A talk by Tim Jackins at the Pre-World Conference for West Coast
North America in Los Gatos, California, USA, January 2026

Societies cannot control themselves. They would like to be in a steady state of accumulating wealth for the owning class consistently forever, but of course it doesn’t work that way. Things get unstable and go all over the place. The current crisis and failure of leadership may be so big the system can’t recover. Let’s assume that’s true. It’s sad that it’s necessary. It’s not sad that it happens. There’s no point wishing it could be delayed. We need to join the battle for rationality.


I’m not confident that we’re prepared for all the irrationality coming out in all these different ways. We all need to work on how it touches our lives, families, jobs, and more. It affects everything. The particular way I want us to think about it now relates to the RC Community.

ATTACKERS RELY 
ON PRETEXTS 


Part of what will happen is that the controlling classes will want to make it impossible for people to think and get together and say, “This ends now. Something new and different has to happen.” It will take a large number of people moving together in that direction for things to change. All the strategies of the oppressive forces are to keep that large group from ever forming, to keep us splintered [divided]. They do it by attacking people and getting them to blame each other.


So, are you ready to be attacked? No, you’re not. None of us are. None of us want that. But in a way you should want it, because it means that you are doing something that has alarmed the powers that be. So far, we’re not very alarming. We’re nice. We do good, well-meaning things.


We’ve been targeted throughout our existence by different hostile pieces of the society. The most recent attack happened in one of our Communities, not so long ago. And it was sort of an accident. It wasn’t meant to be aimed at us, exactly, but somebody presented a good enough pretext [excuse] for an attack. It got very scary for people that a person was accused of doing horrible things to other people, to young people. What actually happened wasn’t in fact horrible, but that didn’t matter. There didn’t have to be any content there. The person had made mistakes here and there, like all of us. There was a pretext to attack a person with full viciousness, and then to attack the organization that she came from, and to attack the government entity that had hired her. There was a great big swirling mess there. It was very scary and restimulating for the RC Community. That person was not attacked for what she did, nor was she attacked for mistakes she made, none of which were horrible. She was attacked as a pretext to upset people for entirely different reasons, and it restimulated perhaps ninety percent of the RC Community.


Some people suggested that we, I, needed to disavow [distance ourselves from] her, for the preservation of the RC Community or we would all continue to be attacked. That we had to chop a person off, which is standard functioning in our society. You know where that pattern comes from. In the family and on the playground, to avoid being the target, you hide from the attackers, try to escape any way you can, and sacrifice anything necessary to protect yourself. And that’s a mistake. It’s always a mistake. But people get that scared. They don’t want to be associated with a group where there’s someone who is under attack, because that means they themselves might get attacked. No one had any real idea what the circumstances were, and it didn’t matter. No one was trying to find out. The powers that be were just whipping up [restimulating] distress.

ATTACKS ARE NEVER JUSTIFIED


How would you like to be a target? If you do too much, you will be. If you become effective, it will be noticed and things will start grinding. It’s sort of a crapshoot [gamble] who gets it [into trouble] and who doesn’t. It might not happen to you, but it will happen to us, so we have to understand it and not be confused by it. As I implied, it’s kind of a badge of honor. We could decide to give out little pins to those who have risen high enough to become targets. It’s a measure of your having made the effort to oppose the irrationalities that are dominating our lives.


How do we support each other? How do we discharge on this, way ahead of time? Different Communities think they’ve prepared themselves and then it hits, and it’s still restimulating. Essentially, we get to look at all the ways we were attacked, isolated, and set aside in our early years.


We have to be clear in our minds that nobody—nobody—has to face this alone. That when it happens, there needs to be enough of us, near enough by, that we step in close with them. As things come at them, we handle those things with them. We need to try and reach the people who get confused about this, and if they’re in RC help them discharge on it.

The purpose of an attack is to derail efforts, to split groups, and to make you turn away from the work you’re doing in order to handle the upset. The more you can be drawn off to do that, the more effective the attack is. We have to understand it—understand where it comes from and not be too upset about it. It has to happen, like the collapse of society. It doesn’t mean you made a mistake. The attackers may, as a pretext, pick out a place where you’ve stumbled. But it’s always a pretext. How many of us have provided pretext? Put your hands up and look around just so you understand. Okay, next question: how many times?

You get to work on where you feel like an attack would be justified because you made some mistake. The attack is never justified, but you feel vulnerable there. It is never justified. We’ve done lots of different things to handle attacks, starting with the ones aimed at my father. We all need to understand this phenomenon as things collapse, because it’s more and more likely to come our way.


GOING FORWARD TOGETHER


Instead of praying that it doesn’t happen or assuming a defensive posture, an attack can be looked at as an opportunity to clarify issues we’ve neglected.


Imagine how powerful you would feel if you knew you were not vulnerable to restimulation. That’s our goal.


Since we’re heading into this particular thicket [challenge], I want to emphasize the point about us standing together and not leaving anyone alone to handle an attack. From the recent experience I talked about, it’s clear we haven’t done enough work on this.


There are still people who can’t understand. They believe their upset [restimulation] and believe they’re justified in acting on it. Nobody’s ever justified in that, and it doesn’t work to make things better. I don’t care what happened to us. That doesn’t justify our believing in and acting on our upsets. That’s our material [distress]. That’s what we work on here.


DIRECTION: 
“I MADE A MISTAKE”


Part of the reason we’re vulnerable is we made mistakes in our childhood and were attacked for it. We were scolded. What did we learn to do? We learned to hide our mistakes. Each of us has a bunch of hidden mistakes. Where are you most vulnerable? Same places. We make mistakes. That’s part of how we learn how to do things. But we know we didn’t have evil intent. We made mistakes where we didn’t have enough information or where distress got in our way. When we see someone make a mistake, we do not want to cut them off and throw them away. We get to figure out how to go forward together.

But that didn’t happen for us, so we are vulnerable when somebody points out where we made a mistake that we’ve had to hide all these years. We don’t think well at those spots. We shrink [become small], we try to avoid, we apologize, we blow up [become angry], we do something, but it’s usually not very intelligent. Show of hands: how many of you have hidden mistakes? Okay, look around. It’s important. Look around.


What I would like you to do is see if you can tell somebody that you made a mistake and what the mistake was. If you can’t tell them, you just say, “I made a mistake,” and you think about it. See if you can work on it this way, because some of the things you maybe shouldn’t tell yet.

You would be very impressive if you were not vulnerable to restimulation—if your mind, your face, everything could stay with a person through whatever attack they were experiencing. That’s the kind of power humans can have and you want to have. That’s what will help us move through a lot of things together.