Lecture: Creating a Third Dynamic (1957)

 The main thing–the main thing I’m saying is, that an organization which has a multiple, not-apparent purpose would probably be very successful. You get a business manager, he’s a pretty good promoter. He hires a few salesmen around town to go around evenings, and they simply sell memberships and back up the hearse–or whatever else they do to sell memberships–and they get names on the Survival Club pledges and the USA clubs are sold to them and–the membership–and they’ll get out from under in case of atomic war or something like this. You’re not trying to sell them religion or getting better or you’re not trying to sell them anything but self-preservation which is usually easy to sell. And it doesn’t cost any fabulous amount and your finances on the thing tend to work themselves out one way or the other. Furthermore, the organization here will have this in its literature pretty well codified and organized. You’re not exactly sailing out into the blue.

Now you may or may not know this, and it probably isn’t important anyway: I was a member of Naval Civil Affairs at the end of the last war and they sent me to the Princeton School of Government. Well they had to get a four-year education done in a few months and they were actually doing a pretty good job because all they were trying to do was smarten some guys up so they wouldn’t lay too big an egg when they got out amongst disaster populaces. Therefore, my interest in the subject of disaster relief has been greater perhaps than it would have been otherwise having been educated in this subject. I was once, by the way, a field executive with the American Red Cross in the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster. And these things have some reality to me, you know. I mean it isn’t very unreal and the thing that I have the greatest reality on is it’s awfully easy–it’s awfully easy to form groups to take care of disasters. And why civil defense is unable to recruit people to do this, I wouldn’t have a clue unless their program is so lousy that the people that they’re trying to recruit see through it at once, as a fraud or something. It must be a terribly bad program. Nobody’s signing up for civil defense these days. They’ve deserted this sphere.

Well disaster relief, or organizations to lead toward the survival of peoples are not very complicated organizations for this reason. The people themselves each one have some desire or some knowingness on the subject. You get the idea? You’re using native talent. Now you’ll understand better when I say an auditor has to be, really, to get good results, has to be trained as an auditor. You got that? Well, a couple of mechanics and a filling station operator don’t need very much education to be your transportation officials. You got that? So all you have to do is throw them the idea, how’re we going to get–how’re we going to get three thousand survivors transported from the city out to this evacuation area. Why sit around and jam your wheels with it, see? You find some guys that know something about wheels, and you say, “Heh, it’s your baby. It’s your baby. Now you’re in charge and you make sure it’s done and we’ll hold you liable for it and you give us a report every meeting on what you’ve done in order to organize this thing.” You see that. In other words, you’re dealing with something where you have tremendous quantities of native ability. Where you don’t have to do a great deal of education. You can pick and choose.

Now the mistake would be to just do everything for the people and set up a service that does everything for the people and that’s that. No, you’re going to be a slicker-because remember basically, even if this is known only to you, this is a therapeutic operation. You shove the responsibility at them. You shove them the problems. Soundly enough organized, basically, in the organization so there’s some way they can do something about the problems if they think of an answer. You put them into communication with one another with regard to these problems and you get them tremendously interested in it.

All right, we have a Survival Club team, and it has–it has twenty basic offices, and that doesn’t care whether we’re getting in recreation or whether we’re working about inflation or whether we’re working about atomic disaster or what we’re working on, there are twenty offices. We’re going to have a picnic, let me assure you that you’ve got to have all of these officers at a picnic, even the medical. See, they’ve all got to be present at the picnic just as they would be at the disaster. Just make sure that they have countless assistants so that they get so busy trying to keep their assistants busy that they never have any time to be critical of what you’re doing.

Now, it’s quite interesting–it’s quite interesting but you’re adding goals and purposes to people. And you’re taking a society which is relatively purposeless and you’re putting purposes into their heads. We don’t care what the purpose is. The purpose is every few weeks we’ll have a picnic. Every Saturday night we will have a dance. We’ll own a piece of property that has a big barn. The thing by the way has to be even about thirty-five to filly miles away from town in order to be in a safe area outside an atomic fallout.

Even then it might be a little dangerous, but you have provisions against that.If-you’ve got programs you know. And if the programs aren’t going right and the members aren’t turning up, blame the members and ask them for suggestions and get them all together to remedy this horrible thing.

They’ll come up with ways and means of doing it. If they’re inefficient, if the club isn’t running efficiently, all you have to do is tell them to run it better.

When I say you tell them, you wouldn’t even have to be an officer. It’s just propaganda that you put around.

The art and skill of being an executive is being an expert agent provocateur. That’s being an executive. Some people think it’s being an organizational expert. No. It’s just provoking people until they’ll organize. The capitalist failed because he got them to organize against him. That wasn’t smart.

Now here then is a Survival Club idea: United Survival Action Clubs. The reason they’re called that is just so you can say USA Club. But the loose term is Survival Club. You want a group, you want people you can talk with, you’ll find these people take quite a while-with another purpose, together–before you could talk to them about anything like Scientology or better IQs or anything else. But if they are performing their job well, they will be getting better and you will be making a country and a government possible.

You want a group, don’t try to form them on the basis of Scientology just per se and as such. All you want is to get some bodies together and I’m giving you an idea of how you get some bodies together. Put the bodies together, even though it’s apparently quite distant from what you’re doing. Because there will be a group of bodies which will become a group which will become itself a body that you can communicate with to the society at large. And you can’t talk worth a nickel without a body. I know, I’ve processed some of you. Get you up in the middle of the room, whatcha do you do, squeak.

Well now, you’re doing that with society at large right now. You have not accumulated a body to talk with. You understand that? Well don’t think Scientology couldn’t talk loud and long if you all, those of you who are interested in this, did your job well in organizing Survival Clubs or many Survival Clubs in your area and these were all united together under a central club that fed literature and coordinated ideas and activities and published club news and interchanged it all. Don’t think Scientology wouldn’t have a voice. You would be able to talk.

Now I dare say that this idea will not get there and prevent an atomic war. I dare say that it’s not probable. Well when these people back up the hearse to you about atomic war, remember one thing: That there’ll be tremendous numbers of people left alive. Just be one of them, that’s the trick. Actually, in even a heavily bombed area, about fifty percent of the populace directly under the bombs still lived. Now what are you going to do about these people?¹

Notes