Lecture: The Overt Motivator Sequence (1962)

And you study men under stress and men in various guises and men under various actions of this particular character, and you find out that the world has built up a series of superstitions about people. And they’re not facts–they’re superstitions. They hardly even are dignified as findings.

Your animal psychologist has categorized the whole lousy lot. I mean, he’s got them all. His textbooks are nothing else but the mirage of ought-to-be, see? There’s no facts in there. It’s just a bunch of ought-to-be.

He tells everybody, “Beware of anybody who is active.” Isn’t that interesting? “Beware of anybody who is active.” You will find in the civil-defense manuals of the United States government, in that area delegated to (ha!) psychology, that the whole provision that they have made is for anybody who gets active: and if a citizen were to start flying around and talking about what should be done or what shouldn’t be done or blaming the government or saying anything like this, he is the one you have the butterfly nets for. And this is why you have psychological units in civil-defense teams. They’re the butterfly-net people, and they’re supposed to pick up these guys who get active. And that’s exactly what it says.

I’m not minimizing this or I’m not stretching it or–I don’t have to. I mean, it’s a marvelous example-of “be good.” You see, the whole U.S. civil defense system is based on the idea that there is a thing called the government which is composed of people (which already is silly), and they’re going to take over the country at the moment of an attack, see? They aren’t there now. They’re not part of the people, and they’re not human, you see? And they’re parked up someplace in Canada along the DEW line or down in Mexico or out on some island–and they don’t exist there now. And at the moment of an attack, nobody is supposed to do anything but be taken over by the government. That’s what you’re supposed to do in an attack.¹

Notes