There is no guarantee that Ethical Therapy will work for anyone. If the ethical theory of chapter 6 is correct, then Ethical Therapy will definitely not work for unethical or highly neurotic persons, to say nothing of psychotics. The main purpose of Ethical Therapy is not to remove neuroses, but to prevent them. It is a type of inoculation which will protect healthy persons, but it will not necessarily cure neurotics. If the theory is correct, then healthy persons can remove their residual neuroses through Ethical Therapy. That is to say, persons who already value truth above happiness can be made free of all neuroses by crossing the threshold of morality. That this is the case is evidenced by (1) the historical example of great moral leaders, and (2) the subjective clinical evidence of the few who have tried Ethical Therapy and found that it seemed to work for them. However, this is not scientific proof.

In science, as in Ethical Therapy, one is never certain about the validity of any model of cause-and-effect relationships.

As evidence favoring a model accumulates, one becomes more confident that the model may be true, but one can neither logically nor ethically ever lose all doubts. Once doubts are lost, truth dies.

Insofar as models fail to be validated by controlled experiments, we should become ever more dubious about the truth of the model. Because it is much easier to construct apparently logical, coherent models which are false than to construct models which are true, we should assume that all models are probably false until proven true. Since no model is ever proven completely true, the ethical and scientific attitude to take is that the evidence supporting a model is merely indicative of some correspondence between the model and reality. Eventually all models can be shown to be inadequate for coping with some aspect of reality, viz., Newtonian Mechanics. For this reason, all models of nature must continuously evolve if truth is to grow. So it must be with Ethical Therapy.

Those who have experienced Ethical Therapy may place a high subjective probability on its validity. Those who have not experienced it should approach it in a spirit of skepticism, not faith. The only way to determine if Ethical Therapy is objectively true is by controlled experimentation.

 

Experimentation

Without controlled experimentation to support it, there is no guarantee that Ethical Therapy is anything more than another form of psychofraud. This is the case no matter how strong our subjective belief about its validity may be. All forms of psychofraud have an abundance of true believers.

Since Ethical Therapy claims to work only for ethical persons, experiments to test its efficacy should be centered on ethical persons. The best objective measures for a person's ethics are the following:

1. Breadth and depth of knowledge for a given degree of intelligence and educational opportunity
2. Index of creativity
3. Index of destructiveness

 

Breadth and Depth of Knowledge

From the definition of ethics, it follows that an ethical person will seek to continuously expand his knowledge. Because knowledge is indivisible and the universe is an interconnected whole, it follows that an ethical person will be more likely to learn many different subjects and not likely to concentrate exclusively on a single subject. The depth of knowledge will depend on the person's intelligence. The breadth of knowledge will depend on his ethics. This gives us our first criteria for selecting experimental and control groups within a democratic society having extensive educational opportunity.

1. Persons who are both highly specialized and highly intelligent are likely to be unethical and as a consequence, neurotic.
2. Highly generalized persons with some depth of knowledge in at least two important, but distinct, subjects are likely to be ethical, irrespective of their intelligence. However, the lower their intelligence for a given amount of knowledge, the more ethical they are likely to be.
3. Intelligent but ignorant persons who have had educational opportunities but failed to use them are likely to be unethical.
4. Persons who are both ignorant and of low intelligence may or may not be ethical.
5. Persons who are highly generalized but have no depth in any area are probably ethical if they are of low intelligence, and probably unethical if they are of high intelligence.

We have no truly good measure of intelligence. However, for the purposes of the experiment which will be proposed, it suffices to use an I.Q. type measure plus measures of imagination and force of will t50). The rationales behind I.Q.'s and their uses are given elsewhere (2, 39, 69). Tests of imagination and will are described in Guilford's Human Intelligence (57) and Anastasi's Psychological Tests (2). For our purposes we will classify persons with I.Q.'s below 90 (S.D. 15)(S.D. = standard deviation. A normally distributed population is concentrated (68 percent) between plus and minus one standard deviation about the mean.) as probably having low intelligence, persons with I.Q.'s above 130 (S.D. 15) as probably having high intelligence, and persons in between as probably having normal intelligence. Finer classification is not meaningful with as crude an instrument as an I.Q. test. Clearly this classification is prone to some error. In general, we will classify persons in the lower 30 percent as "low," persons in the upper 2 percent as "high," and persons in between as "normal."

Given the above crude classification, we divide our experimental and control groups into normal, high and low intelligence persons. We further divide our groups into (1) generalized, (2) specialized, and (3) ignorant persons. For this purpose we can use such tests as the Graduate Record Examination for depth of knowledge in specific subjects and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and the U.S. Army classification tests for breadth of knowledge. The previously mentioned criteria of "low," "high" and "normal" are applied to all scores. We now divide our subjects into the following categories:

I High Intelligence Highly Generalized Depth in at least two distinct areas	II Normal Intelligence Highly Generalized Depth in at least one area
III Low Intelligence Generalized Some Depth in at least one area	IV High and Normal Intelligence Highly Specialized Some Depth only in one area
V High and Normal Intelligence Ignorant No Depth in any area	VI All other persons

In making the above classifications, we control for a normal range of educational opportunity, i.e., access to free or nearly free education through the college level. If someone else—our parents, the state, etc.—pays for our education, it is considered "free." This applies to most persons throughout the U.S. and Western Europe. Persons in categories I, II and III are probably ethical. Persons in categories IV and V are probably unethical. Persons in category VI are in an unknown ethical condition and will not be used in the experiment. We are now ready to further classify by creativity and destructiveness.

 

Creativity and Destructiveness

Creativity and destructiveness are not mutually exclusive characteristics, although they may exist on a single continuum. Some persons are both creative and destructive, e.g., Napoleon, Richard Wagner, Lenin, and Edward Teller. Others are mainly creative, e.g., J. S. Bach, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Still others are almost entirely destructive, e.g., Genghis Khan, Torquemada, Al Capone, and Adolf Hitler. We measure a person's creativity objectively by how much objective truth that person has engendered, i.e., by his net effect in increasing mankind's collective ability to predict and control the total environment. This is a fairly straightforward operation when the person is a scientist or technologist, but it is very difficult to apply to contemporary artists.

The best objective criteria for the quality of art is its durability. The more persons continue to consider a particular work of art "great" over the longest period of time, the greater the art. For contemporary art we must use more subjective criteria. Probably the best criteria for the quality of contemporary art is the amount of praise it receives from persons who are objectively ethical and creative, i.e., outstanding scientists and technologists. This category would almost never include professional critics who have typically been quite blind to what is truly great in art. For example, Grieg was a highly acclaimed composer in the nineteenth century while Beethoven was lambasted during his lifetime for his best work. The same phenomena seems to occur in all the arts—painting, e.g., Rembrandt; literature, e.g., Melville; sculpture, e.g., Rodin; architecture, e.g., Wright, etc. Therefore, if artistic creativity is to be used as a criterion for total creativity, we should rate it on a subjective scale of one to ten by a panel of objectively ethical and creative scientists and technologists. Two heterogeneous panels of given degrees of objective creativity would probably be quite consistent in their artistic rating; e.g., J. S. Bach seems to be the universal favorite composer among outstanding mathematicians and theoretical scientists (182).

The objective ratings of creativity and destructiveness will have three components: (1) the amount of objective truth communicated; (2) the importance of inventions and discoveries; and (3) the importance and number of machines constructed and maintained. In the latter case, the concept of "machine" is quite broad and includes such diverse things as houses, medicines, organizations, computers, languages, weapons, etc.

Educational, economic and engineering criteria may be applied to measure the degree of creativity: (1) the number of students taught and their scores on standardized achievement tests as previously discussed; (2) both the costs of a new invention relative to old ways of doing the same things and the number of new events which can be predicted or controlled by the new invention or scientific theory, (3) the economic return on the building or repair of machines such as vehicles or human bodies, and the amount of knowledge increased per unit cost by the machine as in (1).

The destructiveness measures would be the exact opposites of creativity measures and would include (1) the number of persons misinformed with false information (e.g., the spreading of psychofraud is destructive, since it decreases the ability to predict and control), (2) the number of persons damaged and the degree of this damage (e.g., the number of ethical persons killed or the percent of disability), and (3) the value of the property destroyed.

There are, of course, some outstanding examples of highly destructive persons such as Adolf Hitler. Most persons are not actively destructive in this way. The most common form of human destructiveness is the spreading of psychofraud or deliberate lies. In any case, with some difficulty, an objective index of creativity and destructiveness can be obtained for every person. This index can then be used further to divide our experimental and control groups. By subtracting the destructiveness index from the creativity index, we will have an index of net creativity. The upper 2 percent will be considered creative. The lower 30 percent will be considered uncreative, and the middle 68 percent, normal.

 

Experimental Design

If the ethical theory is correct, there should be a high positive correlation between creativity and ethics. The ethical groups should be much more creative than the unethical groups. The highly intelligent but ignorant group should be the most destructive (see Eq. 1, p. 124).

As the acid test, we divide each of the five groups randomly into several groups of equal size which should be statistically comparable. To one of the groups we apply Ethical Therapy; to the others we apply various placebos, i.e., the full spectrum of psychofraud (religion, classical psychotherapy, humanistic psychology, behaviorism, etc.). At the end of five years, we should begin to see significant differences, although some differences would begin to show immediately. The unethical groups should show no differences in creativity between those treated by Ethical Therapy and those treated by the placebo. Among the ethical groups we should expect to see a significant increase in creativity and knowledge among the group treated by Ethical Therapy over the placebo group. Clearly none of the therapists should know to which group his clients belonged nor should the evaluators of health and creativity—a triple blind placebo control.

Subjectively, the ethical groups treated by Ethical Therapy should report a decrease in anxiety and all emotions in general. Persons associated with this group should find them calmer, kinder and more pleasant to be with.

The ethical groups should, by and large, continue to get healthier than the unethical groups, independently of the therapy, until highly degenerative aging sets in. Conventional psychotherapists who are themselves objectively ethical and healthy should be shown to have a better effect on the ethical groups than their less ethical colleagues. Among the unethical groups there should be no differences as a function of treatment. The unethical groups should show a continuous degeneration of health as a function of age.

This is, of course, only a broad outline of how an experiment to test the validity of Ethical Therapy should be structured. The technical details are beyond the scope of this book. However, if Ethical Therapy is valid, the predictions made above can be verified objectively. Subjectively, any person can verify Ethical Therapy for himself.

Subjective verification will give us subjective, not objective, truth. Therefore, this should be seen as only a first step in the process of objectively verifying the validity of Ethical Therapy. Under no circumstances should a person be satisfied with subjective truth. Rather we should all use our feelings of subjective truth as a stimulus to obtaining objective verification for our hypotheses and theories. However strong our subjective beliefs, we should never cease to doubt them.

 

Auto-Ethical Therapy

We can all administer Ethical Therapy to ourselves by (1) consciously trying to make all decisions in our daily life on the basis of what will maximize objective truth, (2) seeking the company of persons who are or seem to be objectively ethical, i.e., persons in groups I, II, and III, and (3) avoiding persons who are or seem to be objectively unethical, i.e., persons in groups IV and V. The most difficult aspect of auto-Ethical Therapy is in consciously trying to make all decisions on the basis of what maximizes objective truth. Theoretically, all we have to do is apply the eight ethical principles of the previous chapter. This is not always easy to do. It is for this reason that the guidance of an experienced Ethical Therapist is valuable.

An Ethical Therapist is any person who deliberately follows the prime ethic and practices the eight ethical principles. Such a person may be officially designated a "psychotherapist," but more often he will be engaged in objectively creative activity and will not consider himself a psychotherapist. The vast majority of psychotherapists, as we have seen, seem to practice only psychofraud. We undergo Ethical Therapy by associating with an objectively ethical person, working with him or her and learning from him or her. We eliminate neuroses not by seeking psychotherapy but by seeking objective truth.

The most obvious first step to take in auto-Ethical Therapy is simply to educate ourselves as best we can in science, technology and the humanities. Since we are trying to maximize truth, this means we should avoid specialization and try to obtain maximum knowledge and practical experience, breadth and depth, in all the physical, biological and psychosocial sciences and their application, in order to see ourselves and the universe in an integrated evolutionary perspective. As a minimum, a person should strive to have a thorough foundation in mathematics, physical science, biology, music, literature, art, philosophy, and what few objective facts are known in the psychosocial sciences, such as history, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc. One should first obtain the rigorous foundations and then add layers of depth on a broad front.

A more detailed description of an ethical education is given elsewhere (50, 51). Here we will illustrate the application of the criterion of maximizing objective truth to the more personal decisions which must be made. It is by consciously and deliberately making our everyday decisions on the basis of ethical principles that ethics are best self-engendered. AutoEthical Therapy can be illustrated by a few examples.

Example 1

A person, P, is employed by an organization which specializes in doing contract research and development for government agencies and foundations. He is highly regarded by his colleagues and makes a lucrative and secure living with the potential for becoming independently wealthy. P sees that most of his work and that of his organization, although remunerative, is in no way helping any person outside of himself, his organization and the bureaucrats, who are his clients, to be happy. Although he has invented many useful devices and technologies which are highly praised by all his associates, he sees that these inventions are "shelved" by the bureaucrats and that the public, who is supposed to benefit from these developments, receives nothing. The bureaucrats take credit for his work as a means of further entrenching themselves and continue to do nothing creative. The intellectual energy and creative output of his organization, although well remunerated, is in fact being completely wasted, since (1) no one's ability to predict and control is being increased except his own, and (2) incompetent, mendacious, destructive bureaucrats are being entrenched. The choices he has are (1) to continue as he is or (2) to start a company of his own where he can develop worthwhile products which will be sold directly to the public and to industry.

The first choice will bring him the opportunity to (1) be secure, (2) become independently wealthy and (3) do intellectually stimulating work, but it (4) will not maximize objective truth. The second choice involves (1) great risk to his wealth and security and (2) the opportunity to maximize objective truth. Ethically he should take the second choice. If he does not, he will probably become neurotic. If he does, he may lose his money and his security, but he will become healthier and get closer to the threshold of morality. He will have done his best to maximize objective truth.

Example 2

P is now in business for himself and he has made a great success of it economically and ethically. He is developing many worthwhile products which are selling well and enriching him. His work is clearly expanding objective truth. However, he sees his country dominated by ignorant, unethical politicians who are waging highly destructive wars and deceiving the public for no other reason than to personally stay in power. They are doing their utmost to stifle dissent and censor the press. Their policies are such that the educational resources of the nation are withering from lack of financial support and positive direction. The youth of the country is turning more and more to drugs, hedonism and destructive ideology. Something must be done.

The choice before P is to risk his highly ethical and profitable business by becoming politically active or to continue as he is, expanding objective truth, enriching himself and providing security for his family. If he becomes politically active, he may be (1) harassed by the political leaders, (2) abandoned by his business associates, and (3) still probably completely unsuccessful in changing the political system. If he continues as he is, (1) the nation will probably continue to decay, but (2) he will continue to have an interesting, worthwhile and secure life.

The ethical choice is to risk everything in order to bring about ethical political change. Inaction is always unethical, and it is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior. If he does nothing, the unethical politicians will continue to destroy his and other countries until all truth is destroyed. The truth which he can engender by purely technical means can in no way compensate for the truth which is being destroyed through political means. By doing his best to improve the political system, he will also be doing his best to maximize objective truth, even if it costs him his business, his friends, and his very life. He is practicing auto-Ethical Therapy.

Example 3

Person A has to make the simple decision of what to do on Friday night. A has three choices: (1) go to a purely social function with B. who is sexually attractive, intellectually stimulating and a potential mate, and will go nowhere else but to the function, (2) go to a not-to-be-repeated lecture by a world renowned scientist on a very important and interesting subject; or (3) uniquely help the sole ethical political candidate, P. with his campaign for an important political office under circumstances given in example 2.

The ethical choice is the third one. The first choice might provide stimulating company and lead to an ethical mate, but the occasion itself is trivial. If the potential mate is truly ethical, there should be no problem. The second choice would be intellectually stimulating and increase objective truth for A, but it is possible to learn most of what transpired at the lecture secondhand. The third choice is the most ethical choice, because ethical political change in a society on the verge of decay is much more important than any personal experience. By helping P there is some chance, however small, that all of humanity may greatly benefit. If P and others like him are not elected, it is almost certain that objective truth will continue to be destroyed, perhaps in an irreversible process. Person A would maximize immediate personal truth by choice 2. Person A might maximize intermediate personal truth for both A and B by choice 1. However, only choice 3 has the potential for increasing truth significantly for all humanity in the long run. Therefore, in accepting choice 3, A is maximizing objective truth.

Example 4

Person C is driving legally in a strange city. A policeman stops C and gives him a completely unjustified traffic ticket. The policeman offers to "pay" the ticket for C, since C is from out-of-state. C knows immediately that the policeman is merely soliciting a bribe. Furthermore, he knows that the administration of this city is highly corrupt. The choice for C is to (1) pay a ten dollar bribe, or (2) spend several hundred and perhaps thousands of dollars of his time and money with little chance of success suing the policeman and the city for false charges. The ethical choice is the second one. It is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior. The policeman is clearly being unethical. Unethical means cannot produce ethical ends. Bribing the policeman is clearly unethical. Truth will be maximized if C spends his time and money trying to obtain justice, even if it means appealing his case to the Supreme Court.

Example 5

Person D lives in a police state. No criticism of the political leaders or the system is tolerated. Dissidents are often certified insane, put in asylums and have their minds destroyed with drugs and psychological torture. The choices before D are to (1) openly criticize the system and try, with very little probability of success, to bring about political reforms; (2) try to escape from the police state into a neighboring democratic country at the high risk of being killed or, worse still, captured; (3) go along passively with the system, not actively opposing it or supporting it; or (4) join a very small and largely ineffective underground which practices systematic terror and which has almost no chance of changing the system.

The most ethical choice is the second, because one cannot live in a police state without in some way supporting it, and it is unethical to associate with unethical persons. Furthermore, escaping from the police state is the most effective form of protest against it and only in a democratic state will D be free to expand truth as best he can. Also, he can best fight against the police state from abroad.

If D takes the first choice, he will almost certainly be destroyed, and everything he said will be distorted or suppressed by the state-controlled media. If D takes the third choice, he is passively acquiescing to evil by doing nothing against it; he is deliberately associating with unethical persons. If he takes the fourth choice, he will be forced to hurt innocent persons in attacking the leaders with almost no chance of bringing about reforms. One can best fight evil in association with ethical persons in democratic states. The second choice will maximize objective truth. It is auto-Ethical Therapy.

Example 6

Person C has been helping ethical political candidate P of examples 2 and 3 to the limit of his ability. He has become exhausted to the detriment of his health. P asks C to go to a critical meeting with some important supporters. If this meeting is not handled well, P may lose the election. No one else can handle the meeting as well as C, although there are other persons who could go. The choices for C are (1) to attend the meeting for P at the risk of almost certainly permanently damaging his health or (2) take some much needed rest which has been ordered by his doctor.

Under these circumstances the ethical choice for C is to rest and let someone else go to the meeting. To deliberately damage one's health for any reason is unethical, because to destroy health is to destroy truth, and unethical means cannot bring about ethical ends. However, torture and martyrdom should be born if the alternative is cooperation with evil persons. It is ethical to take reasonable risks with one's health and life for an ethical cause. Great discomfort should be born for the sake of truth. However, it is unethical to decrease truth for any person, including one's self, for the alleged sake of greater truth for the majority. One need not maximize truth for one's self so long as total truth is being maximized, but truth must never be decreased for anyone, including one's self, even at the cost of one's life.

For this reason, it is unethical to smoke or take drugs, e.g., alcohol, marijuana, LSD, and heroin, which may harm the body and probably do nothing to expand objective truth (177). Abortion and suicide are also unethical for the same reasons. But private unethical acts cannot be ethically interfered with. Therefore, in an Ethical State persons should be allowed to take any drug they wish and commit abortions and suicide. It is unethical to interfere with a person's freedom for the alleged sake of his "welfare" (50). This is why involuntary commitment of persons to psychiatric institutions is wrong. Persons who appear insane should be left alone as long as they hurt no one other than themselves. If they hurt others, they should be treated as criminals unless they voluntarily choose to be treated as mental patients.

In reality the choices are rarely as clear-cut as they were in the hypothetical examples. Most choices that have to be made are over less important matters and are not subject to purely logical analysis. They involve the use of subjective factors and evaluations. The important thing is that the person consciously considers the outcomes of his actions on the totality of objective truth before he makes a choice. If he does what he subjectively believes will maximize objective truth, he will, through a process of trial and error, eventually prove his subjective judgements objectively true.

The eight ethical principles can be applied to every aspect of our daily lives. The deliberate, purposeful following of the principles, even when logical mistakes are made, will cause any person to become increasingly ethical and less neurotic. However, only a person who is already ethical will elect to behave in this manner. Once he does, he will note an immediate improvement in his sense of psychological wellbeing and in his ability to interact creatively with other persons.

It is essential that persons wishing to practice Ethical Therapy disassociate themselves from unethical persons, who by their words or deeds communicate that they value happiness above truth. This may involve seeking new employment, friends, or even leaving one's family. But it must be done. Ethics can only flourish among ethical persons. And only persons who are developing ethically can eliminate all neuroses and destructive emotions.

 

Self-Evaluation

However Ethical Therapy has been administered, we can each evaluate its effects on ourselves. Subjectively, we can examine our own emotional state and see if we are calmer and less prone to anxiety and destructive emotions than we were in the past. Objectively, we can see if we in fact better predict and control our total environment. Ethical Therapy will fill us with inner peace, but so can psychofraud. It is only in the elimination of all destructive emotion, while increasing our objectively verifiable ability to predict and control our total environment, that Ethical Therapy is differentiated from psychofraud. In performing our self-evaluation of Ethical Therapy, we should go through the following steps.

1. Take a daily inventory of our emotional states and note how often we feel anxiety, fear, anger, hatred, envy, greed, jealousy, etc. If Ethical Therapy is working, we should feel less and less the power of these emotions.

2. Note how other persons react to us. If others regard us as emotional, we may still be more emotional than we thought. If we attract ever more ethical persons and gain their friendship, then Ethical Therapy is probably working.

3. Keep a written record of our predictions of physical, biological and psychosocial events. For example, if we are increasing our ability to predict (1) psychosocial events, then we should be able to correctly foresee political and social developments as well as personal behavior; (2) biological events, then we should correctly foresee the future states of our health, the health of those around us, the ecology of the planet, etc.; and (3) physical events, then we should correctly foresee weather, astronomical happenings, the truth or falsehood of mathematical theorems, the conditions of our machines, and results of scientific experiments in physics, chemistry, geology, etc.

4. Keep a written record of our attempts to control the physical, biological and psychosocial environment. If our deliberate actions lead to predicted results in the environment, then we are controlling. If our ability to produce the results we desire is increasing, then we are increasing our ability to control. If political and social events through our actions are becoming as we wish, and we and those around us are becoming increasingly ethical, then we are better controlling our psychosocial environment. If through our actions our health and the health of those around us and the ecology of our surroundings is improving, then we are better controlling our biological environment. If our machines and our physical surroundings are, through our actions, becoming ever closer to our wishes, then we are ever better controlling our physical environment.

5. Keep an inventory of all our creative activity. If our ability to predict and control is increasing through our actions, then we are being personally creative in our own lives. If the ability of other ethical persons to predict and control is increasing through our actions, then we are being socially creative.

Although the five steps above will give us some objective criteria on our ethical progress, they are still, in part, a subjective experience, because our experiments are not well controlled. Ultimately we must subject all evaluation to objective, independently verifiable experimentation. If we cannot get anyone else to agree with our observations, we should seriously doubt the validity of our observations. It is always possible that we are right and everyone else is wrong, but it is not likely. By and large, we should value most the opinions of those who seem objectively most ethical and intelligent. We should value least, but not ignore, the opinions of those who seem objectively least ethical and intelligent. In making these judgments, ethics should be weighed more heavily than intelligence. In dealing with others, we should always listen and give them the benefit of the doubt insofar as ethics are concerned. Only unethical persons will refuse to give us honest opinions, if we ourselves are ethical.

 

Overview

The major impediments to Ethical Therapy and mental health are our preprogrammed, emotional patterns of behavior which drive us to seek happiness without purpose and security without truth. In reprogramming our nervous system to value truth and only truth, we are lifting ourselves by our mental bootstraps completely out of the animal plane of existence toward the ultrahuman. This is the step beyond man across the threshold of morality. It is a step which can easily make us stumble.

Virtually every form of psychofraud claims to make us better than we are. Yet we see, objectively, that for thousands of years man's progress has been limited primarily to the physical and the biological environment. There is no evidence that we, as a species, have progressed ethically. We have increased our creativity primarily through an increase in our social intelligence, i.e., the accumulation of knowledge and the evolution of our machines (50). There has been little evolutionary progress toward a systematic incorporation of ethical principles into human society. Among others, Judaism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and more recently democratic socialism, have made stumbling steps in the right direction. Each one of these ideologies had progressive elements which succumbed to institutionalized psychofraud. If we are to avoid self-delusion, we must subject all our models of nature, including those of personal behavior, to scientific evaluation. The Ethical State (50) is a means for us systematically and objectively to incorporate ethical principles into our sociopolitical system and scientifically evaluate their effects. Ethical Therapy is a way for us to incorporate objective ethical principles into our personal lives and evaluate their effects.

By seeing ourselves in an ethical, evolutionary perspective and doing our best to maximize objective truth, we will become increasingly ethical and help others become ethical. An increase in ethics decreases neuroses and increases creativity. Ethical Therapy will bring about this state of affairs. Ethical Therapy is both social and personal.

Social Ethical Therapy is concerned with increasing the ethics of others. Personal Ethical Therapy is concerned with increasing our own ethics. The nature of the world is such that we cannot for long increase our own ethics without increasing the ethics of others. The act of trying to increase other persons' ethics will also increase our own ethics. Social and personal Ethical Therapy are inextricably intertwined. We cannot practice one without the other, although we can emphasize one over the other. It is best to begin by emphasizing personal Ethical Therapy before attempting social Ethical Therapy.

This book has been a simple introduction to personal Ethical Therapy. The Moral Society (50) is a more complex, but still general, introduction to social Ethical Therapy and the broader implications of evolution and ethics. Social Ethical Therapy cannot be applied to society as a whole unless personal Ethical Therapy is first applied to the most creative persons in our society.

If the most creative persons in our society are not willing to sacrifice the maximum increase in personal truth for the sake of maximizing social truth for their children or fellowmen, then our collective neuroses will continue to increase and truth will eventually be destroyed for all mankind. Truth will be destroyed by the spontaneous and institutionalized spread of psychofraud. Currently the political system of every nation is structured to proliferate those institutions which destroy truth. These institutions are commonly called "bureaucracies."

Bureaucracies are organizations which have as their de facto, not de jure, objective the maximization of the security and happiness of their members. In so doing, they spread psychofraud and sow the seeds of their own destruction by destroying all forms of corrective criticism, because no organization, no nation, no species can long survive in the absence of objective truth. To see that this is the case, it is necessary to be ethical. To remain ethical, it is necessary to undergo and practice Ethical Therapy. Once personal Ethical Therapy has begun, social Ethical Therapy will follow.

 

Projection

Personal Ethical Therapy will bring individual health, creativity and self-fulfillment. Social Ethical Therapy is essential to the continued evolution of our species.

The only common denominator in the entire evolutionary process is the growth in the collective intelligence of the biomass, i.e., a growth in the joint ability of all living creatures to predict and control the total environment. Intelligence can not continue to grow unless it becomes ethical, as has happened with the human species. We note that our prehuman ancestors were not unethical but merely trivial. Only a person who has been ethical can become unethical and destroy truth. Only ethics can create truth. This is the case because there is a limit to the quantity of information which can be transmitted by the genes (51, 96). Eventually, if an evolutionary nucleus is not to stagnate as did thousands of now extinct species, it must be creative. The human race has been creative for millions of years. In so doing, it has increased its collective intelligence through the accumulation of extragenetic information in the form of knowledge and machines. Simultaneously, it has grown in creativity through biological and, during the last 50,000 years, almost entirely through cultural evolution.

The only objective criterion for the ethics of a group is its creativity. The only objective criterion for the efficacy of Ethical Therapy is an increase in creativity. The human race is at a crossroads where it can (1) sink into the happy oblivion of psychofraud and become extinct or (2) deliberately and consciously continue its evolution through Ethical Therapy.

Almost every human being is born with the potential to become fully ethical and moral, as is evidenced by the ethics of children. Since all children increase their creativity, all persons are ethical as children. The fact that so few adults remain ethical is the result of ideology in general, institutionalized psychofraud in particular, and the immoral nature of our bureaucratized society. These problems can all be solved practically, effectively and soon, if there is a will to solve them (50). Ethical Therapy is essential to their solution.

Without Ethical Therapy in some form, i.e., without positive reinforcement of inborn, naturally ethical behavior, all persons become unethical and destructive. With Ethical Therapy almost all persons can become ethical and creative, if they have not already become unethical. Each ethical person can become a nucleus of expanding ethical intelligence for himself and others. By simply being himself, an ethical person is both a practitioner and a recipient of Ethical Therapy.

Ethical Therapy is based not on a specific method, but on a general goal. It is based on the goal of expanding ethical intelligence as best we can for ourselves and others. This is an infinite goal which will never be reached by us or our progeny, but it is a goal to which we, as a species, can always move ever closer as we grow in ethics, intelligence and creativity. It is the only goal whose pursuit can bring us unending joy as a trivial consequence of our conscious evolution toward infinite ethical intelligence.

To create a group, a nation and a world dedicated to the unending expansion of ethical intelligence is the means and the end of Ethical Therapy. Those who practice Ethical Therapy will undergo it. Those who undergo Ethical Therapy are practicing it. All who are or shall become a part of Ethical Therapy are also a part of the infinitely evolving ethical intelligence of the universe. The means are the ends. This is the Cosmic Moral Society. This is unending evolution. It is something worth striving for.