You have to understand something about policy. Policy is not just something that LRH just dreamed up. It is something that has been worked out and that has held true over a period of time. If someone who was supervising staff knew all the policies on central orgs that have been worked out over the years, and if he did what they said, he would never have to solve a single problem. Looking over any scene in an org and the policies for the area, LRH could routinely give the policy covering that situation. It is interesting for an organization as young as this one to have this much policy. Policy makes communication possible between two points. This is its main function, not forcing people to obey orders. In the absence of policy, you don't have communication between two points, because the two points are not agreed on anything.
Tradition is, likewise, an agreement. The above points about policy, therefore, also cover a civilization. A civilization has mores and guides to conduct, which are agreed upon and which assist the general survival of the individual and the majority of the group. Policy is, or should be, based on experience and should lead towards survival.
So we have policies, customs, and procedures. These are sequential doingnesses. If you don't know and follow these, you fall out of agreement with the people who are following them, and you will feel strange. You might have a better way to do something than the agreed-upon way, but if your way is at wide variance with the accepted way, the others may shoot you.
If a society is too dissonant, it is no longer a civilization, because it does not have agreements. There are all kinds of ways of getting married these days. This bunch of mishmashes shows that there is something wrong with the institution of marriage as it now stands. The rise of animalistic psychology has violated the individual's right even to have customs. Behaviorism invalidates the idea that people should have customs. There are only supposed to be pushbutton responses. One is supposed to react to stimuli, etc. Instead of policies, you have manipulation. People and societies object to manipulation, especially hidden manipulation. It violates the right to have a right way to do things. It denies the individual the right to any sense at all. It is no longer based on considerations of survival. The dignity of Man involves the ability to decide policy with others. Policy and customs are things that make sense, at least at the time that they are formulated. Customs and policy look odd when they persist after the problem that they were created to handle has vanished. When a tradition that originally made sense loses its sense, it may now have, as its rationale, "politeness", or some such thing. People tend to carry solutions into the future after the problem is licked.
Policies can conflict if realities are different. For instance, in Miami, during the second world war, American planes had a habit of practicing dive bombing on hips entering harbors. They got fired on by a Dutch ship returning from the South Pacific.
In scientology, we appear to be out of step. But what we are out of step with is the new technology of control, which assumes that men are animals that should be handled by having their buttons pushed. LRH was taught at Princeton that law proceeds from the customs of the people. Law that proceeds only from a central source and ignores or seeks to change people's customs will either be ignored or will bring on a revolution, as with Prohibition. The Civil Rights Act also sought to change customs by legislation. It violates the First Amendment and other amendments of the Constitution. It violates the right to a jury trial, something that no one seemed to notice. This produced a breakdown in communication, which resulted in disorder and rioting, because it was a violation of custom and an attempt at a central enforcement of custom. The way to keep the peace is to keep the customs of the people. Military governors had this fact laid on them with an axe, since this was the way to keep civil bodies in back of the front lines under control. Having them out of control was embarrassing.
When you violate the expected survival pattern of an area, you have said, "Die!" Bucking a custom is bucking a theta comm line. You have cut the comm line between point A and point B. Now their actions don't mesh, since they are operating on different policies.
Custom and policies are methods of bringing about communication and agreement along certain matters that lead to a higher level of survival. If policy leads to a higher level of survival, it is good policy. Poor policy leads to a lower level of survival, and bad policy leads to complete disaster. This accounts for the ebb and flow of civilizations. Civilizations could die out because their customs have become antiquated, but far more often civilizations are smashed by the fact that the central government or an external source (an invasion) has smashed the customs of the civilization. Today, on this planet, communism is engaged upon this process, using the Wundtian psychology of 1879.
Scientology is not in conflict with the customs of the planet or the universe. Quite the contrary: If you can communicate with anyone on the subject of scientology, he will agree with you, unless he misunderstands a word, since you are talking to him out of the traditional technologies of healing and the human spirit, and the traditional philosophies and psychologies: "Know the truth, and the truth will set you free!" This is an ancient policy of psychology that is now being violated. For instance, Washington is now claiming that the government has the right to lie! This violates the custom of "tell the truth" and the policy of the courts. Governments justify government lies in all sorts of ways, but individuals aren't supposed to lie. It is legal for governments to lie but not for the individual to lie. This is bad news.
The man in the street will agree with you, as long as you don't use words that are strange to him. He will agree on ideas such as the idea that Man has a right to be free, to control his life, etc. Our target is not to make an insane person quiet but to make him sane. That has been the target of mental healing since the Stone Age, but not in the last half-century. That is why we are looked upon as dangerous by the new faddists, who are interested in manipulation, not freedom. They would argue with the idea that it is good for people to be free, an idea that has never been contested in civilized society. Try asking a psychiatrist, "What are you trying to do with your patient?" He will never tell you that he is trying to make him sane. He will obfuscate. The slave philosophy was practiced in Sparta. Communism is similar, but bolder.
"We have made progress in how to accomplish goals which Man has had as long as he has been Man." What we have developed that is new is a technology to attain the traditional goals of philosophy and religion. Scientology's way of expressing Man's basic goals and our organizational methods may be new, but not the basic goals of scientology, which are the goals of Man. We can improve on the idea behind the witch doctor: healing by manipulation of symbols. We have the advantage of being able to communicate and have a session. By "witch doctor" we do not mean someone who uses an African black magic juju, but a real healing witch doctor.
In the absence of orthodoxy, anything can be called unorthodox. A society that has no right conduct is a society in which anyone can be punished and criticized, by art critics, scientific agencies, etc., "because he is not conducting himself rightly." You can no longer comply; there is nothing to comply with. "They pretend there is a custom there, when there isn't any, ... that there is a '1-2-3-4' procedure, and then will never tell you what it is, and yet punish you because you don't comply with it." The material wealth of a society doesn't demonstrate its longevity or endurance. Greece's greatest art [and philosophy] was produced in its decline.
The communication of custom is itself a technology. When it breaks down, the custom can be abandoned. Conversely, when the custom itself has broken down, you get communication breaking down. We get a breakdown of a civilization when its customs break down because of a failure to communicate them. You get no cooperation when people don't know the customs on which they operate. The means of communication of customs are no longer taught in this civilization. This is where study tech and misunderstood word tech fits in.
So you could be remiss in teaching scientology by using words that are strange and misunderstood. If you do this, you have not established communication. Being comprehensible comes ahead of being effective, since comprehensibility makes your effectiveness apparent. "If you're truly comprehensible, [people] will forgive you almost anything, as witness my life." So the proper order of importance is: