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DEFINITION OF ORGANIZATION,
PART I
(From the "How To Present Scientology To
The World"
cassette series)
(A lecture given on 8 November 1956 by L.
Ron Hubbard)
...
Now, you look at these numbers up on
these letters and you have,
actually, the total concept of
organization normally existing,
plus one thing, a command
chart. No service, no electrical
company's office, nobody,
should be without one of these command
charts. I'll show
you what they look like. They're square -- I
mean, an
oblong, a rectohedron or something, because everybody on
them at the top is pretty thick. And you have written
across the
top here, it says Board of Directors, or Joint
Chiefs of Staff,
or it says something at the top here.
It's very impressive.
That's in bigger letters, see? And
then you have two little
dingle-dangles that drop down
from this and other signs are
appended to that. And one of
them says Secretary of Navy, and the
other one says the
War Department or something. And then this
dingle-dangles
down into, well, other boards, you see: Bureau of
Naval
Personnel, Chief of Naval Operations, Chief of Staff, so
forth. And this dingle-dangles down to another thing that
says
Regiments or something, you see, Fleets or something
like that.
And then this goes down to Commanding Officers
Of. You got that.
That's pretty smart. And then this goes
down to Officers Of, and
this goes down to Petty Officers
Of, and this goes down to the
army and the navy, see --
rank and
file, see?
That's how they do this. That's how they
do this. And you've got
this beautiful... You know,
it's... well, it's beautiful! You
never saw the like of
these things. They're pretty. You know,
they're usually
done on mahogany, Philippine mahogany, something
like
that, you see them. Or they're done in great things: you
open up a manual and you keep unfolding, and you unfold
them down
like this, and you fold them up like this, and
there it says
across the top Joint Chiefs of Staff, see?
Boy, is that... Tsk!
That's it! We've got something here.
We know who's boss around
here. Obvious, it's the Joint
Chiefs of Staff;
they're boss.
A private wants to go on leave, he knows
where he is supposed to
go. He isn't supposed to go up
there at all; that's too high for
him. He's supposed to go
see these people right above him, see --
his petty
officers. And the petty officers, they're supposed to
go
see the officer. The officer is supposed to go see the
commanding officer. The commanding officer is supposed to
go see
the Fleet. And the Fleet is supposed to go see the
Chief of Naval
Operations. Chief of Naval Operations is
supposed to go over here
to the Secretary of the Navy, and
the Secretary of the Navy is
supposed to go over here to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You see,
that's the way it
goes. Got it? Yeah. And then they say whether
or not he
can have
some leave.
Now... All right. Now, they forward this
back, see, and it goes
like this: the Joint Chiefs of
Staff up here, and then it goes
down to the Navy
Department here, and then it of course goes over
to the
Chief of Naval Operations, then it goes over here to
Fleet, and that goes down here to captains, and the
captains go
to the officers, and the officers go to petty
officers, and they
get down to the man, and he knows he
can't have any leave. See,
it's simple! See, the whole
thing works out. It's obvious, this
whole thing
works out.
You think I was just indulging in some
mockery, something like
that, but I wasn't; that's a
command chart. It says who's boss.
And if you didn't have
one of those things the whole place would
go to pieces,
you know that! Nobody would know who to salute.
Nobody
would know who to send the paychecks to, for whom to...
Well, nobody would know! That's all. You see? I mean,
you'd just
be lost, and maybe it'd be a
good thing.
Because the only thing difficult with
this command chart is the
moment the guns start going, the
little dingle-dangles vanish.
They just go missing. See,
they... Before the first sentry takes
off -- before the
first sentry takes off not to confront the
enemy -- these
things disappear amongst the boxes. So you have
Joint
Chiefs of Staff standing in the -- well, they never stand
in a first line -- but you have Joint Chiefs of Staff, or
something, sitting someplace else. They're not any longer
on the
chart. I know; I've looked on the chart. You have
troops down at
the bottom of one of these command charts.
You can talk to one of
these charts by the hour and it
won't shoot. Won't do
a thing.
And I've been in the interesting position
of sending a message up
through one of those things for a
very important piece of
information that should have gone
right on up to the top, since I
was operating a comm
center. It was very interesting. Just as in
any company or
something, somebody says, "A machine is broken
down. All
production will now be delayed for the next ninety
days."
He'd want to report that, you know. He'd think it'd be a
good thing. Somebody up at the top is liable to notice the
whole
factory isn't running
or something.
And so I tried to report this through one
of these chains of
command, and I found out that I was
really getting there. Only
they knew that that particular
post and area had been wiped out
and taken a long time
before, so they never bothered to answer. I
asked some
chaps right here in Washington, I said, "Why didn't
you
ever reply to those despatches? What was
the matter?"
He says, "Well, you were wiped out a long time
before that."
And I says, "I was!" It was obvious. It
was right there on his
chart that those command channels
didn't any
longer exist.
Well, the very funny part of it is, the
moment that action was
engaged, why, one found himself
finally doing what I did: I
picked up a telephone, called
the Secretary of Navy. See, and I
said, "I'm tired of this
place. I'd like
to leave."
And he
said, "Yeah."
I said, "Yeah, I've got some important
despatches. As a matter of
fact, we've got enough
despatches here to practically sink the
Japanese navy if
they had to carry them. There's a lot of traffic
and stuff
like that, and
so forth."
So he sent his plane down and picked me
up and flew me home. You
think I'm just talking through my
hat but that is exactly what
happened. Everybody knew the
phone systems were out, and
everybody knew the command
chart didn't exist anymore, so it was
very easy to pick up
a receiver and say, "Give me Washington."
They wanted to
know Washington where. I said, "Washington, DC." I
said,
"Give me the Secretary of Navy." I couldn't think of
anybody else. That's quite a phone call from down in the
South
Pacific through, and you just think that
doesn't exist.
...
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