The unexamined life is not worth living for man.

Socrates

 

Long ago an elderly stonecutter was being tried by the citizens of his community. He was an unusual man in having been a good soldier, teacher, mathematician, art critic, practical physician, scientist and many other professions, although he was not truly outstanding in anything. His principal hobby seemed to be in questioning established "truth" and spreading doubts. He thought this was the road to truth. He was charged with being a corrupter of the morals of the young. It was proved that he questioned the validity of the established religion and the wisdom of the current political and social order. He lived in the freest and most progressive region in the world; yet he clearly sought to undermine its political and social foundations. He had created so much unrest and dissension in the community that he was regarded as a menace to the public welfare by the majority of his peers.

They merely wanted him to stop being a troublemaker and behave himself. However, the stonecutter felt that in good conscience, he could not refrain from searching for truth as best he could and communicating it to all who were interested. He therefore suggested to the entire community, which had assembled to try him, that the only way they could stop him from being a bother to them was to kill him. They were reluctant to do this because it might have political repercussions and make a martyr out of the stonecutter. But he left them with little choice, and they voted for his execution.

The stonecutter took this with complete calm, which was his usual state of mind, and at no time displayed any adverse emotions. His friends were extremely upset about the turn of events, and they implored him to recant and save his life. However, the stonecutter thought it wrong to compromise his ethics and accommodate to popular prejudice. He said it was better to die in the search of truth than to live in fear. He was executed shortly afterward. He was a recipient and a practitioner of Ethical Therapy. His name was Socrates (16, 107).

About 100 years before Socrates and 6000 miles to the east, there lived another recipient and practitioner of Ethical Therapy who, although unknown to Socrates, would probably have been his best friend had they met. His name was Confucius. He is probably the most influential practitioner of Ethical Therapy who ever lived; although, like all practitioners, he made mistakes.

Confucius was noted for his absolute calm in the face of all adversity and his uncompromising stance on matters of principle, even to the point of his willingness to die for them (30). By his own account, he was never particularly outstanding in any subject, but was well acquainted with all the knowledge of his day (20). He felt that government should be administered only by highly knowledgeable persons with a broad understanding similar to his, because ignorant persons who seek power over others are almost always evil and corrupt. The best safeguard guaranteeing ethical leadership was that the would-be leaders should objectively demonstrate broad knowledge and creativity. He thought that decisions should be based on reason and that emotion had no place in an ethical life. His ideas, although independently derived, were very similar to those of Socrates (20, 30). The difference is that Confucius' ideas were, after a period of 500 years, to serve as the direct basis for one of the most creative civilizations which ever existed. Socrates' ideas survived indirectly through Christianity, which in turn formed the basis for Western Civilization.

Not all recipients and practitioners of Ethical Therapy have been as outstanding or successful as Socrates and Confucius. Some are buried in obscurity and failed to have a noticeable effect on human evolution. Others wavered in making ethical decisions, were plagued by destructive emotions, and on occasion, compromised their principles. Still Ethical Therapy eventually succeeded even in their cases. One such person was Giordano Bruno (1548-1600).

Giordano Bruno was no stranger to psychofraud or destructive emotions. In fact, he became, of his own free will, a Catholic monk in his search for truth. His inquiring mind and passionate nature made it impossible for him to submit to monastic discipline. He became an open heretic, a renegade and a fugitive. He broke all his vows, particularly those related to chastity, and engaged all his passions. His appetite for sensual pleasure as well as his appetite for knowledge seemed to know no bounds. By his own account, "not all the fires of the Caucasus could avail to allay the fires within him." Still his greatest love was the pursuit of truth. As he wandered throughout Europe learning, teaching, fighting, loving, and trying to avoid the Inquisition, he continuously modified and improved his philosophy, which was a coherent view of the universe integrating all the sciences, mathematics, history, and philosophy of his day, as well as theology and other forms of psychofraud which he mistakenly considered knowledge. He came to realize that truth was something one continually sought and not something one found.

When the Inquisition finally caught up with Giordano Bruno, he was a vigorous, mature man of forty-four in the prime of life. He could not bear the thought of dying for theoretical abstractions and an ever-changing philosophy. Therefore, he made an ethical mistake and groveled hysterically before the Inquisition as he recanted his most cherished beliefs. In so doing, he discovered that unethical means cannot achieve ethical ends, and he lived to regret his recantation. He was continuously harassed and made to suffer by the Inquisition for eight years afterward. He finally refused to compromise any further.

At the age of fifty-one, he stated his philosophical position clearly and unequivocally to the Inquisition. He remained absolutely calm and refused to be swayed in the slightest degree by theological arguments or bloody threats. He did this not to defend his ever-changing philosophy, but to defend something much more important: the right of each person to pursue and express truth in his own way to the limits of his capability. As he was being led to the stake, he was offered the solace of a crucifix and of his religion, which he had never really discarded. In a calm, clear voice he rejected this hypocritical offering saying, "Ye who pass judgment on me feel, perhaps, greater fear than myself." He was burned alive and died without uttering a sound. His passionate, tumultuous life ended in the quiet, calm strength that comes from Ethical Therapy.

Thirty-two years after Giordano Bruno was murdered by the Catholic hierarchy, there was born in Holland the man who was most clearly and profoundly to express the nature of, and rationale for, Ethical Therapy. At an early age he began to question all the accepted "truths" of his time and to try to learn as much of mathematics, science, art, and philosophy as he was intellectually capable. He was independently following the same path that had been taken by Confucius, Socrates, Giordano Bruno and countless others. At the age of twenty-four, like his predecessors, he became extremely obnoxious to his community and was forcibly expelled from it. They tried to kill him but failed. He was an extremely versatile young man, however, and had no trouble making his way in the world.

He was a highly skilled optician and artist, besides being an accomplished mathematician, scientist, philosopher, historian, linguist and biblical scholar. He was as quiet, serene and unassuming as Giordano Bruno had been tumultuous, passionate and bombastic. He also had the advantage of having avoided exposure to serious psychofraud from birth and of successfully undergoing Ethical Therapy at a very early age. He was to practice Ethical Therapy all his life. All who knew him commented on his pleasant, courteous and completely unemotional manner in all his dealings. He was noted for his ability to approach any problem in a completely rational, objective and dispassionate manner. He was probably the most unneurotic person who ever lived. He expressed his philosophy, which was pure Ethical Therapy, in a beautiful and great book he called Etica. He continuously lived his philosophy and never made any ethical compromises, even when his life depended on this. He risked all his security as well as his life when he refused to recant his "heresies" at the age of twenty-four. He declined a secure, comfortable university appointment at the age of forty-one, because it involved unethical compromises, however minor. He chose instead to continue living in self-imposed poverty and grinding the lenses whose dust he knew was destroying his lungs and would eventually cause his death three years hence.

He chose to die helping men see, rather than to live by unethical compromise. His name was originally Baruch de Spinoza, but he changed it to Benedict when he was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam at the age of twenty-four. For hundreds of years after his death, he was to be denounced by the established order as an extremely wicked heretic and a fool. Yet no other person has ever expressed or practiced Ethical Therapy with greater clarity.

Confucius was equally a man of thought and of action. Socrates was a man primarily of thought, but not adverse to action. Giordano Bruno was primarily a man of action, but he could think beautifully. Spinoza was almost entirely a man of thought. Each of these men practiced Ethical Therapy in his own way.

Closer to our own lives we have practitioners and advocates of Ethical Therapy in Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Teilhard de Chardin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and thousands of lesser known but equally ethical, if not equally brilliant, persons. These range from the American educator and scientist James B. Conant to the thousands of ordinary persons, who at great personal risk have opposed the stifling of dissent and the free inquiry in the Soviet Union, e.g., Andre Sakharov; to the thousands of Americans who deliberately risked their lives and freedom to oppose the Vietnam war, e.g., Daniel Ellsberg; and to the countless and nameless others who have risked their careers to correct the inequities of bureaucratic corruption in both the communistic and democratic states. The question before us is, What do all these persons have in common?

In examining the lives of all the outstanding practitioners of Ethical Therapy, we find the following three common factors:

• 1. A broad understanding of all the knowledge of their contemporaries. They may not necessarily be outstanding experts in any field of knowledge.
• 2. The eventual development of a cool, rational and completely unemotional attitude in dealing with all problems, even when these persons are by nature highly emotional. They are unneurotic.
• 3. A clear understanding and expression of the value that truth is more important than anyone's happiness, including their own and that of their loved ones.

From a purely therapeutic point of view, we would at least like to understand how these persons became unneurotic. Was it an accident of birth? Or was it due to some inadvertent, natural-occurring psychotherapy in their environment? Can persons of ordinary or less than ordinary intelligence also become as unneurotic and creative as these persons? If so, what are the factors which will bring this about? We can easily find common factors in the behavior of healthy, unneurotic persons. But what are the common factors in their heredity and their environment which made them so? We will try to answer all these questions.

Before answering any questions, we must clearly define what the questions really mean and what are our basic goals. We must develop a common language for discussing neuroses and ethics. This is the principal task of this chapter. It may seem somewhat abstract at first, but the relevance of the arguments and the definitions will soon become clear. We begin with a discussion of "method" as it relates to Ethical Therapy.

 

Method

Ethical Therapy is founded not on method but on goals. So long as we are concerned with method, we are vulnerable to psychofraud. Ideologies differ almost entirely in their methods, not in their goals. For example, democracy and communism both claim to want freedom, happiness and prosperity for their citizens. Democracy claims that the basic human freedoms of speech and self-expression are necessary and sufficient conditions for the creation of a progressive society (67, 101). If we do not have these freedoms, we have already lost the game. Communism, according to Lenin, holds that every freedom is a fraud if the means of production are not in the hands of the people (135). Public ownership of the means of production is the most essential ingredient for human progress. Furthermore, the Communist Party as the instrument of the people is infallible in its workings. Therefore, any challenge to the authority or wisdom of the Party is wrong, dangerous and destructive. Any means to suppress these challenges are therefore justified.

The ideology and psychofraud of both democracy and communism consists entirely in accepting as infallible particular means for accomplishing common objectives. The same phenomena occurs in the so-called "social sciences" in general and in psychotherapy in particular. These and other forms of psychofraud become obsessed with method without becoming clear about goals. In order to understand and use Ethical Therapy, we must first understand the nature of goals.

We will develop theory in this chapter and methods of Ethical Therapy in the following chapters. It is conceivable that both the theory and the methods may be in error. Only the basic goals are beyond error, because basic goals are beyond logic. To accept blindly the methods and theory of Ethical Therapy as true is merely another type of psychofraud, because these methods and theory have yet to be fully tested scientifically. It is only by accepting the goals of Ethical Therapy that we can achieve lasting mental health and avoid all psychofraud and neuroses.

 

Goals

We all have goals and purposes. Most persons seem to have the negative goal of avoiding pain and death. Yet we know that sadomasochists seek pain and suicides seek death. In discussing suicide we refer only to those persons who have a serious interest in killing themselves, not persons who go through sham suicides as a means of getting sympathy and attention.

It seems impossible to get people to agree on goals. Therefore, we might be unrealistic to expect them to agree on methods. However, the apparent disagreement on goals is only superficial. This disagreement results from the fact that most stated goals are, in truth, merely means of achieving what are the basic common goals of all humanity.

We say that a goal is "basic" when it is an end in itself and not a means to an end. A goal is basic when it is all that we want and we wish nothing beyond it. In this context a suicide's basic goal might not be death per se but the elimination of all sensation and desire. The suicide might want to eliminate sensations because they are unbearably painful, e.g., a terminal cancer patient or a victim of torture. Desire in general might be eliminated because some particular desire cannot be fulfilled, e.g., suicide because of unrequited love. A shorthand way of expressing all of this is to say that a person commits suicide to eliminate unhappiness.

We define happiness as "a state of mind in which we feel that our desires are being fulfilled." Desires that have been fulfilled do not make us happy. Only desires that are being fulfilled make us happy. Desires that are not being fulfilled make us unhappy. Since it is usually impossible for any person to simultaneously fulfill all his desires, most persons are usually happy and unhappy at the same time. When the strength and number of the desires being fulfilled exceeds the strength and number of desires unfulfilled, we say "the person is happy." When the converse is the case, we say "the person is unhappy."

It seems that happiness is a basic goal for all human beings. Other desires are intermediate goals whose fulfillment is merely a means toward this basic goal. Our desires themselves are determined by our heredity and then modified by our environment. The desire to remove the basic sensation of hunger is innate. However, the desire for a particular kind of food is learned, although many tastes are innately pleasing while other tastes are innately obnoxious. We are not born wanting food. We are born wanting to end pain caused by the absence of food. In Maslow's sense, pleasure and the avoidance of pain are basic needs. In Skinner's sense, stimuli which cause our subjective sense of pleasure or pain are respectively rewards and punishments. They are reinforcers, not because of our subjective feelings, but because they can modify our behavior. However, we each know what pain and pleasure are, even if Skinnerians might deny their existence.

As human beings develop, the stimuli which cause pain and pleasure change. For example, a hungry child might feel pain from the lack of food and pleasure from its ingestion. However, certain ascetics feel neither pain nor pleasure in regard to food. They may eat only as a logically perceived means of staying alive. The need for food, i.e., the reinforcing properties of food, can also be eliminated by drugs and brain surgery without any learning on the part of the person (140). Such a person might still wish to be happy, but he would no longer have a desire for food. In the case of the ascetic, food and perhaps life itself are merely means to an end and not ends in themselves; i.e., they are not basic goals.

Happiness, in our context, can be caused by, but is not synonymous with, the absence of pain and the presence of pleasure. Fulfilling a desire may cause pain and give no pleasure but still bring about happiness—for example, a mother giving birth to a desired child. Pain and pleasure are physiologically determined mental states which can be experimentally induced by directly stimulating certain parts of the brain (140). They are, therefore, not usually basic goals but merely means of producing the apparent basic goal of happiness. The question before us is whether happiness is the only basic goal.

 

Basic Goals

Happiness is clearly a basic goal. Some would say that it is the only basic goal. However, happiness is an unoperational goal, because one person's happiness can be another person's unhappiness, e.g., sadomasochism. If happiness is a purely personal experience determined by our peculiar heredity and experiences, then happiness cannot serve as a practical guide for implementing a scientific ethical system or psychotherapy. We cannot agree with the ethical hedonists that "the greatest good is what makes for the greatest happiness for the greatest number," because we cannot agree on which kind of happiness is best. Not even the humanistic psychologists who claim that all happiness is good would approve encouraging sadists to do their thing, unless perhaps they chose to do it to masochists. However, as is well known, when the masochist said, "Hurt me!" the sadist said, "No!" Therefore, happiness would be a nonoperational basic goal, even if it were the only basic goal.

Animals can probably never go beyond pleasure and pain as means of inducing or preventing happiness. Human beings, however, can and often do go beyond the pleasure principle. They do this by creating their own basic goals (150).

While we may all be born with happiness as a basic goal, we clearly do not always keep it as a basic goal. For example, there are religious persons who believe in an absolute morality, which they will uphold irrespective of who is made happy or unhappy by it. They will undergo extreme privation and even die or kill their loved ones to uphold their religious principles, e.g., the biblical myth of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son.

It might be argued that following ethical principles is really increasing happiness. This may or may not be the case in the beginning of any form of ethical behavior. What is important is that ethical behavior can become an end in itself, i.e., a basic goal. An ethical person, regardless of his particular ethics, behaves as he does without any thought for his or anyone else's happiness. Whatever the cause-and-effect relationships between ethics and happiness, they are clearly distinct entities. Happiness is a specific state of mind. Ethics are a particular set of behavioral rules.

 

Ethics

Ethics exist on both an objective and subjective level. Subjectively, ethics are rules which we feel compelled to follow irrespective of their emotional effects. We will follow these rules whether they cause us or anyone else pain or pleasure. We will follow these rules whether they will cause us or anyone else anger or sorrow. No subhuman animal can behave this way. This is what is called the "Moral Sense." It is what makes us uniquely human. It can and has been the source of misery and joy for millions of persons.

The Moral Sense can create saints and martyrs, but it also can create oppressors and tyrants. The Moral Sense can produce men such as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Spinoza, Gandhi, and Schweitzer; but it can also produce a Torquemada, a Calvin, a Robespierre, a Lenin, and a Hitler. When a person becomes utterly convinced that he is righteous, he may die for his beliefs, but he often is also willing to kill those who do not share his beliefs. Therefore, subjective ethics alone are inadequate for guiding human behavior. We need objective ethics.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, claimed that ethical principles could not be derived objectively (167, 168, 169). He argued, quite convincingly, that if a person were to know all the facts in the world, they would not tell him how he ought to behave in general, although they might tell him how he should behave as a means of achieving some particular goal. In other words, facts can tell us how to achieve goals, but they cannot tell us what our basic goals should be. If human beings had an infinity of distinct basic goals, we would have to agree with Wittgenstein and say that ethics can never be objectively determined. However, as we will show, there are only two basic goals, and all other goals and desires are merely means of achieving these two basic goals.

We know that happiness is a basic goal because we never speak of our own happiness as a means to any other end. The very question, Why do you want to be happy, makes no sense. Happiness is an end in itself. We can ask a person, Why do you desire food, sex, money, power, knowledge, or death, and these questions will make sense, since they can be seen to be direct or indirect means to happiness. They are means of avoiding pain and receiving pleasure. However, happiness is never a means to any other end. Therefore, happiness is a basic goal common to all persons.

Taking as true the proposition that happiness is a basic goal, it then follows that any goal which can be substituted for happiness is also a basic goal. This is the case because if happiness is an end in itself, then anything we desire in its place will also have to be an end in itself.

We know that pleasure is always a source of happiness and that pain is always a source of unhappiness. Therefore, anyone who is willing to forego pleasure and undergo pain with no hope of ever receiving pleasure again has as a basic goal something other than happiness. This applies to aberrant persons, such as sadomasochists, who receive pleasure from activities which usually cause pain in others. This does not apply to persons who forego pleasure for the moment and undergo temporary pain in the hope of greater future pleasure while avoiding greater pain. For example, the Christian martyr who undergoes privation, torture and death for his beliefs in the hope of avoiding Hell and then going to Heaven is still pursuing the basic goal of happiness. It is the martyr who does not believe in a better life after death and still avoids pleasure, suffers pain and dies for his principles who has found a basic goal other than happiness.

Historically we have examples of such persons in Confucius, Socrates, Bruno, Spinoza, Jefferson and Trotsky (30, 32, 99, 101, 143). None of these men expected a better afterlife. Indeed, they all disclaimed the existence of such a thing. Yet we know that they all took great risks and underwent privations; some even underwent imprisonment and suffered pain and death, all for rather abstract ethical principles.

As we examine the life histories of other persons known to have behaved in a similar manner, we see that always what they substituted for the basic goal of happiness was ethical principle. Yet we know that many of their beliefs were very different. As we look deeper, however, we find one common belief in all of them. They all shared the belief that truth is more important than happiness and that the preservation and expansion of truth is worth any risk or any price.

The only basic goal that has ever been substituted for happiness is the goal of truth for ourselves and for others. This is the case even when the notions of "what is true" and "how can we know truth" are very different.

We note that the substitution of truth for happiness as a basic goal does not preclude truth's causing happiness or unhappiness. If a person has truth as his basic goal, then by definition the expansion of truth will make him happy. The important distinction is that he pursues truth as an end in itself and not as a means to an end. He would have pursued truth even if it had made him unhappy. He does not concern himself with the emotional effects of truth in his pursuit of it.

The ethics of truth is the only basic goal which can be substituted for happiness. The only objective ethics are those ethics based on the maximization of truth. "That which maximizes truth is the greatest good" is an objective ethical principle which can be used to guide human behavior and at the same time maximize happiness. Objective ethics are therefore uniformly optimal rules of behavior. They are those principles which, regardless of our basic goals, truth or happiness, will maximize both truth and happiness. They are principles which will best fulfill our basic desires, irrespective of whatever our immediate desires may be. To see that this is the case, we must first explore the nature of truth.

 

Truth

To possess truth is to know. But how do we know when we know? Clearly subjective "truth," i.e., the belief that we know, is inadequate, since people can believe many contradictory things which are at variance with reality. This is abundantly manifested in religious wars and in psychotic behavior. Therefore, an objective ethics cannot be founded on subjective truth.

Subjective truth is the basis of all mystical experience. A "mystical experience" is a type of personal enlightenment which convinces us that we know in the absence of any objective evidence. This is how, according to legend, Buddha discovered truth while sitting under a tree engaged in contemplation. It is what the Gestalt psychologists would call "insight." This type of mystical enlightenment is the basis of many great discoveries. Creative scientists and inventors as well as artists often have these periods of insight during which a pattern crystallizes. Therefore, subjective truth is probably a necessary first step in the discovery of objective truth. The problem arises when persons substitute subjective truth for objective truth.

We often hear of the mystical nature of our great thinkers — Pascal, Newton, Goethe, William James, and Einstein, among others. However, it is often forgotten that persons such as Torquemada, Calvin, Rasputin and Hitler were also mystics. Therefore, while subjective truth can lead to objective truth, it can also lead to gross self-deception and a destruction of objective truth. It can lead to psychofraud. The only way to assure the maximum expansion of truth is to subject all assertions of truth to objective tests before tentatively accepting our own insights, let alone the insights of others. This does not mean that we reject subjectivity and personal enlightenment as means toward objective truth. It means that we remain skeptical about all "revelations" and accept models, theories, and hypotheses as true only insofar as they can be objectively verified.

 

Objective Truth

Objectively, the only time we know that we know is when our alleged knowledge enables us to predict and control. We objectively accepted Newton's mystical insights into the workings of the universe because those insights enabled us to predict and eventually control astronomical phenomena with great precision and reliability. We accepted Einstein's mystical insights into nature because these insights enabled us to predict and control even better than Newton's insights. Similarly, many of us reject the insights of the Indian mystics because there is no objective evidence that these insights enabled anyone to predict and control as well as the systematic application of scientific method. We reject pure mysticism and all forms of psychofraud because they simply do not work in the objective world.

Scientific method is a technique for assuring that mystical insights and theories in general are objectively valid. If reading Tarot cards, Ouija boards, tea leaves, astrological charts, or inkblots increases our ability to predict and control, then scientific method will lead to the acceptance of the proposition that these mystical techniques have some validity. Scientific method demands controlled experimentation to verify all models. Subjective belief and clinical evidence are inadequate criteria for truth (50).

Scientific method can never give us certainty, because all measurements, observations and experiments are liable to have errors. Therefore, scientific method can only give us probable knowledge. Only mystics presume certainty. Alleged "scientists" who claim certainty are themselves being mystical. Systematic doubt is the basis of science and objective truth.

Since objective truth is probabilistic and not certain, objective ethics cannot be absolute, but must be relative. Truth itself is an unknowable ideal to which we can always get closer but which we can never fully reach. It is an asymptotic process. That is objectively true which enables us to predict and control. That is "truest" which best enables us to predict and control. From past experience and the nature of the universe, we know that what is truest today may not be truest tomorrow.

The basic goal of pursuing objective truth is an infinite process which has no end. This is the case because (1) that which must be known, i.e., predicted and controlled, is itself infinite in time and space, i.e., the universe; and (2) we can never reduce our observational errors to zero about any aspect of nature. It is the unreachable, infinite nature of ultimate objective truth that makes its pursuit a uniformly optimal strategy.

When we speak of "truth," we refer to truth about nature (the physical, biological and the psychosocial environment). In the artificial world of mathematics, we may know absolute truth through tautological statements, but even here we can make semantic errors. A few years ago a famous mathematician "proved" a very complex theorem which was widely held to be absolutely true by the mathematical community until another mathematician gave a counter example of the theorem. This was a scientific proof that an alleged analytic proof was in error. Therefore, we should even doubt apparently tautological statements such as "Business is business," in which the same word might be used in different senses, thereby producing semantic errors.

 

Optimality

Given that (1) our basic goal is to expand objective truth and (2) only that which enables us to predict and control is objectively true, then only that which increases our ability to predict and control is "good." Since (1) what we predict and control is our total environment and (2) the total environment is infinite in temporal and spatial extension, we can determine how "good" an action was only by integrating its effects over all future time and space. Since science indicates that our lives are finite and our knowledge dies with us, truth can continue to exist if and only if we communicate it to others. Mysticism can justify the sole pursuit of personal, subjective truth. Objective ethics justifies only the pursuit of objective truth which can be, and should be, communicated to others. Therefore, if our basic goal is objective truth, then we are concerned with truth for everyone and not just for ourselves. We may emphasize truth for ourselves, but ethically we can neither ignore truth for others nor increase our own knowledge at the expense of other persons' knowledge and welfare. If we are to be ethical, we must try to maximize truth in the collective body of mankind which extends into the future. Clearly truth is never collectively maximized by any action which reduces truth for a single person. To increase truth is to increase the collective ability of all persons to predict and control their total environment. To reduce truth is to reduce the ability of any person to creatively predict and control the total environment

A mere book or a computer may contain valid information, but truth cannot exist independently of persons. If we value truth, then we must value the persons who are the repositories, disseminators and creators of truth. Truth is information which has become part of the collective intelligence of humanity (50). To diminish truth for any person, including ourself, is to diminish it for all humanity. To increase truth for any person, including ourself, is to increase it for all humanity. However, only the truth we engender in others survives our lives. Therefore, truth cannot be maximized if it is not communicated to others and continuously made to grow through creativity.

By maximizing truth we will maximize happiness, because truth is the only inexhaustible desire whose pursuit can always make us happy. All other desires become satiated and disappear. If our basic desire is happiness, we must then find new desires to satisfy. In an affluent, hedonistic society, the desire for desire becomes the overwhelming need, which drives persons to drugs, mysticism and psychofraud in general. This desire for desire is a frustrating, futile goal which leads to disillusionment and unhappiness for those who seek it. The pursuit of happiness as an end in itself leads only to unhappiness. Happiness can only come about indirectly by leading a meaningful, purposeful life. Only the pursuit of objective truth for ourselves and others as an end in itself can give continued meaning and purpose to life.

Regardless of what our immediate and basic desires may be, we will best achieve them by pursuing truth as an end in itself. By dedicating our lives to the pursuit of objective truth we maximize both truth and happiness. Therefore, the adoption of objective truth as our sole basic goal is a uniformly optimal strategy which will get us whatever we want better than any other strategy.

To be ethical is to desire objective truth at least as much as happiness. The more overriding our desire for truth is, the more ethical we become. When objective truth is a person's sole basic goal, then he has reached his maximum level of ethics and we say the person is "moral." When a person desires happiness more than truth, then he is unethical. When his sole basic desire is happiness, he is at his lowest level of ethics, and we say the person is "immoral."

 

Morality

A person who is ethical may occasionally behave unethically, just as a person who is unethical may occasionally behave ethically. Ethical persons increase truth more than they decrease it, and so the net effect of their lives is the increase of truth. Unethical persons decrease truth more than they increase it, and so the net effect of their lives is the decrease of truth. Moral persons only increase truth and never decrease it. Immoral persons only decrease truth and never increase it.

It should be noted that a person has three and only three options in regard to truth: he can (1) increase truth, (2) decrease truth, and (3) not affect truth. In real life almost everything we do will either increase or decrease truth. Trivia is, therefore, an ideal concept which is used in a relative sense for actions which have very little effect on truth. Similarly, in real life almost no one becomes totally moral or immoral. These are also ideal concepts which are used in a relative sense to describe persons who are highly ethical and highly unethical respectively. Absolute morality is a state to which we can always get closer as we become increasingly ethical, but we can never fully reach it without a quantum jump across the threshold of morality. Ethical Therapy can help us make this quantum jump.

Ethical Therapy is a process for increasing morality. Morality is the desire for truth. Morality is the basis of all creativity. The more ethical a person is the more creative he will be for a given level of intelligence. By seeking objective truth as our sole goal, we maximize creativity, because truth can only grow when there is creativity.

 

Creativity

We defined creativity as "the organization of the environment into new patterns which increase the collective ability of mankind to predict and control the total environment." By this definition any new technology or scientific discovery is a product of creative endeavor. However, teaching truth is also creative because here we have organized the environment, i.e., the student's mind, into a new pattern which increases his ability to predict and control his total environment.

By similar reasoning, works of art are also a result of creativity because their perception reorganizes persons' minds into new patterns which increase their ability to predict and control. In the case of the effects of art, the reorganization occurs mainly at the unconscious level as opposed to the conscious reorganizations of science, technology and teaching. However, the result is the same. The greater the art perceived, the greater the increase in the ability to predict and control the total environment. The reasoning behind the creative nature of the artistic processes is discussed elsewhere (50). However, the fact that exposure to great art increases the ability to predict and control could be objectively demonstrated by controlled experiments.

Hypothesis: Children raised in an environment replete with great art, e.g., the music of Bach, Beethoven and Penderecki, the paintings of El Greco, Rembrandt and Picasso, and the literature of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, should be better able to predict and control their total environment than a statistically matched group of children raised in a similar environment devoid of artistic stimuli. Although a controlled experiment of this nature has never been done, there is considerable clinical evidence that this is the case (50).

The above hypothesized relationships between truth and artistic beauty need scientific verification. For the time being we will use these stated relationships merely as working hypotheses. Intuitively we subscribe to the ancient wisdom that truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.

As was indicated earlier, creativity is the best evidence of health. It is also the best objective evidence of ethics. Unethical persons, i.e., persons who have happiness as their prime basic goal, are by definition uncreative in their net effects and may be destructive. To destroy is to disorganize the environment into patterns which decrease our ability to predict and control the total environment.

Since unethical persons are at best uncreative and at worst destructive, it is unethical to waste energy by increasing their ability to predict and control. The net effect of increasing the ability of unethical persons to predict and control is to decrease the collective ability of humanity to predict and control. Immoral persons are by definition always destructive and should always be avoided. By avoiding unethical persons, we increase the collective creativity of the human race. This is the case because by avoiding unethical and immoral persons we deprive them of intelligence and the power to destroy, since they can only obtain power and intelligence by using the creativity of other persons for their own purposes. Since the net effect of unethical persons is destructive, denying them intelligence and power decreases destruction, i.e., increases creativity. These relationships are expressed in the following equation:

Equation 1: C ~ IE

Where: C = Creativity, in quanta of knowledge generated per hour, Range: minus infinity to plus infinity

I = Intelligence, in quanta of knowledge controlled per hour, Range: Zero to infinity

E = Ethics, dimensionless ratio Range: (-1, O) for an unethical person, (O, 1) for an ethical person, -1 for an immoral person, O for a trivial person, 1 for a moral person.

~ Indicates an approximation

Destructiveness is negative creativity

As is indicated in Equation 1, creativity is a function of both ethics and intelligence. Recall that intelligence is the ability to predict and control the total environment. All ethical persons are creative. However, a highly ethical person of low intelligence may not be as creative as a less ethical person of high intelligence. Since a moral person has truth as his sole basic goal, he considers neither his nor anyone else's happiness when making decisions or taking actions. He is always creative.

Moral persons are probably quite rare in human history. When they appear, they seem to shake the world with their creativity. Most of the founders of the great world religions and ethical systems seem to have been highly ethical men whose work became corrupted by the less ethical men who succeeded them. This seems to have been the case with Moses, Confucius, Zarathustra, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and Luther. In our own day, we have seen it happen to Marx.

Moral persons may be highly creative even when their intelligence is less than extraordinary. However, it seems to take a minimum intelligence of a fairly high order to become moral, just as it takes a human level of intelligence to become ethical. Clearly no subhuman animal is ethical, because no subhuman animal creates systematically. When unethical persons are highly intelligent, they use their ability to predict and control to destroy. Immoral persons are usually highly intelligent and highly destructive.

From our definitions it follows that highly ethical persons are healthy and that unethical persons are neurotic. Examples of highly intelligent, unethical men in our own time are Stalin and Hitler. Both were neurotic. Hitler, who was probably more intelligent and imaginative than Stalin, was also more neurotic, unethical and destructive. The relationships between ethics, intelligence, creativity, neurosis and Ethical Therapy may now be discussed.