Cooperation Power and Abuse

An essay by musician and artist Pete Wright, of Crass and Judas II, exploring how we relate to each other and underlying behaviours that get in the way of co-operative decision making.

crossmananalysis@protonmail.com

Please be aware that the final Coda is not suitable for those of a religious disposition.

Pete Wright

(The last coda is not for those of a religious disposition)

COOPERATION POWER AND ABUSE

I’ll try to explain my ideas of how we relate. The ideas can seem counter-intuitive. On the plus side, they are easily confirmed or refuted by observation.

Fair warning: the explanation seems to cut across and re-define much of what we take for granted as being true in personal relations, and it gets worse from there on.

I have been examining power and abuse to understand how they work, looking at the motive for abuse, the means we use, and the method. Motive, Means, Method. These three are interwoven.

It has taken a long time to deconstruct the things I took for granted, skirting round my old ‘certainties’, trying to understand the patterns beneath and behind our behaviour.

My way in was spotting what I later understood to be ‘behavioural switching’ during a long series of emails I received about disputed royalty payments of all things. One email might be conciliatory, the next, aggressive and damning. Alongside this, the impressively abusive treatment my partner was subjected to by her family members formed a stressful parallel. That was years ago. ‘Switching’ now sits in the middle of the work rather than at the beginning. It is the means we have for abuse. Motive, Means, Method.

I’ve long known about the method, the basic tools we employ to abuse each other, from my partner’s studies in psychology and counselling. These form the techniques we use on others, and which are used on us: denial, minimisation, distraction, attack, projection, and exclusion by definition. We are awash in this behaviour. Sorry: a lot of our behaviour turns out to be quite formulaic. More of that later.

Most recently, I have been trying to pin down what drives us to abuse, what motivates us. This was triggered by conversations where my description of how we might socially regulate our behaviour using existing social agreements was not so much examined and disagreed with, as not allowed to stay ‘on the table’, wiped clean. It was an eerie feeling. A particular view of social interaction was subtly and consistently reinstated, as if I had never spoken.

The Standard Model

We appear to have a standard model of how we relate to other people. It is a shared starting point. I feel it is a prison of our own making. Here is an analogy for the model using readily available household items:

Set a salt pot and a pepper pot on a table a little way apart. Between them put two knives side by side, one knife pointing from salt to pepper and the other pointing from pepper to salt. The pots are the people, the knives between are their behaviour.

In the standard model, the pots are what is important, central. Each pot is focussed on the other pot, decoding, trying to understand, modifying understanding and behaviour according to the other pot’s behaviour.

Our behaviour varies in type and intensity, but proceeds as a sequence, one thing following on from another.

That’s the model.

Concentrating on behaviour.

We may be good at reading other people, but we can’t know all about the other person, nor all about ourselves. A lot is guesswork. Imagine for a moment we forget about the salt and pepper pots, and concentrate on the knives, our behaviour. There are two main types of behaviour. One is of fellowship, goodwill and cooperation, and the other is combative, abusive, attempting to wield power and control, or defend ourself from power, control and abuse. There are different degrees and intensities of these two behaviours, but they are either one thing or the other. Cooperation or combat.

THE MEANS

Most of our interaction is cooperative. We cooperate with each other easily and unselfconsciously as we move through crowds without collision, drive safely and considerately, care for each other. We are open. We contribute. We are ‘we’.

The remainder is combative, trying to wield power over others, or defend ourselves from other people’s combative behaviour.

Behavioural ‘switching’.

We move from cooperative behaviour to combative behaviour in the space of an indrawn breath, and can, in a breath, move back again. We ‘switch’ behaviour. For these changes to occur so fluently and quickly, there is likely to be something that facilitates the change, and something else that facilitates the change back.

My understanding is that we adopt an internal ‘stance’, an algorithm or template, for the switch one way, and another for the switch back. If we are paying attention, we can ‘feel the switch’.

The stance for cooperation.

In cooperative behaviour, we adopt a stance for seeing ourselves as ‘one among many’, a sort of ‘objectivity’. We sense our connectedness and interchangeability with others, an object among equivalent objects. What is good for you is likely to be good for me. We relate as ‘we’.

Here is the crucial part: there is already a strong social agreement as to what is good or bad behaviour. This is social wisdom. Behaviour is judged solely from the point of view of what it feels like to be on the receiving end. I may like to poke you with a stick, but neither of us want to be poked with a stick. So, poking with a stick is held to be undesirable behaviour. “Do unto others . . .” Social wisdom.

Now the stance for combat.

In order to abuse, we enter the ‘power mode’.

This is it:

Breathe in. Draw back into yourself.

You are now within, looking out.

You are the ‘I’, the subject.

I am the ‘you’, the object.

Subject. Object.

The subject, you, takes precedence over the object, me.

You take precedence over me.

You are entitled to have power over me; your will should prevail. You have always been entitled, will always be entitled. It is ‘right and natural’.

MOTIVE

What is it that motivates us to abuse, what drives us to wield power as if it were our right?

To get to that, first, another question:

Male, female – we live with these identifiers. They have a function, presumably. What function do they serve?

When we cooperate, gender seems to have no function apart from practical considerations; gender is not a signifier.

But it plays a deep and important role in our sense of who we are.

Gender comes into its own in ‘power mode’. It is used to discriminate and to abuse. Gender remains a huge facet of control and domination worldwide. This is what gender is used for. In cooperation, irrelevant, in control and abuse, central.

Gender, age, education, skin colour, class, religion, nationality, social standing, wealth, occupation, politics, sexual orientation, diet, tastes, health, beliefs. For a start. These are elements of who we feel we are, our sense of self, while in cooperation they are irrelevant.

All these attributes of identity serve as sensitivities, like exposed nerves. They are an array of hair-triggers in our makeup that, when touched, flip us into anger, prejudice and abusive behaviour. And touched they are. These same attributes also identify us as confederates or targets for abuse. This is our dangerous outer skin.

Our negative emotions are produced when these triggers are tripped or permanently activated. This is what drives us to abuse, our sense of ‘me’.

Because these aspects form a substantial part of our sense of identity, we feel ‘dis-armed’ and uneasy if we move away from this touchy, weaponised zone of who we feel we are, and out into the realm of cooperation, where large parts of our identities are irrelevant.

‘Elastic’.

No matter how simple that ‘pot and knife’ analogy, and how straightforward it is to just concentrate on behaviour for a moment, the pots are quickly and efficiently sneaked back to prime place on the table. It is like magic. It seems impossible to stay concentrated solely on behaviour, to stay with the behaviour.

“I’m sure if you consider the person . . .” “But this person may be feeling . . .” “There’s probably a reason . . .” “The ego . . .” “It’s not all one person’s fault . . .” “You have to try to understand . . .”

There is discomfort, a sense of displacement, whenever the subject is ‘behaviour’, rather than ‘a person behaving’. Talk gravitates back to the person. The standard model is quickly reasserted or implied. It is as if we are on elastic that pings us back to a default mode of looking at the person not the behaviour. If we look at the person, behaviour becomes a ‘matter of opinion’. One person says one thing, the other person says another. ‘Tis, ‘tisn’t. Our behaviour is now safely insulated from our own social values. Abuse can continue unimpeded.

Looking at behaviour, however, allows us a chance of regulating that behaviour, because we already share a social agreement on what is good and what is bad behaviour. Concentrating on behaviour gives us mutual access.

Concentrating on the person does not. We are drawn back to our comfort zone of looking at the person not the behaviour, of being ready to use the power stance at any moment. This is what reinstates those salt and pepper pots to prime place – our sense of who we are. We feel exposed and vulnerable if we cannot hurt other people at the drop of a hat. How tragic is that? A comfort zone, embodying large parts of our sense of self, but at what huge cost to ourselves and others.

This mechanism keeps us abusing. The abuse is driven by that long list of aspects of who we feel we are. And the process stubbornly remains socially invisible while we concentrate on the ‘person’. Our sense of identity drives us away from seeing ourselves by our behaviour. It prevents us from regulating that behaviour by our agreed social standards. The sense of ‘I’ in us trumps our togetherness.

METHOD

Here are the techniques we use to abuse.

Combative and Passive Aggressive behaviour.

Passive aggressive behaviour is combative behaviour with a fake smile.

We can employ direct force or intimidation, but, most often, here is the sequence we tend to follow:

I state my rightness and your wrongness.
I minimise the value of your position or input.
I distract. Sow confusion. Wander off the point.
I attack. It’s your fault. You are in the wrong.
I project negative qualities onto you and feign a ‘reaction’ to prove it is true.
Now, the most powerful step. I define your input as inherently faulty or inadmissible. Anything you say will then be

automatically negated. Any facet of the other person can be used in this definition of exclusion.

Of course, we can jump about or even go straight to the last step which is the most powerful. We can go round the steps again and again, interspersed with blatant or subtle lies.

Recap.

A good deal of who we feel we are, our identity, serves only to trigger us to abuse or be abused. Our personalities, rich in acquired facets, drive us to hurt ourselves and others.

So, the aching sensitivities of our makeup are the motive, the driving force.

The ‘stance’ we have for switching to abuse and power is the ‘means’.

Our combative behaviour is the weapon of choice, the default method of abuse.

It’s not all bad. On the other side of the scales is cooperation.

Cooperation.

Our obsession with identity is not an accident. It is our super-effective way of hiding our misdeeds from all but the recipients, even from ourselves. Abuse is hidden in plain sight. Exclusion by definition is second nature. Take a look.

Ego is a weapon.

Here are two especially uncomfortable codas:

– The bulk of literature and drama consists of narrating passive aggressive or combative behaviour while steadfastly avoiding identifying it as such. In a culture where these behaviours were well recognised and understood, and self-regulated, literature and drama would become a little redundant. Oops.

– The stance or algorithm for abusive behaviour:

1. draw inwards and back into yourself

2. stay within, looking out

3. you are the subject, the ‘I’

4. all else is ‘you’ or ‘that’

5. the ‘I’ takes precedence, is entitled to prevail, have power

This stance is familiar because it is the essence of every God we have ever invented. This ‘idea of God’, this stance, is not just a template or algorithm – it is the most potent template. It allows us to switch directly into power mode despite our cooperative social agreement. We, and our religions, and all our organisations exploit this template on a grand scale. Individuals and organisations may claim for themselves our social wisdom, but only to mask the power that runs beneath. The power template, God, is secular. Just to be clear: All power is abuse. All abuse is power. Our idea of God is the algorithm for switching from cooperation to power and abuse.

That idea we came up with, God, along with all its derivatives, is and always has been a neat little trick. This compact motif is the one thing that allows us to feel entitled to, and enables us to, abuse others. The idea is essential to any individual or organisation that exerts power, that abuses. It is the bedrock of all abuse. It is secular and completely enmeshed with our lives.