Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 21

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Playing the Game

The highest activity is playing a game. When one is high-toned, he knows that it is a game. As he falls away down the tone scale, he becomes less and less aware of the game.

The greatest ability of thought is DIFFERENTIATION. So long as one can differentiate, one is sane. Its opposite is IDENTIFICATION.

The legal definition of sanity is the “ability to tell right from wrong”.

Therefore, the highest ability in playing a game would be the ability to know the rightness and wrongness rules of that particular game. As all rightness and wrongness are considerations and as the game itself is a consideration, the playing of the game requires a high ability to differentiate, particularly it requires an ability to know the rules and the right-rules and the wrong-rules.

When an individual is prone to identify, he is no longer able to differentiate the right-rules and the wrong-rules, and the right-rules become wrong and the wrong-rules become right, and we have a criminal.

A criminal cannot play the game of society. He plays, then, the “game” called “cops and robbers”.

A person who strongly identifies is not necessarily a criminal, but he certainly is having trouble playing the game of society. Instead of playing that game, he “gets tired”, “gets sick”. He has these things happen because he doesn’t want to play the social game. He has a “game” of sorts in “hypochondria”.

Now, if you had a culture which was running a no-game game for anybody, a culture which itself had no game for everybody to play, a culture which had in its government a fixation on keeping anyone from playing the game THEY wanted to play, we would have, as its manifestation, all manner of curious ills, such as those described in various ideologies like Capitalism or Communism. The entire government game would be “Stop playing YOUR game”. The degree of sanity in government would be the degree it permitted strong and active participation in the game of government, in the game of playing your game.

But if people who can’t play the game can’t differentiate, similarly, a sane person could find himself very confused to be part of a game which wasn’t differentiating and where the rightness and wrongness rules were unclearly defined. Thus, a government without exact and accurate codes and jurisprudence would discover in its citizens an inability to play the game no matter how sane they were.

Thus, the game can be crazy and its players sane, or the players can be crazy and the game sane. Either condition would affect the other. When we get crazy players and a crazy game, the end product of either of the two imbalances above, we would get anything except a game. We would get chaos.

As a useful example of an inability to differentiate, let us take people who cannot see anything wrong with slanderous materials. We have here people who see no difference. They don’t differentiate. They don’t differentiate, because they see no game. They see no game because they can’t play a game. Or, habituated to a social structure which had no rules of rightness or wrongness, they have lost their criteria.