 from An Essay on Management:
Power, and very real, forceful power it is, can be sustained only when it deals with theta goals and is derived from theta principles. Authoritarian power, held by breaking or perverting ARC, enforced punishment drive, brings to management certain destruction and brings to the group reduced efficiency or death. One, in considering these things, is not dealing in airy philosophic impracticalities but in facts so hard and solid they can worn and eaten and used as roofs. We are dealing here with the basic stuff of management and group survival. It is to be commented upon that management has succeeded despite its use of punishment drive and because of existing theta goals whether management knew it or not. This sums up not particularly to the discredit of managements of the past but to the highly resistant character of theta goals. Management, failing to understand the true force of its power and the source of that power, seeing only that if it cut and perverted ARC it had power of a sort, has been the yoke around the neck of mankind in most instances, not the proud thing management thinks it is or could be, keeping the wheels turning. Where wheels turned in the past it was usually because of highly vital theta goals and thoroughly despite management. Management, being a needful cog in the scheme of things, has been kept around by a hopeful mankind on the off chance that it someday might be of complete use. A punishment-drive management is the spoke in the wheel of an action being conducted by a goal maker and a group, not the grease for the wheel which management sincerely believes itself to be. A goal-maker—group combination action is only enturbulated because of lack of a good management or the existence, much worse, of a punishment-drive management. Man would run better entirely unmanaged than in the hands of an authoritarian management for the end of such a management is group death. A group would run better theta managed with real theta power than a group entirely unmanaged.
Management derives power most swiftly by acting as interpreter between a goal maker and a group. The power of management is effective in ratio to the cleanness with which it relays between the goal maker and the group on ARC. Management loses real power in the ratio that it perverts or cuts lines between the goal maker and the group. When the goal maker exists now only as a printed code, management can continue to prosper and can continue to serve only in the ratio that it keeps that code cleanly interpreted between archives and group. Management deteriorates and grows unprosperous in the ratio that it perverts or cuts the lines from code to group.
There is an intriguing factor involved, however: ARC lines. When they are slightly interrupted they deliver power to the individual that interrupts them. True it is authoritarian power – death power. But a very faint tampering with a line gives authority to the tamperer since he is obscuring to some slight degree a section of Theta. His group is trying to see the Theta and reach it and if they can do so only through the tamperer and if they are convinced that the tamperer or tampering is necessary (which it NEVER is), then the group tolerates the tamperer in the hopes of seeing more Theta. Mistaking this regard for him as something he is receiving personally, the tamperer cannot resist, if he is a narrow and stupid man, tampering a little more with the ARC line. He can live and is tolerated only so long as the Theta he is partially obscuring is not entirely obscured. But he, by that first tampering, starts on the dwindling spiral. Eventually he is so “reactive” (and he would have to be pretty much reactive mind to start such an operation) that he obscures the Theta or discredits it. At that moment he dies. He has put so much tension on the line that it explodes. If it is not a very theta ARC in the first place, he is relatively safe for a longer period. The pomp and glory he assumes are not his. He makes them enMEST and entheta and eventually corrupts them utterly and corrupts himself and all around him and dies as management.
L Ron Hubbard – from an Essay on Management 9 January, 1951
Moving On Up a Little Higher 