[From Bill Powers (980617.0527 MDT)]
Bruce Nevin (980515.1123 EDT)--
I have no trouble understanding that a control system controls even when it
is doing nothing (when there is currently no disturbance to resist).
What I am trying to get is clarification of what you mean by a "coercive
system."
It seems to me that you cannot refer to a thing as coercive unless you also
claim that it is a control system. I don't believe that you are claiming
that a system such as a school system or a government ("the state") is a
control system. So I find the term confusing, and much of the discussion
seems confused.
Since only human beings are control systems of the necessary kind, you are
right. No social system is literally a control system, hence no social
system can actually coerce anyone.
However, individuals can coerce, both separately and in cooperation against
a third party, and they can do so in support of their belief that they're
defending a certain kind of social system. When they agree on coercion as a
principle, codify their rules of conduct and record them in stone or on
paper, and act in concert to enforce them, they can produce what looks very
much like a social system that coerces. We know that the responsibility for
the coercion always lies within each individual who supports and implements
the principles of coercion. However, to the victim of coercion, it seems as
if the individual coercers are interchangeable and faceless. The victim
feels like one against many -- like one person against a System.
When I used to claim that there is no such thing as The System, I was
thinking only of the plain fact that only human beings (or other living
systems) can have goals and control. But I was forgetting that people write
things down and create artifacts both physical and organizational. When you
go to work for General Motors, you fill a slot with responsibilities that
are already laid out for you; they are the "company's goals", not your own.
Accepting those goals is a condition of employment. And who makes this
condition? Another employee who had to accept enforcing the conditions of
employment on you as a condition of his own employment. Somehow the
company's goals have attained an existence of their own, as if "General
Motors" had attained the status of a living system. The company's goals may
be written down or exist by common consent, but they are nobody's goals in
particular. They are the residue of many previous generations. Yet if you
don't accept them as more important than yours, you won't be working there
for long.
A social system as I think of it is an organization in which individuals
fill functional positions, but in which policy has developed over many
generations of individuals and is no longer tied to any one of them. A
person who wants to work within the system is required to adopt its
publicly and privately stated rules. Some of the people are, in fact,
assigned to perceive whether everyone does adhere to the procedures and
principles of the system, and others are assigned the role of enforcing the
rules -- punishing or dismissing individuals who go against them.
A coercive social system, then, is simply one in which the rules of conduct
mandate and require some people to be coercers of other people who interact
with or within the system. An obvious example is the legal system, one part
of which consists of people devoted to devising and writing down rules
intended to apply to everyone's behavior, another part which consists of
people who judge whether individuals have obeyed them, and still another
part consists of people hired to apply sanctions to those who have broken
the rules, with authority to apply as much force as necessary up to and
including lethal force. Individuals carry out each branch of these
functions, but the roles are built into the system and persist despite the
constant turnover of personnel.
I count a system as coercive not on the basis of whether force is actually
used on people, but on the basis of whether there are provisions in the
system's rules for the _automatic_ application of force (to the degree
required) when deviations from the rules occur. If the amount of force
permitted and required by the rules of the system increases with the degree
of the infraction, then the system is clearly designed to mimic a control
system, and what is controlled is the behavior of the people to whom the
rules apply.
The degree of coercion is measured by two things: first, the limits on the
amount of force that can be applied (in a prison or a bad part of a city,
those limits may extend to killing people if that's required to control
their behavior); and second, the sensitivity to small infractions (how
rapidly the countermeasures grow in magnitude as the size of the infraction
increases). If the limits on force are set high and the sensitivity to
infractions is also set high, we have the equivalent of a brutal
concentration camp in which every behavior that is not demanded is
forbidden, and punishment for the slightest infraction is swift and severe.
By my definition, any system with enforced rules is coercive, provided that
sanctions are automatically applied in proportion to deviations from the
rules. This means that all school systems, all social systems for that
matter, are coercive, because all of them that I know about have rules, and
the rules include prescriptions for automatic penalties for infractions.
Such systems are clearly set up in the attempt to control people's behavior.
This does not mean that all social systems are equally coercive. They
clearly are not. Some restrict the use of force so much, and allow such
large deviations before any penalties are applied, that control of behavior
is entirely ineffective and might as well not exist. There are all degrees
of coerciveness in social organizations from that might-as-well-not-exist
level to the level of a maximum security death camp.
From the standpoint of the victim, coercion is one end of a scale, the
other end of which is freedom. The same action may seem coerced or freely
chosen, depending on whether the system is designed to control your
behavior or simply has no rule for that behavior or no mechanism to
enforce that rule. If there is a rule and enforcement for the action you
are performing, any lack of freedom shows up the moment you try to vary
that action, to do something a different way. Then you discover that you
are free only to obey the rule, and that any deviation will automatically
produce forces from other people intended to make your action return to the
required form. The sense of freedom is destroyed as soon as you find that
your "freely chosen" behavior is in fact required by someone else and that
you're not permitted to act any differently.
Best,
Bill P.