Assumption 6: Coercion or Community

This one has been tough to write about. For one thing, coercion--and one’s urge to use it--evokes such dark emotions. I was just watching a documentary about the beginnings of the Inquisition in a small village in France. Because the Church was losing its power and centrality among the people, there were initiatives to identify townspeople who were participating in "heretical practices." After many depositions and hearings, five people were burned at the stake. During the next two centuries, many more were persecuted, tortured, and killed.

This was not the beginning, nor the end of coercion. It goes all the way back to our pre-human and early human experience. Struggles for power and dominance were settled by force or the threat of force. Social stability depended on the dominance by some individuals or groups, and the submissive acceptance of it by others. The hierarchy was created and maintained by some form of violence.

In our modern and post-modern world, we have progressed beyond all that. We are civilized, aren't we? Well, yes, we are, but others aren't, so we must attack them, overwhelm them with our superior power, and liberate them from their coercive social structures. And they will be so grateful! Or if not, then they deserve the misery. This is how we solve problems; not every problem, but the really important ones.

We begin learning how to do this, and how to think this way, through parental guidance. A good spanking, for the child's own good, has marvelous results: Compliance. Most of the time. While they're at home. If not, kids get a time out in their room, or when they're older, they get grounded for a week. In school, the education continues: "corporal punishment" is no longer used very much, but misbehavior results in detention. It's excellent training for the post-graduation or post-drop-out life: If you don't comply, you go to prison. We put you away; some would say we throw you away.

How comfortable to have put that last description in those terms. Let me make a small shift: If we don't comply, they throw us away.

Does that change your feelings about this?

In organizations the same pattern exists, though it's applied more subtly, yet no less intensely. Managers expect compliance from their direct reports. If they don't get it, performance reviews won't be good. No pay increases or advancement. If my people get really stupid about it, they're out of here. We've got a business to run. But sometimes managers have priorities that conflict with those of their own peers. It's OK; that's why we invented the hierarchy: we also have managers who resolve differences among us. They have greater power, and what they say goes. We don't always like what they do, but we prefer this arrangement to just fighting with our peers. Don't we?

We live in a culture of coercion. We subscribe to and support the assumption that coercive behavior is needed to maintain order--in our families, in our organizations, in our countries, and in our world. And many of us hold a further, underlying assumption that this is the only choice, and the alternative would be chaos.

There is some evidence, however, for an alternative assumption: that instead of coercion we can acknowledge our community of shared interests. We can re-connect with those we have disowned and made into "others," and engage with them in a different form of interaction, based on mutual respect as human beings, supported by our own self-respect as human beings. We can vulnerably communicate our own interests, concerns and aspirations. We can invite others to do the same with us. And we can frame this interaction in the context of our super-ordinate goal: building mutually satisfying relationships and working arrangements--ones that work well for all concerned.

This is a good definition of community. It's available for use in our families, in our schools, in our work organizations, and in our governments. The family systems work of Virginia Satir, for example, has been eminently successful in building healthy families that are not based on coercion. Some schools have been quietly operating this way, and some organizations have had great business success with this different approach. More courts are diverting divorce proceedings to mediation, and some are starting to use the approach of restorative justice--bringing together those who created damage with those who were harmed, along with their families, and supporting their coming to terms with each other about how to repair those damages.

It's hard work, especially while we unlearn old ways and learn new ones. Most people have less experience with community than they do with coercion/compliance. So the needed attitudes and skills for community are not as widely held. But they are learnable. They are effective. And they are much more satisfying for the human spirit and ultimately for the global society.