I’m currently studying the book Science of Survival by L. Ron Hubbard. The book covers the emotional Tone Scale, a scale which shows the successive emotions a person can experience. The emotions are arranged on the scale in an order that represents better and better potential for success and survival.
For example, fear, grief and apathy are low on the scale and indicate that potential survival is poor for a person chronically in those emotional states, whereas enthusiasm and strong interest are emotional levels that show a person who has a high potential for success and survival.
The book covers how to establish where a person is on a long-term and on a short-term basis and what you can do to help them move into higher emotions and thereby help them survive better.
It also covers how to determine the emotional level of groups and societies and how such societies will react. For example, a society in the emotion of fear is most easily influenced by someone in the emotional tone of anger. So Germany in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, with terrible economic problems and starvation threatening, was a society in fear when along came Hitler, an angry death talker, preaching how he would save Germany, restore it’s glory and destroy the scapegoats he named as the source of the country’s problems. A fascist government is unfortunately a natural fit for a society in fear.
When addressing the emotional level of groups, Mr. Hubbard says:
No culture in the history of the world, save the thoroughly depraved and expiring ones, has failed to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being. It is an empirical observation that men without a lasting faith in a Supreme Being are less capable, less ethical and less valuable to themselves and society.
When I read that I thought of Patheos and that this quote would probably resonate with many of its users, so I thought I’d share it with you. Tell me what you think.
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