LISTSERV "toward a science of happiness"
NEW WORLD ORDER DIARY
Hal Pepinsky
August 19, 1993
EGGHEAD VACATIONS
My Mama taught me that it was a compliment to Adlai Stevenson that he was
an egghead. Well, Bill Powers, here we are both on vacation (I feel as
though I'm in a break now before classes begin), and look how we're
spending it. On testing ideas. Thanks. This kind of vacation lifts my
spirits. I seldom get the chance to trade ideas so seriously.
Fernando Marshall and others who have been writing, thank you too. For
me, this is not only a rehearsal for the class this fall I've been
brooding about all summer, but a chance to think through what really
matters to me about my "research" just now.
My apologies to Rick Marken for inadvertently omitting his latest response
from those I just sent. Bill Powers refers to Rick's observation that I
am talking about HCT--Hallucination Control Theory--rather than PCT.
Below I'm responding to you too, Rick.
FILLING IN NON-VIOLENCE
Bill, you may not know me well enough to know how I feel about this, but
I assume everyone's perception/action is at root a religious practice.
But it's true, PST-ists no more come from the same religious position than
any of the rest of us. I'm not pretending you ought to agree. But you
call yours a theory, you derive propositions from it, and among those
which seems to me in fact to be a straightforward deduction from your
theoretical premises is rejection of hierarchy or law'n'order. Either
Rick's propositions about law'n'order and Gary's about the necessity of
leadership are false, or your theory is false it seems to me. I'm just
asking y'all which it is. You not only MAY argue about it; I think you
are obliged to argue it on your own "scientific" grounds. The validity of
your theory hangs on the result, does it not?
"Control" is a slippery term. I want to pin you down on what you mean by
it. I'm indebted to phenomenologist Alfred Schuetz's writing for making
me aware that "control" can be of two kinds in the mind of any beholder:
what Schuetz calls a "because motive"--I perceive I have no viable
option--or an "in-order-to motive"--I'm trying to get something because I
want it. Your claim to have revolutionized perception research, as I
understand it, rests on positing that the perceiver RATHER THAN external
circumstances controls perceptions. I infer you must mean my perceptions
are governed by what I want, a means to the ends of my own choosing,
rather than my simply perceiving what externalities tell me I have to
perceive. The power to decide what I want cannot be taken from me, and
hence, as I have so often cited E.F. Schumacher as saying, "Individual
behavior is in principle unpredictable."
I have long since given up trying to separate reality from hallucination
(inspired by countless others who have done so before me). After decades
of debates, I also find no objective way to separate doing what one has to
(e.g., serving one's gods), and doing what one will. All I can see
possible to assess is what we get get for responding to one another one
way rather than the other.
We can talk about what you and I want to do or achieve; we can retain a
healthy skepticism that an outburst of grievance is driven by the object
rather than by safety of the target of one's anger--what I call the
lightning-rod effect of violence. As I have noted before, I like you have
long since learned for instance that when a student tells me angrily that
a Ted Bundy must burn, burn, burn in the electric chair and in hell, has
never met the victims and generally couldn't be bothered about the plight
of people as far away as Florida, I don't believe Ted Bundy nor his acts
caused the anger. I often find myself inquiring of students why they are
so angry, and lo and behold the attitude reflects personal circumstances.
Buddha is the oldest person I know of to make explicit that in resolving
anger of this kind, one must seek a transcendant ground--above the
manifest fray--upon which to heal the pain of all concerned, or like
Gregory Bateson's dolphins, turning anger and fear into safety and peace
requires that participants resolve double or even triple binds between
them by letting their focus rise past them. On these all-too-ignored
principles of how control works we agree.
One sentence of yours, Bill speaks volumes to me about the conflict
between control as it works for you and control as it works for me. It
may have been an offhand remark to you, but it reminds me of the position
pacifists repeatedly find themselves in among warriors. You write:
[If I succeed in turning your anger into happiness,]...I will still
want you happy, but because I am now in fact seeing you as happy
thee will be nothing further to do.
I'm reminded of what I imagine to be a universal feeling by a tired
parent: Now that I've catered to my child and quieted her, please let her
sleep and leave me in peace when I walk out of the room! Or there's the
parole officer who tells a parolee who is barely hanging onto sanity and
liberty, "You're not causing any trouble. You're on your own now."
To me, happiness in the form of social security is ACTION--a world of
action, of attention. You can expect neither trust nor happiness (Marilyn
French calls it "felicity"; native people speak of "joy") to continue
unless you continue to nurture it. As some parents learn to their sorrow,
leaving a child alone is asking for trouble. That may be solipsistic
freedom, but home it ain't. The science of peacemaking I again join a
host of ancestors in proposing is one of studying how happiness is
obtained AND SUSTAINED.
Long before I began to find substance in this field of inquiry I noticed
that "justice," "law-abiding" and such terms of approval for our social
relations were, in our models empty sets. Within linear, additive models
"justice" for instance becomes an empty set--the invisibility of signs of
injustice which include being able to predict decisions before they are
made. I think it is too, all the more so because as I have described it
in THE GEOMETRY OF VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY most fully, I find justice to
have its own form--to fit a model which does not exist within the linear
realm, including models used by John Rawls...and by you as I see it.
I'll recapitulate briefly here. You see happiness as coming from absence
of conflict standing in the way of attaining some basic goal. When you
get frustrated on your way there, that presents the problem. I suppose
instead that persistent drive toward any goal is violence itself, which we
variously describe (or feel crazy or fearful of acknowledging) as
behaviors we think represent it--like trying to get someone's purse or
into their body whatever it takes. Even when you get it, your anxiety
remains, in the existential forms described by Max Weber for instance as
Calvinist belief in predestination or by Emile Durkheim as anomie--getting
all the goodies you ever dreamed of getting and having nothing left to
live for (much like the child who is left alone by infinitely tolerant
parents). Violence as I diagram it is trying to move through life in
straight lines, like Thoreau's soldiers--as personal energy or group
energy.
If I am correct and social security is as vast and intricate a world to
study as I think, I shouldn't pretend any sort of definitive statement of
how peacemaking works here. Above all, I'm proposing the need to study
because we know so little of the world. One feature of secure relations
I and many writers notice however, it particularly in point: happy
relations, joy in living require that one suspend one's fear that life is
meaningless without accomplishing goals, and to surrender oneself to
trusting one's destiny to the decisions of others without predetermining
what one is after. Letting go of one's attachments is one way it is
commonly put. In fact, Bill, you speak much this way in your last chapter
about how to live with PCT: seize the moment and let yourself listen and
be guided by it. I only think that now, with Rick and Gary pushing PCT in
a different direction, you belie your own propositions, and fail to
acknowledge that the "conflict-free" world you extrapolate from your
theory has a distinct character of its own. Where the goal is maintaining
the security of one's social relations, it pays to worship no other goals
before it. Again, this is just one of the ways I try to talk about what
"democracy" or social security is as against what violence is, at length
in the geometry book.
As to using violence because that's the only way I can make the violence
stop, I do it myself, find myself reluctant to pass judgment on others who
do as against trying to understand why they do it (as you do, Bill), and
conclude the geometry book with an admission that I don't expect to
resolve the problem for myself or anyone else. That's a corollary to
presuming as you do that we cannot predict whether someone will respond to
us one way or another moment-to-moment, act-to-act. Could slaves in my
home country have ended slavery by revolting violently as you propose,
Rick? Well, in a sense they did so. White slaveholders lost the Civil
War and the 13th Amendment prohibited slavery for all time. Let's imagine
the slaves had actually risen to supreme leadership of this country of
ours. They might free themselves for awhile, but as you so eloquently
tell us, Bill, slavery would just be pushed somewhere else and persist.
I imagine Mao Zedong died a pretty disappointed guy: he pulled off an
amazing series of political revolutions but dynastic relations never
succumbed to the cultural revolution he sought, but were only reinforced
by the violence against those who held power over others there.
Moralistically, I can say that Mao's was a noble effort. However, I take
it that what matters for purposes of our discussion is instead what he got
for what he tried to do. I constantly resort to anger and violence in
struggling to help friends deal with injustice, even with my nearest and
dearest. I just don't try to kid myself; all the evidence I have suggests
that like hanging onto a grudge, it doesn't gain me the trust and sense
that relations have improved the way other initiatives of mine do. Asking
what works is fundamentally different from asking what's wrong with us if
we don't do it. On this point I agree with you implicitly, Bill: we have
to let go of figuring we can make each other's decisions; that's a mighty
romantic quest, but it doesn't produce the security we seek from it.
Why bother learning how people attain security (yes Bill, by degrees or
moments to be sure)? Because like any seeker of knowledge I assume my
power to get what I want increases the more I learn about how to get
there. One irony in peacemaking is that you can best plan how to get
there by not-planning where to be when you arrive.
Yes, I do believe that gaining security requires sensing what others feel.
But so does the imputation that someone is "controlling" perceptions and
coming unglued over conflict (which in my view can be perceived as an
asset in secure relations or a liability in violent ones; hence one thing
that gives me joy in relations is being surprised about what I want when
I get there). But that evokes a whole other series of NWOD entries on how
making peace requires putting the spirituality back into science/learning,
and I've gone on long enough for now...