Whenever people get together to work as groups, they make agreements, whether actually stated or not, regarding what is right and what is wrong—in other words, what will help the group’s survival and what will be destructive to its survival.

This is called a moral code—a set of agreements that each person has decided to follow to ensure that the group survives.

When something has survival characteristics, it is said to be moral. A survival action is a moral action. And those things that go against survival are considered immoral.

Whether you have a group of two people working together, two people forming a marriage or a whole country being formed—it does not matter the size of the group—they decide on certain agreements. It could be an agreement for a day, an agreement for a month or an agreement for the next five hundred years.

The breaking of one of these agreements is commonly known as a transgression. When members of the group break the agreed-upon moral code, they often feel that they cannot tell others about it. The transgressions can build up and then cause a breakdown of the agreements, which causes the group to fall apart.

In Scientology, the problem caused by such transgressions has been examined in great detail. There are two parts to this problem and these are described in the next article.