Re: virus: Guns for Peace

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Thu, 25 Mar 1999 16:14:54 -0500

Hi,

From: Reed Konsler <konsler@ascat.harvard.edu> <<
Really? What if I have a theory that I want another person's property, or that I want to hurt someone? Surely it is necessary to coerce people with actions and words in these cases. Isn't that what every mature human being learns to do...coerce themselves? Don't we supress our more primitive actions in favor of our more sublime? Even so, do we escape our more primitive theories?
>>

Why do you have such a theory? Even if you do have such a theory, why should you resort to coercion when cooperation is still an option?

Violence is a learned response, just like cooperation -- and while it works well in the short term, cooperation pays off real big in the long run.

<<
Is there such a gulf between what goes on in our own mind and what goes on in our societies? Perhaps you should think a while on how "independent" you are...how thick a line do you draw between yourself and the rest of the world? Is such a line rational, or do we share more than we might think? I believe people live out their lives, to a great extent, in the lives of the people that surround them...we live in each other's cognitive and emotional universes.
>>

Exactly. That is *the* reason why mutual preference problem solving is such a boon!

<<
Given this, and your insistence that we cannot "force" people to think or act a certian way...what are our options? Do we let the wolf eat our children?
>>

No. The wolf would probably be much happier eating some of the steak on your table. For intractible conflicts (which usually arrise out of entrentched theories on the part of one or more parties), there are several possible solutions.

The first is the one I have mentioned, where you (1) protect the victim, and (2) help the agressor to achieve their goals by non-coercive means. (and "goals" has to be understood in large sense. The coercion they are using is a *means* to an *end*. Are their non-coercive means to the same end? Is that end itself merely a means to the real end?). Call this "diplomacy" or "negociation".

A second, and overall much worse, option is to simply to cease all interaction -- whether temporairly or permantly. This doesn't solve the problem, but it does allow time for the participants to understand each other. This is "cease-fire", and can be coercive, although ideally both parties agree to it and then it's not...

<<
Agreed, but what do you do with people who don't respect other people's rights? What do you do with people that coerce their peers and lessers. If everyone were as you would like, there would be no need for authority...but we aren't all like that, are we?
>>

Certainly the solution is *not* to stop respecting their rights! The ultimate solution has to rest with a change in the aggressors theories -- they need to see that coercion is not the best way to acheive their goals. As to how to bring them to this knowledge, *that* is the major question of the social sciences, psychology and politics. In the mean time, we must do all that we can to minimize the damage they cause, while maximizing their oppourtunities for knowlegde acquisition.

<<
Do you HONESTLY think that you want anything you haven't been programed by your genes or environment to want? Do you think you have some original, independent, novel character that chooses and creates things that you were never told or trained? If so, may I can this divine spark of individuality your "soul", for lack of a better term. Do you have such a soul? Do you have such a thing which comes, ordered and passionate from nothingness or from where we know not?
>>

Sure, I've been programmed, but I'd like to think that, at least since I acheived consciousness (which I would peg at age 15 or 16), I have been picking and choosing my memes. It is a matter of degree, of course -- I am still a product of my past (as I know all too well...)

<<
I don't think one can learn painlessly. Real learning is a struggle against the world within and the world without. The painless part is memorizing facts and learning rhetoric.
>>

I think "painful" learning is a product of our culture, which tells us that change in our beliefs is bad; that making mistakes is bad. We are trained/conditioned as children (via coercive disipline) to avoid making mistakes, to avoid being "wrong". It is this training that later makes us hurt when we are shown to be wrong -- instead of being glad at discovering our error (so that we can fix it). Entrentched theories die hard. Dogmatism is the enemy!

ERiC