NEW WORLD ORDER DIARY
Hal Pepinsky
August 23, 1993
PEACEFUL CONTROL THEORY
Here's a stab at describing what in your terms, Bill Powers, I believe to
be a meta-PCT. At the tenth order, we are faced with a choice between two
fundamental models of perception control. One is as you propose. The
model is of ultimately one of scarcity and entropic, I believe. The other
model works like this:
First, peaceful control presupposes that the reference perception at the
next moment is unpredictable from those at previous moments, just as you
cannot predict from our having yellow that it will become green when we
add blue. In this respect peaceful control is a Markov process, and is
consistent with your premise that referents are unpredictable.
Unpredictability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for peaceful
control.
Second, from a potentially infinite range of goal or referent choices at
the next moment, the one selected must somehow be an interaction term
between one's referents at preceding moments and the referents one
perceives in the other person or group. Anyone who perceives peace in the
interaction must from his or her vantage point see a resonance of the
preceding referents just as one would see pure green when yellow
encountered blue. This is a matter of retrospective assessment. Together
with the perception that this interaction has been "created" by the
parties because it was unpredictable, the retrospective perception of
interaction creates security or anti-disturbance, amounting to experience
of harmonic phrasing in human interaction.
Choice to act and feel within the second model can amount to violent
interaction with other persons or groups. The capacity to arrange
peaceful interaction across persons and groups is what Buddhists refer to
as one's level of compassion, implying awareness of more extensive ranges
of preceding referents of others and selection of a next referent for
oneself that accommodates them all at once. It's not that we succeed in
this effort and instantly transform the world. It's just that our
capacity to operate within the second model rather than the first
determines our sense of social security, in lieu of despair over recurrent
disturbance.
Disturbance or conflict within the first model becomes grist for selecting
a new referent within the second. That is, I seek to discover ways in
which people are hurt or uncomfortable with my preceding referents to help
myself break with my own past--to make myself at once unpredictable and
purposeful to myself. Confrontation only means facing the conflict; what
one does about it changes fundamentally from the one model to the other.
One manifestation of operating within the peaceful control model is that
actors report considerable relief and empowerment from confronting their
antagonist--relief that the confrontation has finally occurred. For some
of us in criminal justice, a key problem with that version of the violence
model is that a premium is placed on separating victim and offender and
sheltering them from confrontation with one another. As Alfie Kohn
argues, conflict only becomes a threat when we believe someone has to
prevail in the terms of the conflict as originally posed.
Perhaps I cut through to what choices face us at the tenth order so
readily because I do not find that people operate within cognitive
hierarchies. A level that is higher for me or you at one moment can
easily become lower at another moment, in the sense that that level seems
to us to have become as concrete and immediate as any we can imagine.
What unifies my analysis is my theory that the tenth-order choice
manifests itself at each of the other levels Bill discusses.
A PCT-ist could argue that my second control model is subsumable within
the first, but I find it important to highligh differences peculiar to the
distinction between the two. I don't know how to specify any central
tendency for variation as between the two control models and so have no
statistic to offer for levels of disturbance or security; I'm still at the
stage of describing the two underlying processes and finding many ways to
do so. As grist for peacemaking analysis, I suppose I would look in PCT
results for actors who seemed to change referents rather than let
themselves be disturbed by conflict, what my mother in her small group
research used to call "productive nonconformists" who don't even have to
conform to their own prior referents. I would presume all of us have the
capacity to become productive nonconformists, and that knowing how people
gain social security in the process would encourage us to do so more.
The second model is much more readily affirmed in public (including
scientific) discourse in some cultural settings than others. As between
Norway and the United States for instance, I and others find a pronounced
tendency to assume that no true freedom and security lies beyond personal
autonomy--or that the only meaningful control is unilateral control. I'm
reminded of Swedish psychologist Magnus Hedberg asking me in Scandinavia
over thirty years ago whether I had any interest in enjoying a freedom to
work WITH others in contrast to my professed interest in working FOR
others, and when I said I saw no difference, telling me I would have no
trouble returning home. To a large degree my research career since has
been an attempt to figure out what Magnus meant, and to become aware of a
dimension of social life I may have been acculturated to ignore.