STAYING IN CONTROL 1
When you are out talking overtly about Scientology, you will inevitably meet some people whose entire purpose is to make you be covert in your communication.
They’ll say, “Ah well, are you sure that’s true?” or “How do you know that?” or “Actually, well, I’ve heard of that cult/’ throwing it off the line somehow or another, in order to drive you down and get you to soft-pedal1 or tone down2 what you were saying. The people who are doing this, in one way or another, simply cannot tolerate motion, and you’re in motion and communicating. In general, they don’t like this. It wouldn’t matter what you were talking about.
If you were trying to communicate to them directly on a basis where they had very low agreement, you would be having a hard time too.
They will justify their objection to your communicating by objecting to what you’re talking about.
If you have bird-dogged3 what you’re talking about as the real objection (and you think that is a justified objection), after a while you will get very covert in your communication line. You should just recognize that people object to you talking, I don’t care whether you talk mellifluously,4 ingratiatingly,5 overtly or roar like a bull; it doesn’t matter, they’re going to object one way or the other to the fact that you’re communicating, and the worse off they are, the more terrifically covert they will be about this. They will be very covert—they’ll really worm around the corners on it.
Recognize this about people who are objecting to you talking: When
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1. soft-pedal: to play down; give little attention to, make less noticeable, etc.
2. tone down: to make {something written or said) less strong, less forceful or less harsh. The term tone down has no similarity to tone level or Tone Scale. Tone down does not mean down tone or down the Tone Scale
or at a lower tone level. Tone down means simply to make less strong, less forceful or less harsh.
3. bird-dog: to search out diligently or pursue doggedly.
4. mellifluously: sweetly and smoothly.
5. ingratiatingly: so as to get oneself into favor; to gain grace or favor with; to render oneself agreeable to.269you’re having any kind of a mess-up in trying to talk with somebody, the basic objection is the fact that you’re talking. It’s not true that everybody objects to your talking (don’t let me give you that impression), but in this specialized case, where you’re getting any kind of an objection—no matter how covert—the main objection is the fact that you’re talking.
The way to overcome that objection is to simply drive it into apathy by talking more overtly, and more. Don’t try to modify yourself for an agreement. You’re sitting in the living room, and there are some friends around, and they have a guest. This guest says, “Well, isn’t that a cult?” or something of this sort, after he’s heard you’re a Scientologist, Bird-dog him right there. His main objection is the fact that you’re talking.
He probably considers himself attacked as an authority. After you go along a little further, you’ll find out maybe he’s a medical doctor or a psychologist. Perhaps he has some vested interest, or he minored in psychology in the barber college (that’s where they teach that now), and he makes a nasty crack; he’ll pretend some vested interest in what you’re talking about. A proper reaction on your part is to just shift the subject entirely, skip it and talk about something that the rest are talking about or interested in and just shut up at that point, only shut up loudly. There are no halves about this; just shut up loudly. You just look at them with a little surprise, and look out and say, “It’s nice weather we’re having,” or get off to some banality.6 Cut him to pieces and ignore him afterwards, because his main objection is to you talking. It didn’t matter what you said; that’s why he raised an objection.
He can’t raise objections to you talking about things that are along certain social codes, because nobody objects to people talking about these certain things. The reason he can’t object to you talking in general is because you generally would talk about things that are not socially objectionable, We have a social code that says it is permissible to discuss the weather, roads, automobile accidents, Aunt Agatha’s operation, business conditions in general—whatever is in the news at the moment. You’re not supposed to interrupt people when they’re talking about those things. That’s socially acceptable, so nobody dares object to those. But you get off the subject a little bit—for example, if you were to start talking about a Lama7—you’ll find all of a sudden people now have the right to object because you’re off the subject of their acceptance.
Cut him to pieces by a loud silence, and shift the conversation the other way. There’s no halfway point; you don’t diddle along saying, “Well I don’t know, a lot of people say it is a cult, but you know, between ourselves, really there are a lot of sincere people mixed up in this; I know there are a lot of . . .” You don’t do that—that’s what he hopes you’ll do.
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6. banality: a statement or action which is dull or stale because of overuse.
7. Lama: the title given to certain Buddhist priests of Mongolia and Tibet.270If you cut this guy dead (and this isn’t just in the interest of being nasty), you leave a sudden vacuum. It is now up to him to try to lead into a subject which he knows nothing about, and he can get into the most dreadful morass8 you have ever heard of. You have just left a vacuum, and haven’t given him a proper answer; you’ve left a communication line unfinished. This vacuum has been mocked up and he falls right into it. He’ll have to talk about it; he has no other choice, and you can go on ignoring him. The longer you ignore him, the more upset he will be about the whole subject. But he will finally have to go out and buy a book to find out all about this subject so that he can do something to you about it.
Or you just cut him to pieces. You say, “Scientology is an applied religious philosophy. It is the study of the human spirit in its relationship to the physical universe and other life and it does a lot of things for a lot of people.” Start explaining it to him very carefully, and if you really want to be nasty about it, mock him up as a two-year-old kid and explain it very, very well to him.
You think the rest of the people at the party are going to turn on you for doing such a horrible thing—they’re with you all the way. If you have nerve enough to do that, you’ve got nerve enough to lead them. But they won’t be with you all the way if you sort of apologize for having brought it up and kind of mildly introduce the subject in one way or the other.
You might think this is contrary to your experience on the line, but if you’ll think back over the times when you’ve been very covert, it might have been socially comfortable for you at the time it was happening, but it did not produce any subsequent result.
If you had not cut the individual to pieces, the second you left he would have told all the others some great untruth which he had read in the medical manual concerning Scientology, or something of the sort. He would have cooked any impression that you had made unless you had already cooked him.
That’s a nasty crack, but the truth of the matter is, the next time this individual who objected to what you were saying is present and you’re not, he will make hash out of you unless you’ve already made hash out of him. So just finish him on the spot.
Finish him by saying, “Did you ever study Scientology? Oh, you studied psychology. Oh, when was that? Ha-ha—when—when was that? Oh, that was from a regular university? Oh? Oh yeah, very interesting. But, did you ever study Scientology? Oh, you read something. Where did you read this? What issue was that? Who said that? Who said that? Oh, did you read all of the article? Did you . . . I remember the article very well”—this throws him off board because he’s just invented the article—”I remember
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8. morass: used figuratively to mean a difficult, troublesome or perplexing stale of affairs.271the article very well, but in the last half it said it was very beneficial to man in general—didn’t you get down to that? Oh, I see. Well, do you do everything in a perfunctory9 way like this?” Then drop him!
The art of conversation and the art of dueling have many things in common, and if you are ever dull enough to fail to see this similarity, you deserve everything you’re going to get in a fight like that. The dueling trick of suddenly coming up with your weapon and dropping well back to invite a desperate lunge is very, very well known to a great many dead men. The other one is, even in the face of skill, if you just press in a thundering hard attack and just keep on attacking, sooner or later he’s going to find a hedge or something at his back and fall into it; you’re just taking a chance that way.
In view of the fact that nobody is in the kind of condition to really put up a good fight these days, you’re taking a horrible advantage. This guy is dueling you with a hatpin and you have a broadsword. You just go in overtly and butcher him.
This has a lot to do with your procurement of preclears. You wouldn’t think so, but it does. You use an overt communication line and people immediately say, “Look, this guy isn’t scared. If he isn’t scared then he must be a survivor type. If he’s a survivor type, why, that’s for me, because obviously I’m not a survivor type.”
All you have to do to demonstrate yourself as a survivor type (one test only), is continue to communicate!
Let’s take this in a most horrible way (since we are talking about dueling and killing): Supposing you stabbed a fellow and he fell down, and he just lay there, stretched out, and he kept on talking to you in a rather undisturbed tone of voice. Suppose you then got your broadsword and hacked him into several pieces, and he kept on talking to you in a rather undisturbed tone of voice. And you then got a big keg of gunpowder, put it under him and blew him up and spattered him all over the scenery, and he kept on talking to you in an undisturbed tone of voice. Somewhere along the line you would have the idea that this was a survivor type.
Do you know what would happen to you as a result? You would go into apathy. It is enough for a line of troops to simply keep on charging, no matter what the cost of loss, for the superior force to sooner or later throw their arms down if they can’t stop this continual elan10 of charge, fall back, charge, fall back, charge, fall back, charge, fall back, charge. All of a sudden the troops who were winning will just throw their weapons down and leave. They can see dead men all over the place out there in front of them, and yet they obviously are not winning. It isn’t the bullets that win, it’s the idea behind the men firing them that in essence wins.
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9. perfunctory: done merely as a routine; superficial.
10. elan: spirit or enthusiasm; liveliness.272It wouldn’t matter if a government had all the atom bombs and all the gold in the world. If an idea set in for any reason whatsoever in such a government, that it had been outboxed, and that it was being out-thought, and it became kind of confused about it, things that it hated continued to survive and continued to survive, eventually this government, armed to the teeth, would go into apathy about the whole thing. They would just quit. And they do.
I’ve seen this happen in hunting. I saw a fellow one time unable to kill a porcupine. He fired several high-caliber bullets into this porcupine and finally took a club to it. By this time he was getting frenziedly desperate about the whole thing. He stepped back, and the porcupine got up tremblingly, shook its quills, grunted a little bit and started to walk away. This guy didn’t reattack the porcupine; he just started to scream.
You’ve watched the mechanism of a tantrum in a child; it’s just the recognition of senior survival. All you have to do to demonstrate senior survival is continue to communicate; I don’t mean monotonously, but when they all think you’re dead, say something.
So conversationally, socially and in the conduct of a practice, if you just keep this kind of thing in mind—either drop it cold, so they fall in head over heels, or overtly attack, but never go in between—you’ll get it. You can walk down the street and tell somebody to come around and see you. Of course he might get the idea you’re bothering him; you’ll occasionally get a rebuff, but so what?
If you were just to continue sending letters out into your community, regardless of whether they were ever replied to or not, and continued to send them repetitively to the same people, those people would start showing up. It takes three letters to begin that effect, and five letters are almost impossible to ignore. People would come around; they wouldn’t have any other choice. For instance, don’t send out one mailing to a mailing list; cut your mailing list one-third and send three mailings to that one third of the list, and you’ll get more people coming in.
In other words, stay alive. And the best way to stay alive is just to be tremendously effective. If you’re trying to stay alive in a practice, be effective, keep communicating, don’t take no for an answer, never drop into this covert, apologetic line, and you will be very well in, believe me.
I hope I’ve solved a problem or two that you might have had.
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HUBBARD DISSEMINATION COURSE
DISSEMINATION DRILL 15Name: Handling Attacks by Staying in Control.
Reference: “Staying in Control” in this manual.
Purpose: To teach a Scientologist how to skillfully handle attacks and objections to one’s talking about Dianetics and Scientology, by shifting the subject or calmly attacking back.
Position: The student sits with two other Scientologists in front of him. These two other Scientologists may be students on course. The coach sits or stands so that he can observe all three.
Patter: There is no set patter. The student and the two others all pretend they are at a social gathering and the two others helping in the drill also pretend that they are non-Scientologists.
Step A1. The coach cuts into the conversation and says, “Well, isn’t Scientology a cult?” or some similar antagonistic question. The student is to immediately look at the other students with a little surprise, then look out the window or away and say to one of the persons sitting next to the coach, “It’s nice weather we’re having,” or something similar. The student just shifts the subject entirely, ignores the coach and continues to talk in an undisturbed manner about something else that the other persons may be interested in.
2. The coach tries to get his question answered, but the student must continue to talk to the other students about some plain social subject disrelated to Scientology (weather, a television show, a current movie, business conditions, etc.), ignoring the coach utterly and completely. Once the coach can see that his questions are not going to be answered by the student, he gets up and walks away from the group.
These steps are repeated until the student can do the drill flawlessly and with ease.275Training Stress: The coach must ensure that the gradient is kept in on this drill, going from lighter snide remarks and questions to heavier attacks and objections to the student’s talking about Dianetics and Scientology. The student is flunked for getting riled or agitated or otherwise failing to handle the attack by shifting the subject in an undisturbed manner. Also flunked is any failure to smoothly control the conversation with the other persons helping in the drill while the coach is asking his snide questions. Note: There is only one coach for this drill. The other Scientologists helping in this drill may converse with the student on whatever topics he brings up, but they are not to do any coaching or bullbaiting.
Step B1. The coach cuts into the conversation and says, “Well, isn’t Scientology a cult?” or some similar antagonistic question. The student is to attack back in an overt (not covert), undisturbed, calm manner. The student does this by explaining very carefully how Scientology is an applied religious philosophy.
2. The coach continues to make snide, cutting remarks and now the student handles these by calmly attacking back with questions that challenge the coach. For example, questions such as “Did you ever study Scientology?” “Where did you read that?” “Who said that?” “You don’t believe that nonsense do you?” “Do you always talk about things you don’t know about?” etc., can be used by the student in attacking back.
3. Once the student sees that the coach has been cornered, he is to just drop him and start talking with the other students about some socially accepted subject (current events, a movie, etc.). The student is not to answer any of the coach’s communications from that point on, despite all attempts from the coach to get him to do so.
4. Once the coach sees that the student is not going to answer any of his questions or respond to anything he says, he gets up and walks away from the group.
These steps are repeated until the student can do the drill flawlessly and with ease.
Training Stress: In coaching this drill, the coach must ensure that the attacks are done on a gradient, lighter to heavier. Stress is on the student
276attacking back in an undisturbed, calm manner. The student is flunked for becoming dispersed or acting hesitant or dropping down into an apologetic attitude towards the coach. The student is also flunked for not controlling the overall conversation during the time when the student is questioning the coach as well as after the student drops the coach. Note: There is only one coach for this drill. The other Scientologists helping in this drill may converse with the student on whatever topics he brings up, but they are not to do any coaching or bullbaiting.
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Notes
- Hubbard Dissemination Course (1986). This document in PDF format. ↩