The following is an excerpt from an article written for Freedom by Mr. Hubbard in November 1969. Its message, that the road to ruin is paved with false information, is especially relevant today in view of the rapid diffusion of data on the information superhighway.
f there is anything calculated to jam up the administrative machinery of a society, a government, a police force or an intelligence agency, it is A FALSE REPORT.
It is an old, old trick to enter false reports into administrative machinery just to cause useless worrying and fruitless work.
Police time, already drawn thin by undermanning and escalating crime, can ill afford the endless hours spent chasing down reports, apparently authoritative, which finally turn out to have been false in the first place.
Intelligence files are made completely unreliable by false reports injected into them. A whole intelligence operation can be sent askew if their data files are ruined by false reports. This factor has been long known and understood.
In the book The Art of War, written in 400 B.C. by the Chinese Sun Tzu (as republished by Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963) there is a very basic chapter which lays down the intelligence practices which continue until today and in which he discusses types of agents. These include the “expendable agent” whose duty is to place false information. He is called “expendable” because the enemy will probably kill him when they find his information is faulty. The practice and consequences extend to civilian and administrative activities, not just to war.
During an examination of the sites and history of the ancient world in the Mediterranean, a Scientology expedition isolated what they called “a third party action” as the basis of the decay of these civilizations. A third party plants false accusations between two others to bring about contention, war and destruction of rivals. Thus, quarrels and conflicts do not resolve since the third party, the covert quarrel maker, who is spreading the false information to the other two parties about each other is seldom noticed or identified.
A state can also be depowered by a covert enemy who enters false information into its domestic affairs or cultural activities, causing internal contention until it breaks down law and order.
Thus the use and penalties of falsifying information is common practice in the world but is destructive beyond belief. It may very well account for the cold war itself.
Some “third party” neither Russian nor Western is possibly very active between these two power centers, feeding false provocative information about Russia to the West and false provocative information about the West to Russia. If it keeps up and it is not identified, it could result in World War III.
Thus the extent, significance and use of false information is of ancient tradition and contemporary threat...
You could almost begin a modern renaissance if the masses of planted false reports about people, organizations and governments were swept out of the administrative files of nations. Then maybe we would know, as peoples and governments, what was really true.
A government acting on information as faulty as that commonly in their files leads to fantastic blunders in national policy, vast fund wastage, improper manpower usage and general loss and despair.
Things are not going all right in the world. One could as a start refuse to act on any information unless it were proven by personal investigation.
The road to ruin is paved with false information.
