Building Our Community of Consciousness
Building Our Community of Consciousness is a Cosmotheist lecture given by Dr. William Pierce on October 10, 1976 at the office of the National Alliance in Arlington, Virginia. Below is the “condensation of remarks” which was reported in ACTION: Internal Bulletin of the National Alliance
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I talked to you last time about what we want to accomplish, in the way of building our movement, in the next few years. The essence of what I said is this: the goals which lie before us are not political goals in the ordinary sense. We are not thinking now in terms of having won over a certain percentage of the electorate--of having taken a certain portion of the Jews’ power away from them--by a certain date in the future.
Instead, our goals are organizational goals. We are think in terms of increasing our capabilities. We talked about two thresholds we must cross, the first and more pressing being the threshold of viability, and the second the threshold of aggressive action.
When we have crossed the threshold of viability we will have an organization capable of preserving and safeguarding our Truth indefinitely, complete and undistorted. When we have crossed the threshold of aggressive action, we will have an organization capable of seizing a wide range of opportunities to pave the way for the eventual triumph of our Truth.
Now, it is the fashion these days for organizations of various sorts to pretend, right form the moment of their inception, that they have already crossed the 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 the Black Panthers. One of the first things they did was muster their whole strength--a dozen or so Negroes--give everyone a shotgun, and then march into the California State Legislature in Sacramento with the shotguns over their shoulders. They began waving their guns and making threats until they were arrested, and the news media gave the incident enormous coverage, greatly helping the growth of the organization.
There are two criticisms which can be media of such activity. First, while it worked for the Panthers, it certainly won’t work for everyone. The news media, while not directly praising the armed invasion of the California Legislature, reported it in such a way that it seemed a heroic action: the downtrodden but nevertheless noble, brave, and manly Black taking up arms to gain his rights, ect.
If the sympathies of the media masters and their rank-and-file employees had been different, the action could have been reported instead as a hollow and silly gesture, because the 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 the way they are reported. In fact, it doesn’t even work all the time for the left wing. The Symbionese Liberation Army is an example of a left-wing group which foolishly imagined that it had crossed the second threshold and began acting accordingly. It had not even taken the 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 the way it did for the Panthers--it yields, at best, an inorganic sort of growth. That is it results in the mere agglomeration of an undigested mass of members and supporters.
Now, there are instances where inorganic growth is perfectly satisfactory--in the 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 the approval of a portion of the public. It is different from selling ATTACK! Subscriptions to people who are in general agreement with our position on regaining control of the news media, for example, or with our position on racial separation. And it is different form most of what we have been doing in the way of interaction with the public in the past. We had a reason for what we did in the past. We had to establish contact with the public. We had to become known to a number of people measured in the thousands, at least--better, in the tens of thousands--so that form those thousands or tens of thousands we could begin sifting out the few, measured in the 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 the future our newspaper will continue to be directed toward the public, and we want to see the number of people it brings us into contact with each month rise form the 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 the organic growth of our community. We must recruit, one buy one, the few from the 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 the many who will only stand on the 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 the street. Now we must also make a personal contact. We must explain, almost on a one-to-one basis, our identity and our mission, the meaning of our Affirmation, and how the life of that particular person will be changed when he or she begins living for the sake of eternity instead of for the moment and begins serving the Creator’s eternal Purpose instead of only his or her personal whims.
Each of us must become a missionary for the Alliance, as well as an ATTACK! distributor and leaflet distributor. For many of us, that many mean coming out of the 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 the National Office--we’ll have a book in print which presents, in coherent form, the 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 the 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 the wise guys will think, the 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 the 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 the open-mindedness to understand something so different form the Jewish lies he’s been taught all his life, and with the 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 the past. But the most important activity contributing to our growth in the 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 the 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 the 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 the Creator and our mission as agents of the 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 the world to see, of our Truth applied to daily living.