as live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself. He who said that a man who had two loaves of bread should sell one to buy white hyacinth,44 spoke sooth.45 The creative, the constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the maw46 of oblivion: these things are pleasure and these things are necessity. There was a man once who had walked a thousand miles just to see an orange tree and another who was a
41. Matterhorn: a mountain on the border of Switzerland and Italy.
42. Bund: a street running along the waterfront in Shanghai (a seaport in eastern China).
43. amour: (French) love.
44. hyacinth: a plant of the lily family, widely cultivated for its cylindrical cluster of fragrant flowers in a variety of colors.
45. sooth: truth.
46. maw: anything thought of as consuming, devouring, etc., without end.
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mass of scars and poor-set bones who was eager just to get a chance to "fan47 another bronc."
It is very well to dwell in some Olympian48 height and write a book of penalties and very well to read to find what writers said that other writers said, but it is not very practical.
The pain-drive theory49 does not work. If some of these basics of Dianetics were only poetry about the idyllic50 state of man, they might be justified in that, but it happens that out in the laboratory of the world, they work.