There’s one big technological problem with having these drones patrol the skies, Igor says. “You need to confirm that it’s not a bird,” he laughs. “You don’t want to make enemies with Mother Nature.”Justin Ling, The Invisible Russia-Ukraine Battlefield. Wired Dec 23, 2024 5:00 AM.
Is “make enemies with someone” a disturbance to your control of some perception?
Discuss.
My first thought is that “not to make enemies with someone” or “live in peace with someone” is a - quite general or typical - controlled variable.
Eetu
Even if the speaker were not identified as a person in Ukraine named Igor, this expression is one of several clues that the quoted person is not a native speaker of English.
What does that have to do with collective control?
Discuss.
Sometimes; it depends on what I did to make the enemy and who the someone was who was made an enemy. I have never intentionally made enemies. I’ve accidentally made enemies by saying or doing things that led to people becoming my enemy. And the fact that I accidentally made those enemies was sometimes, but not always, a disturbance to other perceptions I was controlling. It was a disturbance, for example, if I was hoping (controlling for) working with the person or remaining friends with the person. I usually corrected for those disturbances by resetting my reference for the disturbed variable rather than by trying to get the person to not be my enemy (which would involve trying to control their behavior and I’m not into doing that since it just results in conflict.
Actually, it’s kind of an interesting question given what’s happening in the US these days. While I am not interested in making enemies I think there are a lot of people out there who apparently relish it. I think Trump and Musk and their MAGA followers actually relish the idea of making enemies. It’s called “owning the libs” and I think they have been very successful at it. I think they control for it because having intense lib enemies gives them control over the people who are “on their side”. Welcome to the dark side of control!
Best, Rick
The question is
There’s a reason that expression is in quotation marks. The question is not about human relationships associated in your memory with the similar expression “make an enemy of someone”. The question is about the expression “make enemies with someone”. Is that way of speaking a disturbance to your control of some perception? Is there anything odd about it?
Perhaps you thought it might be a disturbance to my understanding of PCT since you can’t really “make” a person be an enemy, intentionally (control for them being an enemy) or unintentionally (cause them to be an enemy as a side effect of our controlling something else). But “make an enemy” is really no more of a disturbance to my understanding of PCT than “sunrise” is to my understanding of how the solar system works. In both cases the words describe the way things look and that is what is relevant to the discussion. I know that I appear to make an enemy only if I successfully disturb (intentionally or unintentionally) a variable the person is controlling in a way that requires that he or she treat me as an enemy in order to keep that variable under control; and I know that the sun appears to rise because the earth is rotating towards it. But once we know these things, we can talk again like regular people, unless an understanding of what is really going on is relevant to the discussion. But maybe it is. I guess I’ll find out when you reply;-)
Best, Rick