# Behind the power curve

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/behind-the-power-curve/1665>\
**Category:** CSG1994\
**Created:** [May 18, 1994, 6:15am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/behind-the-power-curve/1665 "1994-05-18T06:15:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/c67d28/32.png) [@William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/William_T_Powers2)\
**Post date:** [May 18, 1994, 6:15am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/behind-the-power-curve/1665/1 "1994-05-18T06:15:18Z")

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[From Bill Powers (940517.2120 MDT)]

Rick Marken (940516.1900) and Tom Bourbon (940517.0815), etc. --

There was an article in the Durango Herald today about a 13-year-old  
boy in a class for students who have been expelled from school. The  
article said "He says he would fight anyone who challenged him  
because 'that's how life is'". I wanted to know what he meant by  
that, but of course the article didn't say. The reporter wasn't a  
therapist, and knew nothing of PCT.

When I read those words, I realized that to this boy they made  
sense. Behind all the details of his behavior -- which included  
bringing to school the gun that got him expelled-- there is a system  
of thought, a set of principles that fit that system, and a logical  
structure that supports the principles. All this in a boy 13 years  
old.

Right now, of course, that structure is still incomplete in that  
boy; it must contain all sorts of contradictions and would collapse  
if explored in any detail. But, we can imagine, he isn't finished  
with school yet. He will first go to college, in a few years, in  
some sort of youthful offender program. This will firm up the basis  
of his structure and eliminate some of the contradictions. Then, a  
while later, he will attend graduate school, where he will be  
taught, behind bars, by advanced practitioners of the art:  
professors of crime. He will learn the logic, the principles, and  
the system concepts of crime so well that he will become an expert.  
He will no longer be part of the society that we know, but will live  
in a different world.

But let's suppose that something happened to turn this boy around.  
Let's suppose that he encountered a charismatic teacher who managed  
to get him interested in physics and mathematics, and that he found  
he had a talent for such things. Let's suppose that his former  
structure collapsed and was replace by a new one, and he became an  
avid student. Now the defective logic with which he started would be  
replaced by proven methods of reasoning, by techniques and  
procedures of the intellect. The principles he would learn would be  
all those that science has developed, and instead of thinking of  
himself as a lone eagle, an outcast, a Robin Hood, he would begin to  
get a picture of himself as a real scientist, a pursuer of truth, a  
member of a great community of scholars and thinkers. He would learn  
the logic, the principles, and the system concepts of mathematical  
physics so well that he would become an expert. He would rise above  
the society that we know, and would live in a different world.

So we have two imaginary versions of this boy, living in alternate  
futures. Which one, I wondered as I mused about the article, would  
be most likely to grasp PCT and join in the quest for understanding  
of human nature that goes with PCT? And I answered myself, \_neither  
one.\_

The reason is that this boy is behind the power curve, an expression  
that I probably need to explain.

Some decades ago there were some spectacular and widely-publicized  
airplane accidents involving powerful delta-wing aircraft. The  
engines in these aircraft were almost powerful enough to drive the  
plane straight up from the standing start -- but not quite powerful  
enough. Furthermore, because of the design, these planes had to land  
in a sharply nose-up attitude, with a considerable amount of lift  
being provided by the thrust of the jet engines, in order to keep  
the landing speed low enough to be handled.

The problem was that if the nose-up attitude became too extreme, the  
airplane would begin to slow, requiring more power from the engines  
to keep it in the air, and beyond a certain point it was not  
possible to recover from the configuration while landing. Putting  
the nose down to gain airspeed would let the plane drop hard into  
the ground; raising the nose to maintain altitude would require  
greater and greater power from the engines, and eventually more than  
they could produce. Once this regime had been entered, the aircraft  
was said to be "behind the power curve" -- adding more power would  
just make the situation worse and the crash would occur sooner. And  
not adding power would result in a crash anyway. Some of you might  
remember the pictures on television, as the aircraft trying to land  
nosed farther and farther up, just above the runway, with the  
engines on afterburner, and finally crashed tail-first into a ball  
of flames that killed the pilot. About then, the expression "behind  
the power curve" became popular for a little while, although I doubt  
that many who used it understood what it meant. (Somebody will  
probably point out that this term also applies in automotive  
engineering. No quibbles, please).

The boy growing up under my two imaginary scenarios is working, I am  
saying, behind the power curve. In either case, he is simply coping  
with his environment by learning a system of logic and principles  
that inevitably settles into a groove from which, after enough time,  
it is impossible to escape. All the mental resources that are  
available become more and more tied up in supporting the system of  
thought that has been learned, in coping with its internal problems  
and in warding off disruptions.

What is missing here? For all I know, it's not missing in this boy  
and he will not live out either of my imaginary futures. But what  
would be missing that would prevent slowly becoming frozen into a  
way of thought -- either a "good" way or a "bad" way? What is it  
that enables some people to look at their own convictions with  
skepticism, to stand back from them and to avoid becoming literally  
lost in thought until it's too late to recover?

If I really knew I would probably disappear in a cloud of ectoplasm,  
but I don't really know. I can only guess. I think it may be some  
glimmer of a higher level of organization, perhaps what we call  
awareness. I think that everyone has it, but that in the attempt to  
learn how to control what matters in a complex and uncooperative  
world, many people gradually fall behind the power curve, with less  
and less awareness left free to ask what is going on, and more and  
more of it committed to the demands of learning ever more complex  
modes of control. Beyond a certain point, there isn't enough  
influence from this higher level or awareness or whatever-it-is  
thing to permit any more major changes in the organization that has  
come into being. There's no way to recover from the attitude any  
more, without crashing. The only choice is to crash, or to keep the  
throttle at full bore as long as possible.

When I think of that poor doomed son of a bitch trying to keep that  
airplane in the air, I get a vivid picture of what life does to us  
all. We become committed to whatever seems to work for us, and end  
up being trapped inside of it because we have come to depend on it  
totally for our survival and well-being. The harder we try to get  
ahead of the process, the farther behind the curve we get.

Is there a way out? I think there is, and that one way is to become  
aware of the phenomenon, the earlier the better. I think that at a  
certain age, which I can remember and have seen many others (in  
retrospect) going through, there develops a strong resistance to  
being educated any further. There is a sense that a committment is  
about to be made, and that if you go any further down the same path,  
a certain kind of freedom of the mind is going to be lost. There is  
an awareness that if you do accept the premises that are now  
presented to you, your own logic will suck you in the rest of the  
way and there will be no turning back. It feels the way I imagine it  
would feel to sign a consent form for a lobotomy: the last act of  
free will you will ever make.

The way out, I think, is to avoid making that committment, forever.  
No matter what it is: to crime, to a science, to a profession, to a  
religion, to a political movement, to a theory, to anything. I'm  
talking about the phenomenon of belief. To believe is to seal off  
the system from any further major modification, from the development  
of any higher levels of control. To believe is to eliminate all  
inner conflict, and therefore all need to develop any higher levels  
of perception. Belief offers relief from inner turmoil; it provides  
peace of mind, a sense of inner unity, and blessed calm. That is why  
people want to believe, and why they do it by the hundreds of  
millions.

The problem, of course, is that people commit themselves to very  
different and very incompatible beliefs, in each case the whole  
point being to eliminate any trace of thought that they could be  
wrong. Belief is behind the nazis and neo-nazis, the KKK and the  
John Birch Society. It is behind the new-age crystal gazers, the  
flat-earthers, the Lemurians and Atlantaeans, the Hesballah, the  
Mafia, the survivalists, and the man up in the mountain town of  
Nederland, Colorado, who (before being deported back to Norway as an  
illegal alien) had been keeping his father and his father's friend  
in a crate in a shed behind his house, packed in dry ice against the  
day when they can be cloned back into life.

To a person who has managed to avoid committment to any particular  
belief, there is one simple perception that applies to all beliefs  
that exist, whether we think of them as nice or nasty. \_They can't  
all be right.\_ By definition, each person who has made a committment  
to a belief no longer even considers that it might be wrong. So it  
is obvious that if a belief, such as the belief that the United  
States is being systematically and purposively undermined by Jews in  
the banking and entertainment industries, is incorrect, those who  
believe it will never know that it is incorrect. If our 13-year-old  
boy believes that the right thing to do when challenged is to fight,  
then he will never consider that this belief could be wrong, and he  
will conduct his life accordingly. If our boy becomes a mathematical  
physicist who believes that mathematical physics contains the  
answers to all problems, then he will never consider that this  
belief might be wrong, and he, too, will conduct his life  
accordingly.

But the person who has not found relief from inner conflict by  
settling on a belief will see clearly that all these other people  
are mistaken -- or if any of them are right, they will never be able  
to settle among themselves who is right. It is, after all, possible  
to believe something that is true: there are many more Round-  
Earthers than Flat-Earthers. But from within any framework of  
belief, it is impossible to verify a belief. To test a belief means  
to conceive of a circumstance in which it could possibly be proven  
wrong. And even to conceive that, seriously enough to perform a  
test, is to see the belief from a higher level and to be free of it.

If people lived in small groups isolated from all other small  
groups, belief could be a satisfactory end-point of human  
development. Elimination of inner conflict, inner doubt, frees the  
energies for productive use and leads to great inner peace. The  
"truth" of a belief, if the belief is at all well constructed, is  
irrelevant. The question of truth becomes relevant only when one  
belief system leads to behavior that conflicts with another belief  
system. Then believing is no longer a satisfactory end-point.

We no longer live in small isolated groups; we ceased to do so at  
the dawn of history. For something like 10,000 years, and with  
increasing urgency, there has been a need to develop a new level of  
perception and control from which conflicts between belief systems  
-- which I associate with system concepts -- can be resolved. I  
suspect that this new level is in the process of appearing,  
unrecognized but becoming increasingly effective. How else would we  
be able to make sense of the very concept of a system concept? Even  
to name it is to make of it an object to be observed, not a place  
from which to observe everything else.

If system concepts were the highest level of perception, we would  
not know about them or even suspect that they existed. We would  
simply adopt them as beliefs, and see the world as organized  
according to the belief. The Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Muslim  
would not even say "I believe in God." They would simply refer to  
God, as they refer to a river or a mountain. They would not say "I  
believe God is punishing me." They would simply say, humbly  
reporting the truth, "God is punishing me."

This essay has about exhausted its theme. It lacks a conclusion, but  
perhaps this sort of thing is best left unconcluded.

> **···**
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------  
> Best,
> 
> Bill P.