[From Bill Powers (940517.0030 MDT)]
Tom Bourbon (940516.1629)--
RE: violence
You probably know that I've understood that point for years --
probably for as long as I've known the same thing about you.
How has that reduced the incidence of very ugly things people
do to one another? Would a similar understanding, on the part
of everyone on the planet, assure an end to people doing ugly
things to one another? Would conflict end?
This is a profound question that leads into controversial territory.
When you follow the logic of PCT all the way through, concepts such
as evil disappear, as does good. In principle, if you understood a
rapist's hierarchy of control systems, you would find that rape
serves the requirements of that person's higher-order goals, all the
way to the system concept level, and of course that person's system
concept level is as it is because of that person's requirements for
maintaining a low enough level of intrinsic error.
I think that the real answer to your question will ultimately be
supplied by PCT sociologists. In the long run, it is the
environment, both physical and social, that determines what a person
must learn to do in order to prevent intrinsic error. Notice that I
do not say that the environment "causes" people to be rapists. All
the environment can do is establish the conditions under which
people must learn to control what matters to them. But as in the
Skinner box, those conditions have a strong influence on what
behaviors will be effective in controlling perceptions. The rat in
the Skinner Box is perfectly free to press with anything on
anything, or never to press on anything at all, but the fact is that
unless the rat learns to make the lever sticking out of one wall of
the cage be perceived in the down position, the rat will starve to
death or die of thirst. Before that happens, the rat will reorganize
and most likely discover that making the bar go down will cause
food, water, or whatever to appear. The conditions in the rat's cage
determine very narrowly what must be done to correct intrinsic
error.
A human being confined in a social cage will also learn to do
whatever is necessary to correct intrinsic error. This is not a
matter of inherited characteristics or traits, or inborn tendendies
to behave in a certain ways good or bad. It is simply the result of
the fact that when there is protracted intrinsic error, any person
will reorganize and keep reorganizing until the intrinsic error goes
away. Since reorganization is random, some people will correct
sexual intrinsic errors by masturbating, others by becoming
homosexual, others by learning to play the complex heterosexual
games that society (tacitly) approves, and others by learning that
forcible rape within or across genders will work. All of these
methods and many more will serve to reduce the intrinsic error of
sexual deprivation.
Which method one ends up using is partly a matter of chance, as
reorganization is random, but it is more strongly influenced by the
ease with which some solutions can be found, in comparison with
others. If E. coli is in a medium containing several point-sources
of attractants, there is some chance that it will arrive at any of
the point sources, but the chance is greatest that it will end up at
the nearest one or the one surrounded by the fewest barriers, the
one requiring the fewest tumbles to reach and around which the local
gradient is the steepest. So I imagine it is with human
reorganization.
A human being experiments at random with different ways of
correcting sexual errors, when the fires are raging at their
hottest. But this experimentation takes place in an environment of
other people who have strong opinions about the merits of their own
solutions and the undesirability of certain other solutions. Each
sex has complex reasons for wanting to play the game in a certain
way and to avoid playing it in other ways. Women, for example, very
strongly dislike being hurt because of the intrinsic error, although
in the end some of them can come to accept it. Women, some very
young or single women at least, have strong reasons for not wanting
to become pregnant. Many women also experience sex in the context of
a larger personal relationship, and find that the lack of any
relationship but copulation is uninspiring. The result is that men
experimenting with various ways of reducing sexual deprivation find
certain reorganizations to be ineffective. The same difficulties, of
course, are experienced with the genders reversed.
Furthermore, social customs add to the difficulties by establishing
physical characteristics as being sexually desireable. This makes
the correction of sexual intrinsic errors difficult for women and
men who do not fit the popular ideals adopted by the opposite sex.
One successful reorganization, of course, results in rejection of
the social standard for attractiveness, which removes that barrier
to sexual satisfaction. Obviously, great numbers of people find this
solution, but it is difficult to find when vicarious experiences of
sexual attraction found in movies, television, and ordinary life,
during adolescence, suggest that only beauty is sexually attractive.
Men have long been influenced by this custom; now it seems that
women, too, are beginning to adopt it far more than they used to.
Nice buns.
I'm speaking from an uninformed position, of course, never having
actually studied these matters. Also, I don't intend all of this to
be a return to Freud; clearly there are other intrinsic reference
signals involved in rape and other forms of violence in addition to
sexual ones. All I'm trying to do here is to illustrate how one can
approach problems of this sort without falling back on ideas about
inherent personality characteristics or environmental control of
behavior. Each person is faced with the problem of correcting many
intrinsic errors and keeping them below tolerable limits. And each
person must learn how to do this in an environment made terribly
complex by being composed largely of other people trying to do the
same thing.
People are not the way they are because of what the environment,
including the social environment, has done to them. They are the way
they are as a result of learning how to resist what the environment
tries to do to them, particularly with respect to producing
intrinsic error in them. I think that if we study people in a
society with this idea in mind, we will begin to see the barriers
and channels that allow certain kinds of reorganizations to succeed
and cause others to fail. We can evaluate what a person has learned
to do by looking at the situation in which this was one of the
plausible solutions to the problem of keeping intrinsic error small,
given the array of means available. And we can begin to think of how
to change the social and physical environment to increase the
likelihood of reorganizations that we can agree would be more to
everyone's benefit.
But doing this requires taking a hard look at the situation in which
many people have to do their learning. One way to ensure a violent
society, or segment of society, is to arrange for all actions but
the most extreme to be ineffective in controlling what a person
needs to control. Poor people do not become violent criminals
because of being poor. They do it because of being hungry, and cold,
and bored, and afraid, and ashamed of their ignorance. They do it
because, as they experience the world, nothing else works to improve
their condition. Of all the solutions to reducing intrinsic error,
violence and crime are the most easily-found solutions when all
other doors are closed. It's easy to point to a few shining examples
of people who have lifted themselves by their bootstraps out of
crime and poverty, but there is no possibility of all poor people
doing that. Our society would be unable to absorb 30,000,000 people
looking for well-paid jobs. It is structured so that the existence
of poor people is necessary, in order that a much smaller number of
people be supported in luxury. And it is becoming ever more so. The
rise in crime and violence is simply a reflection of the fact that
nothing else works.
Te problem of crime and violence, as I see it, is a direct result of
the fact that people must and will try whatever is necessary to
reduce intrinsic error, and of the fact that our society is
structured so as to leave few ways of doing this, for large numbers
of people, short of violence and crime.
The task of the PCT sociologist/psychologist is to begin unraveling
cause and effect in this society, to show how the way the society is
can be explained by the way society has been and continues to be.
And at the center of this puzzle is not the crowd but the
individual, a single person trying to get control of the most
important perceptions in order to avoid physical pain, sickness,
hunger, cold, and endless yearning. When you understand that person
and how the surrounding world of people and things limits the
possible end-points for reorganization, you will understand all
people, and the whole society. And it will become clear what needs
to be done to avoid raising more generations in even deeper trouble.
ยทยทยท
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As to what you do now, about living amid people who have already
grown up and formed almost immutable system concepts, I can only
agree with Tom Bourbon. Avoid them, try to catch them and put them
away, or carry a gun. I think it is almost impossible to alter
system concepts in an adult human being, once they have formed and
become interlocked and elaborated. Perhaps one day we will be able
to develop effective methods of counselling that lead to actual
reform. But in the meantime, one can only try to survive long enough
to make progress toward the real solution, which is a restructuring
of our whole society so the next generation can grow up in a world
with more possibilities.
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Best,
Bill P.