6409C15 SHSpec-39 Scientology and Tradition

     You have to understand something about policy.  Policy is not just
something that LRH just dreamed up.  It is something that has been worked out
and that has held true over a period of time.  If someone who was supervising
staff knew all the policies on central orgs that have been worked out over the
years, and if he did what they said, he would never have to solve a single
problem.  Looking over any scene in an org and the policies for the area, LRH
could routinely give the policy covering that situation.  It is interesting
for an organization as young as this one to have this much policy.  Policy
makes communication possible between two points.  This is its main function,
not forcing people to obey orders.  In the absence of policy, you don't have
communication between two points, because the two points are not agreed on
anything.

     Tradition is, likewise, an agreement.  The above points about policy,
therefore, also cover a civilization.  A civilization has mores and guides to
conduct, which are agreed upon and which assist the general survival of the
individual and the majority of the group.  Policy is, or should be, based on
experience and should lead towards survival.

     So we have policies, customs, and procedures.  These are sequential
doingnesses.  If you don't know and follow these, you fall out of agreement
with the people who are following them, and you will feel strange.  You might
have a better way to do something than the agreed-upon way, but if your way is
at wide variance with the accepted way, the others may shoot you.

     If a society is too dissonant, it is no longer a civilization, because it
does not have agreements.  There are all kinds of ways of getting married
these days.  This bunch of mishmashes shows that there is something wrong with
the institution of marriage as it now stands.  The rise of animalistic
psychology has violated the individual's right even to have customs.
Behaviorism invalidates the idea that people should have customs.  There are
only supposed to be pushbutton responses.  One is supposed to react to
stimuli, etc.  Instead of policies, you have manipulation.  People and
societies object to manipulation, especially hidden manipulation.  It violates
the right to have a right way to do things.  It denies the individual the
right to any sense at all.  It is no longer based on considerations of
survival.  The dignity of Man involves the ability to decide policy with
others.  Policy and customs are things that make sense, at least at the time
that they are formulated.  Customs and policy look odd when they persist after
the problem that they were created to handle has vanished.  When a tradition
that originally made sense loses its sense, it may now have, as its rationale,
"politeness", or some such thing.  People tend to carry solutions into the
future after the problem is licked.

     Policies can conflict if realities are different.  For instance, in
Miami, during the second world war, American planes had a habit of practicing
dive bombing on hips entering harbors.  They got fired on by a Dutch ship
returning from the South Pacific.

     In scientology, we appear to be out of step.  But what we are out of step
with is the new technology of control, which assumes that men are animals that
should be handled by having their buttons pushed.  LRH was taught at Princeton
that law proceeds from the customs of the people.  Law that proceeds only from
a central source and ignores or seeks to change people's customs will either
be ignored or will bring on a revolution, as with Prohibition.  The Civil
Rights Act also sought to change customs by legislation.  It violates the
First Amendment and other amendments of the Constitution.  It violates the
right to a jury trial, something that no one seemed to notice.  This produced
a breakdown in communication, which resulted in disorder and rioting, because
it was a violation of custom and an attempt at a central enforcement of
custom.  The way to keep the peace is to keep the customs of the people.
Military governors had this fact laid on them with an axe, since this was the
way to keep civil bodies in back of the front lines under control.  Having
them out of control was embarrassing.

     When you violate the expected survival pattern of an area, you have said,
"Die!" Bucking a custom is bucking a theta comm line.  You have cut the comm
line between point A and point B.  Now their actions don't mesh, since they
are operating on different policies.

     Custom and policies are methods of bringing about communication and
agreement along certain matters that lead to a higher level of survival.  If
policy leads to a higher level of survival, it is good policy.  Poor policy
leads to a lower level of survival, and bad policy leads to complete
disaster.  This accounts for the ebb and flow of civilizations.  Civilizations
could die out because their customs have become antiquated, but far more often
civilizations are smashed by the fact that the central government or an
external source (an invasion) has smashed the customs of the civilization.
Today, on this planet, communism is engaged upon this process, using the
Wundtian psychology of 1879.

     Scientology is not in conflict with the customs of the planet or the
universe.  Quite the contrary:  If you can communicate with anyone on the
subject of scientology, he will agree with you, unless he misunderstands a
word, since you are talking to him out of the traditional technologies of
healing and the human spirit, and the traditional philosophies and
psychologies: "Know the truth, and the truth will set you free!" This is an
ancient policy of psychology that is now being violated.  For instance,
Washington is now claiming that the government has the right to lie!  This
violates the custom of "tell the truth" and the policy of the courts.
Governments justify government lies in all sorts of ways, but individuals
aren't supposed to lie.  It is legal for governments to lie but not for the
individual to lie.  This is bad news.

     The man in the street will agree with you, as long as you don't use words
that are strange to him.  He will agree on ideas such as the idea that Man has
a right to be free, to control his life, etc.  Our target is not to make an
insane person quiet but to make him sane.  That has been the target of mental
healing since the Stone Age, but not in the last half-century.  That is why we
are looked upon as dangerous by the new faddists, who are interested in
manipulation, not freedom.  They would argue with the idea that it is good for
people to be free, an idea that has never been contested in civilized
society.  Try asking a psychiatrist, "What are you trying to do with your
patient?" He will never tell you that he is trying to make him sane.  He will
obfuscate.  The slave philosophy was practiced in Sparta.  Communism is
similar, but bolder.

     "We have made progress in how to accomplish goals which Man has had as
long as he has been Man."  What we have developed that is new is a technology
to attain the traditional goals of philosophy and religion.  Scientology's way
of expressing Man's basic goals and our organizational methods may be new, but
not the basic goals of scientology, which are the goals of Man.  We can
improve on the idea behind the witch doctor: healing by manipulation of
symbols.  We have the advantage of being able to communicate and have a
session.  By "witch doctor" we do not mean someone who uses an African black
magic juju, but a real healing witch doctor.

     In the absence of orthodoxy, anything can be called unorthodox.  A
society that has no right conduct is a society in which anyone can be punished
and criticized, by art critics, scientific agencies, etc., "because he is not
conducting himself rightly."  You can no longer comply; there is nothing to
comply with.  "They pretend there is a custom there, when there isn't any, ...
that there is a '1-2-3-4' procedure, and then will never tell you what it is,
and yet punish you because you don't comply with it."  The material wealth of
a society doesn't demonstrate its longevity or endurance.  Greece's greatest
art [and philosophy] was produced in its decline.

     The communication of custom is itself a technology.  When it breaks down,
the custom can be abandoned.  Conversely, when the custom itself has broken
down, you get communication breaking down.  We get a breakdown of a
civilization when its customs break down because of a failure to communicate
them.  You get no cooperation when people don't know the customs on which
they operate.  The means of communication of customs are no longer taught in
this civilization.  This is where study tech and misunderstood word tech fits
in.

     So you could be remiss in teaching scientology by using words that are
strange and misunderstood.  If you do this, you have not established
communication.  Being comprehensible comes ahead of being effective, since
comprehensibility makes your effectiveness apparent.  "If you're truly
comprehensible, [people] will forgive you almost anything, as witness my
life."  So the proper order of importance is:

     1.  Comprehensibility.

     2.  Necessity (demand).

     3.  Effectiveness.

