Hal to Rick on human nature

Actually, the entire theory is one of human nature, but I'll try
starting. Two contending sides of human nature are described in every
religious/political theory tradition I have encountered--one side that
hurts others unless it is punished into submission, and one side that
operates on the belief that compassion pays. My friend Bill Breeden
offers an analogue: It is human nature to poop in our pants, but it
is also human nature to decide to control our bowels for the sake of
having friends hang out around us. In the human nature of control, we
constantly struggle to decide whether to respond
retributively/forcefully or compassionately. Those forms of
interaction take geometric form. In pure form, the retributive side
entails having unchanged motives, while the compassionate side entails
changing one's motives as a function of where one finds referent
motives in others, not to mimic them, but to accommodate them.
Compassionate interaction is two-sided: either party, which may be an
individual or a group, may respond to my bid to have motives orbit
around one another by persisting in a straight line. A retributive
response would seek for my motive to prevail over the opposition.
Someone who seeks peace looks for ways to encourage the motives of
others to begin orbiting in response to one's own bid for
compassionate interaction. It is an art or science in itself,
different from trying to dominate competing motives, rather like
trying to harmonize with someone's loud solo singing rather than
trying to drown the other singer out.

It is indeterminate to me whether at any moment any actor, individual
or organizational, hangs onto a motive or tries making the shifts. In
my inquiry, I ask what results people get for taking the one path or
the other. I suppose that the more we learn (and indeed find the more
I learn) the more attractive the choice of trying to engender
compassionate interaction becomes, simply because we have the safety
of knowing how others have succeeded in such attempts.

PCT falls into the realm of modeling what people do when their motives
are supposed to be independent of others'. Hence, it describes one
side of human nature to me. What say? l&p hal