Chapter 19 - THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES If there's any time that two and two don't equal four, it's in a marriage. Add one 2.0 to another 2.0 and you don't get Cheerfulness (4.0). You get fireworks! A person's attitude about the opposite sex is dependent on his tone. Love itself is not an emotional tone; but the energy of loving may raise, lower or intensify one's tone. It can sit anywhere on the scale. We may see a young man deeply in love who starves himself to death (a characteristic of Apathy) or a young girl in love who manifests a dreamy enthusiasm which makes her bloom. Let's examine this "grave mental disease" (Plato's definition of love) on a few levels of the scale. At Grief/Apathy the person doesn't outflow much love; he wants to receive it, but he worries so much about losing it that he is never able to have it anyway. His "you don't really love me" needs constant reassurance. Far too many marriages are based not on love but on the limp substitute, Propitiation. The .8 or .9 usually marries someone who "needs" him. The fearful person yearns and marries for security. The 1.1, although incapable of true affection, will put on a good show when it furthers his own purposes. He will charm, flatter and betray; he'll undermine his partner's confidence; he'll point out faults (just to improve her); he'll try to educate her into adjusting to her environment ("Stop being vital and alive"); he'll break his vows; he'll enjoy clandestine affairs. It's all part of his game. The 1.2 doesn't believe in love, but he may enjoy playing the cool Lady Killer. The 1.5 overrides and dominates his mate using blame and blunt invalidations. He'll try to enforce affinity ("say you love me"). Antagonism mostly wants a sparring partner. So, it's not love, but who's doing the loving that counts. WHAT IS LOVE? Fred Allen once said, "It's what makes the world go around with that worried expression." This too depends on tone. It's a natural instinct for man to seek companionship and ultimately to select one person of the opposite sex as a partner. The highest-tone love is based on strong friendship-one which will survive as a friendship with or without the introduction of romantic (or physical) love. Such a relationship requires the willingness and ability to communicate easily and a fairly close agreement about the things one considers essential goals and efforts. Together these produce a strong attraction and understanding. When two people disagree about most things, their understanding and affection for each other are limited. Similarly, if they cannot communicate easily, fondness and understanding are low. When you hear a person say, "We can't talk to each other, but we're really in love," you know somebody's kidding somebody. This isn't love (or even a decent friendship) but some sort of aberrated attachment. Below 2.0 on the scale, the individual tends to consider only the physical universe or physical objects real. Therefore, the low-tone person is less likely to choose a mate because of any shared understanding and is more likely to fall in love with an object. This is evident when a person's only comments about the sweetheart are like these: "Wow! Is she stacked! He's groovy; he looks just like Tom Jones." Later they say: "I just can't understand what he's talking about half the time, but I'm crazy about him." "She's got a dizzy mind, but in the dark who cares?" So they get married and make a down payment on their wall-to-wall miseries. In a few years, these same people will lean across a bar table and moan, "My wife (or husband) doesn't understand me." OWNERSHIP After failing in love with an object, the low-tone person wants to own and control it. The beginnings of most downscale romances are in the 1.1 band. He's plotting how to "make out," and she's eagerly reading the articles entitled "How to Trap Your Man." Following the initial stages, however, the low-tone lover tries to reduce his mate to Apathy (where the person thinks he is a physical object and is therefore as ownable and controllable as a vegetable). This is the famous battle of the sexes: two lowscale individuals trying to own, dominate and control each other. Each one, of course, resists such domination and control, using the tools of his particular tone. SENSATION In addition to his need for companionship and understanding, man needs sensation. High on the scale a person can experience pleasurable sensation easily in many ways. In the low bands, the person needs more impact to feel sensation of any kind. His love life reflects this obsessive need for more impact in masochism, sadism, promiscuity, perversion, orgies, preoccupation with pornography and the constant search for variety. IS THERE A HIGH-TONE LOVE? Yes, Virginia, there really is a high-tone love. Brotherhood, friendship and love are only possible above 2.0 where people aren't motivated to trap, dominate or own one another. And they do not worry about losing each other. They channel their mutual understanding into growing together, rather than apart. We find constancy-the desire for a monogamistic relationship. The partner is faithful, not because of custom, enforcement or fear, but because he prefers to be. The high-tone person is able to sublimate the sex drive, so his love is not so dependent on the physical relationship. This doesn't mean he outgrows lovemaking. On the contrary, the upscale person enjoys sex more than any of the lower tones. However (some people will never believe this), when two people share a high-tone spirit of play, this is a more intense sensation than that of sex. MIX AND MATCH If I were to devise a computer program for mating people, the first step would be a test for emotional tone. Once tones were matched, I would look for compatibility in goals and activities. What does the person want to achieve and what does he consider the most important way he can spend his energy? If one partner thinks the ideal occupation is an unending junket around the country on a motorcycle and his partner prefers puttering in the rose garden, theirs is a rather slippery grip on a workable partnership. Two people within the same tone range will be well matched, which doesn't mean they'll necessarily live happily ever after if they are below 2.0. You can't sweeten lemon juice with vinegar and get good lemonade. I knew one marriage where the husband started out at 2.5 and the wife at 1.5. He was easy-going, pleasant and content with a routine that was uninspired and uninspiring. She was feisty and domineering. Most of the time he simply ignored her, going his own way; but occasionally he dropped to 2.0 long enough to deal with her. After several mellowing years of marriage, they equalized out with a mildly antagonistic marriage which consists of constant, shallow banter. They resolve most of their differences by stubbornly going separate ways, which seems to satisfy them both. This is a relatively compatible relationship which call "individuated togetherness." Another marriage between a Grief and a Sympathy appears to serve a mutual need. She conjures up countless soupy problems which never completely resolve, and he gives her constant fussy attention. Thus they maintain their own kind of low-tone affection for one another. This marriage serves another admirable purpose: it takes them both off the market so they can't inflict themselves on higher-tone people. The only danger to this type of compatibility occurs when one person moves upscale (maybe he gets promoted or his bald spot grows back in). This ruins the whole game. When diverse tones mate up, the person in the lower tone demands more affection and gives less. He wants more communication and contributes less. He asserts his beliefs on less foundation and he expects to receive more agreement than he gives. The high-tone person seeks to understand; but the low one wants to be understood (even though he complains that "nobody understands me"). The upscale individual with his tremendous capacity for loving finds it wasted on the down-tone partner, who can only accept a limited amount of love. This is much like trying to pour a gallon of water into a thimble. You end up with only a thimbleful-and a big puddle. The warped emotional dependence of a low-tone person sometimes traps the upscale individual who thinks: "She needs me." But, as Ron Hubbard says, "When any individual has to depend upon his emotional partner being low on the tone scale, he's like a man dying of thirst who drinks salt water. It is wet, but it will not keep him alive." (Science of Survival) I observed a marriage between a Conservatism man and a Propitiation wife. They owned a business which she dedicated herself to giving away. She refunded to people who actually purchased the product from someone else (a complete loss since the product was not resalable). She hired people who lied to her customers, sold the wrong products and stole from her. Her husband was kind at first; but he soon became alarmed by his wife's one-woman welfare program, and he dropped to Anger where he put tight controls on her spending. This didn't stop her, however. She developed more covert ways of spending money without his knowledge. The last time I saw them, she had written several checks without recording them, so when the rent check for their business bounced, her husband, inarticulate with rage, was ripping her checkbook to shreds. OTHER EMOTIONS There are a number of human responses that are generally described as emotions. Some of them fall into one band or another as synonyms or shadings of emotions; but some move across the tones. Hate is strongly expressed in Anger; but a person may hate up and down the entire emotional band. In fact, he may have been taught to hate many things (or that he must love everything). So we could find a person in the paradoxical state of "hating love" (especially when his darling runs off with another man). A person who is quite free emotionally can actually enjoy a "good cry." Another might hate having a good cry. Sometimes courage and cowardice are described as emotions. Actually they alternate like cake and custard on a napoleon pastry. We find true courage at the top, then caution, indifference, and "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" (at 2.0 and 1.5). Across the Fear band we get pure, ungarnished cowardice. Toward the bottom (near Sympathy and Propitiation) the whole issue gets cluttered with noble deeds. Grief of course, is a limp coward. Making Amends may be prone to acts of heroic martyrdom (people who burn themselves alive to prove some fanatic point), and in the sub-basement, the fellow doesn't even know there's a threat. Hope (often called an emotion) is high on the tone scale; but down near Fear it becomes an escape mechanism and a little lower it turns into gullibility. We find foolish optimism at .8 and .9. Below this, hope is perverted into daydreams and delusions. And one daydreams only because he has not been able to achieve real action. Well, you get the idea. There are many so-called emotions, and they all fit into the scale somewhere. JEALOUSY Jealousy is not an emotion, but the motivation for an emotion, so it can erupt at many different levels of the scale. A person feels jealous when there is a real, imagined or threatened loss of affection, and this usually drops him down tone. He may become angry, fearful, covert, griefy, propitiative or apathetic about it. Jealousy actually stems from the desire for information. The jealous person is wondering: "Does he still love me?" "Was he out with another woman?" "Does she wish she had married the other guy?" "What are they laughing about together?" The big question is: "Does he want to replace me with someone else?" The reason jealousy finds no foothold in a high-tone relationship is because communication is free and open. Lower on the scale, where the person thinks of his mate as an ownable object, there is a much greater threat of losing the object. Also of low tone is the person who deliberately provokes jealousy from his partner; it's another covert method of attempting to own and control. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOYS AND GIRLS The main difference between boys and girls is the same one you thought it was back in kindergarten. There are no differences in tone between men and women except those that are introduced by the culture. Boys are admonished for crying. Such training tends to produce the stereotyped rough, swaggering male; but such a false tone will collapse under stress. When the bottom falls out of a man's world and he cannot cry, he is forced into Apathy (which is probably the exact reason there is a higher incidence of suicide and alcoholism among men). On the other hand, girls are not supposed to be tomboys; they must act "ladylike." For this reason, many women stay stuck below Anger as gossipy 1.1s, clinging vines or soft-hearted Sympathy types. High on the scale, the stereotypes fall away. A woman can be enterprising and capable without sacrificing her graciousness. The high-tone man can be both aggressive and compassionate-and he doesn't lose his masculinity. Topscale people are neither confused about their gender, nor must they assert it. THE REBOUND You should make no major decision (to marry, to separate, or to serve your first baked Alaska when hubby's boss comes to dinner) while temporarily downtone. This is where you find the familiar phrase: "Marrying on the rebound." I knew a girl in college who broke up with her boy friend and dropped to Grief. Before she moved up any further than Sympathy, she met a young man in Apathy/Grief. They seemed to have so much in common and, of course, he needed her. They married. The last I saw of them, he was jealous, possessive, demanding; constantly whining his need for her, he held this once-bright girl locked in the bottom band of the scale. The trouble with rebound is that we don't bound back high enough before we make decisions. THE DEGENERATING RELATIONSHIP We sometimes see a marriage start out high-tone and degenerate. This occurs when either person drops downscale for any reason and doesn't return. The emotional balance is destroyed. One of the most frequent causes of this phenomenon is the broken agreement. When an individual breaks the codes in his relationship with another, he ceases to survive so well, because those codes were originally devised for the survival of the marriage. The minute he breaks the agreement, some of his freedom is gone. He must hide his actions from the other person. This takes us back to communication. As long as we are able to say anything to a person, we like that person and the relationship thrives. A partner who commits any non-survival act against a marriage drops downtone. He may be gambling with the rent money. She may be gossiping about him at her bridge club. Infidelity automatically drops a person downscale. The individual who is keeping a secret becomes less talkative, irritable, picky and critical of his partner. Eventually such a marriage erupts with both partners unhappy, blaming and bewildered. They settle into a low-tone relationship or they separate. If either partner remains in Grief about the subject of love, he may go off and write soap operas or country western music ... FOR MEN ONLY Girls, go freshen your mascara while I chat with the fellows for a minute. Have you noticed that sometimes your charming, sweet-tempered gal turns into an unmanageable vixen whose only purpose is to drive you up the wall? There's a medical explanation: it's premenstrual tension, caused by physical changes in her body. In most women, the symptoms occur four or five days before the onset of menses. She goes berserk (griefy, jealous, accusing, nagging, irritable or whatever) and strikes out at the nearest target which, unfortunately, is usually you. Don't take it seriously and don't confuse this madness with the tone scale. What to do? Current medical research indicates that in the near future it may be possible for women to take hormones and dietary minerals which will reduce or prevent these symptoms. Meanwhile, you can try indicating the source of her unhappiness. If there's a thread of reason left, she may be able to get herself under control. You can tuck her in with a good book and go play solitaire in the basement with as few words as possible (anything you say will be used against you when you come up for trial again next month). If all else fails, run for cover. When two people don't understand this emotional paradox, they can get into some ludicrous situations (if not the divorce court) as did some friends of mine: It was New Year's Eve. A violent snow storm raged outside as Marie and George were spending a quiet evening alone in their second-floor flat. All was well until the monthly uglies overcame Marie. She started nagging, "Here it is the end of December and you never did put the storm windows up. It's snowing like mad and we've still got screens on the windows, for gosh sakes! I can't imagine what the neighbors think." She kept picking at him until her bewildered (and normally good-natured) husband stomped out into the storm. In a desperate attempt to please her, he grabbed a ladder from the garage, climbed up the slippery rungs and grimly began to replace each screen with a storm window. His frantic wife, meanwhile, pranced from window to window, raising it up and screaming, "What do you think you're doing? for gosh sakes, it's New Year's Eve . . . George, you're out there in the middle of a blizzard ... You're insane! George! What will the neighbors think?" MARRIAGE Before you decide you want to hang your wet socks on the same shower rod with someone for the rest of your life, you should establish some mutual purpose in marriage-one that includes the advancement of your own personal goals (the goals needn't be the same, but they mustn't clash). Too often a person sacrifices his own goals for marriage. She gives up a promising career to become a housewife. The man abandons the invention he wants to develop and takes a nine-to-five job for security. As millions of disillusioned spouses can tell you, that marvelous loved one can never fully compensate for the broken dream. For the sake of tolerable cohabitation, marriage may require that you give up some of your mangier personal habits; but when it asks you to abandon your aspirations, the. price is too high. Marriage is not an end in itself. It should help further your individual purposes. To determine whether or not you are close enough in tone and other important elements with a particular person, take stock of the assets and liabilities in your relationship. As one of my sharp college friends puts it: "What's the pain/pleasure ratio?" Is he (or she) giving you too many moments of worry and torment, compared to the periods of fun, warmth, inspiration and sparkling agreement? If the ratio is only 50/50, that's too delicate; it could easily tip the wrong way. A good relationship should be about eighty-five (pleasure) to fifteen (pain), which will give you just about enough trouble to keep life interesting. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter 20 - MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE OFFICE I was shown into the sales manager's office. Briefly I described the product I wanted manufactured, and asked for an estimate on price and delivery. He seemed to be worried about how I was going to sell them all; he asked me to repeat all the specifications again. He rambled on about production problems. It took me more than thirty minutes, and much persistence, to get him to tell me that it would take at least three months (and possibly longer) for delivery. After juggling papers and charts around for a while, he admitted he couldn't yet give me a rough estimate of costs. I left after extracting his promise to mail me price quotations as soon as possible. Whew! If the rest of his company operates in such a low tone band, I thought, my product will die of old age on the assembly line. Better try someplace else ... I called on another business and was turned over to the company president. I told him my requirements while he took notes. He asked one or two questions, and said: "Fine. It'll take us three weeks to deliver them and I'll have a price for you in a minute." While I was recovering from this shock (three weeks; not three months!) his fingers flew over the keys of a calculating machine on his desk. He made a brief phone call, punched a few more keys and gave me the price. Just like that. Immediately, I placed my order with him and left the office fifteen minutes after arriving-and everything was done. What a relief. And what a difference from the first company. I'd found a topscale man, and there are few experiences so gratifying. My trust in him was not betrayed. He delivered as promised. One week after my product was received and in distribution, I received the price quotation from the first company I visited. It was twice the cost I paid. Just as an individual's tone relates to his survival, the tone of a company's leaders influences the survival of an organization. Within a year, the first company I called on was out of business; the other one is still expanding. I placed dozens of orders with this firm over the years. All were handled with cheerful efficiency. At one time I spent a week working in the company's plant on a special project connected with one of my products. Observing the routine and the personnel I could see that the high-tone leadership influenced the entire place. The staff was cheerful; but their good-natured banter did not interfere with the output of work. On the contrary, that's what high-tone is all about. When a person feels happy and light-hearted he will accomplish twice as much as when he's down. Whether you're buying or selling, whether you're stock boy or presidents choosing the right people has everything to do with your success in the business maze. CHOOSING A JOB When you take a job with an upscale company, work can actually be fun and the climate will encourage the growth of your talents and ambitions. An entire organization reflects the tone level of its leadership. So, maybe you can't judge a book by its cover (especially these days when even a treatise on the life style of an aardvark would sport a naked woman on its jacket); but you can judge a company by its reception room. In a high-tone firm you will see employees moving briskly; but there's always time for a little in-joking as they pass through. When you see staff members trudging by in grim silence, ignoring each other, bickering or speaking in whispers, you can be sure the leadership is heavy-handed. Employees who lounge through gossipy day-long coffee breaks are the result of lax leadership (to use the word loosely), probably around Propitiation or Sympathy. Let those first impressions influence you. And remember that a high-tone boss is worth more than a dozen fringe benefits. AS THE BOSS An application form can tell you almost everything you need to know about a man except the most important: what is his emotional outlook on life? When you're hiring, it's smarter to choose a high-tone person with no experience than a low-scale one who knows every nut and bolt of the business, because you can teach an upscale person anything (if he's interested) more easily than you can teach the low-scale person to change his tone. I'm talking about a person who is chronically low. He can be raised up by a skilled professional, of course; but if you're trying to run a productive business you don't have time to spoon-feed emotional infants. Efficiency experts claim that you can raise morale and production somewhat if you paint the walls old swimming hole green, pipe in some lilting supermarket music and install pretty blond secretaries. An aesthetic atmosphere is certainly tone raising; but in the long run, it's better to select upscale people right from the start and treat them well. No amount of music and fancy paint will offset the destructiveness of a high volume, low-scale person who's really working at it. A talented woman started a partnership with a personable young man in an advertising agency. She took care of getting new accounts while he managed the administration. They became well-known and prosperous. She frequently raved about his brilliant business acumen. Later their partnership broke up and she assumed full responsibility for the business. Sometime afterward, still bewildered by the experience, she said: "He was so incredibly charming; but it was only a facade. He never could follow through on things. He'd start a project and then he'd tire of it and be off on something else. He was never around to follow up on things he got going. When he wanted out of the business, I couldn't understand it; but I bought him out because we had an agreement to do that." Only after he left did she discover how run-down the company was. Because of poor management, they'd been losing money steadily for five years, and she found it necessary to rebuild the company herself in order to recover her investment. She started by cleaning out the deadwood-friends of her former partner who were drawing salaries over fifty thousand dollars, but contributing nothing. Even when she first learned of the tone scale, she found it hard to believe he was a 1.1 because he was so "brilliant." (Need I mention that you shouldn't confuse intelligence with emotion?) You could study most business failures and discover a low-tone person somewhere on the scene. There is one certain rule on the subject: You will never run an efficient, cheerful and productive organization with a staff of low-tone individuals. You'll spend most of your time handling personal conflicts, apologizing to customers for goofs, replacing personnel, soothing disgruntled staff members and trying to plug the holes in the sieve before all your profits drain out. THE LOW-TONE EMPLOYEE Downscale types can do more to sabotage the success of your firm than you can imagine in your wildest nightmares. They'll filch everything from nickel blotters to million-dollar ideas. They may talk big deals with all the confidence of lemmings racing over the edge of a cliff while leading your company toward corporate suicide. They'll stop all the best ideas from reaching you. They'll garble messages and orders. They'll misfile important papers. They'll tell you everything is great when the place is collapsing, and when things are picking up they'll paint such a picture of gloom that you'll contemplate hara-kiri. They'll goof up jobs, delay orders and enrage customers. If a few downscale people in an organization only messed up their own assignments they could be tolerated. But, unfortunately, they labor diligently (both wittingly and unwittingly) to halt the production of efficient people as well. For this reason, I consider it more efficient to run a business on a skeleton staff of highscale people sincerely working for the benefit of the enterprise, rather than a large staff of low-tone people pulling in the opposite direction. One upscale person is capable of incredibly high output - if he can maneuver without interference. You can do any job more quickly and accurately when you give it your undivided attention until it's finished. However, a few low-scale types in the vicinity (dedicated to the destruction of your goals), can find an abundance of methods for distracting your attention. They call you when a memo would be more efficient. They check back to confirm an order which already has been clearly stated. They drop in to borrow a stapler (their own equipment always breaks down with alarming ease) and try to stay for an hour of idle chatter. You ask them to type a report and they come back to inquire about the size of the margins. They bring you a problem that should be given to Jones. When you're trying to complete your own tasks, just one low-scale person can be real ulcer fodder. CHOOSING EXECUTIVES Most of the "secrets of success" books that catalog the characteristics of self-made millionaires are saying (although they don't know it): be high-tone. With the top tones goes a magnetic drive that never stays down for long. We find responsibility, persistence, good humor and love of work. If you're in a position of hiring or appointing executives, choose with the tone scale in front of you and your credulity locked away in the bottom drawer. That "nice" man everybody likes may be so understanding that nothing gets done. And especially watch out for that brisk, let's-get-things-moving-around-here Anger type who looks like a leader but, with his low boiling point, only attempts to handle people by force, threats and punishment. Man responds to being led, but not to being driven. Heavy-handed pressure appears to work at first; but the fear-ridden person loses all confidence and creativeness and becomes a hopeless bungler. At best, he gets covert revenge by doing only the bare minimum of work. Some years ago a group of psychologists and sociologists studying behavior of business people learned that performance was critically related to the quality of inter-personnel associations, particularly the relationship one had with his own superior. They found that people worked more efficiently (and felt better) if their boss was not too officious, didn't interfere with social alliances built up on the job and was not demanding production in an impersonal and callous way. In other words, employees don't produce well for bosses between 1.2 and 2.0 on the scale. The psychologists decided to train the supervisors in one large company in an attempt to instill the good traits necessary to greater efficiency. Testing before and immediately after, they launched a two-week program in which they tried to teach supervisors to show concern and consideration, and to treat their employees as human beings. Immediately following the course, most of the supervisors rated significantly higher in their attitudes. However, when tests were made six months later (against a control group), most of the men had not only reverted back to their original behavior, but in many cases were less considerate than the supervisors in the control group. Interestingly, the men who maintained a more agreeable attitude were those who worked under better-natured bosses themselves. Thus we see the contagion of low-tone (and high-tone) leadership as it spreads down through the ranks. So even though an individual can be brought upscale to some extent, he won't stay there if he is under the influence of a downscale boss. He not only doesn't stay up, the chances are pretty great that he won't even stay with the company. Whenever you find an exceptionally high turnover in an organization, or in one department, you can bet your slide rule there's a low-tone boss in charge. RESPONSIBILITY You can predict a person's level of responsibility on a job if you examine the quality of responsibility he shows in other areas of his living. The responsible person takes good care of himself physically. He'll be clean, well-fed and well-groomed. His personal possessions will be orderly and in reasonably good condition. He does his best to adequately support and assist his family and to provide them with a promising future. He's loyal to any group he joins. Since he's concerned about the improvement and the survival of mankind, he may belong to groups devoted to such causes. His responsibility may extend to raising plants or animals because such a person prefers living things in his vicinity. He never wantonly kills other life forms, although he will use them when necessary for his own sustenance (the person who will not kill for food he needs is actually on the Propitiation/Sympathy level of the tone scale). He'll revere and respect religion, whether or not he's an active churchgoer himself. INVESTING Use the tone scale in all business dealings whether buying, selling, hiring, firing and especially when you are shaking all your savings out of the cookie jar to invest in a "can't lose" business venture. Your tone scale evaluation will be more reliable than the apparent qualifications of a fast-talking entrepreneur. A number of years ago I knew a No Sympathy person who clawed, wheedled and blackmailed his way to a high position in the entertainment field. Men who were victimized by his chicanery maintained no illusions about this man; but his prominence continued to open new doors for him. At one time he convinced several moneyed men to invest in a restaurant chain which he would run. They responded because he was well-known and "obviously" successful (after all, everybody's heard of him). However, as usual, he acquired more enemies than friends. The operation was soon doomed to failure because of his petty feudings with everyone from his biggest investors down to the customers he needed to survive. To the amazement of those who originally trusted him, it was necessary to sell the operation at a huge financial loss. That the weakness was not in the business itself, was proven by the new owner who went on to build it into a multi-million dollar operation. RELAY OF COMMUNICATION Nearly every function in an organization involves relaying of communication in one form or another, and probably ninety-five percent of an executive's headaches are caused by the break-down of these communications. The moment a salesman writes up an order, he starts a series of communications that must be relayed from sales to production to shipping to accounting and so on. There are multiple opportunities for mistakes along the way (as any businessman can attest). An individual's ability to relay communication is another aspect of tone. The low-scale person garbles messages, introduces alterations or negligently (some-times deliberately) fails to pass them on at all. If you dictate a letter to your secretary, will she take it accurately? Having done so, will she dispatch it without delay? In my own business, I find it easy to identify a customer who employs low-tone help. The customer sends an urgent order requesting immediate delivery. We notice, however, that the order was not mailed until three days after it was written. In one case we received an "urgent" overseas order which was sent turtle-speed by surface mail instead of air. It arrived six weeks after it was written. Send a company representative to a convention and his report will depend more on his tone than on the program. The low-scale person will bring you all the bad news. He'll tell you about the companies that went bankrupt, government cutbacks and new competition that will probably ruin your market. He may entirely forget to mention the hot, new prospect from a giant company. He may alter the report on a new product so thoroughly that you fail to see its potential value. The Boredom person won't bring you so much bad news; but he won't tell you anything exciting either. He'll pass on amusing, but irrelevant, anecdotes. Mostly it's "just the same old thing." Conservatism will give you a more valid report, although he'll tone down anything extremely new and different. Wherever he is on the scale, the person does not realize that he is altering facts. Ten people witnessing an accident will give ten different versions of it. The lower a person goes, the more imaginary his memory becomes, although he believes it to be authentic. People at 1.1 get reality and imagination so mixed up that even their small talk is untrustworthy; but they will swear they are telling the truth. Of course, the wildest perversions of memory occur down at the bottom of the scale where we find fantasies and hallucinations. AROUND THE CONFERENCE TABLE The board meeting, sales conference or a brainstorming session are all excellent opportunities to study the tone in an organization. If someone presents an idea for a bold, new program, tones show up in the various responses. A person at the Grief/Apathy level automatically considers the whole project hopeless and, if permitted, he'll drag up old losses and tell you how things used to be better in the old days. Propitiation or Sympathy will probably profess some enthusiasm for your idea; but he'll immediately offer plans for wasting it (perhaps by advocating a tremendous amount of research or worthless advertising and promotion). The person in Fear will introduce every conceivable worry, "we'll probably lose our shirts." The 1.1 invariably pretends the idea is great, but will immediately attempt to undermine it, "Well, the idea sounds good ... " The 1.5 usually tells you bluntly that it won't work (or he'll try to find another way to stop it). Antagonism, of course, will want to bicker about a few things whether he likes the idea or not. Boredom will shrug and take the course of least resistance. Conservatism may try to delay it, "Why don't we sleep on it? Let's kick it around a bit. We don't want to be too impulsive." He probably won't stop it; but he'll have the brakes on. if there's a 3.5 or 4.0 in the group, he may get fired up with the idea (provided it was a good one) and offer constructive suggestions, methods for implementing, additional uses, promotion and production plans. THE SALESMAN The salesman who understands the tone scale can correctly spot his prospect and bring him up-tone to the point of interest where he makes the sale. (This technique is discussed in a later chapter.) He not only gets the sale, he leaves a happier customer behind. A salesman also can save himself much stress by knowing when not to sell. He's working in a shoe store. A Grief lady comes in; he shows her ten pairs of shoes and she complains about every one of them. If he cannot bring her upscale, he's better off not selling her. She'll be back within a week complaining. Grief suffers a low pain threshold. Where someone else might feel a little pressure, she says, "It's killing me; it's excruciating." Grief considers most everything painful. That's the way it is to her. Furthermore, she is only satisfied when she's been betrayed. The Apathy customer will say, "It's hopeless; there isn't any product that will solve my problem." The best of salesmen run into a few unsatisfiables. If you do sell to such types, expect most of them to come back with complaints and requests for refunds or replacements. They not only consume time, patience and profits, they frequently undermine the salesman's confidence in his product. A smart salesman will simply skip these customers whenever he can. Everybody fumbles through an occasional day when he should have pulled the pillow over his head and stayed in bed in the first place. Such a day is particularly demoralizing to a salesman. After several turndowns he may start to believe that the economy is pretty shaky these days, there's too much competition, nobody's buying anything, or any of the other consolation prizes with which discouraged salesmen reward themselves. It's so easy to go one step further and say, "I give up." The salesman who understands the tone scale, however, will recognize that he has dropped tone and he won't take himself too seriously while in this dark mood. The main difference between the successful salesman and the failure is whether or not he believes the low-tone ideas which come to him on the bad days. Most important, the informed salesman will not decide (just because he's in a slump) to quit and go get a job flipping flap-jacks at the nearby beanery. Instead, he should push himself to call on one more prospect, and then another, until he makes a sale. He (and everyone) should try to quit the day on a win. Revitalized by a night's sleep and a sturdy breakfast, he'll probably be courageous enough to get out there and pitch again the next day. The selling field offers unlimited opportunities to an ambitious person; but it is essential that he sell only a superb product. He must be convinced he's doing the customer a favor when he sells. Because man is basically ethical (down beneath the flim-flam), he won't let himself succeed if he thinks he is taking advantage of others. The salesman who cons his way along may be able to acquire money, but he'll never enjoy ;,t because he can't go uptone as long as he's being dishonest. Sales managers will benefit by selecting high-tone distributors and sales people. Many companies with salable products fail because of the common belief that if you recruit enough people some of them will work out well (this fallacy is particularly popular in the direct sales field). The detrimental effects of a few low-tone representatives can cancel out most of the benefits of this method because word-of-mouth advertising can also work to bad-mouth a product. Mary tells her bridge club, "I just bought a marvelous new Whoosh vacuum cleaner and I love it." "Oh, no!" screams Phyllis, "My next door neighbor was telling me that a friend of her cousin's ordered one of those from a salesman and she never got it. He just took off with her fifty-dollar deposit and the comp any says they have no record of her order and the salesman has quit." Emotional tone being what it is, this bad news spreads faster than chicken pox in a nursery school. Now the whole bridge club seeds the story out through the city: "Don't get taken by those Whoosh vacuum cleaner salesmen. They're a bunch of crooks." Everybody forgets that Mary is happy with her machine. So one unethical salesman can virtually ruin the entire market for the industrious men in the same organization. Low-tone people are predictably unethical. Some knowingly deceive both customers and company. Others simply fail to learn their product well; they make false claims (sometimes out of sincere but misguided enthusiasm), tell unwitting lies, sell incorrect sizes and recommend the wrong products. There are innumerable ways to lose customers-and low-scale salesmen know them all. "WORK" Before we leave the office, we should make certain we take the curse off the word work. Contrary to popular opinion, pleasure is not found in idleness or wastefulness. An up-tone person finds work exhilarating. The successful industrialist is a man who enjoys overcoming the obstacles to management. The greatest pleasure a composer can achieve is in composing. The pianist prefers playing the piano to doing anything else. The active businessman only goes downscale if he's constantly stopped, distracted or if he has some lowscale person trying to spare him (and thus destroy his greatest pleasure) by telling him he should not work so hard. SUMMARY No person can be truly successful and low-tone at the same time. The terms are contradictory. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 21 - GROUPS Unless you're crouched in a cave somewhere under the ice caps of the North Pole, you can hardly avoid being asked to join, donate to, endorse or believe in some group or other. Today there seem to be more groups, clubs, fraternities, lodges, associations, sects and societies than ever before-or do they just make more noise? Anyway, they go all the way from the Stone Skipping and Gepiunking Club of Mackinac Island, Michigan, to the aggressive evangelists known as "Jesus Freaks" from California. Few of us have the problem of a wealthy bachelor I heard of recently. He wanted to will his money to a deserving cause; but he was unable to select one with confidence. Still, it's understandable if we're in some dilemma as to which groups most deserve our time, money and efforts. We live in a culture that is changing with dizzying speed. More than ever we need guidelines to determine which of our constantly shifting values are healthy and honest and which ones are potentially suicidal to mankind. Thinking based on worn-out platitudes and wild guesswork belongs to the Stone Age of human understanding. We need reliable rocket-age judgment to evaluate both old causes and new movements at their inception. With this ambitious thought in mind, I worked out a five-point check (based on the tone scale) that should help you decide the worth of almost any group except possibly the neighborhood coffee-klatch: 1. What is the purpose of the group? 2. How does the group intend to accomplish the purpose? 3. What kind of leadership does it have? 4. What are its actual activities? 5. What are its past accomplishments? PURPOSE Although all of the individuals in a given group are not going to be at the same tone level, the stated (or unstated) purpose of the group generally falls somewhere on the scale. An upscale purpose is concerned with survival. This may take the form of "halt destruction" (not to be confused with the down-with everything groups), preserve, rehabilitate, advance, educate or "let's enjoy ourselves." The highest tone purposes are more concerned with enhancing the future on a long-term basis than reviving the past or preserving the present. Group purposes vary greatly in scope. Some clubs exist for the interest, improvement or amusement of the individual members only (bridge clubs, square dance clubs, etc.). Others gather for the improvement of families or romantic relationships (PTA, child study groups, La Leche Club-and there are even sexually oriented teams that unite for various unusual activities that I'm not going to discuss here in front of the children). Other organizations exist for the benefit of a whole profession or group of people (union guilds, professional associations, ethnic groups, woman's lib, gay lib, charities, government departments, political parties, civic associations and many more). Some groups unite to preserve or advance mankind (planned parenthood, medical research, etc.).. Others have a common interest in plant and animal life (conservationists, SPCA, Audubon). Some are trying to hold the whole planet together before it self-destructs (peace groups, environmentalists, United Nations). Others are exploring or explaining the unknown (flying saucer clubs, astrology, psychic and spiritual groups). Lastly we find groups that unite for the understanding and enhancement of man's spiritual existence and his relationship to the entire universe (churches and religious philosophies). A high-tone group with largest scope would be interested in the survival of man and the whole universe-both physically and spiritually. While an upscale person might join that stone skipping club just for the fun of it, he will also belong to groups of larger scope. HOW DOES THE GROUP INTEND TO ACCOMPLISH ITS PURPOSE? Frequently we see an upscale purpose riding in tandem with a low-tone solution. A militant group may claim to be saving the nation while its solution is: destroy people and burn down all the buildings. There are hundreds of charitable groups whose purpose is to help the unfortunate, but whose solution is Propitiation (rather than rehabilitation). In the long run their "help" is more detrimental than beneficial. LEADERSHIP Frequently the function of an organization depends totally on the charisma of one powerful person. It is important to evaluate the tone level of the leader and whether or not the group is dependent on that leader for survival. Perverted, unethical leadership will destroy the beneficial effects of any endeavor, no matter how upscale the purpose and proposed solutions. If the leadership looks good, but you aren't sure, look at the next two points. ACTUAL ACTIVITIES This is the question that exposes the frauds: What is the group actually doing in relationship to what it is supposed to do? An organization can have the highest possible purpose, an upscale solution and some convincing leadership; but are the activities high-tone? This question helps us unmask Mortimer Murkey, the glib 1.1 who heads up the Society for the Aid and Betterment of Downtrodden Derelicts. On close examination, we find that the derelicts are still downtrodden; but Mortimer is driving a Ferrari and living in a twenty-room mansion-with no (other) visible means of income. ACCOMPLISHMENTS Is the group accomplishing its goal without destroying more than it is gaining? Originally labor unions did much to bring about a financial balance between the unscrupulous industrialists and the victimized worker. Today, however, the pendulum often swings the other way and the results are actually harmful (not always the case, of course). Last year the U.A.W. called an untimely strike which nearly crippled the faltering U.S. economy. They won a base pay of twelve thousand dollars a year for their members; but a few months later they were pleading with management for help in handling two mounting problems: alcoholism and drug use-now considered to be the highest causes for absenteeism on the assembly line. It is no surprise that a greater number of workers are sinking into Apathy when they keep receiving more and more pay for doing less. There is no opportunity to improve one's individual sense of worth if his paycheck increases while his contribution does not. THE IDEAL GROUP The ideal group will be upscale in its purpose, solution, leadership, activities and accomplishments. * * * I'm not going to attempt any extensive analysis of groups here; but perhaps some comments on the more popular ones will make it easier for you to use the five-point test to make your own evaluations. CHARITIES Many universities, medical research foundations, churches and clubs are at least partially dependent upon the charity of the public for support. We are bombarded constantly with requests for donations to one cause or another, and thus many people are forced or shamed into Propitiation. I realized one day that if I gave even modestly to every organization seeking my contribution, I'd be on charity myself. So I now use the five handy dandy points before responding to the fervor of any appeal. (With slight modification these points could also be applied to an individual you might wish to assist financially.) When a charitable organization is propitiating without rehabilitating, I don't support it. SOCIAL GROUPS If they're fun and they raise your tone, why not? DRUG REHABILITATION PROGRAMS Today there are countless groups formed for the purpose of handling drug abuse and they vary widely in effectiveness. The U.S. government recently sponsored four drug treatment programs which a later report called "total failures." According to the report, the plan failed because the solution proposed by leaders of the group was abstinence, whereas the young people participating did not consider all drug use harmful. Since there was no agreement on the exact problem and solution, it's understandable that the results were a bit fuzzy. At the other extreme, one of the most successful drug programs in the world was organized several years ago in the Arizona State Prison. Called Narconon, the program was started by a three-time loser with a nineteen-year history of heroin addiction. Using training drills (devised by L. Ron Hubbard) as well as group study of religious and philosophical material written by Ron Hubbard, the program produces more than an 80% cure of hard drug addiction. Rehabilitation efforts based on physical or mental cures alone seldom achieve more than ten or fifteen percent cure. Now used in several prison systems (for other inmates as well as drug addicts), Narconon, addressing both the spiritual and mental health of the individual, continues to produce enthused, well-oriented citizens who return to society with upscale purposes. Since the group contains only volunteers, there is obviously an agreement as to the purpose, and the results confirm the validity of the solution and the leadership. WOMEN'S LIBERATION I've probably been a women's liberationist without banner most of my life-especially during moments alone in front of a sinkfull of dirty dishes or while listening to some dude with the I.Q. of an amoeba tell me: "You know, you're pretty smart for a woman." However, when the women's liberationists first started their public rampaging, I'll confess that I was often less than proud of my own sex. The purpose was certainly valid: women should have equal recognition and opportunity. No upscale person will argue with that. However, the 1.5 leaders-loud, crude, militant and threatening-frequently reached a level of madness that is out of place in any sane negotiations. I objected to the sick "hate men" undertone as well as the implication that a woman must sacrifice charm and grace to earn an equal paycheck. While the earlier feminists were shouting their loudest, a lady in California wrote a book which started another movement advocating a more "feminine" role in which the woman is helpless, screams at spiders, becomes a fragile dependent and uses tears, pouts, and whines to let her man know that she is a woman. Help! Surely there's a solution someplace between the cigar-smoking, raging gut feminist and the moth who flutters helplessly between Grief and Fear. There is. The upscale woman. Today many top-tone men and women are taking up the cause and working (with much less noise) to level out the imbalances in both home and work situations. Before we can drop our mop pails entirely, however, we must quit blaming men for the whole thing. After all, we females have done our share of deceiving, conniving and playing downscale games. The period of natural feminine outrage has won us a few (grudging) brownie points to be sure; but it is now the responsibility of every woman to be as ethical and high-tone as possible to justify the respect she wants. Meanwhile, I hope the chronic Anger types don't go too far and ruin everything, because when all the noise is over, I'll still be willing to bake a batch of cookies once in awhile-in exchange for the luxury of having members of the more muscular sex keep on slaying my dragons, changing my flat tires and lending me a nice, firm shoulder to lean on now and then. It was never all that bad. GAY LIBERATION As long as we're on the subject of men and women, we may as well dispose of the twilight zone. Gay Liberation groups have been popping up like toadstools after a spring rain. They appear to be operating more openly than we generally find with 1.1s. They gain strength by number, of course; but the fact that they are no longer closet queens doesn't necessarily mean that the hidden and destructive intent is gone. Let's examine their purpose: they ask for understanding, acceptance, freedom and civil rights. All nice, clean sounding words. We should notice, however, that they are not asking for any help in curing their abnormalities (in fact, the worst of them will not admit that their behavior is abnormal; they insist it's just a matter of taste. You know, you prefer peas and I prefer rutabagas). Their solution is to bring public acceptance down to their level where we would condone their promiscuity and perversions (not to mention their propensity for spreading venereal diseases). They do not propose that society help them come upscale where a man is content to be a man and a woman enjoys being feminine (without being all hung up over the whole thing). In Science of Survival, L. Ron Hubbard said: ". . . man is relatively monogamous ... it is non-survival not to have a well ordered system for the creation and Upbringing of children by families." I listened to a pair of Gay Liberationists who were guest speakers before a social club. The end product of their movement, they said, would be total sexual freedom for everybody. They advocated "smashing" (their word, not mine) the roles of the family structure. Their objection to the stereotyped roles (dominant man, submissive woman) contains some element of truth; but when asked what would replace the family structure, one of them merely waved a hand airily and replied that it would work out "somehow." A member of the audience asked how they accounted for the fact that most straights considered homosexual activities repugnant. One of the gays promptly replied: "People only react to homosexuality because they are afraid of discovering it in themselves." (Does this mean that when you are repulsed by seeing a dog eat garbage you really want to eat garbage yourself?) This was a neat (and covert) method of silencing all possible protests from anyone who has all of his hormones in the right place. To analyze the social value of such a group, you need only observe that there are no high-tone homosexuals. Tolerance for nationality, race, religious beliefs, etc. is an inherent characteristic of a high-tone society. Tolerance for a decadent condition, however, contains an apathetic acceptance of the condition as irreversible. Certainly homosexuals should not be abused or ridiculed. But a society bent on survival must recognize any aberration as such and seek to raise people out of the low emotion that produces it. PROFESSIONS We can use the tone scale (and the five points) to examine whole professions as well as the individuals in them. The president of the American Psychological Association recently called for the development and worldwide use of drugs to help prevent the powerful from exploiting the powerless. He said that human survival has become a moral problem and that biochemical intervention may be the best method for overcoming "the animalistic, barbaric and primitive propensities in man . . . We can no longer afford to rely solely upon the traditional, prescientific attempts to contain human cruelty and destructiveness." Let's hope that he was merely trying to provoke some constructive action, because if this mind-boggling statement represents the final product of the field of psychology, perhaps this profession should be placed to rest in history books along with the other primitive remedies (like bloodletting) that didn't quite make it. SUMMARY Many groups attract individuals of a certain tone. A Sympathy person may join brotherhood groups and, though he appears noble, he's actually hiding. Anger and Antagonism people are the first to join protest groups because they love a chance to fight. Many Fear people will be following right behind them because such groups help them become more alive. Behind the scenes of organized violence we may find the cunning 1.1 or 1.2 at work. Recently a newspaper columnist reported seeing some secret films of campus riots. The films revealed that the hardcore militants who shouted the loudest for blood, quietly pulled back hen the violence actually erupted. As professional agitators, they were quite adept at ducking out on the turmoil they stirred up, thus avoiding arrest and prominence. The main thing to remember in choosing your group is that it falls on the tone scale somewhere because of its purpose, its solution, its leader, its activities and its final product. Now that you have all that, you can be gung-ho where it counts. ------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 22 - THE TONE SCALE AND THE ARTS "For some reason I love this painting, but that one ... Ugh!" "I never could dig most classical music; it's too depressing." "Maybe it isn't good writing, but I enjoyed the book anyway." Whether creative people like it or not, most individuals respond to the arts emotionally because there's a definite relationship between the tone scale and the arts. Aesthetics forms a scale of its own going from the gaudiest dime store glitter to the elegance of a masterpiece. This scale moves (perpendicularly) up and down the tone scale. Therefore, we may find flawlessly executed art that is depressing. Conversely, we may see happy, upscale work that is less than perfect aesthetically. When a person says, "I know it's supposed to be good, but it doesn't appeal to me," he is objecting to the emotional tone of the work; he may prefer something that is sad, schmaltzy, fearful, mysterious, gutsy or unobtrusive, depending on his tone. There are thousands of songs in the Grief band alone and they range from quickly-forgotten novelty numbers to exquisite classics. Aesthetics has a strong tone-raising value as you will know if certain books, paintings or music fill you with excitement and pleasure. MUST THE ARTIST BE NEUROTIC? An artist who expects to interpret life truthfully must be able to view all tones from Apathy to Enthusiasm with an equally detached viewpoint. His own position on the scale needn't influence his creative ability. Many of our most talented artists were or are low-scale. However, it isn't necessary for the artist to be neurotic in order to be creative (this is an idea that seems to get passed along despite the fact that it's not valid). Although an artist may be able to produce when he's low, he'll be more robust and adept if he moves upscale, and he needn't sacrifice his form, style or talent in any way. No person gets worse by going up-tone. "A good poet can cheerfully write a poem gruesome enough to make a strong man cringe, or he can write verses happy enough to make the weeping laugh. An able composer can write music either covert enough to make the sadist wiggle with delight or open enough to rejoice the greatest souls. The artist works with life and with universes. He can deal with any level of communication. He can create any reality. He can enhance or inhibit any affinity." -L. Ron Hubbard, Science of Survival ON STAGE The tone scale can be useful to the actor, playwright or director. An actress doing a dramatic Grief scene will do it more easily if she understands all the .5 characteristics, many of which can be conveyed without words (expression, posture, movements and communication lag). A Grief person droops; her eyes are downcast. She never gives fast, snappy answers. She sighs heavily. She's so wrapped up in herself that she finds it difficult to get interested in anything or anyone else. An actor or actress in training could exercise by taking a few lines and saying them in every tone on the scale. THE WRITER Countless writers survive (and even prosper) without formally learning the tone scale. The best of them, however, actually do use the material when they accurately observe and describe human nature. If you write about people (whether real or imaginary), using the scale will make your work easier and more believable. If every political writer and historian knew the tone scale, it would be a simple matter to determine whether any famous person was a great statesman or a conniving scoundrel. Recently I read about a popular but controversial man. Since he's quite influential, I was eager to know his tone. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell whether he was a 1.1 or top-scale because the writer intruded his own emotion so strongly through innuendo and thinly-veiled criticism. Covert Hostility types commonly do this to discredit a high-tone person. When I finished the article I knew more about the writer than the subject of the article. Sometimes, out of admiration (or orders from the editor), a writer will endow his subject with a falsely high tone. If enough direct quotations are included, however, you can usually by-pass the author and make an accurate evaluation. "IN CHARACTER" Probably since the first cave man scratched a hieroglyphic symbol on a wall, student writers have been admonished to keep their fictional people "in character," although they are seldom told exactly how to do this. Today, however, the best interpretation of this ill-defined phrase lies in the use of the tone scale. Once you select the chronic tone of a fictional person, you can keep him in character by sustaining that emotion until your plot introduces a situation that justifies a rise or drop in tone. Meanwhile, you can predict his reactions: When he's threatened will he be brave, pig-headed, cowardly, or so low he's unaware of any threat? Will he be honest when faced with temptation? Will he be generally liked or disliked? Will he boost or depress others by his presence? You can show the village drunk as easy-going or pugnacious when under the influence. If you sober him up, however, he should be placed in Apathy-morose and brooding. The Angry prostitute (such as the one portrayed by Barbra Streisand in the movie "The Owl and the Pussycat") has the same 1.5 characteristics as the tough army general. The characters can be rich, poor, nauseatingly intellectual, drop-out dumb, prudish, nicely moral, nicely immoral or downright cheap. They can be chic or dowdy. They can be members of an Indian tribe or the New York cocktail circuit. But if the tone is constant it can be readily recognized by the jet set debutante as well as the frazzled housewife in Hoboken ("I know somebody who's just like that"). SOME FAMOUS CHARACTERS One enjoyable way to practice the tone scale is by spotting people (whether real or fictional) in books, articles, movies and plays. Let's do a few for a warm-up ... That famous, slinky creature, Long John Silver in Treasure Island was definitely a 1.1, as evidenced by his sneaky trickery and his smiling front. Hamlet seemed to move around the scale; but when he delivered his famous "to be or not to be" he was caught in the indecision of Grief. His uncle (the King) exemplified the suppressive 1.1 by the devious skullduggery which brought about the death of everyone around him. In the The Love Machine Jacqueline Susann describes a No Sympathy person in Robin Stone. In the play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw also gave us a No Sympathy person, Henry Higgins. Liza Dolittle, spunky and outspoken was mostly Antagonism, with occasional fits of Anger. Higgins' lack of sympathy shows up in his complete inability to perceive or acknowledge Liza's feelings, although he sometimes uses the "coaxing cleverness" of the 1.1 or throws a fit of temper. After much exposure to each other, Shaw (believably) settles out the relationship at mid-point (1.5): "She snaps his head off on the slightest provocation, or on none ... He storms and bullies and rides . ." Thomas Berger in The Little Man sketches a 1.1 practical nurse in a few succinct sentences: "... stout, over-curious, and spiteful ... one of those people who indulge their moral code as a drunkard does his thirst ... and went so far as to drop certain nasty implications ... A more sensitive person would have taken my murmur as adequate discouragement, but Mrs. Burr was immune to subtlety." In The Godfather by Mario Puzo we have the tone level of organized crime (1.1 to 1.5). The Godfather himself, often unsympathetic, occasionally angry, operated for the most part as a 1.1. "We're reasonable people. We can arrive at a reasonable agreement but underneath the simulated friendliness, there was a mutually shared knowledge that any person who failed to comply would simply be destroyed. His frequent poses of sentimentality and kindness were merely 1.1 devices for gaining control over others. Despite his apparent love for his family, his activities placed them under constant threat from both the law and rival underworld gangs. We also see the exalted ego of the 1.1 as he demands "full respect" from his underlings, constantly asserting his "honor" while indulging in covert treachery, deception and betrayal. Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five brilliantly depicts Apathy in the funny, pitiful, non-hero Billy Pilgrim. VOLUME The writer can also make excellent (and realistic) use of tone volume. Some characters come on strong while others stay in the background-not intruding too heavily in the story-just as they do in our lives. We see a 1.1 who's amusing and likable-a charming, boyish, ladies' man who's generally forgivable. Of course he's still unreliable, unfaithful and unethical. Some of his jokes will have a bit of an edge; he won't keep agreements; he won't persist on a job. He'll carry all the 1.1 characteristics, but his charm makes him socially acceptable (as long as you don't need to depend on him for much). This is 1.1 on the low side, lightly done. On the other hand, we meet a 1.1 with the volume turned up and, although he still wears the plastic smile, he's so viciously dedicated to destruction that he leaves nothing but tears and frustration in his wake. The difference between them is volume. One Apathy person may be practically invisible, while another sits in the corner, saying nothing, but permeating the room with a heavy, suffocating hopelessness. REALISM VS. ROMANTICISM For a number of years we have been bombarded with a level of creativeness called realism. To this school, life is a garbage can. "Telling it like it is" means depicting drunkenness, deceitfulness, addiction, prostitution, crime, depravity, murder, unhappiness, sorrow, and every form of spiritual slumming. Honest realism shows us the roses in the garden as well as the refuse in the back alley. There's usually somebody around to appreciate every tone of writing. However, it wouldn't hurt any writer to notice the popularity of the upscale invulnerables: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Tarzan, Superman, the Lone Ranger and every hero who can shoot from the hip with his eyes closed and never miss. There's pleasure in believing in the superhuman and, no matter how mundane his own condition, man never tires of this vicarious invincibility. High-tone writing needn't be happy every minute. Erich Segal's Love Story is an excellent example of an upscale story about a young couple who meet on a mutually antagonistic level and, falling in love, move uptone to a delightfully bantering, but meaningful, relationship. The Grief (introduced in the last one-fifth of the book) depicts the way upscale people would react in such circumstances. Critics of this book fall into two camps: for or against. No one, it seems, is indifferent. Segal plays sharply on the emotional responses, s o both high and low-tone readers are deeply moved by this ten-Kleenex book. In the war of the critics, however, the first shot was fired by the 1.2s. No Sympathy doesn't dare let anyone tug this way at his atrophied heartstrings, so he fights back by sneeringly labeling the work "romanticism." And the one who laughs when everyone else is weeping is most likely the 1.1 in the audience. If Mr. Segal were to look closely at those who attacked his book most viciously, he would find them all at 1.1 or 1.2 on the scale. They're saving their kudos for low-tone art that will contribute more to the degradation and destruction of the human race. THE TURNING POINT Most fiction plotting requires at least one major turning point to add interest and bring about the desired ending. The poor little waif makes good. The tough criminal decides to go straight. The philandering husband realizes he loves his wife after all. People do make major decisions which change the course of their lives; but writers go out of character more on this device than any other. When a person experiences (or causes or witnesses) a big upset, loss or misunderstanding, he's likely to make a decision that will change the course of his life; but the choice he makes will be a downscale one. When he drops to a low tone, it's impossible for him to make an upscale decision or determine to be an upscale person. Any decision made in the middle of a low-tone upset Will be a low-tone decision designed to keep such circumstances from occurring again. It is during such extremely depressed moments of life that a person decides to have less affinity for his fellowman ("I'm never gonna love anybody again"), less agreement ("You can't trust anybody"), less communication ("You won't catch me shooting off my mouth again"). This is when he will decide to quit school, leave town, get drunk, never trust a woman, never believe anybody, never tell the truth or try to help anyone again. Let's say the tough, No Sympathy killer shoots at a cop and injures a little girl instead. He immediately suffers remorse and tries to make it up by lavishing the girl and her family with gifts and money. Society may now consider him a "good" man but the author should realize that this man is at Propitiation and the rest of his behavior should be consistent with his tone. He'll still be unethical, weak and ineffectual. If you want the character to go straight, you must plot the circumstances to raise him uptone. After I gave a lecture in California, a young playwright came up to me and said, "I've only recently learned about the tone scale. I'm writing a new play that's nearly finished and I've discovered my heroine is a Grief person. I don't want to end the play with her still at this level; but if I change her tone completely I'd have to rewrite nearly every scene. Is there any believable way I can raise her up before the end of the play?" "Yes," I answered, "Show a turning point of wins, not losses. Let her succeed at something she's trying to do, perhaps by leaving someone who's holding her down." A person at the bottom can experience a tremendous upsurge with any minor victory: baking a cake that doesn't fall or getting a balky car to start. I went on to suggest that he move her up through the tones, stressing some more than others. "She could start by showing a stronger interest in others, then she might become more courageous and willing to fight anything stopping her. Keep giving her wins and you can take her as high as you want." This seemed to solve the problem because his face lit up like a launching rocket: "Yes, I can do that. Wow! You've saved me six months of rewriting." REALIZATIONS When you show a mean, angry character who experiences a devastating loss and realizes that he should turn into a nice person, remember that his decision was made in the middle of Grief ("I'd better be another. I'm too painful."). If you insist on endowing him with the stereotyped heart of gold, remember that heart is made of mush at .8 and .9 on the scale. If you want a character to "realize" on his own that he's been a coward, or a no-good, and you want him to become an upscale hero, you must devise a way to move him up-tone before this realization takes place. People are incapable of confronting the truth about themselves while in any low tone. Near the bottom of the scale, magnificent realizations tend to be nothing more than pretty delusions. A low-scale person moving up will go through Anger, and it's a natural turning point. At this time the former coward will say, "I've had enough of this sniveling around. I'm tired of being everybody's doormat. From now on I'm getting tough." Once he's capable of getting angry, he might move on up. It's at Anger that a person insists on a showdown, a face-to-face confrontation. Don't try to bypass Anger in taking a person upscale. It's unreal. We sometimes read true accounts of people who undergo some "awakening" after enduring the darkest moments of their lives. There are two explanations for this type of phenomenon. Such things can happen to a high-tone person who suffers a loss and bounces back upscale, enriched by the experience. A Conservatism man experienced a nearly fatal automobile accident. During his long recovery he found himself so weak and helpless that he considered suicide. He managed to cling to some thread of sanity, however, and he gradually regained his strength and moved back upscale. Today he's higher-tone than before. If he meets a pretty girl he kisses her. When he wakes up and the sun is shining, he considers it a beautiful day. If it's raining, he still considers it a beautiful day. He's less inhibited and has more fun: "I found out how good it is to be alive." Many of the "breakthroughs" we hear about, however, are nothing more than the person settling into philosophic Apathy. The determining factor is this: what did he do afterward? Did he go out and become more effective or did he develop a sedentary philosophy about the mystic significance of a blade of grass? There is an interesting and consistent phenomenon which I frequently notice: when a person abruptly becomes interested in a mystic, occult, or symbolic explanation for everything, this is a certain clue that some ambition of his was shattered. He's wordlessly slipped into a peaceful Apathy where everything is now explained by stars, numbers, or symbols-all of which are mysteriously preordained and out of his control. THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE ARTIST High creativity cannot take place in an atmosphere of downscale criticism. The artist should select his working environment, close friends, instructors and critics with care. The more successful an artist is, the more low-tone people gravitate toward him. Use a pitchfork if necessary, but get rid of them. The creative person needs a free mind and peaceful surroundings. If you share your dreams with a low-tone person, he'll crush them. Look around you and you'll find many friends with stories that were never written and songs that were never sung because they aligned themselves with someone below 2.0 on the scale and soon gave up. YOUR CRITICS Better to blush awhile unseen than ask the wrong person to criticize your work. The creative impulse is often fragile and the beginning artist is easily discouraged if his embryonic creations are heavily punctured. Even experienced writers are vulnerable. A well-known author showed an unfinished manuscript to a friend. The friend voiced some criticism and the author abandoned the piece for nearly a year. After he recovered enough to finish the book it became a best seller. The critic you select may be well-published, heavily degreed, and wear a stamp of "authority" from some lofty institution; but if you want to survive as an artist, use his tone scale position as the first credential. Although he may know his subject well, his comments come through his tone. If it's low, his intention will be to stop you. Below 2.0 there is no such thing as constructive criticism. Over a period of several years, I encountered a variety of writing instructors. In Freshman English it was a Boredom type whose literary criticism consisted of correcting grammar and sentence structure. Neither encouraging nor discouraging any possible talent in the class, she was harmless. The Antagonism instructor in the Composition Course loved to take a philosophic question, toss it to the class and encourage hot debate. Although we engaged in many stimulating verbal brawls, we learned nothing about writing skill. The next professor I met was pure Sympathy, who so thoroughly understood artistic fragility that he never entered a single criticism or constructive remark into his teaching. He didn't even give assignments. His was a "free" class-even free from help. The most discouraging instructor was a 1.2 who specialized in undermining the confidence of his students. When asked for specific advice on a piece, he curtly replied: "if you want to learn the art of simile, read Georgia Portly Lament." He often referred to obscure writings, implying that unless we knew them we were beyond hope. Criticizing with blunt generalities, he left the students dissatisfied and discouraged with their work and not knowing exactly how to improve it. Eventually I found an uptone instructor (there really are some) and the differences were remarkable. With no wish to hurt or discourage his students, he praised as often as possible. On the other hand, integrity to his job (and his own skill in the field) made him able to criticize when needed. The important difference was this: he gave specific criticism, not generalities. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who is a University art professor and he thanked me profusely. While acutely conscious of his students' vulnerability, he was never able to work out exactly how to criticize until I mentioned the word specific. This kind of correction doesn't hurt (unless the student is on a low-tone vanity trip) because the artist knows exactly how to improve his work; he learns something. Incidentally, this is the main reason a rejection slip is so discouraging to the writer. It's a generality. There is no clue why his story didn't sell. When the author knows the true reason (no matter how gruesome) it is easier to confront than his own low-scale imaginings, and he may be able to remedy the piece. I understand that some publications are now using a rejection slip in the form of a check list, and I'm sure this helps. SUMMARY Choose your art, your environment, your teachers and your critics by tone. You need low-tone help about as much as you need a case of malaria. There is every reason for the artist to be upscale and none for being down. Ron Hubbard said that it is "the artists who, through grossness and vulgarity, destroy the mores of a race and so destroy the race." (Science of Survival On the other hand, topscale artists are the most powerful people on earth, for aesthetics is the quickest method of all for lifting large numbers of people up-tone. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 23 - HOW TO HANDLE PEOPLE BY TONE MATCHING How can you inspire discouraged salesmen? What do you do with the 1.1 who's trying to destroy you? How do you stop the antagonistic interviewer from attacking you? What's the best way to get the indifferent customer to buy? How do you cheer up a friend? What do you do when someone gets angry at you? In other words, how do you handle low-tone people? (High-tone people don't need handling; they are to enjoy.) If you're just interested in getting on with your job, and not doing a major overhaul, you can try tone matching. WHAT IS TONE MATCHING? Tone matching means knowingly adjusting to the tone level of the other person. We do this by going to the same tone or one notch above. When you tone match with a person, he'll like you better and, if he's regularly higher on the scale, you can lift him back up. If he's chronically low, you may raise him, but it will be only temporary. In such a case the person may develop a dependency on you-someone who understands and gives him a lift. Unless you like carrying a load of hitchhikers all the time, you will want to know how to bring him chronically upscale so he can move on his own wheels. Naturally this is what we want for those closest to us, so other methods of tone raising are discussed in the next chapter. Meanwhile we need a way to cope effectively with those short-term associates we meet daily. FINDING HIM If you're not sure where someone is on the scale, you can do a fast conversational test to find out what he likes to hear and talk about. To do this, you start with high-tone creative ideas. If no response, make small talk about the weather, speak with Anger or Antagonism about something, offer a rumor, mention something frightening, discuss some poor, unfortunate souls, remark that things aren't like they used to be or talk about the hopelessness of it all. As you work down, the person will respond when you make remarks on his tone level. In fact, it's seldom necessary to do this much talking, as he'll usually display his tone in the first words he uses. With this test, you are finding out what is real to the individual. Once you converse on his tone level for a while, he will decide that you're a pretty understanding person. He'll like you. If he moves easily on the scale, you can go up a notch and he'll come with you. By shifting higher, one tone at a time, you can talk him up the scale. Some people are so rigidly immobile that they cannot move more than one step up from their customary tone. Fortunately, they're not common. In this chapter we'll give some examples of tone matching and, in some cases, of tone raising, at the various emotional levels. APATHY If you're trying to reach someone who's in bed in deep Apathy (ill or in shock), you'll find that verbal communications don't make it. Thoughts are unreal to him; even the physical universe is somewhat unreal. To get through to him, use a physical communication. Touch his shoulder or take his hand in yours. He'll be more aware of your hand than anything you say. After awhile, if he's responding to your touch and acting more alive, start drawing his attention to various objects in the room. You might mention a picture on the wall, a vase of flowers or get him to feel the texture of the bed covers. Anything you can do to make him aware of the environment around him may help to bring him a bit up-tone. Don't try to communicate an idea or thought. Just cause him to be aware that he's here. The ambulatory Apathy person is often difficult to reach (especially if he claims everything is fine). The two aforementioned methods are both helpful-hand contact and getting him to notice and touch objects in the environment. I sometimes break through this false serenity by discussing the broken dream that put the person in Apathy. If you reach him this way, expect tears, because it's Grief he's holding off. After he unloads it all, he'll move on up. I know one fellow who shook a girl out of Apathy by talking about imminent death. This was so real to her that she responded. When he offered a bit of hope, she moved up to Making Amends saying, "What can I do?" Soon she was sobbing. Interestingly, several people in the environment were perturbed because he "upset" her. On the contrary, he brought her up to caring about her condition. A short time later she was actually upscale enough to get into constructive action. GRIEF Most people instinctively go to Propitiation or Sympathy with a case of Grief. When there's a death, we send flowers or bake a cake for the mourning family. These are natural gestures, and they're real to the person in Grief. He won't respond to any tone higher. (Don't tell a person in Grief that it's "all for the best." It could push him into Apathy.) The response on this tone band is evident in a report from two psychologists running a clinic for alcoholics. As part of the therapy, the psychologists held regular group discussions with the patients. One day one of the former alcoholics commented: "It's too bad you can't find a single true friend in this world." Someone else responded, apathetically, that it was kind of foolish and hopeless to even look for one. The others joined in the discussion. A few of them said that you might locate one true friend; but most of them agreed there was no such thing. The psychologist suggested they agree on a definition: "What do we mean by the term true friend?" After a little deliberation, the group agreed on a definition: "A true friend is a person who would give you the shirt off his back." Here we see individuals who are in Apathy or Grief and the only kind of a friend who would be real to them is one notch higher on the tone scale: Propitiation. To tone match with somebody in the sub-subbasement, your conversation must descend to the sub-basement. To bring a Grief person upscale, do things for him, then pour on the Sympathy until he's satiated: "Oh, you poor thing. I don't know how you stand it. You certainly get all the bad breaks. I can't imagine how you endure it all. It amazes me that you're still going on." With any luck, he'll decide you re very understanding and soon he'll say, "Oh, it isn't all that bad." After that, you should be able to bring him on up to the point where he will receive constructive help. You don't always need to go this far of course (pouring it on so thick) but the important point is this: don't tell him he has no reason to grieve. It won't work. He'll only conclude that you don't really understand him. PROPITIATION Blakely was a house guest with Mr. and Mrs. Porter when he accidentally broke a chair in his room. Deeply apologetic, he asked his hostess to send him the bill for repairs. "Oh, no," she insisted, "that chair was already cracked. We should have fixed it long ago." "I don't believe that. You're just trying to make me feel better. Please send me the bill." Mrs. Porter never did send him the bill, so Blakely mailed her a check imploring her to fill in the correct amount. She eventually did; but she felt guilty about it. When two Propitiation people meet, they create a frustrating impasse. Even when your sense of justice is abused, the best way to handle Propitiation is to accept his offering and thank him profusely. Otherwise, he'll be miserable. You can bring him upscale as you would a Sympathy person, which will be described next. SYMPATHY I was talking to a chronic Sympathy woman one day. She planned to become involved with a drug rehabilitation program because she was sorry for the drug users. She possessed neither the training nor the ability to give them any real assistance (in fact, I knew if she followed her intention, she would soon be wallowing in Grief), so I started talking Fear, warning her of all the possible consequences. Was she prepared to manage this problem and that one? You'd better be careful ... To my relief, she said, "You know, I'm afraid I'm not actually ready to take this on yet." We started gossiping about the incompetents now running the group in question. Eventually she reached an antagonistic determination to become better trained so she could join in and "really do something." This was considerably higher-tone than the compulsion to leap into a situation where she could only lose. FEAR A 1.0 can be reached by discussing all the dreadful things there are to worry about. If you want to lift him up a slot, suggest covert ways of dealing with something that he considers threatening. If he's afraid his house will be robbed, discuss alarms, booby traps and hidden weapons he could use against intruders. THE 1.1 If you just want him to like you, meet him on tone. Flatter him. After all, he's putting on a show for your benefit. Why not enjoy it and let him know you do? High-tone people nearly always get angry in the vicinity of a 1.1 (especially if they're trying to get something done). It can serve a purpose if you want to get him out of your hair. If he's mobile at all, he'll feel that it's safe to come up-tone and fight back. If he's a chronic 1.1, however, he'll retreat because he fears and respects Anger. George was receiving repeated vicious, underhanded attacks from a business associate. One day, fed up with the Covert attempts to do him in, George confronted his adversary: "Why don't you just kill me and get it over with?" The 1.1 laughed, denying the charges; but he quit attacking. In fact, George established a certain low-level rapport with the man by correctly indicating the 1.1's true intentions. NO SYMPATHY Since this tone is part of the 1.1 band, it will also handle well with Anger. Instead of a direct fight, however, you can also try aiming the Anger at someone else. A friend of mine (normally high-tone) was feeling hateful toward a business associate. He was caught in a bottled-up silence so typical of 1.2. Taking his side, I began to talk angrily about his "enemy." This brought some signs of life, so I continued. Soon we were plotting the painful extinction of the other man; together we dreamed up schemes for outrageous and vicious revenge. In a few minutes he was bored with conventional ideas so our plots became more diabolical and ludicrously funny. My friend was laughing uproariously when he finally said, "Oh, the hell with it. I have more important things to do." ANGER You'll never get together with an Anger person by trying to soothe and mollify him. If he's angry at you, you can tone match. That is, leap in and have a real row. He'll love you for it. Remember that the person most admired by the hardened commanding general is his opposite number - the tough commanding general of the enemy's army. A friend of mine spent years cowering and slinking away from her 1.5 husband. One day he stormed at her and she yelled back. They flew into battle, raging at each other in the first major fight in their twelve years of marriage. When they ran down, they looked at each other in amazement and burst out laughing together. There are times when you will need to turn off Anger directed at you by directing it somewhere else. Several years ago when I was in the real estate business, a client called me. He was so mad he was spitting hornets. I had sold him some property; but my broker failed to deliver the final papers. Repeated phone calls to the broker failed to get results, so the client was taking out his mad on me. He blasted away for about five minutes. I let him blast. When he finished, I said, "I don't blame you for being mad. I'm going to find out what's going on down there and, believe me, we'll get action. I'll call you within twenty-four hours." Before the day was over, I raised some dust myself, found the reason for the delay and took care of it. The papers were on the way when I phoned him the next morning. He responded on the cheerful side of Antagonism and then moved upscale. "You know, I like that," he said, "somebody who gets action instead of arguing with me." >From a commercial viewpoint, this tone matching turned out profitably. He so admired my treatment of his affairs that he referred three new buyers to me within the next six months. ANTAGONISM Henry, a business executive, used Boredom successfully for turning off an Antagonistic person. A reporter phoned Henry to say, "I'm going to write an article about you. I'm investigating your outfit. What's your answer to the charge that your company ... ?" "Oh, that same old thing again?" Henry's attitude dismissed the challenging question as unimportant. You could almost hear the bored yawn in his voice as he chatted amiably about some of his company's mundane and non-controversial activities. Soon the reporter became bored himself. "Well, I'll call you if any more questions come up." "Sure, you do that. Any time." The conversation ended so low-key that the reporter never wrote the article. Another method for handling Antagonism is to meet his tone, but aim it at another target. A surly plumber came to replace a defective garbage disposal for me. I asked him if he could put the new one in the opposite side of the divided sink. He grumbled that it would involve too much work and expense. Realizing that I shouldn't get his Antagonism directed at me in this case, I said, "OK. I see what you mean." Later I remarked, "You know, these builders are a bunch of idiots. You see, they put the disposal on this side and the switch on that side. The dish cupboards are all over here ... obviously this was installed by some dumbbell who never went into a kitchen except to eat." He was happy to have a ready-made enemy, so he started ranting on about those "stupid builders." He worked up such a flap that he called the owner of the building, complained about the lame-brained plumbers and obtained permission to move the unit to the opposite sink. You can also meet 2.0 head-on in direct combat. I once met an Antagonistic attorney at a party. I tried some cheerful conversation with him; but he was sour and rude-constantly contradicting, challenging and interrupting-so I abandoned the niceties to play the game in his arena: "Boy, you sure like to fight, don't you?" "What do you mean? I'm a peace loving man." "Don't give me that. You can't resist an argument." "That's ridiculous!" "No, it isn't. You never let anybody say anything without disagreeing." "I do too," he protested. "See? You even had to disagree with that. You won't let me say a thing without contradicting it." "Hey! You got me all wrong. I'm a lover, not a fighter." "Don't kid me. You'd be bored to death if you couldn't fight with someone." This went on for some time (to the extreme anguish of some lower-tone people in our vicinity), but my friend was getting more alive and stimulated by our verbal exchange. Later, bright and cheerful, he said, "You know, you're really OK." "That's right." We were both laughing as he said, "Hey! We agreed on something." THE SALESMAN A good salesman uses the tone scale naturally. A new prospect is often apathetic about your product when you first approach him (after all, he's lived this long without it, so who needs it?) But if you meet him on his tone level and talk him up the chart until he's interested or enthusiastic, you've a good chance for a sale. Most salesmen use the technique of finding a subject that interests the customer. He may be low-tone about business, but tremendously interested in raising tropical fish, so you inquire about the health of his neon tetras. As he talks of them, he'll become more enthused. After he's upscale, you casually ask how many carloads of gidgets he needs today. If you're a sales manager, you already know there's nothing more deadly than the creeping contagion of salesman's Apathy. Suppose there's been a long strike in the city; the economy is shaky; everyone's cautious and waiting; orders are scarce. Your salesmen are thinking of going out on the corner with tin cups. How do you boost their morale? If you call a sales meeting, don't try to hit those boys with a pitch full of puffed-up enthusiasm. Their thoughts and comments about you would be unprintable. Tone match. You can raise the tone of a group of dejected people by thoroughly acknowledging just how bad things are: "Well (sigh) this has been quite a month. I was waiting in line for lunch at the Salvation Army today and I got to talking with the president of General Motors . . "My wife and I held a garage sale last weekend. We cleared ten dollars, which is twice my commission for last month. We celebrated by going out to the Dairy Queen." Take all the coveted grievances and blow them up to the point of gross exaggeration. Misery loves company (that's what tone matching is all about), and once they realize someone does understand that things are tough, they can let go of the emotion. They'll soon be laughing and coming upscale. When this occurs, you can outline the new advertising program and start painting a brighter picture for the future. COMPULSIVE TONE MATCHING I stress knowingly tone matching, because we unknowingly do so all the time-and it knocks us down. It's natural to seek communication with others. So we adjust downward until we can find some area of agreement. The trouble is, when we don't realize we're doing it we slip down-tone ourselves. If we admire an individual (or consider him superior in some way) we can get clobbered even more thoroughly (if he's low-tone), because he's going to use his expertise to sell us a low-scale attitude. We rush to the brilliant engineer with our great new idea. We're going to build a supersonic, computerized, better mousetrap with built-in Roquefort. Enthusiastically, we spill it all out; but he fails to respond. Seeking his agreement, we keep dropping downscale. Eventually (after all, he's an authority, isn't he?) we concede that it's hard to come up with anything new these days; nobody's making a fortune now, and the income tax boys get you first anyway. We slump away wondering how we could have entertained such a stupid dream. We go back to reading our comic books. To successfully tone match we must be stably upscale. It's the only way we can adjust to lower tones without losing the high-tone viewpoint. That's the difference between knowingly tone matching and the compulsive kind-you don't lose the upscale viewpoint. HOW DOES THE LOW-TONE PERSON ATTACK? To successfully deal with tones, we should know the three methods of attack the low-tone person may use: 1) thought, 2) emotion and 3) effort. A person in Apathy, using thought, will try to convince us that everything is hopeless; we're failures; we can't hold a decent job; we've wasted our lives and how could anyone love us anyway? Using Apathy emotion with the volume turned up, he can drive us to the bottom by just emanating the emotion itself. He can sit around feeling that there's no hope for himself, for anyone or anything. The world is doomed. Without saying a word, he permeates the atmosphere with so much black gloom-that we collapse just from the fall-out. Apathy efforts are equally devastating. If someone apathetically handles the materials related to our survival, we are influenced. If your wife insults the boss, wrecks the car, lets your home become filthy, fails to feed and dress your children, you'll be driven down (or to the divorce court). If an employee loses your orders, destroys your goodwill and breaks down your machinery, your survival is threatened and it's a short trip down to Apathy yourself-unless you fire him. IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE If continued attempts to cope with a low-tone person fail and you find yourself coming unglued, break your connections. Why be a hero? Nobody will appreciate it. Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you pull in a Sympathy person to "take care of you." Tone matching is only easy with the occasional acquaintance. Otherwise it's a strain. To deal with people closer to us, let's find out how to raise tone. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 24 - RAISING TONE You may have been wondering why people drop down tone in the first place and, even more importantly, what we can do about it. The following notes will cover the causes for low-tone as well as a few remedies. There are five major reasons a person goes downscale -temporarily or permanently: 1. His present environment (its tone and volume). 2. His general environmental background. 3. Genetic limitations. 4. His current activities. 5. Experiences of pain and unconsciousness in the past. THE PRESENT ENVIRONMENT Turbulent and unhappy surroundings will produce a disturbed individual. You can't punish, beat, drug, shock or command a person into sanity; but you can take him out of a low-tone area and bring him upscale. Environment includes people, places and general health. A person's marriage partner, family, friends, job and neighborhood are all part of his environment. No matter how high he is basically, when someone associates with unsane individuals, he eventually drops tone, at least while in the vicinity of the lower-scale associates. A 3.0 will drop to Anger or act like a 1.1 in a Covert Hostility environment. The 1.1 might improve to a point of Anger in a high-tone environment. In marriage, as we mentioned earlier, one tends to match the emotional level of the partner, with the downscale person coming up somewhat, and the hightone one coming down considerably. When a person is in an atmosphere where he does not receive friendship or love, is not talked to and where no one agrees with his ideas, he will go down tone. Friendship, communication and agreement are essential to man. If someone is living in squalid rooms or neighborhood, he drops downscale. Clean, light, bright and orderly surroundings will boost an individual somewhat (depending on how boostable he is). The person's physical condition is another aspect of environment. Proper rest, nutritious food, exercise and good health are all necessary prerequisites to high tone. If someone is trying to subsist on three hours of sleep and black coffee, he will find himself less stable; small incidents can provoke a sharp drop in tone. If he suffers from a physical malfunction, he can go upscale after a visit to the doctor and proper medical treatment. A new pair of glasses can do wonders by restoring a large portion of his communication with the world. It's low-tone to neglect the care of the body. The use of sedatives or stimulants (including alcohol) also has a tone lowering effect. Hallucinatory drugs may do so slowly or quickly. I have seen LSD users drop into deeply psychotic Apathy for months or years. Even the so-called "harmless" marijuana lowers tone, especially after prolonged use. The individual sinks into a chronic lethargy, suffers from loss of memory and the inability to concentrate. Three office girls were smoking marijuana on their lunch hour. When asked why they were doing this, one girl replied: "Two or three joints and we feel good. We don't care if it might be our last week on the job. We don't care if the work is stupid. We can stand it then. When we go back, it wears off after awhile and we go down again; but we've had it. We've been up." That's Apathy speaking, of course, which is why it's so hard to talk a person out of pot smoking. He's in an emotion that dictates an indifferent response to danger. Marijuana is not yet widely recognized as harmful because few people possess the means for measuring the subtle, corroding effects of this drug on emotional behavior. Once you understand the tone scale, however, no one who's high on grass will ever convince you that he's high on the tone scale. Drugged euphoria is as honey as a carnival Kewpie doll compared to the glow and warmth of a 4.0. I personally discourage the use of any chemical crutches except where prescribed by a physician for treatment or relief of a physical condition. The way to get the most pleasant sensations is to raise tone. It's the best "high" of all-and the side effects are wonderful. BACKGROUND The tone of a person's family, education and general background environment may strongly affect his outlook for the rest of his life. He may be suppressed down tone, he may copy tones he sees around him, or he may be taught low-scale ideas. If a child is punished or overwhelmed every time he loses his temper or speaks his mind, he drops to 1.1 or below and he may stay there. A person goes downscale under the influence of an overbearing boss, parent, older sibling or teacher. If his communication is enforced ("Speak up!") or repressed ("Don't say those things"), if viewpoints are forced upon him ("You listen to what I'm telling you") or his ideas are dismissed ("You don't know what you're talking about"), if his natural friendship is inhibited ("Don't play with Alice") or enforced ("Go kiss your Auntie, now")-all these things will lower his tone. Parents almost automatically teach their children social tone: be polite, nice, kind and generous. Such Boy Scout goodness is fine if the rest of the environment assures high tone. When overlaying a low-scale atmosphere, however, it breeds an ineffectual person who stays below 1.5. A doctor with twenty years' experience treating homosexuals says that as children most of his patients were criticized for rough-and tumble behavior with other boys. Furthermore, he says that he has never known a homosexual who came from a family where open communication prevailed. Mothers could raise the tone of children if they spent less time "taking care of" them and warning of dangers. Better to let their children eat what they want to eat, sleep when ready and even get their feet wet; the youngsters would be healthier and happier. A person who operates on low-tone attitudes taught to him in his youth can sometimes improve by merely learning the tone scale. I once acted, briefly, as a business consultant for a man whose company was on the edge of financial collapse. It was soon evident that most of his difficulties stemmed from his own emotional attitude of Sympathy. Although his business was floundering, he still supported the many downscale non-producers on his staff because Father taught him to be kind to those less fortunate than himself. I started teaching him the scale to help him spot the assets and liabilities among his personnel. The moment he realized that his own Sympathy was harmful to his staff, his family and his business, he moved upscale. Most of his employees were sales people, so he immediately changed the salary structure to provide a low base pay but extremely generous commissions. This soon separated the producers from the flunkies, because the downscale people couldn't earn enough money to subsist, whereas the high-tone people drew more money than ever before. A natural selection took place: the losers left and he was able to replace them with more upscale people. Low-scale educational systems and teachers are also part of the background which can destroy a person's confidence for life, Demanding that a student memorize endless amounts of unrelated data, forcing him to study a subject without getting him interested in it first, using low-tone and confusing textbooks, grading on a curve, teaching too much theory without practical experience are only a few of the detrimental practices we see in schools. A person goes downscale to the degree that he cannot solve his problems, so when education fails to provide the student with the ability and confidence he needs to solve the problems of living, we see the foundation for a low-tone life. Speaking of background environment, a person tends to adopt a social tone from his neighborhood. If he comes from a rough slum where dog-eat-dog means survival, he may develop a tough 1.2 or 1.5 attitude which he wears layered over his natural tone for the rest of his life. GENETIC LIMITATIONS A person may acquire a low-tone attitude because he was born into a certain nationality or race, because he's too short, his eyes are crossed, his nose is too long or he considers himself physically unacceptable in some way. Any person drops down tone when he believes that his physical shortcomings will result in no affection or friendship from others. Around upscale people, who do not discriminate in this manner, he'll come up, provided he is able to let go of his own ideas on the subject. CURRENT ACTIVITIES How a person spends his time strongly influences his emotional tone. If he is idle, without goal or direction, he will go downscale. A person who is "killing time" dies a little himself in the process. Criminal actions or any activity that is detrimental to his fellow men keeps a person chronically down-tone. Although he may get a lift occasionally, there is no remedy that will bring him up on a permanent basis (unless he ceases such activities, of course). A person engaged in perverted activities stays down as long as he continues them. A prostitute will have to change her profession to come upscale. A businessman who is cheating his customers or taking advantage of his employees will not move up-tone, no matter how many millions he acquires. Many activities are detrimental without being illegal. If a person is continually critical and unkind to others, he stays in the lower zones. If a man is going out with someone else's wife, there's no chance of raising his tone. If a person is leeching off of friends or taking advantage in some other way, he holds his position at the bottom of the pit. An individual cannot hang on to a low-tone activity and expect to rise on the scale. By definition this is impossible. High-tone people do not engage in low-tone activities. To take a person's attention off of some downscale temptation, direct him to other interests. This could be sports, a hobby, or learning a new skill. Anything that captures his interest and curiosity (and is not detrimental to anyone) is a potential tone raiser. If he's sitting around in the glums, he'll perk up if he does any physical job-washes the car, cleans out a closet, plays a game of ball or goes to the mail room and licks stamps. On a temporary basis, doing something is all that matters. He improves even more by developing a skill in some area: learns to fix a car, bake a cake, use a typewriter or play a musical instrument. Best of all, the person will come upscale in any activity which embraces a long-term goal. Anyone moves up when he achieves an enormous success. A happy marriage may raise him chronically. Acquiring a new job, getting promoted, selling that story, recording that song, inventing something-any achievement which is meaningful to the individual-can raise his tone. If you assign a person command over more space, more objects or more people, he will go up the scale. The more a person can control, the more up-tone he becomes. I once knew a man who nearly killed his wife by not allowing her to work outside the home. Her family was grown up, the husband frequently was out of town and she was miserable, tearful and complaining. Her husband mentioned this to me one day, wondering what he could for her. She sometimes expressed a wish to go back to work, he said, but he discouraged this because there was no need for her to work. I suggested that perhaps this wasn't a kindness after all, possibly she needed more to manage. Why not encourage her to get a job and see what happened? I didn't hear how this worked out until several years later when I met the man again at a business meeting. He told me that his wife did find a job, was happily working and getting promotions. She was enthusiastic, more efficient in her housework and a more loving marriage companion as well. Here was a lady who obviously needed more of an area under her control. It's also possible to give a person so much to deal with that he comes apart at the seams. If promoted to a position outside of his skills (or one he hasn't earned), he'll drop down-tone. If asked to meet impossible standards, a previously upscale person drops down. He may become so overwhelmed that he quits or for resorts to lies and cheating in an attempt to cover his failings. The greatest stimulation comes from having just enough work that we must stretch a bit to keep getting things done. Admiration is a great tone raiser. Everyone does something well. Find out what it is, praise him and help him to do it even better. The more you do for a person, the less he will do for himself. Too much generosity begets Apathy. So always let - no, insist - that a person contribute something. Anything. EXPERIENCES OF PAIN AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS Although there are many immediate causes for low tone, all uncontrolled emotions (temporary and chronic) stem from one basic cause: past experiences of physical pain and unconsciousness. Because the content of these experiences is hidden from the person's view, he is unknowingly influenced by them. Even a bump on the head or a skinned knee produces a moment of shock (a great loss such as a death causes a similar emotional shock). Although he isn't passed out cold, a person's awareness is shut down momentarily, at which time all perceptions (sounds, smells, sights, etc.) are unconsciously recorded. These return later, under the stimulus of similar perceptions (or words), and cause low tone and various aberrations. L. Ron Hubbard spent many years developing processes to help the individual permanently erase the effects of these painful incidents (read Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health for a complete explanation of these experiences and how they influence us). His processes are now administered by pastoral counselors in Scientology churches and missions. Their first purpose is to lift the individual's tone permanently, by eliminating the source of downscale emotions. TONE RAISING IN GENERAL Anything that raises a person's tone is a valid action. Going to a movie he wants to see can lift a person up. In fact, using aesthetics is the most effective channel of communication for raising a person without tone matching or professional help. He will respond to beauty when nothing else reaches him. This is why visual aids help in teaching and why artistic advertisements sell products. A vase of flowers or a piece of jewelry can lift a woman who's in the dumps. A sleek, new car can change a man's whole outlook. Primarily what you want to do in raising tone is rehabilitate the person's ability to communicate. You do this by making it safe for him to say anything he wants to say. If he's frightened, he should be able to mention this without someone chastising him for it. He must be permitted to shed his Grief. Most important, he must be in an environment where he is free to get Angry. Since we live in a society that condemns Anger and condones Sympathy, this is the most frequently suppressed emotion. When someone is moving up, Anger is a sign of healthy improvement, not that he is ing mad. The best way to help an Angry person is to let him rage. When he stops, ask him if there's anything more he wants to tell you about it. He'll move upscale after he says it all. An individual stays in any one of the restrained tones as long as he can't communicate the emotion above it. The person who is thoroughly stuck in a low tone will seldom yield to a "Hello, how are you," level of conversation. This requires professional counseling (and perhaps considerable time). SUMMARY There are four valid methods for raising tone: 1. Changing the person's environment to one which is happier and which improves his chances to survive (this includes nutrition, medical care and recreation). 2. Education that more thoroughly acquaints him with the culture or gives him the skills of survival. A person can be taught more easily as he moves up. When a classroom situation is fun the student becomes more confident and relays communication more readily and correctly (in this case relaying refers to the application of material in the lectures and texts). 3. Regulating the numbers and kinds of objects (people or duties) under his control. 4. Scientology processing. All four methods raise a person's tone by giving him better tools for survival, improved conditions in which to survive and some valid reasons for surviving. A person who's progressing doesn't necessarily jet up to the stars and sit there watching the rest of us inglorious souls flounder around in the muck. He loosens up first. He hits peaks and valleys; but he's moving. Best of all, he no longer takes the whole thing so seriously (even when he wilts a bit). Gradually his highs get higher, steadier and more frequent. That's progress, and it's worth any price. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 25 - YOU AND ME No matter what grand thing we want to accomplish-from setting up a lemonade stand in the front yard to cleaning up the world-it's going to be easier and more achievable if we get ourselves as highscale as possible. Besides it's more fun. We can stop wars by making our leaders saner. We can stop environmental destruction by raising the responsibility level of the inhabitants We can stop discrimination by raising the understanding of the individuals. Ultimately, the answer to our social ills lies not in developing better systems, bigger programs, ideal philosophies, or in drugging our political leaders into Apathy. The answer lies in lifting the tone level of the individuals. When we make man saner, we make his families, his groups, his races and his nations saner. We start with you and me. THE TRAP While reading this book, you've probably groaned occasionally: "Oh, I do that sometimes. I must be pretty low-tone." It's a grim experience-seeing and hearing ourselves down there in the pit somewhere. Be assured, however, that you are not alone. We all own the emotional keyboard and we've played every note at one time or another. The best way to get out of any trap is to thoroughly understand the trap. So, having recognized some lowscale manifestations in ourselves, we are already a couple of galaxies ahead of the poor soul who's caught in a tone and believes it. He's saying, "Life is this way," and often he considers the condition permanent and irrevocable. If you experience one of those days when your wife won't talk to you; you get a flat tire on the way to the office; you arrive to find that you've lost two of your biggest accounts; the production line is shut down with a mechanical failure and the big boss is in town on an unexpected visit-you might heave a huge sigh and say, "I give up." When you know the tone scale, however, you may be able to say (gulp) "This is Apathy," in which case some part of you is not totally submerged. You can take some control and drag yourself back into the day-awful as it is. In this chapter we're going to examine some of the things we can do to haul ourselves up and stay there. BE SELFISH Be selfish and industrious about raising your own tone. You owe it to yourself, your future, your family, to your work and to mankind. It is never noble to be less than sane. It is never better survival to continue non-survival actions. Anything which raises tone is worthwhile. As we mentioned in the last chapter, this can include bettering our health, our environment, our education, and-for permanent improvement-Scientology processing. Notice your own tone fluctuations: What people, places, or activities drop you down? Which raise your tone? Start orienting your life toward the tone raising people, places and actions. Pleasure and survival go together. Something that increases your pleasure increases your survival and vice versa. Any activity you thoroughly enjoy will be tone raising. This may sound self-indulgent; but only low-tone people try to convince us there is anything honorable about being serious and self-sacrificing. The person who takes the necessary actions to improve his emotional outlook becomes more tolerant and understanding, more able to solve problems, more responsible and more persistent. He can live well and freely; but still accomplish ten times as much as the drones who plod heavily along because they "don't have the time" to enjoy living. FLUCTUATIONS The upscale person doesn't sit placidly serene while buildings collapse around him. Nor does he leap through life in constant orgasmic ecstasy. He fluctuates. He is not stuck. He responds with the right emotion for the occasion, and most of the time he experiences a quiet excitement at the simple pleasures of living. THE SECRET OF POWER One of the biggest mistakes we can make is assuming that we can associate closely with down-tone people for a long time without sliding down ourselves. Other than at gun point, there are only two ways to deal with someone who is working relentlessly to knock us down: We handle him (preferably by bringing him upscale) or we disconnect. Although we needn't condemn a person for his low position on the scale (who can cast the first stone?) we mustn't deceive ourselves either. There's nothing more difficult to face than the destructive evil of a chronic, high-volume low tone. There probably isn't one of us who wouldn't rather pretend it isn't there. It's so much easier to "think the best of people." That's the coward's way out, however, and it's a costly mistake. Most of us err in trying to help someone too long. If a person won't permit himself to be helped, we must be willing to let go. When we keep trying and failing and still insisting we "should be able to manage it," we drop downtone ourselves. If there's a large hole in the bottom of the ship, you either repair it in a hurry or you get out the life boats. Too many people struggle through life trying to bail out their sinking ships with a teaspoon. The secret of power is knowing how to handle and when to disconnect. CHOOSE YOUR PEOPLE Low-tone people, like poison ivy, are easier to avoid than get rid of. So from here on you can save yourself much grief by choosing upscale people right from the start. Even pick the highest tone businesses for your patronage. When you choose trustworthy people, life is brighter and you won't be complaining that "he gypped me" or "I was betrayed." I even (I mean, especially) select my auto mechanics by tone. When I find an uptone fellow, I give him all of my business and my trust, knowing that if the motor in my car develops an alarming new plunk (because a bolt needs tightening), he isn't going to tell me: "The whole flanastran must be overhauled, and that'll run around three hundred dollars." CHOICES Knowing the high-tone characteristics, we find that there are many times we can actually make a choice toward the higher attitude. it's more upscale to trust than distrust. This doesn't mean we should become gullible; but when there's a borderline decision, well feel better if we permit ourselves to trust. (I've even known some low-tone people who actually stretched their ethics upward simply because I let them know I trusted them. This won't work with everyone; but if a person is mobile, he'll reach up-tone more readily on trust than distrust. Do this with children.) When we're debating whether or not to tell the truth, we find that truth is much higher than deceptiveness. Understanding is higher than ignorance; it's always beneficial to learn more. Causing is saner than being effect, so don't sit quietly in the back of the room and let the low-tone committee members run things. Speak out. Owning is higher on the scale than considering one shouldn't own anything. Taking responsibility is more up-tone than avoiding responsibility. It's higher tone to fall in love than to be a cynical loner. It's more upscale to communicate than to suppress communication. GOALS We may want to win a Nobel Prize, invent a substitute for food, learn to telepath with chipmunks or merely get the flower bed weeded out this afternoon. No matter what the job, it's easier to accomplish when we're upscale. On the other hand, we mustn't sit around waiting until enthusiasm strikes us before we tackle the breakfast dishes. The person who accomplishes a great deal while still down-tone is of much greater potential worth. The most important single contributing factor to tone is pursuing one's own goals. So if you're not working toward the goal that means most to you, dust the cobwebs off that dream (the one you abandoned because someone convinced you to be sensible and take up engineering instead) and get on with it. SOME TONE RAISING IDEAS Someone once said, "Life is the thing that really happens to us while we're making other plans." This is true of the downscale person. Up-tone people enjoy the present as they plan their future. Low-tone people only daydream about it (and some merely wait to "see what happens"). Too often we hear people say, "Some day I'm going to start my own business," "I'd really like to write a song," "I intend to go back and finish school," "I want to take up skiing sometime." The difference between upscale planning and lowscale wishful thinking is action. The high-tone person puts his plans into action in the present time. Now. He isn't just thinking; he's doing. We can raise ourselves, temporarily, on the scale by riding on the bubble of wishful thinking. But, if we never act, the bubble soon bursts and we must confront the mundane reality of our existence-and die in little pieces. When we're not working toward a major goal (or even a minor one), it's too easy to "save" ourselves for some purpose important enough for our attention. Saving ourselves is a sure way to drop downscale and stay there. In such circumstances, find anything to do-whether or not it's important. Lethargy produces low tone and, tragically, low tone produces lethargy. The longer we put off an action, the more deeply we sink into a pool of inertia, and it's much more difficult to start up again from a dead stop. Almost everyone must fight lethargy sometimes; but you conquer it by just starting something. Once you're rolling it's easier to keep going and you will move upscale. Finishing jobs can give you a marvelous sense of accomplishment, especially those jobs you're likely to postpone from year to year. Spend a day or a week finishing any projects you have lying around and you'll soar. If your environment is in a state of chaos, the disorder grabs your attention (and hangs on to it) every time you walk through the room. Disorder itself is low-tone. Order is high-tone. So you can bring yourself upscale by simply cleaning and organizing the nest. Afterward you'll have a free mind to address more meaningful projects. Another gambit for raising tone is to get involved. We all have choices almost daily: "Should I go to the party or stay home?" "Shall I go see what that job is all about or just forget it?" "Shall I attend the meeting or take the evening off?" "Should I join that committee or let someone else do it?" "Should I take that judo class or stay home and read?" Assuming that you're considering an activity that's relatively high-tone, you will usually find more enjoyment when you take the active choice rather than the passive one. It's the person who's avoiding work, avoiding risks, avoiding responsibilities, avoiding new situations who's miserable. Always reserve the freedom to withdraw from a situation that is low-tone (when you can't do anything about it). But get involved. DON'T SUPPRESS EMOTIONS If you learn nothing else from this book, you should learn that you never reach high tones until you can experience all of them. To gain mobility you must not suppress emotions. When you feel like crying, cry or you slip into Apathy. If something is fearful, go ahead and be frightened or you become a weak Sympathy and Propitiation type trying to ward off all dangers and never helping anybody-least of all yourself. Don't bottle up Anger; let it go. When someone is doing something objectionable to you, in your space or with your belongings, speak immediately. We only covertly hate that person if we don't voice our complaints. Simply state flatly and directly: "You did this. I object to it. Don't do it again." The more you bottle up such feelings, the more you pin yourself down in 1.1 or 1.2. Some people need to work up a high volume of Anger in order to "tell someone off." This is undesirable because uncontrolled Anger is usually destructive. It's the person who's too cowardly to say something in the beginning who lets his grudges build up until he explodes. State your objections immediately while the volume is low, and they will not stay with you simmering under the surface. Don't worry about hurting the other fellow's feelings. If he's taking advantage of you or doing something harmful, it's a crime to let him continue. If he's unable to improve, you're better off getting him out of your environment anyway. Of course, none of this justifies a person who is constantly critical and invalidating to others. He's fixed between 1.1 and 2.0. BAD NEWS The top of the tone scale tells us that the upscale person doesn't absorb and relay all the bad news. He cuts such communication lines. There are many ways to do this and it will serve us well to use them. If the newspaper makes you believe there's no hope for the world, quit reading it. If a book is depressing (who cares how artistic it's supposed to be?) throw it in the fireplace; it'll help the kindling along. Find highscale entertainment. It can bring back a chuckle or a flow of warmth for a long time afterward. When you're talking with someone and the conversation drops low, change the subject. Cut that communication line. If certain people insist on giving you nothing but bad news, lies, gossip, arguments, criticism, hopelessness or covert barbs, stop associating with them. If you wouldn't tolerate people dumping their trash in the middle of your living room, why let them empty their mental trash cans in your mind? I was at a party when a woman inquired about my religion. She smiled slyly as she asked: "Oh, are you a convert?' She leaned so heavily on the last word that I could see she anticipated doing some covert sniping. I decided to cut this communication immediately. Abruptly and firmly I said, "I don't even know the meaning of the word." I turned away from her and started talking with the others at the table. She didn't speak again and, strangely, none of the other people at our table of six spoke to her. The rest of us carried on an easy, laughing conversation. Later one of the men said to me: "I don't know how you managed to shut Nancy up so effectively; but I'm glad you did. It's the first time I ever enjoyed myself when she was around." This may seem cruel treatment if you're programmed to preserve social graces no matter what. It is actually more cruel to everyone when you permit a 1.1 to direct and control the communication. It always goes down. GIVE AND TAKE It is vital that we reach a balance between what we contribute and what we receive. This principle applies to friendships, marriages, jobs, groups, etc. If we're always helping others and taking nothing in return, we do a disservice to those on the receiving end. We should find a way for others to repay us. If we are taking a great deal from someone else (care, food, shelter, services, money), we should find ways to return the flow or we drop to the beggar level of Apathy and Grief. SUMMARY Don't decide to get married, divorced, quit your job, leave school or enter a convent when you are low-tone. Make your choices when you're at the top. If you suffer any kind of body ailments, get medical attention. Pain drives a person down. Select your associates, jobs, spouse, groups, bosses, employees and allegiances by tone. When you hit a temporary downscale attitude, don't take it seriously. It is nothing more than the coat you're wearing today. It is not you. Don't wait for others to give you a pat on the back for something you did. Give yourself the pat and get on with the next job. Don't try to arbitrate between two people who insist on playing a low-tone game with each other. This is like trying to balance a canoe in a ninety-mile gale while struggling with an epileptic hippopotamus. Don't consign yourself to some constant drudgery that you despise. Direct yourself toward a worthwhile purpose-something that interests you strongly. "Without goals, hopes, ambitions or dreams, the attainment of pleasure is nearly impossible." -L. Ron Hubbard, Science of Survival Trust your own observations and don't believe lowtone gossip, reporting, teaching, advice or news. Look at the source of the communication before you absorb it or pass it on. Don't listen or talk to low-scale people unless you feel able to control the tone of the conversation. Above all, don't share your ambitions with those at the bottom. They're leaning toward death and this includes the destruction of dreams. Watch out for all the clever ways we try to explain away our own low-tone behavior. We're remarkably inventive about this. Keep striving for higher levels of self-honesty. The more you are able to see things as they really are, the more upscale you will become. When you find yourself using tremendous effort to get something done, back off and see if it's really the right action. If it is, do something to raise your tone and the job will be easier. "It isn't how hard one wishes (as they teach a child); it's how lightly one wishes and how interested he is in having that for which he wished." -L. Ron Hubbard, Philadelphia Doctorate Lectures Don't waste your time looking back and wishing things had happened differently. Your future needn't be molded by the past. You can create it today; you're the only one who can. Don't be a weakling. When something needs to be done, do it. It is higher tone to feel dangerous to your environment than to consider your environment dangerous to you. Don't let someone else sell you a goal. Follow your own personal convictions. Art can move a person out of despondency-provided he selects his own art. So enjoy your kind of music, plays, decorations, paintings, books, movies or whatever form of artistry makes you feel wonderful. If you work so long that your job starts getting serious, go walk around outside and notice things. Get reacquainted with the universe around you. You will return to the job refreshed. When you're spending a great deal of time on paper work or intangibles, balance it up by doing things with your hands in your spare time. Dig a hole in the backyard, build a bird feeder, go bowling. Cherish each high-tone person you meet. You can do something about your emotional attitude. Don't wait for someone else in your environment to change first so you can move up. Take definite, conscious steps to boost yourself. When you're able to contemplate life in good humor (without being downright giddy about it) you'll find it easier to tolerate the foibles of others. They'll want to follow you anyway. So don't try to push from below; lead from above. The venture is bound to include some down moments; but no low tone is such a bad place to visit as long as you don't have to live there. Just remember where home is: mobile, free, lighthearted, feeling, communicating, understanding, winning, laughing, powerful, loved and loving. Living to the fullest. That's the top of the tone scale. Now you have the road map. Godspeed, and good traveling. A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF EMOTIONAL TONES 4.0 ENTHUSIASM (Cheerfulness) A lighthearted soul with a free mind. Flexible. A winner. 3.5 INTEREST (Amusement) Actively interested in subjects related to survival. Doing well. 3.0 CONSERVATISM (Contentment) The conformist. Don't rock the boat. Resists changes. Not too many problems. 2.5 BOREDOM The spectator. All the world is a stage, and he's the audience. Neither contented nor discontented. He endures things. Purposeless. Careless. Not threatening; not helpful. 2.0 ANTAGONISM The debater. Loves to argue. Blunt. Honest. Tactless. A poor sport. 1.8 PAIN Touchy. Irritable. Scattered. Striking at source of pain. 1.5 ANGER Chronic distemper. Blames. Holds grudges. Threatens. Demands obedience. 1.2 NO SYMPATHY Cold fish. Unfeeling. Suppressing violent anger. Cruel, calm, resourceful, acidly polite. 1.1 COVERT HOSTILITY The cheerful hypocrite. Gossip. An actor. Often likes puns and practical jokes. Seeks to introvert others. Nervous laughter or constant smile. 1.0 FEAR Coward. Anxious. Suspicious. Worried. Running, defending or caught in indecision. 0.9 SYMPATHY Obsessive agreement. Afraid of hurting others. Collects the downers. Sometimes wobbles between complacent tenderness and tears. 0.8 PROPITIATION (Appeasement) Do-gooder. Doing favors to protect himself from bad effects. Intention is to stop. 0.5 GRIEF The whiner. Collects grievances and old mementos. Dwells in the past. Feels betrayed. Everything painful. 0.375 MAKING AMENDS The "yes" man. Will do anything to get sympathy or help. Blind loyalty. A mop-the-floor-with-me tone. 0.05 APATHY Given up. Turned off. Suicidal. Addict, alcoholic, gambler. Fatalistic. May pretend he's found "peace."