When Panorama Editor Sandy Smith commissioned his favorite reporter to do a program on the Church of Scientology, he made a grave error.

John Sweeney, his pit-bull of choice, lacks the dignity and tact required for a story that would, at least on its surface, address the activities and practices of a religion. As Sweeney himself explains, his tactics have nothing to do with intelligent reporting:

“There are three rules in journalism. First, find a crocodile. Two, poke it in the eye with a stick. Three, stand back and report what happens next.”

Sweeney teamed up with his aptly named producer, Sarah Mole, who had previously done Sweeney’s bidding as an undercover “mole” in a religious organization for an earlier “Sweeney Investigates” program. Together, they set about putting together a program that follows the classic pattern of lazy journalists.

• Find a few naysayers on the Internet, interview them for some juicy, if unsubstantiated allegations.

• Take the claims that can now be attributed to a source and then repeatedly ask “questions” of your “target” prefaced with “Some people say….”

• It’s a job made easy when the topic is something people aren’t familiar with, but would be merely ridiculous otherwise.

A simple example proves the point: look up an anti-semitic website, interview the people who make the outrageous claims and then seek out Jews to ask each one “some people say you control all the commerce and banking in the world”, or “some people say you are the messengers of the devil,” or “some people say Jews are greedy, selfish criminals.” Don’t bother to look at the practices or activities of the Jews, just fire away with the accusations. Of course, the vast majority of the population seeing this would dismisses it as the most sort of propaganda.

Yet, this is precisely what Sweeney and Mole did with the Scientology program. They did get a reaction.What they didn’t get was a story that enlightened anyone.

Panorama Exposed DVD Documentary>

Is this the true face of the British Broadcasting Corporation? (Read the full story>)

In any activity in which people interact, moral codes are developed. This is true of any group of any size – a family, a team, a company, a nation, a race.

What is a moral code? It is a series of agreements to which a person has subscribed to guarantee the survival of a group.

Take, for example, the Constitution of the United States. This was an agreement made by the original thirteen states as to how they would conduct their affairs. Wherever that Constitution has been breached, the country is now in trouble. It first stated that there must not be any income tax. Later, that was violated. Then they changed another point in it, and another and another. And each time they have done this, it has caused problems.

Why are they in trouble? Because there are no agreements other than the basic agreement.

Man has learned that where he has agreed upon codes of conduct or what is proper, he survives, and where he has not agreed, he doesn’t survive. And so when people get together, they always draw up a long, large series of agreements on what is moral (that is, what will be contributive to survival) and what is immoral (what will be destructive of survival).

Moral, by these definitions, means those things which are considered to be, at any given time, survival characteristics. A survival action is a moral action. And those things are considered immoral which are considered contrasurvival.

When two or more persons have a mutual agreement, they act together – which we call coaction. Dancing with someone is a coaction; having a fight with someone is a coaction; working within an organization is coaction.

In naval experience, there is a known datum that a ship’s crew is not worth anything until they have braved some tremendous danger or fought together. You could have a ship sailing with a new crew and, even though they are trained for their duties, nothing works: the supplies never seem to get aboard, the fuel never seems to flow freely to the engines, nothing happens except a confusion. Then one day the ship meets a great storm, with huge, raging seas, and with every crew member aboard working together to bail the water out of the engine room and to keep the screws turning. Somehow or another they hold the ship together, and the storm abates (lessens, diminishes). Now, for some peculiar reason, we have a real ship.

Whether you have a group of two men in partnership or an entire nation which is being formed after the conquest of land from another race – it does not matter the size of the group – they enter into certain agreements. The longevity of the agreement does not have much to do with it. It could be an agreement for a day, an agreement for a month or an agreement for the next five hundred years.

People, then, in forming groups, create a series of agreements of what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is survival and what is nonsurvival. That is what is created. And then this disintegrates by transgressions (violations of agreements or laws). These transgressions, unspoken but nevertheless transgressions, by each group member gradually mount up to a disintegration.

In Scientology these transgressions and their effects have been examined in great detail. There are two parts which encompass the mechanism at work here.

A harmful act or a transgression against the moral code of a group is called an overt act. 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 an overt act a person committed that he or she is not talking about. It is something a person believes that, if revealed, will endanger his self-preservation. Any withhold comes after an overt act. Thus, an overt act is something done; a withhold is an overt act withheld from another or others.

When a person agrees to follow a certain moral code . . .

. . . but then violates those agreements, he commits what is called an overt act.

When a person does not communicate about something he has done for fear of the consequences, this is called a withhold.

The only person who can separate one from a group is himself, and the only mechanism he can do it through is withholding. He withholds transgressions against the moral code of the group from the other members of the group and therefore he individuates (separates) from the group, and the group therefore disintegrates.

The social ills of man are chiefly a composite of his personal difficulties. The workable approach is to help the individual handle his personal difficulties for the betterment of himself and the society of which he is a part.

When someone begins on that arrangement called marriage, he is getting into something which is, to say the least, adventurous. When a couple get married, they are doing something they know nothing about. And, from all indications, when they have tried it more than once, they know no more about it the second time than they did the first.

Marriage is the foundation of the family unit. In this society and time, the family is the closest knit, self-perpetuating, self-protecting unit. It is necessary economically and otherwise to the society the way it is set up in present time. A culture will go by the boards if its basic building block, the family, is removed as a valid building block. So one can be fairly sure that he who destroys marriage destroys the civilization.

The marriage relationship, basically, is a postulated relationship. A postulate is a conclusion, decision or resolution about something. When people stop postulating a marriage, it ceases to exist. That is what happens to most marriages. It isn’t the other way around. It isn’t that all men are evil, so therefore, contracts such as marriage dissolve usually in infidelity and go all to pieces. That is not true. The reverse is true. When you have a purely postulated relationship, you have to continue to create it. And a family which doesn’t continue to create itself as a family will cease to exist as a family. That’s about all you need to know about it.

Where people are having trouble with marriage, it is because they are expecting it to run on automatic. They think it will hang together through no effort of their own; unfortunately, it won’t. It has to be created.

Perhaps someone whose parents weren’t making too good a go of it, looked at this and decided, “Now, look at that! This institution which is inherent in nature, which nothing will ever change, doesn’t perpetuate itself and is not much good because it isn’t hanging together.”

He had a failure. He probably tried to postulate the family into a unit when he was very young. He was working at it, trying to get a Papa-loves-Mama thing going one way or the other, trying to show them that they had something to live for and so forth.

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons a child gets himself injured is to make his parents realize they have responsibilities for the family. Childhood illness and all this sort of thing occur directly after familial upsets.

Nonetheless, whether an individual had in his own parents a good example of a stable marriage or not, it has nothing to do with whether or not he can make a successful marriage.

If you think that everything else is rigged to perpetuate a marriage while you’re not trying to keep it going, of course it will end up in destruction. But if you approach this with the realization that a marriage is something you have to postulate into existence and keep there, and when you stop working at it, it will cease, and if you know the technology contained in the remaining part of this section, you can make any marriage stick or you can recover any facet of any marriage, or plaster one back together again any way you want to. But it takes a little doing and it takes a little guts and that is an understatement.

Learn marriage solutions > 

The adult is the problem in child raising, not the child. A good, stable adult with love and tolerance in his heart is about the best therapy a child can have.

You want to raise your child in such a way that you don’t have to control him, so that he will be in full possession of himself at all times. Upon that depends his good behavior, his health, his sanity.

Children are not dogs. They can't be trained like dogs are trained. They are not controllable items. They are, and let's not overlook the point, men and women. A child is not a special species of animal distinct from man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained full growth.

Any law which applies to the behavior of men and women applies to children.

How would you like to be pulled and hauled and ordered about and restrained from doing whatever you wanted to do? You'd resent it. The only reason a child "doesn’t" resent it is because he's small. You’d half murder somebody who treated you, an adult, with the orders, contradiction and disrespect given to the average child. The child doesn't strike back because he isn't big enough. He gets your floor muddy, interrupts your nap, destroys the peace of the home instead. If he had equality with you in the matter of rights, he’d not ask for this "revenge." This "revenge" is standard child behavior.

Self-determinism is that state of being wherein the individual can or cannot be controlled by his environment according to his own choice. In that state the individual has self-confidence in his control of the material universe and other people.

A child has a right to his self-determinism. You say that if he is not restrained from pulling things down on himself, running into the road, etc., etc., he'll be hurt. What are you as an adult doing to make that child live in rooms or an environment where he can be hurt? The fault is yours, not his, if he breaks things.

The sweetness and love of a child is preserved only so long as he can exert his own self-determinism. You interrupt that and to a degree you interrupt his life.

There are only two reasons why a child's right to decide for himself has to be interrupted – the fragility and danger of his environment and you. For you work out on him the things that were done to you, regardless of what you think.

There are two courses you can take. Give the child leeway in an environment he can’t hurt and which can't badly hurt him and which doesn’t greatly restrict his own space and time. And through Scientology services, you can clean up your own aberrations (departures from rational thought or behavior) to a point where your tolerance equals or surpasses his lack of education in how to please you.

When you give a child something, it's his. It’s not still yours. Clothes, toys, quarters, what he has been given, must remain under his exclusive control. So he tears up his shirt, wrecks his bed, breaks his fire engine. It's none of your business. How would you like to have somebody give you a Christmas present and then tell you, day after day thereafter, what you are to do with it and even punish you if you failed to care for it the way the donor thinks you should? You’d wreck that donor and ruin that present. You know you would. The child wrecks your nerves when you do it to him. That’s revenge. He cries. He pesters you. He breaks your things. He "accidentally" spills his milk. And he wrecks the possession on purpose about which he is so often cautioned. Why? Because he is fighting for his own self-determinism, his own right to own and make his weight felt on his environment. This "possession" is another channel by which he can be controlled. So he has to fight the possession and the controller.

Doubtless, some people were so poorly raised they think control is the ne plus ultra (highest point) of child raising. If you want to control your child, simply break him into complete apathy and he'll be as obedient as any hypnotized half-wit. If you want to know how to control him, get a book on dog training, name the child Rex and teach him first to "fetch" and then to "sit up" and then to bark for his food. You can train a child that way. Sure you can. But it’s your hard luck if he turns out to be a blood-letter (a person who causes bloodshed).

Of course, you'll have a hard time of it. This is a human being. It will be tough because man became king of the beasts only because he couldn’t as a species be licked. He doesn’t easily go into an obedient apathy like dogs do. Men own dogs because men are self-determined and dogs aren’t.

The reason people started to confuse children with dogs and started training children with force lies in the field of psychology. The psychologist worked on "principles" as follows:

"Man is evil."

"Man must be trained into being a social animal."

"Man must adapt to his environment."

As these postulates aren’t true, psychology doesn’t work. And if you ever saw a wreck, it’s the child of a professional psychologist. Attention to the world around us instead of to texts somebody thought up after reading somebody’s texts, shows us the fallacy of these postulates.

The actuality is quite opposite the previous beliefs.

The truth lies in this direction:

Man is basically good.

Only by severe aberration can man be made evil. Severe training drives him into non sociability.

Man must retain his personal ability to adapt his environment to him to remain sane.

A man is as sane and safe as he is self-determined.

In raising your child, you must avoid "training" him into a social animal. Your child begins by being more sociable, more dignified than you are. In a relatively short time the treatment he gets so checks him that he revolts. This revolt can be intensified until he is a terror to have around. He will be noisy, thoughtless, careless of possessions, unclean-anything, in short, which will annoy you. Train him, control him and you’ll lose his love. You’ve lost the child forever that you seek to control and own.

Permit a child to sit on your lap. He'll sit there, contented. Now put your arms around him and constrain him to sit there. Do this even though he wasn't even trying to leave. Instantly, he’ll squirm. He’ll fight to get away from you. He’ll get angry. He’ll cry. Recall now, he was happy before you started to hold him.

Your efforts to mold, train, control this child in general react on him exactly like trying to hold him on your lap.

Of course you will have difficulty if this child of yours has already been trained, controlled, ordered about, denied his own possessions. In mid-flight, you change your tactics. You try to give him his freedom. He’s so suspicious of you he will have a terrible time trying to adjust. The transition period will be terrible. But at the end of it you’ll have a well-ordered, well-trained, social child, thoughtful of you and, very important to you, a child who loves you.

The child who is under constraint, shepherded, handled, controlled, has a very bad anxiety postulated. His parents are survival entities. They mean food, clothing, shelter, affection. This means he wants to be near them. He wants to love them, naturally, being their child.

But on the other hand his parents are non survival entities. His whole being and life depend upon his rights to use his own decision about his movements and his possessions and his body. Parents seek to interrupt this out of the mistaken idea that a child is an idiot who won’t learn unless "controlled." So he has to fight shy, to fight against, to annoy and harass an enemy.

A child needs his parents' support for many aspects of his survival. But if they also severely interrupt his decisions of his life he is given a huge problem which can cause him much worry.

Here is anxiety. "I love them dearly. I also need them. But they mean an interruption of my ability, my mind, my potential life. What am I going to do about my parents? I can’t live with them. I can't live without them. Oh, dear, oh, dear!" There he sits running this problem through his head. That problem, that anxiety, will be with him for eighteen years, more or less. And it will half wreck his life.

Freedom for the child means freedom for you. Abandoning the possessions of the child to their fate means eventual safety for the child's possessions.

What terrible willpower is demanded of a parent not to give constant streams of directions to a child! What agony to watch his possessions going to ruin! What upset to refuse to order his time and space!

But it has to be done if you want a well, a happy, a careful, a beautiful, an intelligent child!

Working with a Child’s Willingness
Allowing Children to Work