[From Bill Powers (931024.1430) --
Hal Pepinski (931024.1200) --
My basic point is empirical. Half or more of the senses of
control and disturbance I monitor among humans conform to a
model other than yours. I compare results of those who control
as within PCT to those who seek control as in what I call
tetrahedronal form. I have a theory of the comparative results
of control within each of the two models. I test the
hypothesized results against experience, data. So far, note
that no moral stand on which result is preferable is implied.
You're still off on a tangent, Hal, because to you "conflict" and
"control" already had meanings before you heard of PCT, and you
haven't modified them in accord with their meanings in PCT. It's
as though I had decided that "love" means self-admiration and
"peace" means an orderly society under perfect police regulation
-- and then argued against your statements about love and peace
as if those were your meanings. You would no doubt feel as
frustrated with this conversation as I do now.
You have an image of control as a process of overpowering
disturbances -- particularly disturbances from other people. You
seem to see PCT as recommending direct conflict, and thus as
describing a basically violent way of life. But that association
is totally off the wall in the context of PCT. It's invalid,
inappropriate, and just the teensiest bit obtuse. You're doggedly
insisting on certain meanings for words, with all the private
associations they carry for you, instead of trying to see beneath
them to the universal principles that underly them: the basics of
PCT.
If you couldn't control, you couldn't even stand up. You couldn't
brush your teeth or drive a car or write your name or utter a
sentence that anyone would recognize as language. If you tried to
ring someone's doorbell your finger would miss the button. If you
started off from home to give a class, you would never get there.
If you wanted to reach accord with someone, your actions would be
just as likely to destroy it as achieve it, if they were even
relevant. Control is simply how you work, from the level of cells
to the level of self-concepts. It's not any special activity,
associated with any special circumstances. It's whatever you do,
no matter what you call it.
If you can behave according to your "tetrahedonal form," you are
controlling. There's no way around it. What you're controlling is
the perception of behaving in that way, in that relation to other
people. If you catch yourself acting contrary to that way of
relating, you will correct yourself -- change the way you're
relating until you perceive the tetrahedonal form again. That is
control. Control is adjusting your behavior until its
consequences are what you want them to be, in any regard from the
concrete to the abstract.
Much of what you say concerning tetrahedonal interactions
presupposes some problem that needs a resolution. Generally, that
problem is conflict of some sort: people with disparate goals
trying to get their own way and thus denying others the chance to
do the same. Your methods seem to aim at going up a level, not
trying to resolve the conflict by force, not by winning it, but
by looking for a new equilibrium at levels higher than the
conflict itself.
Conflicts, in PCT, almost automatically induce the process we
call reorganization. Reorganization does not solve conflicts
rationally; it _disperses_ them by changing goals, perceptions,
and actions, altering an old way of controlling or replacing it
with a new one. Conflicts disappear because they become
irrelevant. When interpersonal conflicts are resolved through
reorganization, _everyone_ changes, _everyone_ adopts new ways of
acting based in part on how the other people are changing.
I think that what you refer to as another model of control is
essentially what we mean in PCT by reorganization. Reorganization
is random, unpredictable, unaimed. It's inventive, creative. It's
what we do when rational or habitual ways of behaving fail us,
cause trouble where they were supposed to save us from trouble.
It's what we do when we haven't the least idea of what to do.
It's how we learn all the really basic things we learn.
I think that among the things you teach, you're trying to get
people to accept reorganization as a natural aspect of life.
Adults -- by which I mean anyone approaching puberty and up --
tend to avoid reorganization because it's associated with pain
and problems. We can learn to do this: avoid experiencing things
that tend to start the reorganizing process. In this way we get
stuck at a certain level of development, having, in effect,
learned how to avoid turning on the very process by which we
continue developing. We find a niche and stay well within its
boundaries, as the cockroach has done for half a billion years.
I glean from your posts that you try to bring people to the
boundaries again, sometimes by reminding them of conflicts and
getting them to face them. You want them to experience the
difficulties they're learned to avoid and to avoid perceiving.
And then you try to keep them in the situation so their natural
ability to reorganize will begin to function again, and they can
find their own way past or through the problem. If you can get
people to interact, and not to avoid the pain, they will simply
change.
This is, of course, only a paraphrase of the way you might
describe the process. But don't you think there are some familiar
chords in that melody? I'm sure there are details on which you'd
differ with me, but are they the most important ones? It seems to
me that what you do is much like what a PCT-wise person would do,
even if the language differs.
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Best,
Bill P.