When I was a very young man I spent most of my teens in Asia and that is an area of the world where human misery and want are very visible, where man has reached perhaps the lowest states of degradation. And a young man moving into that scene begins to ask the questions: “Why? Why all this? What is this? What depths can man fall to and what is he anyway?”

And I began to ask this question, “What is man?” and I found oddly enough that nobody could tell me what man was, what did he consist of, where was he going, what was he doing? I became very fascinated with this particular line of research and I made it my life’s work.

But the philosopher of course has spent most of his working years in his ivory towers and he was pretty insulated from life. To really know life you’ve got to be part of life; you must get down and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence, you have to rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what he is.

I’ve slept with bandits in Mongolia and I’ve hunted with pygmies in the Philippines, as a matter of fact, I’ve studied 21 different primitive races including the white race, and my conclusions were that man, regardless of his state of culture and so forth, was essentially the same, that he was a spiritual being that was pulled down to the material — the fleshly interests — to an interplay in life that was in fact too great for him to confront. And I concluded finally that he needed a hand.

My first effort was to find a common denominator to all men and I had seen him in his more primitive states and I had seen him in highly cultured states and I said, “Somewhere one can isolate a common denominator that embraces all men and perhaps from that we can unlock this riddle.”

Well, I discovered that the common denominator of existence was SURVIVE! Whatever else man was trying to do, whether he was cultured or primitive, he was attempting to survive and then one had to move forward from this point to find out what methods he used to survive, how he adapted himself to environments in his attempt at survivals and so on.

And one found out that man advanced to the degree that he preserved his spiritual integrity, that he preserved his values, that he remained honest, that he remained decent; and he disintegrated or deteriorated to the degree that he abandoned these things and adopted more evil courses.

We live in a world where we have governments and we have societies and so forth, who are desperately trying to help man; they’re trying however to solve his problems for him, and their efforts to solve his problems for him and so forth, have not really resulted in any great advance for man. Now the real work here is to put man in a mental condition where he then can solve his own problems and the aim and goal of Scientology is to take an individual or a group and by taking the individuals in the group, put them in a position where they can confront their own problems and solve their own problems and so bring themselves up by their own bootstraps.

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, it is only workable. 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.

L. Ron Hubbard, Founder
From the video interview An Introduction to Scientology