Judgment

Introduction: Judgment consists of familiarity and the ability to evaluate relative importances. Judgment consists of the importance of the fact with relationship to its surroundings. You will do to the extent that you recognize and observe and evaluate. You know why it is there and what it is and what it does. The more laws there are, the less judgment there is.

Judgment

Excerpt from: lecture "Rehabilitation of Judgment" given by L. Ron Hubbard on the 13 November 1959

You can't have a bunch of slaves and not have super moral codes and laws. Do you see that? In the absence of judgment you have to have all kinds of laws. And you can just put it down in your book that the more laws there are, the less judgment there is.

In living a free life there is one thing that you give up. You give up to some degree a security against getting hanged. Because if a slave follows down an exact grooved course of conduct and always minds and obeys all the laws, every single law, he never gets hanged or punished, does he? Usually he makes it. He's good, safe, stupid and weak.… Never moves a hair out of line. But there's a security connected with that. In a loose way it's analogous to the fellow who holds down a job and gets a regular pay check and it's a fairly safe job and he isn't liable to be fired off of it. He never drives any, he never drives any Mercedes-Benz, but he always eats, see. Life doesn't have any peaks, but doesn't have any abysses, either. See? Security. An unchanging monotony. Nothing really wrong with it. It's a method of living.

One obeys certain laws and subscribes to certain codes and after that he's OK.

Judgment is the factor which has to be substituted for law. And a man can be as free as his judgment is rehabilitated. And that's as free as he'll ever get, 'cause oddly enough he himself will discover himself making a mistake and then put laws on himself. If you don't do it for him, he'll do it for himself. He'll say, "Well, I must never do that again," as he washed the bashed-in head of the baby. See? He just says, "I must never do that again." He has said in essence, without putting "Article four, section eight code penal infanticide, the slaughtering of babies shall be accompanied by punishment," you see. That isn't the way he phrased it. He just says, "Well, that's a bad act. A bad, stupid, senseless act and I am guilty of having accomplished one and therefore after this I shall not do this." He makes up his own law and he says, "I shalt not kill babies." Bang. Get the idea? Men, they live within their own area.

He almost never says to himself another thought. He says, "Well, if I'm going to be around babies I've got to raise my judgment with regard to them." He doesn't do that. He usually puts on the emergency brakes and makes up a law. He doesn't really make an effort to further understand what he is having difficulty with and he is liable to makes laws about. So you see there were two choices he could make as he bashed the babies head in. One of them was to make up a law; "Infanticide. I shalt not commit infanticide here and after as aforestated me." See that was one direction. And he had an entirely different choice which was, "Here and after as a aforestated, if I can commit actions of this character with the consequences appertaining thereto, and I better not be so damned stupid about it, I better find out something about this and I had better increase my judgment on the subject of babies."

Judgment consists of familiarity and the ability to evaluate relative importances. Relative importances.

Guy jumps on deck with a knife in his teeth, you don't want any stimulus response machine which just shoots him because he might be a friend of yours who was simply skin diving. You don't want a stimulus response machine that simply polishes him off. You want judgment enough. Well, judgment consists of the importance of the fact with relationship to its surroundings. There he was, there he is, what are you going to do? Well you're going to do to the degree that you recognize and observe and evaluate. You know why he is there and what is he and what he's doing. That all depends on fairly quick observation. The more laws you have, the less you observed. You settle into the security of just following the law and one day the law goes out of style and there you are still following the law. And all of your aberrations are just laws that have gone out of style.

L. Ron Hubbard