Free Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard

there were to surviving and if necessity were a vicious little gnome with a pitch-fork, 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, Stoics 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 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; it is hearing the kid first say daddy; it is a brawl on the Bund at Shanghai or the whistle of amour 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 28

    loaves of bread should sell one to buy white hyacinth, spoke sooth. The creative, the constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the maw 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 mass of scars and poor-set bones who was eager just to get a chance to “fan another bronc.”
    It is very well to dwell in some Olympian 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 theory does not work. If some of these basics of dianetics were only poetry about the idyllic state of Man, they might be justified in that, but it happens that out in the laboratory of the world, they work.
    Man, in affinity with Man, survives, and that survival is pleasure.
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CHAPTER IV
The Four Dynamics
    In the original equations of dianetics, when the research was young, it was believed that survival could be envisioned in personal terms alone and still answer all conditions. A theory is only as good as it works. And it works as well as it explains observed data and predicts flew material which will be found, in fact, to exist.
    Survival in personal terms was computed until the whole activity of Man could be theoretically explained in terms of self alone. The logic looked fairly valid. But then it was applied to the world. Something was wrong: it did not solve problems. In fact, the theory of survival in personal terms alone was so unworkable that it left a majority of behavior phenomena unexplained. But it could be computed and it still looked good.
    Then it was that a nearly intuitive idea occurred. Man’s understanding developed in ratio to his recognition of his brotherhood with the Universe. That was high flown but it yielded results.
    Was Man himself a brotherhood of Man? He had evolved and become strong as a gregarious being, an animal that hunted in packs. It seemed possible that all his activities could be computed in terms of the survival of the group. That computation was made. It looked good. Man survived, it was postulated, solely in terms of the survival of his group. It looked good but it left a majority of observed phenomena unexplained.
    It was attempted, then, to explain Man’s behavior in terms of Mankind