Building Our Community of Consciousness
Building Our Community of Consciousness is a Cosmotheist lecture given by Dr. William Pierce on October 10, 1976 at tbe office of tbe National Alliance in Arlington, Virginia. Below is tbe “condensation of remarks” which was reported in ACTION: Internal Bulletin of tbe National Alliance
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I talked to you last time about what we want to accomplish, in tbe way of building our movement, in tbe next few years. The essence of what I said is this: tbe goals which lie before us are not political goals in tbe ordinary sense. We are not thinking now in terms of having won over a certain percentage of tbe electorate--of having taken a certain portion of tbe jews’ power away from them--by a certain date in tbe future.
Instead, our goals are organizational goals. We are think in terms of increasing our capabilities. We talked about two thresholds we must cross, tbe first and more pressing being tbe threshold of viability, and tbe second tbe threshold of aggressive action.
When we have crossed tbe threshold of viability we will have an organization capable of preserving and safeguarding our Truth indefinitely, complete and undistorted. When we have crossed tbe threshold of aggressive action, we will have an organization capable of seizing a wide range of opportunities to pave tbe way for tbe eventual triumph of our Truth.
Now, it is tbe fashion these days for organizations of various sorts to pretend, right form tbe moment of their inception, that they have already crossed tbe threshold of aggressive action. Typically, they call a press conference, and then, with great flourishes of militant rhetoric, they proclaim an ultimatum. Or they stage some spectacular stunt.
A good example is tbe Black Panthers. One of tbe first things they did was muster their whole strength--a dozen or so Negroes--give everyone a shotgun, and then march into tbe California State Legislature in Sacramento with tbe shotguns over their shoulders. They began waving their guns and making threats until they were arrested, and tbe news media gave tbe incident enormous coverage, greatly helping tbe growth of tbe organization.
There are two criticisms which can be media of such activity. First, while it worked for tbe Panthers, it certainly won’t work for everyone. The news media, while not directly praising tbe armed invasion of tbe California Legislature, reported it in such a way that it seemed a heroic action: tbe downtrodden but nevertheless noble, brave, and manly Black taking up arms to gain his rights, ect.
If tbe sympathies of tbe media masters and their rank-and-file employees had been different, tbe action could have been reported instead as a hollow and silly gesture, because tbe Panthers clearly had no means at all to back up their theatrics. In general, when such stunts are tried by right-wing organizations, that’s tbe way they are reported. In fact, it doesn’t even work all tbe time for tbe left wing. The Symbionese Liberation Army is an example of a left-wing group which foolishly imagined that it had crossed tbe second threshold and began acting accordingly. It had not even taken tbe precaution of making sure that it would have a sympathetic press gallery before it began its theatrics.
But there is also another criticism of this fashion of pretending to be much bigger and more powerful than one really is. Even if it does not make an organization look merely silly instead of potent--even if it works tbe way it did for tbe Panthers--it yields, at best, an inorganic sort of growth. That is it results in tbe mere agglomeration of an undigested mass of members and supporters.
Now, there are instances where inorganic growth is perfectly satisfactory--in tbe building of front groups, for example, ad hoc organizations with a limited purpose and limited duration.
But for what we are trying to do now--the crossing of our two thresholds-- we must have organic growth. Each new man or woman we win for our cause, in this stage of our development, if he or she is to be a real increment of strength for us, must be someone who understands our Truth and makes a full commitment to it. Each new member must become fully integrated into our community of consciousness.
This is quite different from winning tbe approval of a portion of tbe public. It is different from selling ATTACK! Subscriptions to people who are in general agreement with our position on regaining control of tbe news media, for example, or with our position on racial separation. And it is different form most of what we have been doing in tbe way of interaction with tbe public in tbe past. We had a reason for what we did in tbe past. We had to establish contact with tbe public. We had to become known to a number of people measured in tbe thousands, at least--better, in tbe tens of thousands--so that form those thousands or tens of thousands we could begin sifting out tbe few, measured in tbe hundreds, who were ready to make a commitment, ready to join out community. And a newspaper is really a mass organ, by its very nature. It is simply not economically feasible to publish a newspaper for an audience of only a few hundred people, even very dedicated people.
And so in tbe future our newspaper will continue to be directed toward tbe public, and we want to see tbe number of people it brings us into contact with each month rise form tbe tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. But we must also do something else, which our newspaper by itself cannot do. That is to devote ourselves to promoting tbe organic growth of our community. We must recruit, one buy one, tbe few from tbe many; we must recruit those capable of making a full commitment and becoming integral, full functioning, fully participating parts of our community. We must find and separate out these few from tbe many who will only stand on tbe sidelines and cheer. Finding and winning one such person is more valuable to us now than any public demonstration we might stage.
And this calls for a new type of effort by us. It calls for a much more personal, much more intensive recruiting effort. It will no longer suffice to put a leaflet under someone’s windshield wiper of sell him an ATTACK! on tbe street. Now we must also make a personal contact. We must explain, almost on a one-to-one basis, our identity and our mission, tbe meaning of our Affirmation, and how tbe life of that particular person will be changed when he or she begins living for tbe sake of eternity instead of for tbe moment and begins serving tbe Creator’s eternal Purpose instead of only his or her personal whims.
Each of us must become a missionary for tbe Alliance, as well as an ATTACK! distributor and leaflet distributor. For many of us, that many mean coming out of tbe closet, but it must be done.
In order to make this missionary work easier and more effective, we have been preparing some new materials. We already have an Introductory Meeting Tape, about 45 minutes in length, which was designed especially for this purpose. All you need is a cassette tape player and a place where you can bring new prospects, one or two or three--or a dozen--at a time and sit them down to listen. Within a few months --perhaps this year, if we can solve our labor problem in tbe National Office--we’ll have a book in print which presents, in coherent form, tbe things we’ve talked about in our earlier meetings, as well as a few things we haven’t talked about. It will explain, as simply and completely as possible in a few dozen pages, our identity and our mission, out Purpose. It can serve as a guide for us in explaining these things to new people. And we also have a couple of other things in tbe works which should help this missionary effort.
But most of all we’ll have to depend on ourselves for this new effort to be successful. If we’ve been keeping our Alliance activities a secret form our friends and neighbors and fellow workers, because we didn’t want them to think we’re radicals, we’ll have to change. We’ll have to stop worrying about what tbe wise guys will think, tbe people who have never had an idea that didn’t come form their television sets. Let them go back to their funny papers and their TV and their jewish view of tbe world. We have more important things to do--infinitely more important things.
This new work--this person-to-person missionary work--will be different, and it won’t be particularly easy. You may play our introductory tape for 20 or 30 or 40 people before you can find one with tbe open-mindedness to understand something so different form tbe jewish lies he’s been taught all his life, and with tbe character to make a commitment to it once he’s understood it. But all that effort is worth it. If each of our members wins for us only one new member each year in this way, then we will double our membership each year.
We will also still be winning new people though our public distributions of ATTACK!, as in tbe past. But tbe most important activity contributing to our growth in tbe future will be our new person-to-person missionary work.
This work , for many of us, will be--and should be--at least in part, a transformation of our lives. The way it is now, one can dispose of one’s monthly quota of ATTACK!s in a few minutes and then forget about one’s obligation to tbe Alliance until next month’s package of ATTACK!s arrives. But this person-to-person recruiting is something one must think about and work at every day.
The work itself, even if it does not go beyond playing our introductory tape for someone every time you find a chance, will serve to raise your own consciousness, of course, just as tbe little exercise I described for you at one of our earlier meetings. Pretty soon, you should have only one thought in your mind each time you meet someone, or each time you talk to someone you’re already met. That thought should be: How can I arrange to have this person hear our tape?
But beyond this increased awareness of a purpose in our social contacts, becoming a missionary for our Truth should change our lives in other ways. Types of behavior which we may have tolerated in ourselves before, when we stood for nothing and had no mission to fulfill, will become intolerable when we are fully conscious of our identity as parts of tbe Creator and our mission as agents of tbe Creator. Drunkenness, for example. The wasting of our precious time in foolish and meaningless diversions, whether in front of a television set or in some bar or nightclub, for example.
With an increased consciousness of just what our work stands for should also go an increased consciousness of our personal worth. We should all be better people for it, leading lives which are not only busier, because of our additional recruiting activity, but also more dignified, more meaningful, and better examples, for all tbe world to see, of our Truth applied to daily living.