This is a subject that is really worth reviewing from time to time. On the 18 February 1952 LRH gave a lecture: THE CODE OF HONOUR EXPLAINED. It has been with us for nearly 70 years now. But discussing it with people it seems that by and large it is not truly understood as LRH intended.
We have now added “THE CODE OF HONOUR” as a Main Menu Item on the Back On My Bridge website, and below that, are Ron’s explanations of each of the 15 points of the actual code. It is well worthwhile to go to the website (https://back-on-mybridge.com) and review these points and what Ron has to say about them.
As LRH states at the end of the lecture – “And as I say, this code is a therapy: You can take each point of it, one right after the other, and you will find that by Recall or Lock Scanning you can pick up all the times in an individual’s life when he has violated this clause”.
This is a long Post, but we are not currently living in very ethical or honest times on this Planet! So, the Code of Honour is certainly worth a review!
Below are some excerpts from that original lecture.
“When you talk, then, about morals, you are actually talking about something which was bad for the race once upon a time and which was made into a law. Now, when it became a law and went onto the statute books and was made effective by force of Billy clubs and judges, it was a law and sat on the statute books. But when it was enforced by superstition or just belief that it ought to be or a person is good when he… Or something like that, it was a moral”.
…
“The moral is not based upon reason, honesty, codification, good behavior or anything else. It is based upon the fact that something some time or other in the history of a race has been inhibitive to survival, and the powers that be at that time and their successors adjudicated the fact that it ought to be impressed upon people that they shouldn’t do this. So they say, „If you do this, something bad will happen to you.“ And they don’t even explain what is bad about it; they just say, „Don’t do it. It’s immoral!“ And that ends the whole argument, because if you do something immoral, then the gods are going to get you or something bad is going to happen”.
…
“There was more pain in it than there was pleasure, and therefore it is immoral – anything whereby this action may be apparently pleasurable but experience has taught that this apparently pleasurable action actually contains much more pain and destructiveness than it does pleasure. Therefore, it is immoral. And you can trace down the track of any moral code and you will find that this reasoning was at its basis”.
…
“Something which is ethical is a reasonable or a reasoning action or a reasoning behavior which promotes the maximum survival on all dynamics – that is to say, for everyone concerned in it. Ethics are concerned intimately with survival. If this action means survival on, let’s say, the first dynamic, the future, for the group, it is also ethical – unless, all of a sudden, it means the destruction of the rest of mankind, at which moment it becomes unethical, because, you see, that is more affected”.
…
“That is ethics – has nothing to do with codes, it is what is reasonable, what reasonably means the major amount of survival for the maximum number concerned in the problem”.
…
“Now, something ethical might actually mean the destruction of one or two people, if it meant the survival of hundreds or thousands of people, you see?”
…
“Fully 80 percent of existing moral codes today are defunct, and yet they are still in force. They have lost any reason for being, but they are still in force. And people recognize that these are no longer valid rules of conduct, and recognizing they are not valid rules of conduct, they say, „Why should we have anything to do with them?“ But the second they say this, somebody has been along telling them that something awful will happen to them and that they are now immoral, that they are beyond the pale and that society will have nothing to do with them whatsoever because they have broken 80 percent of this moral code, or something of the sort. Nonsense! But it actually makes people bad. The end result of an arbitrary code is to make people bad, make them antisocial and put them beyond the pale”.
…
“And all you have to do to make a bad human being is to convince them that they no longer have sufficient personal pride to be good, because they have to have personal pride to be good. And if you can convince them that they are bad, they lose their personal pride. And the only reason there is anybody in prison is because they have lost their pride”.
…
“The unaberrated individual follows this code instinctively. And the test of this code is that it is a therapy because every time and every place it has been violated is a lock or an aberration on the individual. You can take this code and use it as Recall Process”.
…
“And you can just take clause one, clause two, clause three, clause four, and find out every time that this person broke this code. And if you find every time, he broke the code on each one of these points, he will come up at the other end very high in tone, because you will have knocked these things out. The more he breaks this code, the less self-determined he is. And the less self-determined he is, the more he will break the code, becoming even more un-self-determined. And it is the dwindling spiral of dishonesty, but it is more than that: It is the dwindling spiral of aberration, it is the dwindling spiral of ill health”.
…
“And as I say, this code is a therapy: You can take each point of it, one right after the other, and you will find that by Recall or Lock Scanning you can pick up all the times in an individual’s life when he has violated this clause. And you will find each one of them is aberrative and that he has worried about it since and he has been upset about it since – not because somebody is going to punish him, but because it was untrue to his own self-determinism”.
THE CODE OF HONOUR EXPLAINED – A lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard On the 18 February 1952.
