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 low-tone 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.
Monday, April 6, 2009
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.
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.
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 high-scale 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.
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 high-scale 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.
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 II 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 com mittee 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.
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 II 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 com mittee 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.
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 musn’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.
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.
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, we’ll 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 dist:ust. 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
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. This can include bettering our health, our environment, our education, and—for permanent i mprovement—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.
Anything which raises tone is worthwhile. This can include bettering our health, our environment, our education, and—for permanent i mprovement—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.
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 & 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."
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 & 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."
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 truthfull~ must be able to view all tones from Apathy tc Enthusiasm with an equally detached viewpoint. His own position on the scale needn’t influence his creativ ability. Many of our most talented artists were or ar low-scale. However, it isn’t necessary for the artist to bE neurotic in order to be creative (this is an idea thai seems to get passed along despite the fact that it’s nol valid). Although an artist may be able to produce wher 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 goinз 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, playwrighl 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 warmup...
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 skulduggery 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, so 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 fellow man ("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, heavilydegreed, 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.
"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 truthfull~ must be able to view all tones from Apathy tc Enthusiasm with an equally detached viewpoint. His own position on the scale needn’t influence his creativ ability. Many of our most talented artists were or ar low-scale. However, it isn’t necessary for the artist to bE neurotic in order to be creative (this is an idea thai seems to get passed along despite the fact that it’s nol valid). Although an artist may be able to produce wher 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 goinз 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, playwrighl 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 warmup...
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 skulduggery 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, so 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 fellow man ("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, heavilydegreed, 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.
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
OWNERSHIP
After falling 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 I 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.ls, 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 down-tone. 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 down-scale 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. 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.
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
OWNERSHIP
After falling 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 I 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.ls, 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 down-tone. 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 down-scale 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. 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.
THE INGREDIENT OF TRUTH.
In a Professional Bulletin, L. Ron Hubbard once said: "In all aberration we discover that it is the ingredient of truth which maintains the aberration in force."—P.A.B. No. 46
Every level of the tone scale contains an "ingredient of truth," and this is what each person uses to defend his emotional temperament. The person in Fear says, "What’s wrong with being a little careful?" Propitiation asks: "Why shouldn’t you do things for people? Isn’t that what life’s all about?"
They’re both right, of course. There’s enough truth in each tone to make a person feel justified in his emotional inclinations; but it is only part of the truth.
There was the case of the butcher who lost both legs and worked around his shop in a wheel chair for fifteen years. One day his granddaughter, Debbie, was playing in a neighbor’s yard with a friend when a strange man came out of the house. Debbie asked, "Who’s that?"
"That’s my grandfather," her friend replied.
"No," said Debbie scornfully, "he can’t be your grandfather."
"Why not?"
"Because grandfathers don’t have legs, silly."
That was Debbie’s ingredient of truth about grandfathers. It was right as far as it went. Thus it is with the tones. Each one is right as far as it goes; but it only goes far enough to become a mockery of the higher emotions.
Every tone level is fortified with clichйs, bromides, proverbs and whole philosophies to justify the position. Only with the use of the Emotional Tone Scale can we differentiate between a truly sane attitude and it’s lowtone imitation. Let’s look at some of the levels to see what sayings a person might use to excuse his tone.
APATHY
"Give me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change." This might well be the prayer of a high-tone person because he is basically realistic about his ambitions. Apathy, however, thinks you can’t change anything anyway, so his brand of serenity is only the weakness of the overwhelmed.
MAKING AMENDS
A regrettable influence on mankind is the King James translation of the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek . .
This phrase is a paradox to thinking man, for "meek" implies spineless submissiveness. Many experts consider this word a faulty translation. In fact, the French Douay Bible translates the beatitude as: "Blessed are the debonair. ."
"Debonair," according to the dictionary, is "affable, gracious, genial, carefree, gay and jaunty." That’s high-tone. It makes more sense.
Personally, I’ve never seen a doormat inherit anything but a little more mud.
GRIEF
"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." Yes, if he can shed his grief through tears, one can move back upscale again. The stuck Grief person, however, just keeps finding more to wail about.
The upscale individual takes pleasure in remembering and describing pleasant experiences from the past. Grief, too, reminisces; but he thinks the past is all there is, so his stories are basted with dripping regrets and spiced with nostalgic mi ght-have-beens.
PROPITIATION
Is it really better to give than to receive? Yes. The high-tone person is a generous one (after the needs of self and family are met), and his giving tends to promote survival. The downscale mockery, Propitiation, however, gives because he is too weak to do otherwise. He’s trying to buy off danger, so his hidden motive is to stop the recipient and render him harmless.
SYMPATHY
"There is always someone worse off than yourself." Yes, indeed, and Sympathy delights in finding every one of them. At the top levels we discover a natural empathy. He doesn’t enjoy seeing someone in difficulty and will do his best to help the person out of it. Sympathy, on the other hand, pats the unfortunate one on the head, murmurs "poor dear," and does his best to keep him there.
FEAR
"Look before you leap." The upscale person has a healthy respect for danger if his actual survival is threatened; but his fear is balanced with courage and good judgment. The person at 1.0 is afraid of everything.
COVERT HOSTILITY
"Count to ten before you lose your temper" may be sound practice for one who is above Anger, but it’s suppressive to one below that emotion for it leaves him without a safety valve and fixes him in the lower tones.
"The day is lost in which one has not laughed." Upscale we find a fun-loving spirit of play. The 1 .1 however, takes everything so seriously that he now pretends to be unserious. He manifests compulsive laughter, a constant effort to entertain or a sweet, insincere mimicry of highscale good humor. He jokes at others’ expense. He mocks and makes fun of everything he can’t do himself. He must show that it doesn’t matter and "it’s all amusing." He’s the witty, cynical critic—the player who spends all his time on the bench.
"Don’t tell everything you know." The high-tone person can be discreet; but he’s not sneaky. The 1.1 prides himself on being "subtle," which is merely a way of defending the subterfuge with which he covers up his perverted activities.
NO SYMPATHY
Kipling said, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. . ." The No Sympathy person prides himself on never getting emotional; he’s always in control.
The high-tone fellow doesn’t panic in a crisis. He handles emergencies better than anyone else; but he needn’t consign his soul to the Deepfreeze in order to keep his cool. He’s a warm-hearted, loving person who’s willing to feel emotions.
ANGER
"You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs." The upscale person is courageous enough to destroy where necessary for survival or when it benefits the greatest number. Anger, driven by false bravado, only breaks the eggs; he never does get around to making the omelet.
ANTAGONISM
"You have to fight fire with fire." When the upscale person gets some opposition thrown at him, he turns it to his advantage; he neither collapses nor gets endlessly involved in fighting it. The "truth" at 2.0, however, is reflected in the necessity to challenge anything that seems threatening. He tries to build a fire out of every spark.
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
There are hundreds of memorable passages (both profound and trite) containing an ingredient of truth which can be used to amplify below 2.0 emotions. For a helpful exercise, examine the similarities and differences between upscale truths and their downscale mockeries. Do this especially before you accept advice; it may be attractively gift-wrapped in a low-tone package.
Many self-help books are in the catagory of neartruths. I read such a book recently by an experienced psychologist who pointed out the flaws in numerous human attitudes. He condemned whining, bootlicking, false veneer and competitiveness. Most of his advice, however, rested in the tone of Boredom. He suggested that one should ". . . sway with the breeze. Take life as it comes. Adjust. Don’t set your hopes impossibly high. Don’t try to thrive on daydreams. Just enjoy what’s here."
Some of his advice rested in Apathy: "We should not try to understand man’s conduct," he claimed, "because asking why we do things is of little use. There are no causes for behavior."
He further advised the reader to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic because both attitudes were crutches used by those who lacked confidence in themselves. We should take life as it comes, he tells us, not dwelling in hope because it’s only wishful thinking.
These statements contain both elements of truth and something false. All of us might hope for a saner world. An idealistic dream, to be sure. The lowscale person only listlessly wishes that someone would do something about it. The uptone individual discovers a way to make one man saner, and another, so he keeps working toward his dream, and his life has a purpose. A man without hope is a flower that never blooms, a sun without warmth, a man with no tomorrow. Hope is man’s link with the future.
In short, this book was telling us that in order to be "mature" one should quit hoping and trying and getting all involved and frustrated. Throw away the oars instead, and let the current take your boat wherever it will. At best this is Boredom; at worst it’s Apathy. In either case, it’s a limp surrender. No high-tone person needs to compromise with mediocrity. And no man needs to settle for less than high-tone.
I read another interesting self-help book which promised to make the reader "powerful and influential with people." The author started off advocating that one walk with confidence, look people right in the eye, observe good manners, courtesy and respect. Sounds good; but this turned out to be another downscale look-alike. When he began proposing methods for artificially boosting status and leveling others down, I realized that the author was selling a 1.1 and 1.2 mockery of power. Nearly every paragraph advocated smooth, but covert, methods for getting attention and putting others down. He warned the reader: "Other people are out to get you, to nullify your status, prestige or authority. Never relax for a moment or someone will push you off your pedestal."
He repeatedly cautioned against the danger of losing one’s temper: "Keep a tight control." He even offered several techniques for introverting the other person with snide, well-placed questions when there was any risk of venting Anger. The book could be summarized briefly: the way to be powerful is to suppress everyone else; but do it nicely with a smile on your face.
Sometimes we see the results of research by sincere people who (because they do not know the tone scale) arrive at false judgments. Recently I heard of a London psychiatrist who concluded after several years of study that "good girls grow up to be bad mothers." He explained that a young girl who always minds her mother, does just as she’s told at home or school, and never causes any trouble or fuss, turns out to be inadequate as a mother because there is no longer anyone telling her what to do.
Those "good girls" were obviously Fear or below, since no spirited, upscale child is so blindly obedient that she remains dependent.
What his research actually tells us is that 1) many people consider a downscale, submissive child to be a "good girl" and 2) the low-tone child grows into a low-tone adult.
SUMMARY
Before you accept the ancient proverb, the popular cliche or the advice of an "expert," look beyond the ingredient of truth for the emotion behind those words of alleged wisdom
Every level of the tone scale contains an "ingredient of truth," and this is what each person uses to defend his emotional temperament. The person in Fear says, "What’s wrong with being a little careful?" Propitiation asks: "Why shouldn’t you do things for people? Isn’t that what life’s all about?"
They’re both right, of course. There’s enough truth in each tone to make a person feel justified in his emotional inclinations; but it is only part of the truth.
There was the case of the butcher who lost both legs and worked around his shop in a wheel chair for fifteen years. One day his granddaughter, Debbie, was playing in a neighbor’s yard with a friend when a strange man came out of the house. Debbie asked, "Who’s that?"
"That’s my grandfather," her friend replied.
"No," said Debbie scornfully, "he can’t be your grandfather."
"Why not?"
"Because grandfathers don’t have legs, silly."
That was Debbie’s ingredient of truth about grandfathers. It was right as far as it went. Thus it is with the tones. Each one is right as far as it goes; but it only goes far enough to become a mockery of the higher emotions.
Every tone level is fortified with clichйs, bromides, proverbs and whole philosophies to justify the position. Only with the use of the Emotional Tone Scale can we differentiate between a truly sane attitude and it’s lowtone imitation. Let’s look at some of the levels to see what sayings a person might use to excuse his tone.
APATHY
"Give me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change." This might well be the prayer of a high-tone person because he is basically realistic about his ambitions. Apathy, however, thinks you can’t change anything anyway, so his brand of serenity is only the weakness of the overwhelmed.
MAKING AMENDS
A regrettable influence on mankind is the King James translation of the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek . .
This phrase is a paradox to thinking man, for "meek" implies spineless submissiveness. Many experts consider this word a faulty translation. In fact, the French Douay Bible translates the beatitude as: "Blessed are the debonair. ."
"Debonair," according to the dictionary, is "affable, gracious, genial, carefree, gay and jaunty." That’s high-tone. It makes more sense.
Personally, I’ve never seen a doormat inherit anything but a little more mud.
GRIEF
"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." Yes, if he can shed his grief through tears, one can move back upscale again. The stuck Grief person, however, just keeps finding more to wail about.
The upscale individual takes pleasure in remembering and describing pleasant experiences from the past. Grief, too, reminisces; but he thinks the past is all there is, so his stories are basted with dripping regrets and spiced with nostalgic mi ght-have-beens.
PROPITIATION
Is it really better to give than to receive? Yes. The high-tone person is a generous one (after the needs of self and family are met), and his giving tends to promote survival. The downscale mockery, Propitiation, however, gives because he is too weak to do otherwise. He’s trying to buy off danger, so his hidden motive is to stop the recipient and render him harmless.
SYMPATHY
"There is always someone worse off than yourself." Yes, indeed, and Sympathy delights in finding every one of them. At the top levels we discover a natural empathy. He doesn’t enjoy seeing someone in difficulty and will do his best to help the person out of it. Sympathy, on the other hand, pats the unfortunate one on the head, murmurs "poor dear," and does his best to keep him there.
FEAR
"Look before you leap." The upscale person has a healthy respect for danger if his actual survival is threatened; but his fear is balanced with courage and good judgment. The person at 1.0 is afraid of everything.
COVERT HOSTILITY
"Count to ten before you lose your temper" may be sound practice for one who is above Anger, but it’s suppressive to one below that emotion for it leaves him without a safety valve and fixes him in the lower tones.
"The day is lost in which one has not laughed." Upscale we find a fun-loving spirit of play. The 1 .1 however, takes everything so seriously that he now pretends to be unserious. He manifests compulsive laughter, a constant effort to entertain or a sweet, insincere mimicry of highscale good humor. He jokes at others’ expense. He mocks and makes fun of everything he can’t do himself. He must show that it doesn’t matter and "it’s all amusing." He’s the witty, cynical critic—the player who spends all his time on the bench.
"Don’t tell everything you know." The high-tone person can be discreet; but he’s not sneaky. The 1.1 prides himself on being "subtle," which is merely a way of defending the subterfuge with which he covers up his perverted activities.
NO SYMPATHY
Kipling said, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. . ." The No Sympathy person prides himself on never getting emotional; he’s always in control.
The high-tone fellow doesn’t panic in a crisis. He handles emergencies better than anyone else; but he needn’t consign his soul to the Deepfreeze in order to keep his cool. He’s a warm-hearted, loving person who’s willing to feel emotions.
ANGER
"You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs." The upscale person is courageous enough to destroy where necessary for survival or when it benefits the greatest number. Anger, driven by false bravado, only breaks the eggs; he never does get around to making the omelet.
ANTAGONISM
"You have to fight fire with fire." When the upscale person gets some opposition thrown at him, he turns it to his advantage; he neither collapses nor gets endlessly involved in fighting it. The "truth" at 2.0, however, is reflected in the necessity to challenge anything that seems threatening. He tries to build a fire out of every spark.
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
There are hundreds of memorable passages (both profound and trite) containing an ingredient of truth which can be used to amplify below 2.0 emotions. For a helpful exercise, examine the similarities and differences between upscale truths and their downscale mockeries. Do this especially before you accept advice; it may be attractively gift-wrapped in a low-tone package.
Many self-help books are in the catagory of neartruths. I read such a book recently by an experienced psychologist who pointed out the flaws in numerous human attitudes. He condemned whining, bootlicking, false veneer and competitiveness. Most of his advice, however, rested in the tone of Boredom. He suggested that one should ". . . sway with the breeze. Take life as it comes. Adjust. Don’t set your hopes impossibly high. Don’t try to thrive on daydreams. Just enjoy what’s here."
Some of his advice rested in Apathy: "We should not try to understand man’s conduct," he claimed, "because asking why we do things is of little use. There are no causes for behavior."
He further advised the reader to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic because both attitudes were crutches used by those who lacked confidence in themselves. We should take life as it comes, he tells us, not dwelling in hope because it’s only wishful thinking.
These statements contain both elements of truth and something false. All of us might hope for a saner world. An idealistic dream, to be sure. The lowscale person only listlessly wishes that someone would do something about it. The uptone individual discovers a way to make one man saner, and another, so he keeps working toward his dream, and his life has a purpose. A man without hope is a flower that never blooms, a sun without warmth, a man with no tomorrow. Hope is man’s link with the future.
In short, this book was telling us that in order to be "mature" one should quit hoping and trying and getting all involved and frustrated. Throw away the oars instead, and let the current take your boat wherever it will. At best this is Boredom; at worst it’s Apathy. In either case, it’s a limp surrender. No high-tone person needs to compromise with mediocrity. And no man needs to settle for less than high-tone.
I read another interesting self-help book which promised to make the reader "powerful and influential with people." The author started off advocating that one walk with confidence, look people right in the eye, observe good manners, courtesy and respect. Sounds good; but this turned out to be another downscale look-alike. When he began proposing methods for artificially boosting status and leveling others down, I realized that the author was selling a 1.1 and 1.2 mockery of power. Nearly every paragraph advocated smooth, but covert, methods for getting attention and putting others down. He warned the reader: "Other people are out to get you, to nullify your status, prestige or authority. Never relax for a moment or someone will push you off your pedestal."
He repeatedly cautioned against the danger of losing one’s temper: "Keep a tight control." He even offered several techniques for introverting the other person with snide, well-placed questions when there was any risk of venting Anger. The book could be summarized briefly: the way to be powerful is to suppress everyone else; but do it nicely with a smile on your face.
Sometimes we see the results of research by sincere people who (because they do not know the tone scale) arrive at false judgments. Recently I heard of a London psychiatrist who concluded after several years of study that "good girls grow up to be bad mothers." He explained that a young girl who always minds her mother, does just as she’s told at home or school, and never causes any trouble or fuss, turns out to be inadequate as a mother because there is no longer anyone telling her what to do.
Those "good girls" were obviously Fear or below, since no spirited, upscale child is so blindly obedient that she remains dependent.
What his research actually tells us is that 1) many people consider a downscale, submissive child to be a "good girl" and 2) the low-tone child grows into a low-tone adult.
SUMMARY
Before you accept the ancient proverb, the popular cliche or the advice of an "expert," look beyond the ingredient of truth for the emotion behind those words of alleged wisdom
THE "COME ALIVE" ASSESSMENT:
One of the most valuable tools in spotting tone is this: What turns the person on? I call it the "come alive" assessment. Notice what grabs a person’s interest and animates him and you’ll know his tone.
Between 1.1 and 2.0 a person gets kicks out of scaring people, making them nervous, bewildered, embarrassed, making them wrong and seeing them disturbed. He will relish recounting such incidents. Upscale people never take pleasure in someone else’s discomfort.
I read recently about a carnival side show in which (with the aid of glass and special lighting) the audience was tricked into believing that a wild animal was coming right out into the audience. The perpetrator of this hoax says he’s happy when the crowd is frightened into a frenzied stampede for the door. "When I do a show and nobody runs, it makes me feel bad," he said.
Pleasure is something that neither man nor civilization can do without. It’s man’s whole reason for existing. The concept of pleasure takes on many meanings as we move up and down the scale, however. In the rich playboy, pleasure becomes an idle satisfaction of the senses without plan or progress toward any goal. High-tone pleasure may be easy and relaxed or dynamic and constructive; but the upscale person never enjoys purely destructive or perverted sensual gratification. He gets enjoyment from survival actions. He will desire skills, a good job, a large income, many holdings and good possessions. These are all survival goals.
Downscale, pleasure moments are turned toward destruction. The Antagonism person takes pleasure in whomping up a good argument or beating down the enemy. The 1.5 will tell you, with satisfaction, how he really "put a stop to that." He’ll advocate killing and blowing things up. The idea of destruction turns him on. A 1.1 comes alive if he runs across a tremendously inviting situation which permits him to be devious, covertly hostile, or perverted in some way. He’ll delight in deceiving someone into believing an outrageous lie. He’ll chuckle lasciviously as he describes how he cheated on his wife. If he dwells on death, illness, tragedy, and poverty he’s probably in the lower band. And if he turns on with a chance to do for the unfortunate, he’s in Sympathy or Propitiation.
A Grief/Apathy person will actually daydream contemplating the most gruesome suicides and deaths of his loved ones and how he and everyone else would feel if this happened. That’s his kinky kind of pleasure.
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Where is his attention in time? A person between 0 and 1.0 is caught in the past. You say, "Look at the purple sunset," and he must describe all the other sunsets he’s ever seen (or those he missed).
Between 1.1 and 2.0 he’s barely in present time. He talks a great deal about "getting things started." He lives impulsively without regard for the future consequences.
Between 2.0 and 3.0 the person is pretty much in present time, although he doesn’t look back much and prefers not to plan too far ahead.
The individual at the top can remember the past with enjoyment; but his attention is on the present and long-range planning of the future.
Between 1.1 and 2.0 a person gets kicks out of scaring people, making them nervous, bewildered, embarrassed, making them wrong and seeing them disturbed. He will relish recounting such incidents. Upscale people never take pleasure in someone else’s discomfort.
I read recently about a carnival side show in which (with the aid of glass and special lighting) the audience was tricked into believing that a wild animal was coming right out into the audience. The perpetrator of this hoax says he’s happy when the crowd is frightened into a frenzied stampede for the door. "When I do a show and nobody runs, it makes me feel bad," he said.
Pleasure is something that neither man nor civilization can do without. It’s man’s whole reason for existing. The concept of pleasure takes on many meanings as we move up and down the scale, however. In the rich playboy, pleasure becomes an idle satisfaction of the senses without plan or progress toward any goal. High-tone pleasure may be easy and relaxed or dynamic and constructive; but the upscale person never enjoys purely destructive or perverted sensual gratification. He gets enjoyment from survival actions. He will desire skills, a good job, a large income, many holdings and good possessions. These are all survival goals.
Downscale, pleasure moments are turned toward destruction. The Antagonism person takes pleasure in whomping up a good argument or beating down the enemy. The 1.5 will tell you, with satisfaction, how he really "put a stop to that." He’ll advocate killing and blowing things up. The idea of destruction turns him on. A 1.1 comes alive if he runs across a tremendously inviting situation which permits him to be devious, covertly hostile, or perverted in some way. He’ll delight in deceiving someone into believing an outrageous lie. He’ll chuckle lasciviously as he describes how he cheated on his wife. If he dwells on death, illness, tragedy, and poverty he’s probably in the lower band. And if he turns on with a chance to do for the unfortunate, he’s in Sympathy or Propitiation.
A Grief/Apathy person will actually daydream contemplating the most gruesome suicides and deaths of his loved ones and how he and everyone else would feel if this happened. That’s his kinky kind of pleasure.
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Where is his attention in time? A person between 0 and 1.0 is caught in the past. You say, "Look at the purple sunset," and he must describe all the other sunsets he’s ever seen (or those he missed).
Between 1.1 and 2.0 he’s barely in present time. He talks a great deal about "getting things started." He lives impulsively without regard for the future consequences.
Between 2.0 and 3.0 the person is pretty much in present time, although he doesn’t look back much and prefers not to plan too far ahead.
The individual at the top can remember the past with enjoyment; but his attention is on the present and long-range planning of the future.
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