The previous chapter developed a general ethical theory at a somewhat abstract, but still simple, nonrigorous level. In this and subsequent chapters we will discuss how these abstractions can be applied to our everyday lives in order to become less neurotic and more creative. In order to obviate the necessity of continuously referring to the previous and subsequent chapters, the basic definitions, axioms and theorems of psychofraud and Ethical Therapy are summarized in the Appendix. These include points which are still to be developed in this and the following chapters.

 

Therapy and Ethics

Systems of ethics and psychotherapy have in common the fact that they both try to change human behavior. Some psychotherapies claim that they are "value free"; however, this is often a specious claim since virtually all psychotherapists differentiate between normal and abnormal behavior. This is a value judgement.

Ethical Therapy does not try to change basic values but rather redirects the person to emphasize the innate value of objective truth and Reemphasize the innate value of happiness. When the person has no value other than objective truth, Ethical Therapy has fully succeeded and can go no farther.

In practicing Ethical Therapy it must always be kept in mind that this, like psychotherapy, is a special type of education. The object of Ethical Therapy is to replace information which decreases objective truth, i.e., decreases our ability to predict and control, with information which increases objective truth. This may not be possible when the person already values happiness above truth. When this is the case, the person will resist the elimination of delusions which make him happy. Some distortions of reality may be altered, if this does not adversely affect his happiness. However, neither Ethical Therapy nor any other treatment is likely to alter the basic value that happiness is more important than truth. For this reason unethical persons can probably never be made ethical and mentally healthy. They have irreversible entropy.

 

Entropy

Intuitively "entropy" is the decrease in the order and coherent information of a system. When we take a sculpture and smash it to pieces we have increased the entropy of that system. When a book is burned, the entropy in that system has increased. When a living creature is ill or damaged, then that system has increased its entropy. When a living creature dies, then it has reached maximum irreversible entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that in all closed systems the entropy is always increasing, i.e., entropy is always irreversible. However, this law, like all scientific laws, is only an approximation to reality.

Every system is in various ways connected to every other system. The universe is an interconnected whole. Therefore, no system is ever completely closed, including the universe (51). However, some systems, such as the solar system, appear to be, for all practical purposes, closed, since they are very little affected by outside forces. Living creatures are also, in a sense, closed and autonomous; however, they appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Living creatures clearly decrease their entropy as they grow, i.e., they increase their coherent information. Eventually all life forms begin to decay and die; therefore, the second law eventually catches up with all of us. However, while they are growing, the information content of all life forms is increasing. This is shown in part by an increase in the size of the body, but most notably by an increase in the information content of the nervous system, which becomes increasingly complex as animals mature. Even if the actual number of nerve cells decreases, each individual cell and the connections between them become increasingly complex as the organism grows. A concomitant of this is an increase in the ability of the animal to predict and control.

An obvious explanation of this phenomenon is that living creatures are in dynamic contact with the rest of the environment and that they increase their information content by taking information from the rest of the environment and making it become a part of themselves. Nutrition is an obvious example of this. Learning is a less obvious example. In laboratory experiments it can be shown that the net entropy of a closed or nearly closed system which contains and includes living growing creatures is in fact increasing. However, human evolution has another component. Man is creative; he can produce more information than he consumes, although he may not always do so. That this is the case involves very complex arguments beyond the scope of this book but which are presented elsewhere (51). The fact is that man can overcome entropy through ethics.

Evolution in the larger sense involves a decrease in the entropy of the biomass, not necessarily in the solar system. While the increase in the coherent information of the biomass may be at the expense of the useful energy of the rest of the solar system, the evolution of man can transcend dependence on the solar system, as has been shown (50, 51). This transcendence results from ethics.

Objective ethics are systems of optimal behavioral rules for decreasing the entropy of a sentient species. Another way of saying the same thing is that ethics are rules for best increasing the total coherent information content, i.e., objective truth in the human species. This is most clearly shown in the cultural evolution of our species. When segments of the human species, such as civilizations, systematically incorporate unethical rules of behavior, either de facto or de jure, then such segments have irreversible entropy and they die, usually at the hands of a more progressive civilization. In this way ethical and psychosocial evolution progress through natural selection. The essential difference between unethical and ethical civilizations is that the former puts a higher premium on happiness than on objective truth, while the latter puts a higher premium on objective truth. We have examples of ancient ethical civilizations, such as the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Indians, which were, as societies, highly creative and which then became entropic. All of these societies became highly mystical and became obsessed with subjective truth and happiness as they began to undergo ethical decay.

Although all civilizations have had mystical components at all times, it may be generalized that all civilizations become highly mystical just before they begin to undergo irreversible entropy. They have institutionalized their psychofraud in an irreversible process which turns the society into a closed system and eventually results in the destruction of that civilization by unavoidable outside reality. This is beginning to happen to Western Civilization today.

How and why this happens is discussed elsewhere (50, 51). The important points to be made here are that (1) from an evolutionary, ethical point of view, it is best that entropic systems destroy themselves and (2) individual human beings represent a microcosm of the evolution and entropic decay of human societies. Human societies decay only because individual persons decay until unethical persons represent a growing majority of the population. At this point the civilization in effect commits suicide (50). Similarly, when an individual person has incorporated a majority of psycho-fraudulent models into his mind, he in effect commits ethical suicide by closing his mind to outside reality.

The entropic decay of the person begins when he makes a choice to seek happiness at the expense of objective truth. For young children this is not a choice which can be made, because the alternatives are not yet clear. Therefore, young children are all ethical and grow in creativity. But sometime after early adolescence most persons seem to make an ethical choice. Once the choice is made, either consciously or unconsciously, then the entropic person will tend to avoid any situation which will increase objective truth at the expense of his happiness. Since it is not possible to maintain illusions of happiness without maintaining illusions about one's self and one's relationship to the universe, the unethical person will incorporate ideology and psychofraud as ways of maintaining his illusions. He will resist violently any threat to his illusions by persecuting ideological heretics or at least avoiding them. It should be noted that although all unethical persons are filled with illusions and need neurotic illusions to be happy, not all persons who have illusions and are neurotic are unethical. Ethical persons abandon their illusions when they see that they are in conflict with objective truth. They become less neurotic. Unethical persons create new illusions when confronted with unpleasant objective truth. They become ever more neurotic and destructive.

The above is clearly seen in religious persecutions when unethical religious authorities have temporal power. We see it today in the Soviet Union where one form of psychofraud — the Orthodox church, Czarism, etc. — was replaced through force by another — communism. It is interesting to speculate what type of society might have been created by a group of psychotherapists with a common form of psychofraud, if they were given temporal power. Skinner has already indicated the type of society he would create. So far his political naivete has spared us one more enforced form of psychofraud. However, for the unethical person, this is not the problem. He is his own worst enemy.

Since the unethical person, by definition, seeks happiness above objective truth, he can only accept objective truth when it does not cause him unhappiness. Since neuroses, by definition, stem from the incorporation of false information which makes us happy at the cost of decreasing our ability to predict and control the total environment, it logically follows that the unethical person cannot decrease his neurosis. He has become a semi-closed system with irreversible entropy. His attempts to be happy at any cost may eventually make him miserable, but he cannot demolish his illusions once he is on this track. He can only incorporate information which does not cause him unhappiness. He cannot replace the information which produced his neuroses with objective truth.

We can never be certain as to who is ethical or unethical. Therefore, all persons should be treated as if they are ethical until we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But it follows logically that if a person is indeed unethical he cannot benefit from Ethical Therapy in any way, since it will at best only make him unhappy. He may benefit unethically from conventional psychotherapy by being made happy with some new illusions or the reinforcement of his old ones. However, this will not increase his creativity or reduce his neuroses. Unethical persons have ceased to be part of the open evolving system which is humanity; they are beyond the help of Ethical Therapy. They have permanently programmed themselves to be neurotic. However, we all seem to be preprogrammed by our genes to be ethical.

 

Programming

Programming refers to the systematic encoding of information into a system. The human mind is programmed in two ways, (1) by the basic genetic code and (2) by the environment. Our basic genetic program directs us to seek happiness and truth. The Moral Sense causes unhappiness when we are not expanding truth. Through random or planned environmental techniques of reward and punishment, we can become reprogrammed to satisfy the demands of our innate moral program through psychofraud and other forms of self-delusion and thereby indulge almost exclusively in our desires for happiness. When this happens, we become unethical and neurotic. Through similar techniques we can learn that the greatest happiness comes from the expansion of objective truth until we clearly value truth above happiness. When this happens, we become ethical, healthy and creative.

While the mind is almost certainly an effect of the body, particularly the brain, it is also clear that the mind can affect the body. This is demonstrated in psychosomatic illness, hypnosis and conditioning. Therefore, the mind can re-program itself. It can reprogram itself to become increasingly unethical or ethical. But, for reasons given in the previous sections, the unethical person has lost his ability for auto-programming in the ethical direction. He has irreversible entropy.

Our ability for auto-programming is itself dependent on the outside forces of heredity and environment. Therefore, our freedom of will is relative and not absolute. However, this uniquely human capability for self-programming, which is a consequence of the genetically programmed Moral Sense, enables us to grow in ethical intelligence and creative power so long as we have not perverted the Moral Sense by becoming unethical. Through reprogramming we can overcome our most primitive instincts and emotions, which are neurologically tied to the pleasure centers of the brain and are part of our program to be happy.

 

Emotions

Emotions are preprogrammed patterns of behavior which predispose us to react to situations (1) aggressively, (2) fearfully, or (3) lovingly. To react aggressively to a situation is to seek to destroy, injure, or remove the source of the situation. For example, if someone shoots at us, an aggressive response is to kill, wound or otherwise incapacitate that person, for example, by shackling or imprisonment.

To react fearfully to a situation is to remove ourselves from the situation or to surrender to it. For example, if someone shoots at us, a fearful reaction would be to run, hide, or surrender and put ourselves at the mercy of the person shooting.

To react lovingly to a situation is to reinforce the source of the situation and help it along. For example, if someone shoots at us, a loving response would be to present ourselves as a more visible target or better still, walk up to the person doing the shooting, put the gun against us and pull the trigger.

It is in the nature of emotions that normally (1) aggressive acts generate only aggression or fear, (2) fearful acts generate opportunistic aggression through the display of weakness, fear through contagion or love through sympathy, (3) loving acts generate only love through mutual reinforcement. Neutral situations generate indifference. All situations are seen as aggressive, fearful, loving, or neutral. Therefore, one would ordinarily say that, the Gospels notwithstanding, a person who reacts lovingly when someone shoots at him deliberately is highly neurotic or abnormal, while the aggressive and fearful responses may be normal and healthy. Similarly, to react aggressively or fearfully to a loving situation is also neurotic. Other emotions, such as sorrow, envy, greed, sympathy, and anger, are variations on and combinations of the three prime emotions previously identified.

While the common concept of "emotion" usually includes all these notions, it also includes other vague notions such as "strong subjective feelings," "agitated passions," "extreme joy or happiness" and such specific physiological states as hunger, sexual arousal and pain. However, the definition of emotion given here is quite specific and does not include these other vague notions. A person may be in any or all of these aforementioned states without necessarily experiencing emotion. Furthermore, two persons can behave in exactly the same way in a given situation; yet one person could be motivated by logic while the other person was motivated by emotion. We cannot necessarily infer emotional states from objective behavior. Emotions may someday be able to be put in a one-to-one correspondence with specific physiological states. But until then and perhaps even afterward, we should consider emotion a purely subjective state.

The best objective indicator of destructive emotions is evidenced when a person systematically behaves in such a way that he defeats his own purpose, e.g., when a person kills a "loved" one out of jealousy or commits suicide out of self-pity. This type of behavior is usually called irrational and not merely illogical. Emotionally determined behavior can also be perfectly rational, ethical and creative, as in the case of maternal love or aggressive self-defense against destructive persons. However, we cannot be creative in our emotions sometimes without also being destructive at other times. For example, we may creatively love someone, but at the same time we may be destructively possessive of that person, if we are being guided by our emotions. Emotions can give us benefits—but at a price. Only objective ethics can guide us through life without these contradictions. Only objective ethics can help us overcome destructive emotions, by making all decisions on the basis of what is logically and scientifically ethical and not on the basis of emotional compulsion.

Behavior can be evaluated by objective ethics. Emotions can only be inferred when a person systematically behaves irrationally and contrary to his stated purposes. As long as a person behaves ethically, we cannot be sure whether or not he is emotional. Although we cannot objectively demonstrate emotions, we each know that emotions exist in ourselves because we perceive our own thoughts directly. We logically infer emotions in others from their objective behavior because we can see the relationship between our own emotions and our own behavior. We are most prone to error when we assume specific causes for emotions, as in the case of psychoanalysis.

Given that emotions are real and represent a double-edged sword that can induce both creative and destructive behavior, we are left with the following questions: (1) How can we eliminate destructive emotions? (2) If we eliminate destructive emotions, what happens to creative emotions? and (3) Is there an adequate substitute for creative emotions? We will try to answer all these questions in the following sections and chapters.

The important thing to keep in mind about emotions is that they are preprogrammed. When we react emotionally, we do not reason and logically decide on our course of action. We do what we do automatically, because of certain preprogramming in our nervous system. The only logic involved is in determining whether the situation is aggressive, fearful or loving, and in how we will accomplish our purposes. In our example, the situation was aggressive. However, an insult is also a form of aggression which is more psychological than physical. A fearful situation would be created if we encountered someone screaming in terror and running for his life, but a mere verbal threat may also produce fear. A loving situation would be created if we encountered someone offering us shelter, sustenance, and companionship; however, mere words of kindness may produce a loving situation. We learn from experience which situations are aggressive, fearful or loving. Even the interpretation of a situation may be preprogrammed; it may not involve conscious logic.

Such is the case with chickens who react fearfully to a hawk silhouette even when they have never seen a hawk before, or the fearful reaction of almost all healthy mammals to sudden loud noises even when they have never heard a loud noise before. In this case, both the interpretation and the reaction are preprogrammed. They have been synthesized by the genes and not by experience.

From an evolutionary point of view, it is clear that preprogrammed emotion and interpretation had considerable advantages in natural selection. Chickens who responded automatically to a hawk silhouette were more likely to survive and reproduce than chickens who had to learn from experience that hawks were dangerous. Primitive men who responded aggressively or fearfully to aggressive situations were more likely to survive and reproduce than men who had to learn about these things by trial and error. Mothers who responded lovingly to the fears of their children were more likely to help them survive so that they could become reproductive adults. Humans who were loving toward one another were more likely to help each other survive, mate, and raise healthy children. Therefore, genetically programmed emotions have definite survival value in a primitive environment of Darwinian competition. The problem is what happens when we react emotionally to complex situations which can best be solved through reason and scientific method?

Emotions still have survival value in the modern world. This is particularly true for young children who do not yet have enough knowledge to cope with situations logically and scientifically, let alone in terms of objective ethics. For a young child to react fearfully to strangers, for example, is perfectly normal and probably has survival value in a society replete with psychopaths. However, as the normal child matures he eventually learns to react to strangers with cautious friendliness as a means of increasing his own ability to predict and control. Similarly, we intuitively believe that the behavioral responses of young children, who are almost entirely guided by emotions, are inappropriate for adults. In general, when adults display the same emotional responses as children, we consider them neurotic, or even psychotic in some cases, for example, when they throw homicidal temper tantrums. Therefore, it is intuitively accepted that part of the process of maturing involves substituting logic and reason for emotion in our behavior. Although we may intuitively accept the notion that a normal mature adult is less emotional than a normal young child, it is not so obvious that the more ethical adults are less emotional than the less ethical adults. Other things being equal, i.e., the organic predisposition to emotionalism, it is not at all obvious that emotionalism in adults may be a consequence of ethical immaturity. However, we will show that neurotic emotionalism is unavoidable for unethical persons. In general, the more unethical a person becomes, the more emotional and neurotic he becomes, until he is as destructively emotional as a young child, but without the compensating creative emotions of love, which all young children have as a consequence of being ethical. Furthermore, emotionalism in adults can be much more destructive than in children, because adults are more intelligent and have more power.

To react contrary to genetic, emotional programming is impossible for unethical persons. This is the case because (1) unethical persons value happiness above truth and (2) the satisfaction of emotions always makes persons happy at least temporarily. Emotionally determined desires are the strongest in the unethical person, and their satisfaction brings him the greatest happiness. In other words, he will satisfy his emotions first and expand truth second. When there is a conflict, he will sacrifice objective truth for happiness. However, because as long as an unethical person has not yet become immoral, he also has a need to expand truth, he will fulfill this need through ideology, psychofraud, and subjective truths which are emotionally satisfying. The more illusionary information he incorporates into his mind, i.e., the more neurotic he becomes, the more he must continue to support his illusions with new illusory subjective truths which in turn make him even more neurotic. Eventually the unethical neurotic creates a wall of psychofraud and emotion around all his illusions and completely blinds himself to objective truth. This state can be maintained by (1) remaining ignorant of almost all of science and the scientific method, and (2) by specializing in a field that is so narrow that he never has to relate it to the rest of the world. The ethical person, on the other hand, will thwart his emotions and abandon his illusions when they conflict with objective truth. In this way he grows in objective truth and in the process becomes less emotional and happier. An ethical person can be made unethical only when he is exposed to a destructive, unethical environment in which his search for truth is continuously punished and/or never rewarded. This always happens in totalitarian states but also occurs subtly in democracies (50).

Neither emotions nor happiness are inherently unethical, and each has a role to play in the evolutionary process, both for individuals and for the species. It is only when emotions and happiness are the criteria by which decisions are made that persons and societies become unethical. Happiness and emotions are not the proper criteria for organizing a progressive society or building a healthy and creative life.

The preprogrammed interpretation of a situation is almost completely replaced by learned interpretations in human beings, but the emotional responses, once a situation is interpreted as aggressive, fearful or loving, may still be largely determined by biological programming. Sometimes this programming is only indirectly genetic, e.g., when emotional responses are determined by hormones.

Through the proper administration of hormones to all mammals, including humans, it is possible to completely reverse sexual desires (126). A female rat treated with male hormones shortly after or before birth will develop secondary male characteristics and when mature, will interpret females in estrus as a loving situation and will try to copulate with them. At the same time it will regard male competitors for the females aggressively and it will fight with them. Therefore, a single injection of hormones at a critical time can completely reverse some of the normal emotions of animals for the rest of their lives (162). There is evidence that some human homosexuals might have been subjected to a similar abnormal influx of hormones into their system during gestation because of genetically or environmentally determined hormone imbalances in the fetus or mother (37, 126). The result is that emotions related to the sex drive have become reversed. Homosexuals may be loving and aggressive in ways typical of their opposite sex. In our society, homosexuals have therefore more of an emotional handicap to overcome in ethical development than do heterosexuals; but they have the ethical and moral potential of all persons. The behaviorists as well as some Freudians believe that sexual response is entirely learned. However, the scientific findings given above contradict this.

This does not mean that any mammal cannot be taught to behave homosexually or heterosexually by extreme conditioning techniques. What it means is that sexual behavior is more determined by biological than by the psychosocial programming in almost all naturally occurring cases. When any organism, raised within the normal environmental range of its species, behaves in such a way that when it is given a free choice of mating with its own sex or with the opposite sex, more often than not chooses its own sex, then we say that organism is homosexual. If it chooses the opposite sex, then the organism is heterosexual.

The emotional reaction of many human beings to a complex, scientific society is very much like that of animals who have had their sexually related emotions reversed. Just as an artificially induced hormonal environment of the opposite sex can reverse sexual behavior, so can the artificially induced mechanistic environment of technological society induce behavior appropriate to a more primitive society. Our emotional responses are dependent on how we have learned to interpret a situation. When a situation is potentially dangerous, uncontrollable and unpredictable, a normal response is to react fearfully. As society becomes more complex and dangerous through technology and its misuses, people react fearfully and either flee from it into psychofraud or surrender to it through bureaucracy (50). The net effect is that they do not cope with the real problems, but only satisfy their emotional needs.

Probably the strongest emotional need is that for security, i.e., the absence of aggression or potential aggression. This is derived from our basic need to survive and is in accordance with Maslow's intuitive notions about the hierarchy of needs. Human beings learned early, through genetic and environmental programming, that any power which could not be predicted and controlled was potentially dangerous and resulted in insecurity. Therefore, human beings have an emotional need to predict and control all perceived forces of nature, i.e., to be secure. This represents the shackling or imprisonment, i.e., complete control, of a potential aggressor.

On an emotional level this need can be satisfied by psychofraud. However, science and technology have created a world so complex and dangerous that to attempt to deal with it through psychofraud, while gaining temporary emotional satisfaction, will quickly bring about the ultimate reality of death. Although the psychofraud of sympathetic magic may have given man considerable emotional satisfaction and caused little damage in a primitive environment, to use sympathetic magic or its modern equivalents of psychofraud for dealing with the realities of nuclear war, pollution and genetic decay can only prove disastrous. However, these problems are so complex and apparently beyond the power of most people, that they are now turning to emotionally satisfying ways equivalent to sympathetic magic for dealing with these very real problems, viz. the growing interest in witchcraft and the Jesus movement (46). The psychofraud of neomysticism, Marxism, psychotherapy and most so-called social sciences are the modern equivalents of sympathetic magic. They represent an emotional escape from reality.

The most unpredictable factor in the total environment of modern society is human behavior. It is the unpredictability and uncontrollability of human behavior, particularly that of the political leaders, which makes the fruits of modern science so dangerous. Therefore, any emotionally satisfying variety of psychofraud is accepted if it promises to predict and control human behavior. The fact that the practitioners of these psychofrauds obtain material and emotional security from their practices makes the psychofraud appear even more attractive to those who are seeking happiness, e.g., Arica, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, and other forms of commercial mysticism. All men become complete victims of their emotions when they seek happiness. Only the desire for objective truth can make us transcend emotional determinism.

 

Determinism

Man can sometimes do as he wills, but he can never will as he wills. Our desires are genetically programmed by nature and engendered by our environment. Our wishes, our needs, and our emotions are completely determined by our heredity and the circumstances of our life. The unanswered question throughout the ages has been, How can man control himself if he cannot control his emotions?

The problem of determinism has never been adequately solved, and we are not going to do so now. However, we can do the next best thing which is to show how a person can become free from the tyranny of his own emotions. The act of freeing ourselves from emotional determinism is itself dependent on circumstances beyond our control. But once we have liberated ourselves from destructive emotion, then our lives can be governed by ethics and reason instead of by emotional whims. In the process, we will eliminate all neuroses.

As long as our basic goal is happiness we will be ruled by our emotions. As long as our basic goal is happiness, the net effect of our lives will be unhappiness. As long as our basic goal is happiness, we will feel compelled to satisfy our strongest emotions regardless of the consequences. One of the consequences will be that we will remain neurotic.

We have seen that the only basic desire which can be successfully substituted for happiness is the desire for objective truth. Therefore, if we are to become free of emotional determinism, we must choose objective truth for ourselves and others as our sole goal. This is the most difficult choice that any human being will ever make, because our family, our friends, our teachers, our political leaders, our business associates, indeed our whole society may seem oriented entirely toward the basic goal of happiness. Therefore, how can this choice be made?

 

The Dialectic of Choice

Any choice we make is determined by our minds and our environment. Our minds are determined by our bodies, which in turn are determined by our heredity and our environment. Yet we constantly make choices and feel that they are our choices and that we have free will. From a metaphysical point of view, we know that free will is an illusion and that it may even be a self-contradicting concept. Still we make choices.

We as individuals cause events even though something originating outside ourselves may cause us to cause them. As knowledge, i.e., objective truth, expands, so does the ability to predict and control events, e.g., the scientific revolution of the last 300 years. By increasing our knowledge, we have greatly increased our ability to predict and control the physical, biological and, to a lesser extent, the psychosocial environments. Extrapolating this process to infinity, we see that if we had complete and total knowledge of everything in the universe, we should be able to predict and control everything, including ourselves. In other words, the mind would have become an effect of itself. Our thoughts would not be determined by things outside of ourselves because all things would be a part of us. This is the case because all existence represents information, and to incorporate all knowledge is to incorporate all information (50, 51).

Of course, it may not be feasible to incorporate all knowledge into a single entity, particularly if the universe is infinite, as there is reason to believe that it might be (60, 61). However, our knowledge of objective truth can continue to grow forever. As our knowledge grows, so does our ability to predict and control. In the process we become "freer" because an ever increasing part of all the events in the universe is being caused by us.

Truth can make us free, but it is always a relative freedom. Complete freedom and the absence of all determinism is as impossible as complete, total, infinite knowledge. The choice is whether to grow in freedom and knowledge or to seek happiness.

The act of increasing our knowledge is what enables us to make the choice. Just as a subhuman animal cannot choose objective truth above happiness, neither can an ignorant human being make this choice. What makes the choice of objective truth over happiness a practical reality is that knowledge can grow, although we have happiness as one of our basic goals.

Man has grown in knowledge not so much because he loved truth as because he could not be happy in a competitive environment while he was ignorant. Knowledge gave him power. Power gave him security and happiness. As his power grew, he became increasingly secure from all the vagaries of nature, save threats from his fellowman, who was also growing in knowledge and power. Man has continued to evolve primarily because of competition with his own kind. This has caused him to grow in knowledge and power, but it has also caused him to create the means of his own destruction, because his knowledge of the psychosocial environment has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical and biological environment. Ethical man now has the knowledge to view himself in an evolutionary perspective and see that the pursuit of objective truth as his sole goal is the only means by which he can learn to predict and control himself. Man has the knowledge ethically to reprogram himself, if he has not become unethical by accepting happiness as the prime value of life. Today humanity must become ethical by deliberate choice or it will destroy itself through ethical decay.

The only common denominator in evolution is increasing intelligence through increasing complexity. This increase in complexity and intelligence has been the result of the haphazard process of evolution through random mutations and natural selection. However, the random mutations which led to the uniquely human property of man's having knowledge of his own knowledge decreased the random element in human evolution, since knowledge then could be accumulated through culture and not solely through changes in biological structure resulting from random genetic mutations.

The increase in knowledge led to an increase in intelligence and power, and so eventually human evolution became primarily, not entirely, a psychosocial process. In Julian Huxley's words, "Man has become evolution-conscious of itself." It is this ability to see himself in an evolutionary perspective which enables man to choose objective truth over happiness as his basic goal, if he has not become unethical.

The desire for happiness is programmed into the human nervous system. This is evidenced by the reinforcing properties of all pleasurable sensations in young children. Less obvious is the fact that a desire for truth is also programmed into our nervous system. This is the source of the Moral Sense. It is evidenced by the fact that almost all children learn and grow ethically and by the cultural evolution of the human species. While man existed in the primitive Darwinian competition of prehistory, there was no conflict between his desires for happiness and truth since he could not remain happy unless he grew in knowledge. Modern society, in eliminating all vestiges of Darwinian competition through socialism, has made it possible for all men to be happy through psychofraud.

Psychofraud fulfills man's needs for happiness as well as his need for truth, since we need only believe that we have truth in order to fulfill our need for it and, as a consequence, be happy. However, it is in the nature of psychofraud that in a rapidly changing world our illusions of truth cannot for long be maintained unless we blind ourselves to objective reality. In the democracies, persons are now blinding themselves to reality with the psychofrauds of mysticism, drugs, psychotherapy, social "science," and other alleged ways of "expanding their minds." In the communist states the entrenched bureaucracies maintain their own psychofraud through the brutal suppression of all dissent and criticism of the official ideology. If entropy does not destroy this generation, it will almost certainly destroy future generations, unless we, as a species, deliberately incorporate objective ethical principles.

The pattern of human evolution is that we are tending toward a single, united planetary species. Currently it matters little whether it is a communistic or democratic system of government which prevails, since both systems are (1) socialistic, (2) permeated with psychofraud, and (3) sufficiently developed technologically to create a completely automated society where all persons may continue to reproduce for centuries while living in a state of complete psychofraud. Both systems are entropic.

The last vestige of evolutionary competition is that remaining between the great power blocs. Through assimilation or annihilation, eventually one system — Soviet, Maoist, socialist, ethnocentric (e.g., Japan or a United Europe), etc. — will emerge as the sole government of the earth. If the basic choice between happiness and truth has not been made by then, the human race will decay genetically, because once all competition is eliminated, it will then be possible in a totally automated society for all persons to grow in happiness and reproduce without growing in knowledge (so). This destruction of the ability to perceive objective reality is the antithesis of natural selection; it has meant extinction for thousands of species in the past.

The only reasons for choosing objective truth over happiness as our sole goal are that (1) we perceive ourselves as part of a cosmic process in which knowledge and intelligence have been growing for billions of years and can continue to grow for billions of years more and perhaps forever (50), and (2) only the constant deliberate pursuit of objective truth for ourselves and others can maximize the happiness of the human race. However, in the latter case it is a happiness which comes about indirectly from leading a purposeful life. To a moral person, joy is the trivial consequence of pursuing truth; it is not a basic goal.

The dialectic is between happiness and truth. The choice between the two can only be made by seeing man in an evolutionary perspective. We have the knowledge to make the choice. Only ethical persons who have the intelligence and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge will make the choice. The choice of objective truth as our sole basic goal is the foundation of Ethical Therapy, but this choice can only be made by those who have not been conditioned to desire happiness above truth. The choice can only be made by persons who have remained ethical.

 

The Threshold of Morality

Ethical Therapy is not a universal therapy. It can never work on persons who are unethical, because circumstances beyond their control already forced them to make the wrong choice. Unethical persons will seek to increase their happiness through psychofraud, and they will be impervious to Ethical Therapy, because objective truth will more often than not make them unhappy by making them aware of their own illusions and inadequacies.

Ethical Therapy is only for persons who through fortunate heredity and environment have the intelligence and the inclination to value truth above happiness. These persons are at a threshold of morality. Ethical Therapy can help them cross this threshold. At the threshold is the deliberate choice of objective truth as our sole basic goal.

A behaviorist would say that we need only reward persons suitably whenever they increase knowledge for themselves and others, to achieve our purpose of having those persons constantly expanding the collective ability of the human race to predict and control its total environment. This, however, would only take persons to the threshold of morality; it would not take them beyond it. The threshold of morality can only be crossed by deliberate choice — an ethical quantum lump.

A person who has been conditioned by punishment and/or reward to value and seek truth still has happiness as a basic goal. If the reinforcement is changed so that the pursuit of truth causes pain and brings no pleasure, then ethics can be extinguished as can any other kind of behavior. To cross the threshold of morality is to make a deliberate choice, without coercion or extraneous rewards, to pursue truth as an end in itself and not as a means to an end. To cross the threshold is to develop a state of mind where no pain is greater than the destruction of truth and no joy is greater than the expansion of truth. That this state of mind can be developed is evidenced by the existence of the great moral leaders of history previously mentioned and the many lesser spiritual heroes who preferred to die rather than to live a lie (20, 30, 32, 82, 99, 101, 143).

The crossing of the threshold of morality can be aided by persons who have themselves (1) already crossed it or (2) are close to it; but the final choice is ultimately made alone by each person who crosses. Those who cross have become moral. Those who stand before the threshold are ethical. Ethical persons in general and moral persons in particular may guide us and point the way, but we must take the final step by ourselves. Furthermore, we can never be sure that we have actually crossed the threshold. We will always have doubts that some unbearable pain to ourselves or our loved ones might make us renounce truth for happiness. What happens once the threshold is crossed is that our confidence in our own ethics grows and all our destructive emotions completely vanish. We become devoid of aggression and fear. If we should ever feel these emotions, then we know that we have not yet crossed the threshold. If we ever feel the slightest twinge of anger or anxiety, then we know that we have not crossed the threshold of morality. It is clear that aggression and fear can be destructive, but what of love?

 

Love

Love is a state of mind where the welfare of another person is sufficiently important to us that we are willing to sacrifice some of our welfare for his. To ethical persons in general and moral persons in particular, "welfare" refers solely to the ability to predict and control the total environment now and in the future, since this is the only objective criterion for truth. Theirs is an ethical love. To unethical persons in general and immoral persons in particular welfare is synonymous with happiness. Theirs is a perverse love.

To an unethical person, the greatest good is that which makes for the greatest happiness. Deceit is countenanced if it makes persons happy. The killing of ideological heretics and the suppression of error, i.e., opinions contrary to the established ideology, is countenanced if it brings the masses closer to heavenly happiness, whether it is the supernatural Christian heaven of disembodied souls or the materialistic, worldly heaven of a communist utopia. When unethical persons "love," they will readily sacrifice truth for the happiness of those they "love."

An ethical person finds it difficult and a moral person, impossible to sacrifice truth for anyone's happiness, including his own. An ethical love is, therefore, not a love of passion, but a love of reason. It is similar in concept to the Greek agape or the traditional Christian concept of "love." It does not include the Greek eras or physical love, although sex itself can be ethical. Ethical love gives without seeking to take; it is non-possessive.

Ethical love increases truth by increasing the knowledge and intelligence of others. To cause physical harm to anyone is to decrease his intelligence, i.e., ability to predict and control his environment. Similarly, to teach, cure, nurture and prevent injury is to increase, or at least maintain intelligence. To engage in mutually voluntary sexual contact is to increase intelligence by increasing knowledge of ourselves in others and knowledge of others in ourselves. The biblical euphemism of "knowing" is most appropriate. To create and nurture ethical, healthy, new human life is clearly a way of expanding truth. Therefore, sex when it results from mutual ethical love is ethical. Conversely, rape, prostitution and other forms of sex without ethical love at best only increase happiness and do nothing to expand truth. Sex without ethical love is perversion.

Love can be a preprogrammed pattern of behavior, i.e., an emotion, which begins as a compulsion to behave in such a way that the welfare of others is enhanced. This is most clearly seen in the instinctual maternal love of most female birds and mammals for their offspring. From an evolutionary point of view, this instinctual love helped the species survive, because it usually manifested itself by the nurture and protection of the young. In some higher species, e.g., emus and wolves, love was extended to include the mate as well as the offspring. In the highest mammalian species, e.g., primates, love was sometimes extended to include an entire family or clan. In all these cases, love increased the intelligence of the species. We note that love is virtually nonexistent in species of the reptilian or lower levels of evolution. It is, therefore, a relatively recent programming of the nervous system through genetic mutation and natural selection.

Love is what enabled man to survive as a group and expand knowledge and intelligence through group effort that was beyond the capability of any individual. Love is therefore central to human evolution and to the expansion of truth. The problem is that emotional love is easily perverted by unethical persons and societies so that welfare becomes synonymous with happiness. When this happens, ethical love dies. Perverse love is closely tied to the other basic emotions and is equally destructive. Ethical love is a cool and rational state of mind which is not tied to the other emotions.

When a person becomes moral, he is devoid of perverse love but filled with ethical love which manifests itself in his conscious, deliberate desire to increase the intelligence of other ethical persons even at great cost and discomfort to himself. Only moral persons will die so that truth will live on in persons they have never met. Ethical love is a state of mind which crosses the threshold of morality. But it persists as an unemotional, purified state, completely under rational control. Ethical love is not uncontrolled emotion; it is an energizing force in moral persons, but it is not their master. Only perverse love is uncontrollable. Moral persons are devoid of perverse love and all other emotions.

Therefore, all emotions disappear in moral persons. The ethical love which remains is not, properly speaking, emotion, because it is not preprogrammed, but a result of a rational choice deliberately made when crossing the threshold of morality. It is the goal of Ethical Therapy to make persons moral, not to eliminate emotion. The elimination of emotion is merely a side effect of becoming moral and valuing nothing but objective truth.

To be devoid of emotion is not to be devoid of human warmth, feeling or sensitivity. It merely means that our actions are rationally determined and are not programmed by the primitive portions of the brain. One can be completely devoid of emotions and still be capable of joy, happiness, and affection. Indeed, the greatest happiness comes from leading an ethical and purposeful life. But to a moral person happiness is trivial. Similarly, only an ethical person shows true un-possessive love and affection.

We cannot avoid all destructive emotions in particular without avoiding all emotions in general. However, the elimination of all emotion will enhance creativity, not decrease it. When we lose our emotions through ethical development, we merely lose a way of being happy, as well as a way of being unhappy, as is evidenced in young children maturing. Persons are neurotically attached to their emotions only because of an evolutionarily obsolete need to be happy. They cannot conceive of happiness without emotions. The irony is that true, lasting happiness and joy come from becoming moral, and becoming moral implies the elimination of all emotion. We eliminate emotions not by directly choosing to do so, but by deliberately pursuing objective truth.

Ethical Therapy involves no more than helping persons cross the threshold of morality by deliberately choosing objective truth as their sole goal. They need not even consider emotion. It is a painless process. A person must cross the threshold by himself, but others can help him determine (1) whether he is approaching the threshold and (2) whether he has in fact crossed. We must each be our own pilot across the threshold, but through ethical love we can get help in navigation.

 

Navigation

Navigation is the science of knowing at all times where we are, relative to where we want to be. In crossing the threshold of morality, we must know at all times whether our actions are ethical or unethical. That is to say, we must know whether our behavior is increasing or decreasing objective truth. Without a navigator to help us, we can lose our way and succumb to psychofraud and the belief that we are expanding truth, when in fact we are only expanding illusions and destroying truth.

Man's competition against the forces of nature, animals and his own kind has been an invaluable aid in helping him find his way toward the threshold of morality. The human losers in the competition were usually more prone to psychofraud than the winners, viz., the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism, the triumph of Europe over Islam, the triumph of materialistic, rational Western Civilization over the mystical civilizations of the East (50). So long as competition was maintained, mankind had a built-in navigator guiding his evolution. However, the competition is now about to end either through annihilation or the hegemony of one sociopolitical system over all nations. Furthermore, the trend in all the existing systems is to eliminate all forms of internal and external competition. Competition is eliminated by monolithic bureaucracies with monopolies of function. This is the case in both so-called communistic and capitalistic societies. Internal competition is eliminated by psychofraud.

Human competition is seen as something evil and destructive by many of the thoughtful young. Clearly competition only makes some of the victors happy. It never makes the losers happy, and in a Darwinian setting, almost all lose. So long as happiness is a basic goal, competition cannot be justified, and man will seek to destroy his only means of navigation. The only way to solve the dilemma is to change the nature of the competition.

 

Creative Competition

Creative competition is a necessary process for navigating and crossing the threshold of morality. All competition has a creative element, but Darwinian competition also has what may appear to be destructive elements, since Darwinian competition leads to the extinction of a life-form or a whole class of life-forms. However, in the broader context of the total information, knowledge and intelligence of the biomass, the net effect of Darwinian competition is creative; it decreases entropy.

In order to navigate to and through the threshold of morality, we must apply creative Darwinian competition to our own thoughts so that thoughts which are true grow and multiply and thoughts which are false perish. We must do this collectively as a society and as individuals. The social aspects of creative competition are presented elsewhere (50). Here we will only discuss the individual aspects of creative competition.

Each thought we have represents a subjective model of some aspect of nature. Insofar as our thoughts bear a true relationship to objective reality, they will enable us to predict and control that aspect of nature of which they are a model. Because no part of nature exists completely independently of any other part and nature is itself infinite in either a real or a practical sense, our models of nature will always be incomplete and lead to errors in our efforts to predict and control. When these errors are tied to emotions, we say that a person is "neurotic." When these errors are of a purely factual or logical nature, we say that the person is "lacking intelligence." By purely scientific means we can continuously reduce the errors which result from a lack of intelligence, although we can never eliminate them entirely. With Ethical Therapy we can eliminate all the errors which result from neuroses.

Our neurotic thoughts are those thoughts we cherish solely because they make us happy. Objective reality has no bearing on neurotic thoughts once they have been engendered. Indeed, when neurotic thoughts conflict with those which are in accordance with objective reality, a common practice is to reject reality and hold on to the neurotic thoughts. If this is done systematically on a grand scale, then we say the person is "psychotic." Our neurotic thoughts are therefore in constant competition with our true thoughts. Creative competition in thought means that our neurotic thoughts perish and our true thoughts grow and multiply.

Since neurotic thoughts are maintained only as means of being happy, the elimination of happiness as a basic goal will eliminate all neurotic thoughts. Once neurotic thoughts have been eliminated, competition between thoughts can be entirely creative. Natural selection will eliminate thoughts which are in conflict with other thoughts which better enable us to predict and control objective reality. The question is how do we first begin to eliminate neurotic thoughts?

 

Ending Neuroses

If the behaviorists were correct in assuming that all behavior results entirely from operant conditioning through reward and punishment, then there would be no hope of producing moral persons and completely eliminating neuroses. This would be the case because persons would be unable to transcend the pleasure principle. The fact that throughout the ages there have been moral persons who were willing to stand entirely alone and suffer ignominy, torture, and death for the sake of truth disproves the basic behaviorist contention.

Morality cannot be extinguished. Ethics can be extinguished only in people who are not yet moral. The facts that (1) moral persons are very rare and (2) the vast majority of mankind apparently has never gone beyond the pleasure principle, indicate that there is a great deal of truth to the behaviorist model and that conditioning techniques can shape much of human behavior and probably all animal behavior.

Through simple techniques of reward and punishment, but mostly through proper rewards (137, 138), we can end many neurotic patterns of behavior such as phobias, compulsive smoking and drinking, bed-wetting and even some sexual aberrations (77, 111, 118, 170, 171). However, the vast majority of persons go to psychotherapists not for these more straightforward and clear-cut problems, but because they are unhappy (42, 43, 28, 71, 146). As noted earlier, they need a friend, even a paid friend (129). It is a feeling of generalized anxiety and depression, or more aptly, "demoralization," which is the overwhelming symptom of neurotics (42, 43, 71). It is these generalized, non-behaviorial, emotional states which impede their productivity and creativity. Behaviorism does not even recognize these or any other mental states. It can only treat clear-cut behavioral disorders with clear-cut symptoms. However, psychofraud thrives on these vague emotional disorders. Psychofraud can and sometimes does bring emotional peace and happiness. Ethical Therapy can do the same.

Psychofraud relieves anxiety through self-delusion; it is the thought that he understands the source of his emotions which makes them tractable to the neurotic. However, the psychofraudulent mode of therapy is not aimed at increasing creativity or making persons moral. It does not take persons beyond the pleasure principle. It does not, nor does it seek to, eliminate emotions. Indeed, most forms of psychofraud celebrate emotions and seek merely to help their patients give full vent to them and express them more freely (65, 66, 74, 89, 132, 179). However, any victim of psychofraud will have his equanimity collapse as soon as his illusions come into unavoidable conflict with reality. For this reason psychotherapists and their patients have a suicide rate which is more than 50 times that of the general population (40, 47, 48, 158, 178). For this reason, it appears that psychotherapists are among the most neurotic members of society and do themselves require constant "therapeutic" treatment to reinforce their psychofraud (24, 47, 81, 115).

Ethical Therapy involves using simple conditioning techniques and suggestion to eliminate simple bad habits and create simple good ones. In this respect there is a wide overlap among behavior therapy, hypnotherapy, and Ethical Therapy. Ethical Therapy also seeks to provide ethical friendship as does classical therapy. What is unique to Ethical Therapy is that it seeks to eliminate anxiety and all destructive emotions indirectly by reorienting the person's value system toward the sole value of objective truth. This can be done in the following ways:

• 1. The person must realize that much of his behavior, as currently manifested, has no other objective than to make him happy.
• 2. The person must then realize that the desire for truth is inherent to him and is as much a part of his nature as his desire for happiness.
• 3. The person must then learn to see himself in an evolutionary perspective where the only common denominator to all of evolution is increasing intelligence through increasing complexity and information.
• 4. The person must then see that the pursuit of happiness is a frustrating and self-defeating goal which can only lead to unhappiness.
• 5. The person must then deliberately and consciously begin to make decisions on the basis of what maximizes truth and not on the basis of what maximizes happiness.
• 6. Once the decisions of his everyday life begin to have a conscious ethical basis, the person will begin to feel a relaxation of anxiety because he now has an objective way of making decisions and he need no longer have emotional conflicts, since objective truth is independent of his emotions.
• 7. The application of ethical principles to his everyday decisions will bring him closer to the threshold of morality until he crosses it through an act of will, the ethical quantum jump.
• 8. The main role of the Ethical Therapist is to be a navigator and help the person analyze his decisions in the light of objective truth by seeing if these decisions are violating ethical principles.

 

Ethical Principles

Given that the prime ethic is Each person must do his best to maximize objective truth then a personal ethical code is logically derivable from this ethic. For example, it follows immediately that lying, for any purpose, is always unethical, since it diminishes objective truth. However, it does not logically follow that we must tell the truth to everyone. We must never lie, but we should speak the truth only to ethical persons who themselves seek to expand objective truth and will use the information we give them for that purpose. To persons we deem unethical or engaged in unethical purposes, we should speak neither lies nor truth, but remain uncommunicative. For example, it is unethical to tell a potential murderer where his intended victim is hiding, but it is also unethical to lie to him. We should remain uncommunicative, even if it costs us our lives. By giving false information we always diminish truth. By giving true information to unethical persons we increase their intelligence and ability to destroy truth. This is why unethical persons should be avoided. We must never cooperate in any way with evil.

A heuristic, nonrigorous, but detailed derivation of ethical principles is given elsewhere (50). A completely rigorous derivation of ethical principles is beyond the scope of a popular book (51). Here we will merely state the basic principles which follow from the prime ethic and then show how to apply them. They are as follows:

• 1. Only actions which increase objective truth are ethical.
• 2. Any action which decreases objective truth for any person is unethical.
• 3. Unethical means can never achieve ethical ends.
• 4. Means which are not ends are never ethical.
• 5. It is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior.
• 6. It is unethical to be certain.
• 7. It is ethical to doubt.
• 8. Inaction is unethical.

Now we will consider these principles one by one to see what they mean and then give examples of their use.

First Principle: Only actions which increase objective truth are ethical.

Clearly the first principle follows directly from the prime ethic, since if we waste energy and resources on activities which do not expand knowledge and intelligence, we are not maximizing objective truth. Any action which neither increases nor decreases truth is merely trivial, but it is unethical to waste resources on trivial activity, since by definition trivial activity can do no more than increase happiness. The more resources, including parts of our life, we waste, the less capable we are of expanding truth.

To learn, to teach and to create are the only bases of ethical behavior. To communicate objective or subjective truth to any ethical person is always ethical because this increases the collective ability of the human race to predict and control the total environment. To nurture and heal ethical persons is ethical because this expands or maintains their intelligence. In short, to be loving with any ethical person is always ethical.

Second Principle: Any action which decreases objective truth for any person is unethical.

It is always unethical to diminish truth for any person, because we can never increase truth by diminishing it. Because all of nature is an interconnected whole, to degrade any part of it is to degrade all of it. Because we are an interdependent species, to diminish truth for any person is to diminish it for all persons. Therefore, it is clearly unethical to lie to or to maliciously hurt any person in any way. It is also unethical to increase the intelligence of unethical persons, because this will increase their power to destroy and will lead to a decrease in objective truth.

Third Principle: Unethical means can never achieve ethical ends.

It follows immediately from the first and the second principles that unethical means can never achieve ethical ends. This is the case because only the expansion of truth is ethical, and any unethical means will necessitate the destruction of truth. As in the second principle, we cannot expand truth by diminishing it. Therefore, it is unethical to lie to or maliciously hurt a single ethical person, even if we feel it might save our lives or the lives of the entire human race. To deliberately destroy or in any way diminish a single innocent, ethical life for the alleged welfare of any group, no matter how large and progressive, is always unethical. In the long run, it must diminish the welfare of the group it was supposed to help.

It follows immediately that slavery or any form of involuntary servitude, such as the draft system, is an absolute wrong which can never be justified, because to diminish any person's freedom is to diminish him as a human being and to diminish truth. A historical example of unethical means bringing about unethical ends in the long run is in the institution of chattel slavery in the southern United States. The greatest harm done by slavery was not to the slaves, who were still abundantly harmed, but to the masters and their progeny, who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of slavery; i.e., their awareness was supposed to be increased as was the awareness of the slaves who supposedly were saved from a life of savagery and brought the fruits of Christianity and Western Civilization. The damage of the Civil War alone was greater than any economic benefit that the masters ever obtained from slavery. The damage of a segregated, insular society produced as the aftermath of slavery has impeded the intellectual, cultural and industrial development of the South to this very day. The political turmoil, social chaos and anguish brought about by the attempts to correct the lingering effects of slavery, e.g., segregation, is the most divisive and destructive force in American society. The Americans of today are still paying and will continue to pay for the ethical mistakes of their ancestors, who used unethical means to achieve what they thought to be ethical ends. In an evolutionary perspective, the sins of the fathers are always visited upon their progeny even unto the tenth generation.

History is replete with many similar examples of unethical means never achieving ethical ends, the most recent one being the disaster of the American Indo-China war where the attempt to support one corrupt, military dictatorship against another led to the most divisive, destructive and costly war experienced by the Americans since their Civil War. Unethical means can never achieve ethical ends for society or the individual.

Fourth Principle: Means which are not ends are never ethical.

This principle follows directly from the third principle. Since the only ethical end is to expand truth, and unethical means can never expand truth, a means which is not an end is any means which does not expand truth. Such means are at best trivial and at worst unethical. Therefore, if our means are to be ethical, they must be ethical ends in themselves and not merely expedient means to an end. Trivial means can at best only bring about trivial results. As was shown previously, unethical means only bring about unethical results.

An example of a means which is not an ethical end but which becomes the central goal for most of mankind is the accumulation of wealth and power. Many thoughtful and ethical persons claim that riches are not their ultimate goal, but only a temporary means so that they can then have the wealth and the power to do what they want. However, it is inherent in human nature that, through a process of conditioning, the means—whether they are ethical, unethical or trivial—invariably become the ends. Therefore, persons who seek to maximize their wealth invariably become so obsessed with making money that before they know it their lives are over and all they have to show for it is a lot of money, which more often than not corrupts and destroys their children by taking away their opportunity to compete.

We see trivial and unethical means becoming ultimate ends among religious groups which practice ritualistic behavior until the ritual becomes the most important part of their lives and they cease to expand truth for themselves or others, e.g., dietary laws.

Only means which expand objective truth are ethical. Only the expansion of truth can be both the means and the end of ethical persons.

Fifth Principle: It is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior.

It is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior, because to tolerate it is to allow truth to be diminished. The prime ethic is that we must maximize truth. If we are to maximize truth, we must be creative and prevent destruction. It follows from the second law of thermodynamics that merely not preventing destruction is sufficient for everything in a closed system to be destroyed. For all practical purposes, human society is currently a closed system, little influenced by forces outside the solar system. If we tolerate destructive behavior among us, we will ourselves be destroyed and we will have failed to maximize truth. Therefore, it is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior.

If we passively allow ourselves to be deceived or injured, we are tolerating unethical behavior and being unethical. Therefore, we are ethically bound to defend ourselves against unethical persons. Only an unethical person would seek to destroy, and it is ethical to eliminate any destructive force. We can never be certain who is ethical, but the probabilities are such that if (1) we are ethical and (2) we are doing our best to behave ethically and (3) someone deliberately tries to deceive us or injure us, then that person is unethical. For reasons previously given, we should avoid unethical persons even if the only way to avoid them is by force. For example, if someone is trying to murder us, then we should use force to defend ourselves even to the point of causing severe or permanent harm to our aggressor. In so doing we are being ethical by eliminating a destructive force from our midst which would eventually probably destroy more than merely ourselves. However, the use of force is only justified when we are in imminent peril and are ourselves being subjected to unethical force. Because we can never be certain, we must engage in passive avoidance of unethical persons whenever possible and use force only as a last resort to protect our own intelligence and that of other ethical persons. The critical point is that we are never certain.

Sixth Principle: It is unethical to be certain.

It is unethical to be certain because it is objectively false to presume that we have complete information on any subject. Since everything in the universe is interrelated and we have only a small amount of information on any subject, we are always subject to errors. We objectively know that this is the case because we always make errors, however small, in all our attempts at precise prediction and control of nature. That part of the environment about which we make the most errors is the psychosocial, i.e., human behavior. Therefore, we must be most skeptical about any models which purport to predict and control human behavior, including Ethical Therapy, because (1) these models are almost never objectively tested and (2) when they are tested, they always have a great deal of error.

Because it is unethical to be certain, it is unethical to kill, injure or imprison human beings simply because our model tells us that they are unethical and that the net effect of their lives will be to decrease truth. If we believe that this is the case, we should avoid such persons and exile them from our midst when they have shown a systematic pattern of decreasing other persons' ability to predict and control (50). It is only when we feel almost certain that we or someone else is about to be forcefully, imminently and deliberately injured by an unethical person that force is justified. Even then, we must realize that we might be making a mistake in that truth may be destroyed for another in our attempt to preserve truth for ourselves. We must never lose all doubt.

Seventh Principle: It is ethical to doubt.

It is ethical to doubt, because we can only learn when we have doubts. Once a person has no doubts about any subject, that person has ceased to learn about that subject. All actions are either ethical, unethical or trivial. Since it is unethical to be certain, it is either trivial or ethical to doubt. Since learning is always ethical, doubting is always ethical and never trivial.

Persons only succumb to psychofraud when they lose their doubts. The Inquisition would not have burned heretics and the Nazis would not have massacred Jews if they had any doubts about their respective kinds of psychofraud. It is only when doubt is destroyed that truth is destroyed.

It was because Einstein doubted the sufficiency of the explanations of Newtonian mechanics that he created the theory of relativity. It is because Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and finally Newton doubted the sufficiency of the Ptolomeic model of the universe that Newton created his general theory of gravitation. It was because the leaders of the Catholic Church had no doubts, that they burned Giordano Bruno and forced Galileo to recant. Doubt is the basis of truth. Systematic doubt is the basis of science. Science is the basis of all ethical action.

Eighth Principle: Inaction is unethical.

Inaction is unethical, because truth cannot be expanded passively. Truth is either forcefully expanded or it is destroyed by entropy (second law of thermodynamics). The old adage, It is only necessary for good men to do nothing in order for evil to triumph, is also derivable from objective ethical principles. We can neither expand truth nor eliminate unethical behavior without action. Therefore, inaction is not merely trivial, it is unethical. If no action is taken, truth will surely diminish. Since the prime ethic is that each person must do his best to expand truth, each person is individually responsible for taking ethical action.

The minimum action that must be taken is the expansion of truth for ourselves. No one can teach what he does not know. If we do not learn, we will never help others learn. However, a life devoted entirely to self-centered learning, while ethical, can never be moral. If we do not teach others what we have learned, truth will die with our lives and truth will not be maximized. We live on only in the truth we engender in others. The action of acquiring objective truth for ourselves will take us to the threshold of morality. But no one crosses the threshold who does not also act to expand truth for all mankind.

 

Applying Ethical Principles

The eight ethical principles given in the previous section are the necessary navigation rules that each person needs in order to cross the threshold of morality. These principles are logically derivable (50, 51) from the single prime ethic,

Each person must do his best to maximize objective truth.

The prime ethic itself is not logically derivable. It is an ultimate basic goal; and such goals have no basis in logic, since they are ends in themselves and not means to any end. Logic can tell us whether our means are consistent with our ends, but it cannot tell us what our ends should be. However, logic can also tell us whether our ends are themselves consistent. In the previous chapter (50) we have seen that (1) happiness is a logically inconsistent end whose deliberate and exclusive pursuit can only lead to death, (2) mankind has only two basic goals, happiness and truth, and (3) the deliberate pursuit of objective truth as an end in itself will maximize both truth and happiness. Therefore, it is logical that humanity should choose objective truth as its sole goal irrespective of whether its basic objective is truth or happiness. However, the nature of man is such that if he has chosen happiness as his primary objective, he will delude himself with psychofraud and through emotion destroy his ability to logically cope with his own problems. This is neurosis, the epidemic disease of modern man, who has built a society on the foundation of psychofraud.

Although psychofraud is the foundation of modern society, the walls and all the superstructure are built by science. Science gives us our tools and power; but, for the majority of mankind, their reasons for existence, their guiding purposes and the basis for their happiness stem from psychofraud.

Ethical Therapy is a means for recasting the foundations of our society without destroying the superstructures. Ethical Therapy is a means which is an end. The specific techniques, e.g., ethical principles, may be in partial, logical error, but they cannot be in total error, because all the means are ends in themselves and all the same end—to expand objective truth as best we can. The very act of deliberately trying to expand objective truth will correct any errors in our means. The simple act of deliberately trying to expand objective truth as best we can will lead us to the threshold of morality and beyond, where all neuroses disappear and true joy is found in the infinite expansion of the human mind.