“What did I do wrong?” cries the jilted lover—a cry we hear more and more often. According to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, which reports approximately half of U.S. marriages now end in divorce.
On a seemingly unrelated subject, an article in the Baltimore Sun quotes Moody’s economy.com economist Sophia Koropeckyj on the percentage of American workers voluntarily leaving jobs rising to the highest level in four years.
Are these social indexes related?
In research published in 1959, Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard found they do.
He stated: “Man has been frantic about the high divorce rate, about the high job turnover in plants, about labor unrest and many other items,” and he pointed out that they stem from the same source.
“We have the view of a person who has a good job, who probably won’t get a better one, suddenly deciding to leave and going. We have the view of a wife, with a perfectly good husband and family, up and leaving it all. We see a husband with a pretty and attractive wife, breaking up the affinity and departing.”
Mr. Hubbard looked into the reasons people offer for leaving:
“Man explained this to himself by saying that things were done to him which he would not tolerate and therefore he had to leave. But if this were the explanation, all Man would have to do would be to make working conditions, marital relationships, jobs… all very excellent and the problem would be solved. But on the contrary, a close examination of working conditions and marital relationships demonstrates that improvement of conditions often worsens the amount of blow-off. Probably the finest working conditions in the world were achieved by Mr. Hershey (of chocolate bar fame) for his plant workers. Yet they revolted and even shot at him. This in its turn led to an industrial philosophy that the worse workers were treated, the more willing they were to stay, which in itself is as untrue as the better they are treated, the faster they blow off.
“One can treat people so well that they grow ashamed of themselves (knowing they don’t deserve it) that a blow-off is precipitated. And certainly one can treat people so badly that they have no choice but to leave. But these are extreme conditions and in between these we have the majority of departures…. The wife is doing her best to make a marriage and the husband wanders off on the trail of a tart. The manager is trying to keep things going and the worker leaves. These, the unexplained, disrupt organizations and lives and it’s time we understood them.”
An understanding of this lies in the field of ethics and is clarified by two terms defined in The Scientology Handbook:
“In Scientology, a harmful act or a transgression against the mores of the group is called an overt act or overt. When a person does something that is contrary to the moral code he has agreed to, or when he omits to do something that he should have done per that moral code, he has committed an overt act. An overt act violates what was agreed upon.
“An unspoken, unannounced transgression against a moral code by which the person is bound is called a withhold. A withhold is, then, an overt act that a person committed that he or she is not talking about. Any withhold comes after an overt act.”
Mr. Hubbard found that overt acts and withholds that are the real cause of departures:
“PEOPLE LEAVE BECAUSE OF THEIR OWN OVERTS AND WITHHOLDS.
“That is the factual fact and the hardbound rule. A man with a clean heart can’t be hurt. The man or woman who must-must-must become a victim and depart is departing because of his or her own overts and withholds. It doesn’t matter whether the person is departing from a town or a job…. The cause is the same.
“Almost anyone, no matter his position, can remedy a situation, no matter what’s wrong, if he or she really wants to. When the person no longer wants to remedy it, his own overt acts and withholds against the others involved in the situation have lowered his own ability to be responsible for it. Therefore he or she does not remedy the situation. Departure is the only apparent answer. To justify the departure, the person blowing off dreams up things done to him in an effort to minimize the overt by degrading those it was done to. The mechanics involved are quite simple.”
“It is a rather noble commentary on Man that when a person finds himself, as he believes, incapable of restraining himself from injuring a benefactor, he will defend the benefactor by leaving. This is the real source of the blow-off. If we were to better a person’s working conditions in this light, we would see that we have simply magnified his overt acts and made it a certain fact that he would leave.”
For more information on this subject, an introductory video and free online course Integrity, Honesty and Ethics are available online on the Scientology website.
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