Article 10:
Violating Humanity With Control- Part
2
by Wendell Krossa
(From the series "Creating A Horizontal
God", Copyright, W. Krossa)
Violence In Reaction To Control
Others have even argued that the failure of hierarchical organizations to meet basic human needs can lead to violence (30). This will occur, they argue, because of the threat of destruction to the self and because of the loss of self-esteem experienced in dominant/subordinate relationships. This argument concerning violence is based on the reasoning that people are similar to animals in emotional makeup and if there is any threat to the self then people will not be able to control their emotions with reason.
It is interesting in this regard to note employee retaliation toward management in a variety of US institutions in recent years. The humiliation and desperation that arises from loss of control over important things affecting a person's life can lead to unpredictable reactions. In particular, the threat of benefits lost, such as job loss in a situation of increasing unemployment, can evoke desperate responses.
Part of the argument regarding violence states that organizations force people to mask primary emotions with secondary ones which prevent the expression of the primary emotions. This produces conflict from bottled up rage. For instance, people are not allowed to express anger toward a boss because of fear of job loss so they may vent their anger in abuse at home or elsewhere. This inability to express anger also causes stress which seriously affects the immune system.
Sandole says that violence becomes increasingly likely whenever any basic human need is not being met (31). He argues that basic needs are genetically programmed dispositions common to all people and people will aspire to meet these needs in one way or another.
He suggests that the way to meet the needs of all parties in an organizational setting is through more cooperative management systems. These systems, he says, "will stimulate further growth of the cerebral cortex which responds to an enriched human made world" (32). He is making the same point that I am arguing for, that people need more humane structures to encourage the ongoing emergence and development of their humanity. Such structuring is essential for human well being.
Cooperative Humanity In Conflict With Competitive Social Organizing
Mary Clark takes an approach similar to other researchers in showing the destructive nature of modern vertically oriented organizational life on human beings (33). Though she does not speak directly to the issue of superior/inferior relationships, her research relates to control in that the competition she speaks of is a drive which inevitably produces dominant/subordinate forms of relating with all the destructive consequences of such relating.
Clark argues that in the past few centuries a view of humanity has emerged which sees individuals as competitive, self-interested persons. This is perhaps the dominant view of the essential nature of humanity today. An economic theory has followed with laws of economic behavior that "assumed a society of isolated, self-centered individuals rationally calculating what was best for number one" (34). This economic ideology originated some two centuries ago with Adam Smith's idea of everyone pursuing their own self-interest and gain to the neglect of cooperation in community. This idea was a pivotal turning point in the history of human ideas and ideologies.
In reality, though, Clark states that humans have evolved "with a desire to belong, not to compete" (35). We as humans, she says, have evolved with a deep need for social bonding and we depend on a supportive social structure to nurture bonding and cooperation.
But our organizations do not meet this deep human need for cooperation. She argues that there has been a severe failure of civilized society as a whole to meet the most basic needs of human beings. In her words, "The problem is we are blind to the fact that we need a society that satisfies our deepest human needs and the problem is that we have constructed, through a long series of deficient social visions, institutions that deny rather than satisfy those needs" (36).
The primary requirement for a more humane existence, as Clark noted above, is to develop institutions that support cooperation and bonding. There are devastating consequences when trusting bonds are not allowed to develop or are not supported. There is depression and the whole body suffers, especially the immune system.
Clark also points out that in contemporary societies aggression, dominance, hierarchy, and appeasement skills are all presumed necessary to get along in a competitive world and all of these elements are assumed to be critical for survival. All of these are used to bolster the behavior of economic or industrial man which is widely considered to be the correct view of humanity.
She states, however, that competition, which is arguably the central ideal and function of our contemporary societies, is destructive to relationships of cooperation and bonding. Competition, she says, in the contemporary hierarchical social order, tears at social bonding which is an absolute need of humans. But such competition continues to be exalted in contemporary societies "despite evidence of its social destructiveness" (37).
Quite bluntly, she concludes that contemporary social institutions fail to meet human needs and in the absence of supportive systems, "destructive, inhuman behavior occurs" (38).
Competition is also linked to numerous other problems such as crime, drug abuse, anxiety, suicide, stress, and child abuse. She says that our societies, through competition, have gained greater economic productivity but have lost the ability to meet the deepest human needs.
Clark is correct in arguing that in our contemporary world competition is becoming one of the supreme values of modern life. We have designed complex ideologies to validate competition and organizational structures to support competition and the domination of others that inevitably results from such competition.
The destructiveness of competition arises from the fact that it is a primal animal drive oriented to domination of others. Competition always verticalizes relationships. In competition, winners emerge as superior and losers are relegated to inferior status. Competition often undermines freedom and equality, the two indispensable features of true human existence and truly human relating.
Competition is the expression of the intensely selfish drive to gain resources for personal survival and pleasure even if it harms others. And competition always operates at the expense of someone else. It is too often a zero sum proposition. Winning competitors gain at the expense of losers. Sadly, such competition has been validated by theories of the selfish gene and therefore excused as natural and even necessary to human survival and well being. But it isn't. Competitive domination was a response and choice made by early life that set all subsequent life on a trajectory that has had immensely damaging consequences for all life forms.
But the selfish gene or competitive selfishness does not define emerging humanity in any essential way. Competitive selfishness is a residual animal drive that is not an essential part of the emerging human self. The human self is now defined by love, cooperation, and sharing in egalitarian relationships with all others. Social relationships and structures that support competition are therefore violating the essential nature of humanity. True humanity will resist such selfish drives to compete with and win over others in order to courageously share for the good of all.
But for balance let me also say that competition is not entirely without benefit. I am referring more to the forms of unlimited competition that too often lead to the few controlling resources and opportunities that belong to all alike.
The above research is only a small sample of the material that details the damaging impact of control on human well-being. These are only a few of the many studies available which show that hierarchical relating in rigidly controlling organizations and systems of organizing is dehumanizing and destructive to human development and well being.
Horizontalizing Worldviews
Humanity is still in the process of emerging from a vertically oriented past and the relationships, processes, and structures developed for life in that past continue to hinder the expression of genuinely horizontal forms of relating and instead promote the expression of residual drives to dominate. People simply can not develop as human in vertically oriented relationships. The consequences, as noted above, are alienation, depression, illness, violence, and early death.
The search for freedom from our predatory vertical past has often been sidetracked to alternatives which turn out to be more of the same old vertical reality. It might be a new government or a new institution, a new approach, a new method or a new movement. But, too often, the alternative ends up promoting the same old vertical orientation which does not liberate people from control except in token ways (e.g. more participation or input on a given issue).
What is necessary to support the shift to a more horizontal orientation is to challenge the basic view of the universe and life as a vertically oriented reality. We need to discard the old vertical orientation with its competitive domination and control and move toward a truly horizontal orientation which can then inspire human motivation and response toward more horizontal forms of relating.
The continued employment of ideas and values that support a vertical orientation will encourage the continued operation of hierarchical relationships and institutions. These arrangements then encourage the continued expression of primal drives to dominate and control. Archaic vertically oriented worldviews explain why present social orders continue to accommodate predatory drives and vertically oriented relationships which then hinder the emergence of more humane forms of relating.
Particularly important in regard to human worldviews is to clarify that humanity, while emerging out of animal reality, does not still consist of anything animal. Humanity is something entirely new and different and is moving toward an entirely new existence free of all competition and control. It is moving toward a truly egalitarian existence. While we still struggle with residual animal drives they are not an essential part of our emerging humanity.
Vertical Supports
By way of summary, there are a variety of factors which work together to encourage the continuation of archaic hierarchical relationships in human societies. A partial list includes the following:
1. Residual animal drives and instincts to dominate and control still existing in human mentality. Millennia of selection for these competitive drives for survival and dominance will not be suddenly erased from the human brain. The ancient animal brain is still the substrate of the modern conscious human brain. This ancient animal brain still emotes archaic drives that influence contemporary human motivation and behavior.
These residual drives often overwhelm human motivations and response. These drives have been the main source of resistance to human development and progress. Many people, perhaps unaware of the animal nature and destructive impact of these drives, will give way to the urges to dominate and control. Other people refuse to express the destructive urges to control others and instead seek to relate as truly human equals. In a large measure, this conflict with residual animal emotions explains much of the conflict and alienation that arises amongst people still trying to exist as human within hierarchical forms of organizing.
2. Vestiges of the bicameral mind. This refers to the emotions, the longing for the lost authority that Jaynes spoke about earlier. This nostalgia acts as a sort of genetic inertia which promotes a strong urge to submit to authority in hierarchical relationships of control. These desires for hierarchical existence arise from actual parts of the bicameral brain that still exist in modern human brains. This is closely related to the drives of the residual animal brain.
3. Religion as the formalized and sacralized embodiment of the above longing for a commanded or controlled existence. Religion offers a worldview, a view of the nature of the universe and of life. It has become a powerful authority validating the vertical social orders that we have today. Whenever something is institutionalized as sacred, it is given a permanence and finality that is difficult to challenge or alter.
Early people were aware of all life as a vertical reality. Their understanding of God/gods became an integral part of their vertical, controlling views of reality. God was then used to sacralize or to make sacred the observed vertical order. In this manner, vertical relationships of domination became the divine order. Vertically oriented animal relating was then embedded as the sacred order in early worldviews.
Later domestication would institutionalize that vertical animal order in human society and structures. The gods were then used to support that hierarchical social order. Eventually, law would replace the direct authority of the gods. And law has continued into the present as the central mechanism for maintaining institutionalized vertical relating. Law continues to support the vertical relating that was embedded in early social structures.
While human mentality and the human brain can adapt rapidly to new reality, the old vertical structures have attained the permanence of the sacred. They are viewed as representing the divine order and therefore should not be subjected to radical change. To alter anything sacred would be to admit that the traditional understanding of the divine was in error. That is considered blasphemy and this fear of blasphemy keeps most people silent, subservient, and supportive of the old order.
4. Fear of freedom. Early people found the movement away from a commanded hierarchical existence too frightening. They preferred the security of the domination/submission relationships of their past to the insecurity of freedom. Their fear of uncertainty and chance in a non-determined existence was too much to live with. The responsibility of choice and its consequences was simply too frightening for early humans used to the orderly rule and supposed security of hierarchical control. Fear of freedom continues as a major element supporting the continued use of hierarchical relationships.
5. Opportunistic greed and selfishness of elites and priestly authorities who exploit ideas of the sacred to maintain their own advantaged positions. Authorities have long exploited the common human respect for the sacred in order to maintain relationships of control. This exploitation is also rooted in the ancient animal instinct for survival and the drive to dominate. This is what is meant by evil masquerading as the will of God.
6. Alienation and its subcategories of estrangement, separateness, and powerlessness. These produce a culture of resignation and submission among those at the bottom who see no alternative to changing the 'sacred vertical order'.
7. People have also developed and continue to develop complex ideological systems, worldviews, and arguments which support hierarchical relationships. These include economic ideologies based on competition which demand efficiency as the main operating principle. Tight hierarchical control is therefore viewed as essential to gain the required efficiency.
These ideologies have also developed corollary views of humanity as selfish, competitive, and dominating and therefore naturally suited to superior/inferior relationships.
8. Political and legal environments have also been developed which support vertical arrangements of relationships. These exist in the form of policies or laws requiring hierarchical management structures in order to ensure efficiency. This is viewed as safeguarding the survival of corporations in the modern economic environment. Governments thereby hope to avoid the damage caused by inefficient companies going out of business. And the immense human damage which results from a predominant concern for efficiency is often excused as the unavoidable cost of success in a competitive environment.
I could add things to the above list such as cultural inertia and the force of tradition. All of these factors encourage the continuation of hierarchical existence. In so doing, they hinder the progress and development of a more humane existence. They hinder the growth and development of the human self and produce instead the alienation so destructive to human well being.
Works Cited:
Ø See Alienation, Community and Work, 1991, edited by Andrew Oldenquist and Menachem Rosner; The Psychology of Control, 1983, by Ellen Langer.
Ø Seeman, Melvin quoted in Alienation, Community and Work, 1991, Andrew Oldenquist and Menachem Rosner, Eds., p.4.
Ø Langer, Ellen. 1983. The Psychology of Control, p.10.
Ø Ibid, p.14.
Ø Ibid, p.10.
Ø Ibid, p.16.
Ø Ibid, p.16.
Ø Ibid, p.137.
Ø Time, April 1, 1996.
Ø Langer, Ellen. 1983. The Psychology of Control, p.228.
Ø Oldenquist, Andrew and Menachem Rosner, 1992. Alienation, Community and Work, p.3.
Ø Ibid, p.6.
Ø Seeman, M. 1981. "Coping with Stress at Work" in International Journal of Health Services, 11: 491- 510 quoted in Alienation, Community and Work, p.26.
Ø Oldenquist, Andrew. 1992. Alienation, Community, and Work, p.9, 121.
Ø Ibid, p.121.
Ø Ibid, p.124.
Ø Ibid, p.124.
Ø Kipnis, David. 1976. The Powerholders, p.18.
Ø Oldenquist, Andrew. 1992. Alienation, Community, and Work, p.127.
Ø Ibid, p.127.
Ø Ibid, p.8.
Ø Leviatan, Uriel. 1992. "Hierarchical Differentiation and Alienation" in Alienation, Community and Work, p.159.
Ø Ibid, p.159.
Ø Ibid, p.159.
Ø Ibid, p.160.
Ø Kipnis, David. 1976. The Powerholders, p.208.
Ø Agassi, Judith.
Ø Oldenquist, Andrew. 1992. Alienation, Community and Work, p.11.
Ø Ibid, p.85.
Ø Burton, John, Ed.. 1990. Conflict: Human Needs Theory, p.29.
Ø Sandole, Dennis. The Biological Basis of Needs in World Society: The Ultimate Micro-Macro Nexus, p.64.
Ø Ibid, p.79.
Ø Clark, Mary. p.35?
Ø Ibid, p.39.
Ø Ibid, p.39.
Ø Ibid, p.37.
Ø Ibid, p.40.
Ø Ibid, p.50.
From the series "Taking The Vertical Out Of God" by W.
Krossa.
Copyrighted material.
