How To Choose Your People Chapter 18

Chapter 18 — Cliché's to Live by – Or Should We?

CLICHES TO LIVE BY – OR SHOULD WE?

The well-meaning minister tells us to "turn the other cheek." Mother says, "Laugh and the world laughs with you." Teacher admonishes, "Count to ten before you lose your temper."

With the help of kindly mentors, most of us started stuffing our mental closets with guiding platitudes from the time we read our first Popeye comic strip. We take out and dust off some of them at the slightest provocation; others we keep around because they might be valuable someday. We seldom consider cleaning out the closet because it's too difficult to separate the authentic pieces from the counterfeit. In this chapter we'll haul out a few odds and ends and examine them beside the tone scale.

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 clichés, 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 hightone. 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 might-havebeens.

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 category of near truths. 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 lowtone adult.

SUMMARY

Before you accept the ancient proverb, the popular cliché or the advice of an "expert" look beyond the ingredient of truth for the emotion behind those words of alleged wisdom.