- Never desert a comrade in need, in danger, or in trouble.
- Never withdraw allegiance once granted.
- Never desert a group to which you owe your support.
- Never disparage yourself or minimize your strength or power.
- Never need praise, approval or sympathy.
- Never compromise with your own reality.
- Never permit your affinity to be alloyed.
- Do not give or receive communication unless you, yourself desire it.
- Your self determinism and your honor are more important than your immediate life.
- Your integrity to yourself is more important than your body.
- Never regret yesterday, life is in you today, and you make your own tomorrow.
- Never fear to hurt another in a just cause.
- Don’t desire to be liked or admired.
- Be your own advisor, keep your own council and select your own decisions.
- Be true to your own goals.
L Ron Hubbard
The importance of the Code of Honour is best explained by LRH point by point as given below:
Here are the 15 points of that code:
- Never desert a comrade in need, in danger or in trouble.
Just never do that. It is not only non-survival for comrades, it is very non-survival for you.
- Never withdraw allegiance once granted.
If you grant allegiance, you make a postulate that you are going to have allegiance to this group or this entity or this god.
And immediately afterwards, perhaps, you say, „Well, I’m not going to.“ You see, it is ten times as bad to be a backslider as never to have been, because the person who never was and never did make the postulate, of course, isn’t trying to overcome a postulate. But the person who says „I am now a true son of the church,“ who, a few years later all of a sudden discovers that he is not a true son of the church and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the church anymore, he really goes to the devil. The only thing that is making him go to the devil is that he postulated that he was. So it is much worse to be a backslider than never to have been at all.
- Never desert a group to which you owe your support.
A person sometimes has to differentiate what group he is supposed to support and how wide that support is and what these elements are. But a person who deserts a group will show up on a E-Meter a thousand years later. You apply this testing to the E-Meter and you find the most interesting reactions of the needle. You will find out that an individual who has deserted a group he was supposed to protect, for instance, will show up – even if it was a thousand years ago.
- Never disparage yourself or minimize your strength or power.
Never disparage yourself or minimize your strength or power, no matter how much other people would like you to believe that this is the way to be polite or how to win friends and influence people. I can guarantee you that minimization of yourself, your strength, your power, is the fastest way in the world to make enemies and to be torn limb from limb, because it says „I’m weak; go ahead and attack me.“ It says, „I’m a 1.1. Come on, boys.“ It says „Go ahead, knock me flat; I’m nobody.“
And you will find in the most decadent societies and the oldest and most tired societies that the minimization of one’s strength and power is the order of the day. The Japanese says (inhaling sharply), „I withhold my foul breath from your face.“ And then he says, „This unworthy one would like to say to glorious you that in his humble and ignorant opinion…“ This is the chatter. And where are those people on the tone scale? Boy, they are almost dead!
When one race in particular, the German race, was really in its power – a long time ago, back before Christ – if you were to ask a German knight „Now, come on, admit it: You aren’t the strongest knight in five tribes around; you know that,“ he would probably have taken his battle ax to you. You would have insulted him. By the way, the tribes were almost unaberrated. They had terrific, high self-determinism – very powerful-minded people. And the Romans were strung along the Rhine and trying to hold them down and so on, and they would get into a battle with them and some German knight would ride back and forth and he would announce that he was the strongest and he was the most powerful and he was the best and he was worth any 180 Romans, and would they send out 180 Romans so he could eat them up. So they would send out 180 Romans and he would eat them up. Very discouraging.
Those tribes suffered when they suffered at all because of their tremendous individualism. They would not hang together as political entities to fight Rome. And Rome could be way down tone scale, but it still had its legions in good organized marching formation and, as a result, they could hit a solid blow into these thin, individualistic tribe coalitions. As a result, the German nation never did much fighting. I mean, it never came out beyond the Rhine – except, of course, to capture Rome, North Africa, to every couple of generations wreck all of Europe for the last twenty-five hundred years. And it seems right now to be getting into a position where it is going to do it again. You know, nobody is going to convince those people. But if you want to lick the German nation, the way to lick the German nation is to get in there and make it the vogue to negate self, to say that this is the polite way to live: „that this unworthy one…“; not to blow hard about what one can do, not to be egotistical and so on, that these are all bad; never to talk about what you can do, always listen to the other fellow say what he can do, and so on.
Now, if you could do that, you would fix the German nation so we would never have any more trouble with them at any time ever. Fortunately nobody is trying to teach America how to win friends and influence people, because that would put us so far down the tone scale we would probably lose. And I am glad to say that nobody does teach them anything about how to win friends and influence people, regardless of a book out on that subject.
By the way, an actual clinical check-back on the practices of how to win friends and influence people shows that this particular attitude toward life is the surest way to make an individual sick and hated. Low ARC. It says go into ARC with everybody you meet, regardless of where he is on the tone scale. That is a great trick. How sick do you want to be? And God, you might meet a Republican or something! Now, this will be a tough part of this code. And I stress again that this code I’m talking to you about is actually a natural code.
- Never need praise, approval or sympathy.
Never need praise or approval; of course, never need sympathy, but never need praise or approval. Gosh, people would have an awful hard time trying to figure that out, until all of a sudden they found out why they had to have praise and approval – because praise and approval are licenses to survive, and an individual would have to be down tone scale and non-self-determined indeed to have to go around and ask other individuals „Can I survive?“
- Never compromise with your own reality.
If you think it is real, it is real. Don’t ever compromise with it. Somebody else comes along and says, „Well, it’s not real. Actually, it’s on page sixty-four of Professor Wittebump’s ‘Cranium Depository System,’ which came over from Germany – oh, pardon me, Bavaria or the Balkans at such and such a time, and it says on there that actually they are hallucinations and illusions which are on the left side of their right side but aren’t under because they aren’t up and submarines have fear.“ And you say, „Anybody who could be that confused must be right.“ Well, that would be having your own reality compromised with.
Now, it is a mighty tough thing to tell somebody who would be very circuit-determined instead of self-determined that any time he considers something right, it is right for him, and he had better not change his mind about it – unless he contacts and runs out the postulate that made him think it was right, and then he can change his mind. Because accepting other realities than your own, against your own assessments, is a certain way to go down tone scale. You will get sick!
- Never permit your affinity to be alloyed.
In other words, never permit a feeling of affection you have to be tampered with by somebody else. You can tamper with it if you want to, but don’t let somebody else come along and tell you that the reason why you shouldn’t like Jones is because…, and tell you a lot of things about Jones. And don’t let anybody come along and tell you you have to like Mrs. Smith, like they used to when you were a little kid, you know? You remember? „Yes, you have to like Aunt Bessie. Yes. You know, she has a lot of money.“ (They don’t tell you that; they probably leave it to you.)
“But you have to like her. Now, it makes her feel so bad when you don’t run in the room and kiss her when she comes in. You must run in and say hello, you know, and say…“ That is the way to handle Aunt Bessie. Yes, but that is the way to kill yourself. If you don’t like Aunt Bessie, you will get lots further with Aunt Bessie, by the way, by saying „I don’t like you!“ She will immediately get confused and say, „Why, dear?“ This will worry her. „Well, I don’t like your nose. I don’t like the way you’re wearing glasses. And I don’t like those clammy kisses you give me.“ Aunt Bessie would probably put on Act for you and say, „(sniff, sniff) You are very cruel to me.“ „Well, I don’t mean to be cruel; I just want to tell you the truth.“ The first thing you know, Aunt Bessie would only be interested in one person in that family. That is the boy who would say those things to her. Fascinating!
- Do not give or receive communication unless you yourself desire it.
- Your self-determinism and your honour are more important than your immediate life.
- Your integrity to yourself is more important than your body.
- Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today and you make your tomorrow.
- Never fear to hurt another in a just cause.
If you want to have a fellow managing who is going to do a terrible job of it, get somebody who is afraid to hurt people, and you will have a lousy operation. You want somebody that can tear people to pieces any time that it is indicated, and you will have a good, smooth-running organization – not because it is force that is required, but honesty. Because the individual who is afraid to hurt people is going to be dishonest to those people. He is afraid to hurt them, you see, so he will wind up by hurting them a hundred times worse.
- Don’t desire to be liked or admired.
Don’t give a damn. Because if you start giving a damn, you won’t be liked or admired. The only way to really be liked and admired is not to care whether you are liked or admired and to act most any way you please. And you will be surprised how many people will like and admire you, but that isn’t why you act the way you please. You act the way you please and as you should because it is honest to. See, it is kind of a lie to be one thing and act like another just because it is polite.
- Be your own advisor, keep your own counsel and select your own decisions.
And that is a heck of a thing, isn’t it? You are educated from childhood to listen to the opinions of others. To you they are worth nothing, because only you have data enough to evaluate you and your actions. Only you have data enough. You can sit down and communicate for days, weeks, months, to a person and not even then give him all the data you have about you.
So go around and get advice if you want to. It is not going to be good advice because it is not based on all the facts. Only you have those facts about you. So you only get along well if you are your own advisor. If you take counsel with yourself about what is right and what is wrong, you can take counsel with others in order to find out if your data agrees with theirs, or what between you can you pool as data which makes a new conclusion.
- Be true to your own goals.
To cause things, one must be cause. And the primary requisite of cause is a statement of intention and goal. The primary requisite to be cause is a clear statement of what you are trying to do. Only when you clearly state it can you avoid being yourself an eventual effect. What am I trying to do? If you can’t answer that you will foul up! So even though it is a poor goal, it is better than none. You can put that down as a beautiful maxim. It sounds like one of those horrible truisms, but boy, it will fish you out of more holes than you can possibly imagine you can get yourself into. A poor goal is better than none. You will find yourself, very often, spinning around. You don’t know which way you are going or which way is up, because you decided all the goals you could put your eyes on were too vague or too poor or too unwanted to try to attain. And that itself is a bad aberration and shows a misdirection on your part and a misestimation on your own part and a lack of understanding on your own part of what you are doing. There is no goal vast enough to absorb your total capabilities, because your total capabilities are so vast that they make goals. You are yourself cause. So how on earth can you set it up so cause can be anything else but cause? Unless you come down scale a little. But a goal, any kind of goal, is better than none.