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This Coercive World

W e live in a coercive world, bombarded by warning signals and threats. The governmentwarns, "Obey the law or go to jail." Law enforcement agencies pay attention to us only

when we have done something punishable. In our churches we hear, "Sin not lest your souls be damned." The landlord never thanks us for the rent, but if we miss, tells us "Pay up or get out." When mortgage payments are delinquent, the usually unresponsive bank threatens to send the sheriff. Educators tell us, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," and bemoan the permissive society that forbids them the use of the rod and the switch. The boss orders, "Get here on time or be fired." Options like "Eat your vegetables or else no dessert" or "Say that again, and I'll wash your mouth with soap" teach children "what is good for them." Legal, business, and social institutions communicate with us most frequently by advising uswhatwe should do…or else. The common meaning of "Behave yourself' is "Do what I want you to do." Coercing us, pushing us around-threatening us with punishment or loss, or telling us what we have to do to escape or avoid punishment or loss-is the predominant technique for getting us to "behave."

Sometimes people tell us what they are going to do to us if we fail to act as they would like. When the threatener is also going to administer the punishment, the coerciveness is quite open. At other times, people warn us of dire consequences that will come from someone else, perhaps even from an impersonal Nature; those warnings, although technically coercive, are just good advice. When we remind someone to carry an umbrella in order to keep from getting wet, we do not have to be concerned that we are coercing them. But even this benevolent warning illustrates in a minor way our general acceptance ofcoercion. Although we need not worry ourselves about this mild and unimportant instance, it is worth noting that we could achieve the same result-getting someone to carry an umbrella-by reminding them not that they could keep from getting wet, but that they could stay dry.

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Coercion and Its Fallout

At the other extreme, a friend pushes us violently to prevent a falling object from striking our head. The push, although technically a form of coercion is really a kind of physical "good advice," something we learn to handle without suffering the undesirable side effects that I shall be concerned with throughout this book.

Between these extremes. we have instances like that of the physician who warn . -stop molting or die of cancer," with caring friends and family echoing the threat. Is it fair to accuse a physician ofcoercion when he tells us the dangers ofcontinuing to smoke? I am concerned, in this in ta.nee. because the "treatment" could have taken a positive rather than a negative form. Instead of simply warning us again t the dire consequences of smoking, the physician could have tried to get our family and friends to be especially nice to us when we did something incompatible with smoking.

Teaching a patient what to do is more likely to accomplish the desired goal than is warning the patient what not to do. Physicians who simply warn a patient of impending death unless he stops smoking are likely to find that the patient continues smoking but stops coming to them for advice. As I shall show later, we react to coercion by avoiding or escaping from our coercers if we can. The patient's avoidance of the physician shows that the advice, however good its intentions, functioned as a threat.

This book, too, tells of the prevalence of coercion in our lives, describes the disastrous side effects of coercion, and even warns of catastrophe if we fail to eliminate or reduce our coercive practices; the book itself could be considered, technically, an example of coercion. It does not, however.just threaten. It also provides guiding principles-in some instances, specific courses ofaction-that could permit us to apply noncoercive techniques instead ofresorting to the "solutions" of coercion when we want to or have to influence others.

Because we so frequently coerce each other, many of us take coercion for granted; we fail to recognize how great a role it plays in our interactionswith each other. Actually, coercion has its beginnings in our interactions with the physical environment.

The Hostile Environment

. ature itself sets the example. The physical environment constantly threatens to overwhelm us with cold, heat, wind, rain, snow, flood,

This Coercive World

earthquake, and fire. "Ifyou do not want to freeze," it tells us, "build helter;" "construct darns or floods will sweep away your homes;"

-famine is coming; store food." Watching the skies and listening for weather predictions has become almost second nature. We are always defending ourselves against the environment.

ature, of course, never tells us what we have to do ifwe want to avoid discomfort and catastrophe. We cannot logically attribute intent to nature; being impersonal, it cannot really intend us to build dams and store crops. And yet, experience tells us that the forces of nature will come down hard on us ifwe do not take precautions. Our conduct follows general laws that are independent of the personal or impersonal character of the coercer, and of the coercer's intent or lack of intent. Reacting to warning signals from the inanimate environment just as we do to coercion imposed by our fellows, we tend also to personify nature, even if only in our speech.

In the face of nature's overwhelming power, we have learned to appreciate its gifts-the resources it does make available to ingenuity and industry, and its awesome beauty. But nature exacts its price for everything, threatening to take away with one hand what it has given with the other. Famine always follows feast.

We also seem unable to deal with many of the natural marvels our intelligence has discovered. Nuclear energy promises to make up for the impending depletion of coal, oil, and gas reserves, but its deadly residues are already poisoning our planet's soil, water, and atmosphere. Stockpiles of nuclear weapons, intended to prevent war, require only a madman's command to ensure the ultimate meltdown. Plant hybridization has made it possible to produce enough wheat, corn, and rice to feed the world, but by reducing genetic diversity it leaves those critical food sources vulnerable to complete destruction in one quick catastrophe.

Our internal environment, too, threatens us with physical discomforts that may eventuate in illness and death. The pleasures we derive from alcohol and otherdrugs make us biologicallydependent, reducing our ability to adapt to nature's realities. That biological imperative, sexual reproduction, threatens to overpopulate the earth, creating poverty, deprivation, and social tensions that express themselves in warfare.

As we grow older, threats from the inside intensify. We defend ourselves against our own body's coercion by supporting a huge, expensive medical establishment, at the same time making ourselves

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This Coercive Worl

Our body's economy re, Besides, who looks fo1 powders, and capsul coercion seem in turn

Even if we consider exacted tremendous tr:i Although each indivic counteracting nature's the construction, cloth

Housing, clothing, agri disappearance of the., industries, distributior immediately expose ou in parts of the world w

a precarious struggle I our time counteractin. of our current freed immediately evident.

Because we have bee: have come to consider commitment of time. 1

overcoming normal anc We have not dealt so si because their magn intermittency and unp control. Huge disaste tomados, floods, or vol1 vulnerability, but we prevailing freedom frat only extreme cases of we are always paying r biological resources.

But here, rather than it with a philosophical 1 like storms, floods, hun are "acts of God." By si catastrophe, we blind

Even religious symbc the elements and of 1 fertility, seasons, wini ·"'

Coercion and Its Fallout

vulnerable to the cold mercy of an avaricious insurance industry. The tax code gives depreciation allowances for machinery, but not for human bodies.

Because a large segment of society has succeeded in overcoming the external and internal stresses the natural environment imposes, many of us have lost sight of the extent to which nature coercively shapes our conduct. We pay specialists to act as buffers between us and nature; how much effort did it take to obtain the money we pay them? How much of our income goes to rent or purchase the roof over

our head that lets us ignore storms and uncomfortable temperatures? How great a share of our time and labor goes toward repairing leaks in that roof, or keeping up, beautifying, and increasing the efficiency of the structure? The escalating cost of the fuel that permits us to avoid life-threatening temperatures is a reminder of our vulnerability to environmental coercion, and arouses fear even among the well-to­ do that income and savings will not suffice to guarantee future

protection. The cost of modem medical technology is forcing hard decisions about who is to survive and who is to be allowed to die.

How much of our time and labor goes for the clothing that keeps us comfortable and dry no matter how inclement the weather? The manufacture and maintenance of clothing, once a major occupation

of the female half of the world's population, persists as an important

segment of industry and retains high status as a leisure-time activity even among the affluent.

In this country, a few agriculturalists produce food for everyone. Other specialists devote themselves to food preparation, and many people now depend for sustenance on restaurants, precooked foods, and packaged meals. Incredible increases in agricultural productivity and distribution efficiency, along with levels of personal income previously undreamed of, have made it possible for most of those in economically developed countries to forget about the threat of starvation. Cost escalations in recent years, however, sent many scurrying back to leisure-time gardening and cooking. The depletion of soil resources and natural stores of water in the service of increasing food production, and the pollution of those resources in the service of energy production, have once again sharpened our awareness of the possibility of mass starvation.

Pharmaceutical companies stand ready to counter this threat, but their artificial foods, vitamin pills, and energy capsules raise new fears about biological adaptation and about the quality of life itself.

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This Coercive World

Our body's economy requires more than bare calories and chemicals. Besides, who looks forward to meals that come in squeeze tubes, powders, and capsules? And so, some of the answers to nature's coercion seem in tum to be generating new kinds of threats.

Even if we consider only shelter, clothing, and food, nature has exacted tremendous tribute as the price ofsecurity and forgetfulness. Although each individual may play only a small role in directly counteracting nature's coercion, what would our society look like if the construction, clothing, and food industries were to close down? Housing, clothing, agriculture, and animal husbandry-the sudden disappearance of these and their associated and interdependent industries, distribution networks, and marketing enterprises, would immediately expose our individual vulnerability. Like those who live in parts of the world where extremes of cold or heat force them into a precarious struggle for existence, all of us would spend nearly all our time counteracting environmental pressures. The illusory quality of our current freedom from nature's coercion would become immediately evident. Many of us would not survive.

Because we have been able successfully to relax our vigilance, we have come to consider as well-justified expenditures the enormous commitment of time, effort, and resources that society devotes to overcoming normal and everpresent forms ofenvironmental coercion. We have not dealt so successfully with natural catastrophes, either because their magnitude is overwhelming or because their intermittency and unpredictability preclude any practical system of control. Huge disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, tomados, floods, or volcanic eruptions remind us occasionally ofour vulnerability, but we tend to regard these as exceptions to our prevailing freedom from environmental constraints. In fact, they are only extreme cases of threats that are always present, against which we are always paying ransom from our store of physical, social, and biological resources.

But here, rather than struggle against nature's hostility, we accept itwith a philosophical rationalization: "That's life." Natural disasters like storms, floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes that leave us homeless are "acts ofGod." By simply accepting the inevitability ofunavoidable catastrophe, we blind ourselves to its coercive character.

Even religious symbolism reflects environmental coercion. Gods of the elements and of natural phenomena-fire, oceans, thunder, fertility, seasons, winds-were afforded as much status as were

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Coercion and Its Fallout

deities that were presumed to direct and pass judgment on human social values and practices- the gods oflove, justice, music, drama, and knowledge. According to more modern interpretations of God's will, His wrath is visited on mankind in the form of lightning bolts, famines, floods , earthquakes. olcanic eruptions, plagues, epidemics, and more recently, AIDS.

Environmental coercion ha found its way into our language, in the ways we describe and explain our own conduct: ·some of us are starved for affection. thirsting for knowledge, burning with passion, or coldly logical; we ha,·e breezy. sunny, stormy, or even volcanic personalities; young people on the way up the career ladder are advised not to make aye : peedsters run like the wind; irate parents thunder at their children: ideas flash into our heads; misfortunes rain on u : the clouds ofwar gather; fiery orators speak incendiary word : financial bubble are always bursting; our armed forces make lightnin attack : mobs erupt in violence.

Warnings of impendin unplea ant or catastrophic weather and other natural di asters permit u to prepare defenses and ward off or reduce their eYerit:y: ·e honor and handsomely recompense the prophets. The 1'" indu try. ·hich Yalues time in thousands ofdollars per second and bow to audience size as the supreme arbiter of success or failure, deYote thousands ofseconds per year to weather forecasts . It dazzle u jth marvelous and fabulously expensive displays of m eteorological and ,idea technique. The decision to devote such effort, expen e. and ingenuity to reporting the weather, and at the same time tone ect the qualityand amountofprogramming in education, science. politic . drama. and music, reflects community priorities. In spite of our \i hful assumption of supremacy, we remain subservient to nature even d uring our leisure.

The Hostile Community

Perhaps the everpresent ph sical coercion is responsible for the general acceptance of social coercion, too , as a fact of life. I have heard punishment advocated as a teaching technique for the developmentally disabled on the ground that any method not involving punishment runs counter to the principle ofnormalization. "Normalization" refers to the notion, ordinarily quite reasonable, that we should bring the handicapped back into the main stream

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This Coercive World

rather than continue to segregate them. In this instance, the proponent of punishment argued that a classroom without punishment is an abnormal environment, to which no children should be exposed. He seemed to be saying, "Life is hard; our children should find that out early." This warping of a basically decent notion-normalization-comes, I believe, from unthinking adaptation to the coercive model that even nature provides us with.

Social coercion is indeed accepted as natural. Inhabitants of the world's great cities take it for granted that they must bolt their doors, secure their purses, carry an extra wallet with a few small bills to hand over when faced with a knife or gun, and lock their car doors even when driving, lest an intruderjump inwhen they stop at a traffic light. No women and only foolish men walk after dark in that famous cradle of liberty, the Boston Common; mugging, rape, and robbery are inevitable there, and the police react with contempt for the victim's ignorant carelessness. On a larger scale, terrorism has become a standard expression of economic, religious, or political dissatisfaction in many parts of the world.

But not only the lawless practice social coercion. We punish children and criminals in the hope of forestalling repetitions of unacceptable conduct. In our educational system, the typical school attempts to get children (and adults) to learn by threatening them with failing grades if they do not; successful learning receives little notice. Our legal code is largely a catalogue ofpenalties for every kind of civil and criminal infraction; it defmes desirable conduct mainly so that we might recognize and punish deviations. We threaten war to keep other nations from seizing our possessions and corrupting our values; superior force is the basis ofmodern "diplomacy." Going outside the law ourselves, we deny employment, schooling, and even hospitalization to people who suffer illness that might have come about through nonstandard sexual behavior. Attempts to institute prayer in public schools never cease, even though the U. S. Supreme Court has stated, "Prayer exercises in elementary and secondary schools carry a potential risk of indirect coercion; students should not be made to feel like outcasts by religious observance not their own." Workers go on strike to force concessions from their employers, and companies threaten bankruptcy in order to nullify previously negotiated agreements. Property developers do not hesitate to force tenants out ofapartments that are to be turned into condominiums; the landlord-tenant relationship has become adversarial.

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Coercion and Its Fallout

Our "free enterprise" system, supposedly based on the principles of supply and demand, is more free for the suppliers than for the demanders. In their own self-interest, the suppliers, whose rewards are limited only by their intelligence, energy, resources, and ruthlessness, subject the rest of society to coercion. In turn, the demanders, limited by the severity of their needs, attempt through governmental regulation to coerce the suppliers into restraining their quest for wealth. In recent years, this countercontrol has become less and less effective. Our increasingly prevalent tendency to let the unrestrained self-interest of the marketplace determine prices, wages, profits, interest rates, corporate size and scope, and resource conservation is sometimes called "social Darwinism" – a direct acknowledgment of economic coercion, analogous to the environmental coercion that gives rise to the biological "survival of the fittest."

Although people influence each other in many ways, they tum more readily to coercive means to get results than to other means. The news media are filled with reports of murder and destruction. Hardly a day goes by without an account of child abuse by parents, parent abuse by children, spousal abuse, or sexual coercion in the workplace. We expect to be warned, intimidated, threatened, pushed around, and perhaps beaten even by those who employ, teach, protect, govern, or love us. Threats of punishment, deprivation, or loss are standard practice in the workplace and classroom, establish a one-way dominance relation between police and citizenry, provide the basis for attaining political objectives, and even color the most intimate interactions within families.

At ourjobs, we are accustomed to being reprimanded for bad work and ignored for good. We resign ourselves to forced contributions to charities and even to individuals we do not care for. In spite of campaign finance laws, municipal and state employees are quite aware of the consequences in store for failure to contribute to a political campaign. And job security is always an issue in labor­ management disputes.

For many students, high grades function as rewards not for their own sake but because they signify the avoidance of low grades. Millions of pupils would escape from school immediately if the law permitted; even in college, with students paying high tuitions, professors who do not require attendance expect only a fraction of the registered students actually to attend classes. In the elementary

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This Coercive World

grades and all the way through high school, teachers are concerning themselves more with coercive techniques for maintaining discipline than with effective methods of instruction.

We punish crimes, but only tolerate lawfulness. Virtue is supposed to be its own reward, but within the legal code, virtue being its own reward means simply that it keeps us out ofjail. And our police, on whom we rely for everyday protection and security, are taught to accomplish their task by intimidation, force , and punishment; they have come to represent a power to be feared, a formerly benevolent institution that now demands subservience.

We watch our legislative bodies with callous amusement as our representatives cut each other down in revenge for rebelling against the leadership or for nonconforming votes. In the highest councils of government, individuals seek to consolidate their power or prestige by discrediting rivals, even at the cost of compromising matters of principle and national security.

Within families , the question of"who is boss" often has to be settled before acts of giving become possible; intimidation and submission are frequently the prerequisites for sexual interaction. Family coercion starts early. As soon as infants begin to move about on their own, "getting into" things, adults resort to restraint and punishment to set limits. It is not unusual to find parents who rarely speak to their children except to scold, correct, or criticize. Even as infants we are exposed to the coercive model; we learn quickly to participate in a system in which coercion is the standard way to get others to do our bidding. Ifbabies could talk, we might hear many of them say, "I am justgoing to keep on screaming until you give me what Iwant." These kinds of coercion do not happen because we are by nature cruel or mean, or because we want to instill those qualities in our children, but because we have not been exposed to effective alternatives. Nature rarely provides any other model for us to emulate.

Perceptive cartoonists are quite aware of the role of coercion in the family and in other parts of our lives. In one comic strip, a child who has been shown being scolded and having toys taken away, ends up saying to a friend , "I'm going to be wailing hysterically for the next two hours." In another strip, the cartoonist displays a fine appreciation of the essence of coercion: The early frames show a mother trying to get her children to "behave" by making such threats as, "Eat your dinner or there will be no dessert," "Sit up straight or leave the table ," "Drink your milk or no 1V tonight," and "Keep your feet off the table

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Coercion and Its Fallout

or go to your room." In the final frame, the husband comes home and asks, "What's for dinner?" She replies, "My specialty, chicken a la ultimatum." In yet another comic strip, we see a teenager saying to his friend, "My mother is a psychologist. All I have to do is act a little twisted and she'll do anything it takes to bring me back to normal." And then, a cartoon shows a bar with a sign in the window, "Eat, drink, and be merry… or else!" Many more examples are available; cartoonists, who have a special talent for picking out life's incongruities, especially actions that are out of keeping with our stated ideals, often find coercion a fertile field for satire.

The social life of teenagers among their peers continues and intensifies the coercive model. The first tobacco produces dizziness; the first alcohol tastes terrible; the first pot is disappointingly dull; the first sex is often awkward and sometimes humiliating. Nevertheless, the threatened expulsion of those who fail to go along with the group is enough to push the beginner over these initial barriers.

Like environmental coercion, social coercion is so prevalent that we find it hard to imagine life without it. Freedom, one of our most cherished values, has no qualities of its own; just as we would have no need for the concept of plenty were it not for our experience of deprivation, it is the absence of coercion that gives meaning to freedom. If all were supplied with the basic necessities of life, the concept of freedom from want would never have arisen; freedom of speech and freedom of the press would never have found their way into our vocabulary were it not for the existence or threat of censorship; the principle of freedom of the seas would never have been enunciated were it not for piracy and war; the notion of free enterprise is a reaction to governmental control; when Franklin D. Roosevelt announced as a national goal the achievement of freedom from fear, he touched a universal longing that arises from our constant exposure to environmental and social threats of all kinds.

B. F. Skinner advanced the thesis that the concept of freedom would be unnecessary, and even without meaning, if our society could eliminate the conditions from which we were always seeking freedom. Ifwe had never enslaved one another, the ideal of freedom from bondage would not have been needed. More generally, ifwe did not try to control each other by threats of punishment, deprivation, re triction, and loss, we would all be free without the concept of freedom ever having arisen. Freedom would then be a fact of life, but

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This Coercive World

the term, in its present connotations, would not even have entered our language.

The notion that we might possibly exist without coercing one another was so incomprehensible that many otherwise thoughtful readers denounced Skinner because they believed he was attacking the ideal of freedom itself. In reality, he was arguing for the elimination of those "facts of life" from which we all yearn to be freed-in particular, from the coercive techniques that we use to control each other's conduct.

Coercive control permeates our lives. Because many of us underestimate its prevalence, it is important to point out that those who advocate and use coercion for therapeutic purposes-sometimes called "aversive therapy"-are acting well within established and accepted social norms and customs. I believe they are wrong but they are not the evil, unfeeling caricatures that some of their more self­ righteous critics paint them to be.

To place practitioners ofaversive therapy in the context ofa society in which coercive control is an established policy, however, is to point out that as scientists, they are making no discoveries; as therapists, they are doing nothing that requires special training or competence. Heads of state, military leaders, law-enforcement officials, and prominent members of the educational establishment have long ago taught us by their example all we would ever need to know about how to control others coercively. Today's aversive therapists, saying and doing what has always been said and done, are contributing nothing new. But in this instance, failing to contribute is wrong; it is wrong because their science has made it possible to do better.

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