Can You Be Right?

Have you ever run across a situation where you knew you were right and another person with a different opinion knew they were right? Happens almost every day, right? Well, last night I ran across just such a situation. I am pretty darn sure I was right and the other guy was damned if he was going to be wrong. So, what to do? Here's what L. Ron Hubbard has to say as excerpted from the chapter You Can Be Right from the Introduction to Scientology Ethics Book:

"One tries to be right always, right down
to the last spark.

"How, then, is one ever wrong?

"It is this way:

"One does a wrong action, accidentally or through oversight. The
wrongness of the action or inaction is then in conflict with one's necessity to
be right. So one then may continue and repeat the wrong action to prove it is
right."

...

"For rightness is the stuff of which survival is made. And as one approaches the
last ebb of survival, one can only insist on having been right, for to believe
for a moment one has been wrong is to court oblivion."

So how do we cure this desire to repeat wrong actions, just to prove you are right? Mr. Hubbard has the answer for that too:

"But by getting the offender off the compulsive repetition of the wrongness, one
then cures it.

"But how?

"By rehabilitating the ability to be right!

"This has limitless application - in training, in social skills, in marriage, in law, in life.

"Example: A wife is always burning dinner. Despite scolding, threats of divorce, anything, the compulsion continues. One can wipe this wrongness out by getting her to explain what is right about her cooking. This may well evoke a raging tirade in some extreme cases, but if one *flattens the question, that all dies away and she happily cease to burn dinners. Carried to classic proportions but not entirely necessary to end the compulsion, a moment in the past will be recovered when she accidentally burned a dinner and could not face up to having done a wrong action. To be right she thereafter had to burn dinners."

*Flatten (a question): Flattening something means to do it until it no longer produces a reaction.

Part of this article can be found here. If you want to read the whole article, buy or borrow the Introduction to Scientology Ethics Book. You can check out your local library, get it at the Church website or go into a Scientology Church and look at it in the Church library.