Throughout history religion has been the driving force behind the establishment of a moral and ethical society. However, at the same time that morals were declining in mid-twentieth-century Western “civilization,” that traditional religious role was being systematically weakened. As L. Ron Hubbard observed, courts in the United States had banned the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools – and that code, designed for a people of several millennia past, was already largely in disuse.
In 1980, having witnessed society’s quagmire and recognizing this urgent need for timely moral direction, L. Ron Hubbard wrote The Way to Happiness, the world’s first nonreligious moral code. Through its twenty-one precepts, this code provided man with the rules of behavior he so urgently needed.
No matter where the booklet was used (and by the mid-1990s well over fifty million had been circulated) the results were telling, as more fully described in this site. And it is far from coincidence that since the introduction and broad distribution of this powerful little booklet, morality has taken its rightful place in public debate. And what this shows is the simple fact that though society appeared to have lost its moral compass, L. Ron Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness gave the world a new sense of moral direction for the first time in decades.
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