How To Choose Your People Chapter 2

Chapter 2 — The Emotional Tone Scale

THE EMOTIONAL TONE SCALE

If you already despise somebody, you don't need the tone scale to tell you there's something wrong (with him, naturally), but it will give you a good reason for your feelings and provide an excuse for not inviting him to your next party.

There are certain people we insist we love despite the fact that they continually disappoint us. As dinner congeals on the stove and the soufflé quietly sinks into a gooey mess, we wonder, dejectedly, how we ever got mixed up with someone who doesn't even think to call when he's going to be late. It seldom occurs to us that we just might be expecting too much from those on whom we bestow our priceless affection.

There are people who dwell in the twilight zone of our friendship. They seem nice enough – they always remember to send a birthday card and to wipe their feet at the door – but there is no joy in spending an evening with them.

In the next few chapters we're going to climb up through each level of the tone scale. With any luck, we should discover the entire cast of characters in our lives, and (at last!) we'll know just what to expect from them (For quick reference there's a condensed description of each tone inside the back cover). Before we get to the individual tones, let's cover some general information about the scale.

SOURCES

Since every book must have a last page, and preferably one that is within comfortable shooting distance from the first page, I won't try to include everything there is to know about the tone scale and emotions.

The basic data in this book as well as the quotations (except where otherwise indicated) come from "The Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation," "The Hubbard Chart of Attitudes" and Science of Survival, by L. Ron Hubbard. I recommend them all for further study (see list in the back of the book).

The examples are from my own forays into the jungle.

UPS AND DOWNS

People experience an emotional curve. That is, everyone fluctuates on the scale from hour to hour, day to day. He goes up if he wins the office pool. He slumps when he loses that big sale. He falls in love and soars to the top. His girl leaves him for another man and he drops to Grief.

Young children often travel up and down with the speed of light. As they grow older, the high peaks are cropped off, the curve widens and they often settle into one tone (or narrow band) where they remain a large share of the time. Once in a while they drop and resettle as life bumps them about. The person we call high- tone doesn't settle down on the scale. He maintains a high interest and enthusiasm for living. Although he may become upset and drop down-tone in a lowscale environ- ment, he is resilient and recovers quickly once he is free of the influence.

The high-tone person displays the emotion called for by the occasion. When he suffers a deep loss, he feels Grief. If he's the victim of some underhanded trickery, he usually gets angry. He experiences the right emotion at the right time. So, the person who is surviving well fluctuates all over the scale; he's volatile. The better his condition, the more mobile he is. When he gets mad, he's really mad, but he gets over it. When he gets scared, he'll get unscared. He may be unaccountably de- pressed once in awhile, but he'll recover quickly.

If you're trying to improve a person, you're not trying to take him off the scale (the so-called "emotionless" person is definitely on the scale). We improve someone most when we enable him to gain control, action, ability and experience with all of the tones.

Whenever we mention a high-tone person having "control" over his emo- tions, there is always somebody around who insists: "Emotions are only true when they are spontaneous. Controlling emotions just wouldn't be honest!" On the con- trary, it is the low-tone person who is the real phony; he doesn't even experience the right emotion for the occasion. This objector is the same person who will likely weep at a wedding or laugh madly when someone falls down and breaks a leg. That's honest emotion?

When we call a person low-tone, we're not talking about the boss who got mad the other day when he found the unfilled customer orders thrown into the wastebasket. This doesn't make him a 1.5 (Anger tone). The 1.5 is a person who's mad almost constantly. When we mention Fear, we don't mean the hunter who runs when his gun jams as the bear charges him. We're talking about a fixed condition – the inability to change one's attitude and one's environment.

The able person can act and react; but the low-tone person reads the same lines for every scene in the play. This is aberration. All that's wrong with a low-tone person is his inflexibility. When he gets frightened, can he let go of the fear? If a man gets mad and tells someone off, can he let go of his grievance? High-tone people bounce back upscale. Low-tone people stay chronically settled. Although they may shift a notch up or down, they never move out of the lower ranges for long.

A NEW LOOK AT THE MEANING OF SANITY

It's easy to say that a man is mad if he insists he's Napoleon or if he runs amuck in the streets killing people. But there is little doubt in the minds of intelligent people (particularly those in our young reform movements) that a more subtle madness permeates our whole culture today. We see a society that permits the indis- criminate destruction of people and environments (through wars and pollution), a society that pours millions into mental health "research" while institutions fill to over- flowing and suicides increase. We see government agencies that confiscate honey off health store shelves because of "mislabeling" while condoning the label "enriched bread" on a product containing mostly unpronounceable chemicals, whipped and baked into a foamy, plastic lump. Legally a person is considered insane if he doesn't know right from wrong; but this is hardly a guide we can use in our delicate daily judgments and choices.

Along with its other helpful offerings, the tone scale gives us a reliable scale for measuring sanity.

The lower a person is fixed on the scale, the less sane he is. There is no sharp division between sanity and insanity. A person is more or less sane at any given minute. In fact, he may be rational in one area of living and nutty as a pecan pie in another.

It's mostly the volume of a tone that provokes society to lock a person up. That is, when someone is caught in a low tone with the volume turned on full, he's generally considered insane. This means that one angry person may beat his wife with a baseball bat while another (at lower volume) destroys her with words. They're both insane; but society recognizes only the first one as dangerous.

SOCIAL TONE

Most people wear a pleasant social tone layered over their chronic emotion, and they use this to handle the superficial exchanges in daily living. The store clerk smiles politely even when he'd prefer to kick our teeth in. When we meet a casual acquaintance on the street, we generally say we're fine even though we're miser- able.

With a little practice, however, you will be able to identify the chronic tone quickly despite this protective covering.

MISSING EMOTIONS

Likely you'll think of some emotions not shown on the scale. Most of them will fall somewhere on the levels either as synonyms or as another depth of a tone. For instance, anxiety, embarrassment, worry, terror and shyness all represent different shades and depths of the Fear band.

There are other feelings such as love, hate and jealousy, which come through a person's tone. A Sympathy person loves much differently than an angry one. A jeal- ous husband might shoot his rival or he might get quietly drunk, depending on his tone.

Some of these extra feelings will be discussed more in a later chapter.

OTHER FIELDS OF RESEARCH

Bits and pieces about emotions turn up in any research on human behavior. Without the use of the tone scale, however, material on the subject seldom aligns into workable form.

Any person counseling, advising or attempting to assist people (providing he actually wants to help the individual) will welcome and accept the tone scale because his own observations will indicate its validity.

There's an interesting example of a professional study which confirms the arrangement of emotions on the scale. A psychiatrist in a large Midwest university hospital recently conducted a five-year research program in which she interviewed over four hundred terminal patients in order to find ways of helping the dying pa- tients face their predicament. From her research, she discovered that most people go through "five psychological stages before death: denial, anger, bargaining, grief and acceptance." During the first four periods, the doctor said, the patients still have a glimmer of hope for life. In the final stage, "for the most part, he is ready to face the end in peace."

After you read the next few chapters, you will recognize that the five stages the doctor reported are: Antagonism, Anger, Fear (in the form of Propitiation), Grief and Apathy.

SUMMARY

Low-tone people will give you many articulate reasons for their attitudes; they will use their intelligence to justify their convictions while, in actual truth, they are trying to explain emotional attitudes over which they have no control. The An- ger person will say, "You gotta be tough with people.'' The Fear person will admon- ish you to "be careful...'' and the Apathy individual will tell you (if he bothers at all) that "nothing can be done, anyway." Each person believes what he is saying. If he's lived in a tone for a long time, it's home – and he's convinced he has an inherent right to be there.

We don't need to dislike people because they are low-tone. Nor should we try to "think the best of them" in the face of contrary evidence. The kindest action (for them and ourselves) is to evaluate them correctly. Only then do we have a chance of lifting them upscale.

You can start teaching the tone scale to children when they are four or five years old. They are usually fascinated as soon as they see the colored tone scale chart. You could give them no better preparation for living. Having taught it to my own boys, I know they will not work for, hire, vote for or fall in love with a low- tone person (and that's quite a few worries out of the way).

Don't tell another person where you think he is on the scale. You may be wrong and it could depress him. You may be right and it could worry him. In either case, it won't help him. (Surely at some time or other you've met and loathed a guy who smiled at you, smugly, as he said, "I've got you all figured out." We'll get him all figured out, incidentally, in the 1.1 chapter.) So, don't do it. If he reads this book and finds himself on the scale, he'll be taking a major step toward his own improvement. Most people raise themselves on the scale considerably by simply understanding it.

Use the tone scale to choose your people, to find trouble spots in your family, your office and your groups. Learn how to spot people quickly and you won't ex- pect more than they can give. Instead, you can help them raise tone.

Try not to concern yourself too much with your own position on the scale. We do bump into ourselves in odd places; turning a corner and seeing a face in a harsh mirror we exclaim: "Who is that stranger? Oh, no! Is that really me?"

It's disconcerting, but as you continue reading you'll find yourself up near the top too. I promise.

Anyway, this book is about those other people remember? Not you and me. Now, let's have a look at these characters . . .