The various ideas that people and groups have about what is right and what is wrong have often been the cause of arguments and conflicts. People and groups have these conflicting ideas because they have differing moral codes. Nothing is completely right or completely wrong. But in Scientology, what actually lies behind the whole subject of rightness and wrongness has been found. This discovery is based on fact, not opinion.

A right action is right to the degree that it helps the greatest number of people or areas of life, including one’s family, one’s group or team and Mankind as a whole. A right action assists survival.

And therefore a wrong action is wrong to the degree that it harms the greatest number of people or areas of life. It lessens survival for the most people.

In the matter of being right or being wrong, a person can become very confused in his thinking. Some people do very wrong things and insist they are doing right.

There is something that is not sensible or reasonable about “being right” that explains why this happens. Simply stated, there is a very strong feeling or urge in everyone to try to be right. And this happens along with an effort to make other people wrong. We often see this in people who are too critical of others.

You might have seen a person acting defensively, trying to explain away behavior or actions that are obviously wrong. Most explanations of conduct, no matter how unlikely or hard to believe, seem perfectly right to the person making them, since that person is insisting only that he is right and others are wrong.

A person tries to be right and fights being wrong. This has nothing to do with actually being right about something or actually doing right things. It is an insistence that has no concern with a rightness of conduct.

A person tries to be right always, right down to the end.

How, then, is one ever wrong?

A person can be wrong in this way:

He does a wrong action, accidentally or through failing to notice something. The wrongness of the action or the inaction is then in conflict with the person’s need to be right. So he then may continue to repeat the wrong action to prove it is right.

As an example, a wife is always burning dinner. Despite scolding, threats of divorce and so on, she continues to do it. You can completely end this wrongness by just getting her to explain what is right about her cooking. This may very well bring about a lot of anger and yelling. But if you just continue to ask the question, her urge to burn dinners will go away and she will happily stop doing so. She might even remember a past time when she accidentally burned a dinner and could not face up to having done this wrong action. So to be right, she thereafter had to burn dinners.

There is a basic idea about any thought or conduct that is not rational:

All wrong actions are the result of an error followed by an insistence on having been right. Instead of correcting the error (which would involve being wrong), a person insists the error was a right action and so repeats it.

Rightness is what survival is made of. But there is the trap from which Man seems to not be able to get free of: overts piling up on overts, made even stronger by a person continuing to insist on his rightness.

There is, fortunately, a sure way out of this trap, using the tools of Scientology.