Ron Says…

“An individual is unable to earn everything he needs in order to take care of his family and those that he has immediate care and charge of and he feels that the best thing to do is to make more money and so care for them better via money. So he assumes higher and higher levels of activity in order to achieve more and more money and so be able to pay more and more for the upbringing of children.

“This is not necessarily good, you know. If you take a quick survey of rich men’s sons, it’s something like a quick survey of ministers’ sons. It’s very lamentable.

“By the way, Scientology reverses this proceeding. It is the first thing known that reverses this proceeding. A kid born to a couple of parents who are Scientologists is a lucky kid. Although most of these parents will give the kid much more latitude of action than he really should have, this is still better, this is still better than a tight circumscription of every activity the child has. The kid’s pretty lucky. As a matter of fact, these kids that—around Scientology are pretty frisky and they’re generally very healthy and rather uninhibited and also, oddly enough, they seem to be a little kinder.

“I’ve made this test a few times. I’ve had one of them swat me, you know, and I said, ‘Ow! Ow, ow, ow!’ And the kid would look at me, you know, and wonder whether or not he shouldn’t process it out.

“But the minister’s son, the rich man’s son, rather argues against this idea that the best thing to do is to do everything there is to do for a family. The rich man is—feels that he will never be able to stand on his own two feet. He’s usually pushed around. He’s given much more than he should have, and he generally winds up in the juvenile court division. Quite routine for this to happen. But that’s because he is taught something else. He’s taught that somebody is taking care of him and therefore he must be a dependent unit. And it is dependency, the—his feeling of dependency which is about the only thing which is aberrative. Because his father is able to take care of him, or his mother or something like that, the kid is given this feeling of dependency.

“A child has, ordinarily, a great feeling of independence. And if this independence is brought up the line, why, we find that the child is pretty good.”

L. Ron Hubbard

from 9th American Advanced Clinical Course lecture
“Education: Goals in Society—Adult Education”
10 January 1955