Control and Conformance

A minority of people are control-seeking. They may seek to control anything from small social groups through to the whole world. They rarely  tolerate opposition.  They divide into rival groups, each with the same fundamental aim – to gain control over the area they have targeted. That often forms the basis for a ruthless competition.

The majority of people exhibit passive conformance. They live with the current rules until they become visibly damaging to their personal or familial or peer-group interests. They align with the control-seeker group which persuades them that it poses least threat and greatest promise for those interests.

Most other mechanisms of control are influenced by these basic personal traits. The most directly related mechanism is politics which takes the trait of control-seeking to damaging extremes.

 Personal Experience

People react to current circumstances in a manner strongly influenced by past experience. The strength of influence of personal experience is illustrated in simplistic terms by sayings like “use a carrot and a stick” or “once bitten, twice shy”.  These illustrate the perceived value of bribery (not necessarily just monetary) and threat in persuading who or what to support or oppose.

Personal experience can also be used to preserve the status quo. People will often reject even small changes as a result of previous bad experience with the introduction of change (“better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know”).

 Confidence and Grasp

Some people feel that much of their life is too complicated for them to control unaided. A few are sure that they know how to cope. Which of the few gains credence depends on their ability to convince people that they have a better grasp than their rivals of the problems and their solution.

People who seem to understand the basics of a problem and are effective at debating against advocates of rival views gain a wide following. Charisma and confidence, allied to a plausible grasp of the problem are often the determining factors in who is believed.

The large majority of people lack confidence in all but a very few specialised areas. If they must make a decision they place their trust in the recommendations of the most effective advocates.

 Politics

Disagreements about the validity of rival policies lead collections of people (religious sects, clubs, companies, etc.) into political behaviours. What characterises politicians is fanatical dedication to gaining and retaining power over definition, interpretation and enforcement of collective rules.  

Politicians recognise that to gain authority they must compromise with others. They form coalitions with other politicians. They make compromises in order to gain and keep power. Larger groups consist of layers of coalition and often the nature of the compromises is kept secret.

The amount of compromise becomes steadily greater as the overall numbers involved in the coalition grows – and its extent is more likely to be hidden from the rank-and-file of the coalition and from the wider group the coalition seeks to govern.

 Religion

Here religion refers to belief in universal physical and/or spiritual rules. That covers theistic (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) and non-theistic beliefs (Atheism, Humanism, “Mother Nature”).

Rules appear via the insights of individuals. They are prone to occasional change due to new insights and reinterpretations. An organising hierarchy  arises to manage change and enforcement – commonly there are rival factions who support conflicting interpretations and insights.

There are two primary approaches to convincing people to accept the “truth” of a particular religion. Evangelism uses argument to persuade people to use their free will to make the “correct” choices. Coercion denies the use of free will, forcing “correct” decisions upon people.

These are related to two concepts of how transgression is punished. Divine Retribution is the sole responsibility of a deity – albeit, in some cases, occurring during life and in others occurring in a subsequent life. Secular Retribution is applied by people, in some cases claiming to act on behalf of a deity.

 Culture

A culture is a group of people who share unwritten rules, infringement of which is deprecated. Deprecation can lead to ostracism, persecution and sometimes violence. Cultural rules can cover things like diet, personal appearance, speech and behaviour.

Cultural rules change very slowly. The process of change normally has to be almost invisible to the local populace or justified by a strong suggestion it is vital to survival of the community. In consequence cultural rules often delay or eliminate change. Their consequences can range from preservation of tradition to xenophobia.

Frequently there are “cultural police” consisting of people who get themselves acknowledged as cultural protectors or trend-setters. They undergo no election process –  they gain tacit acceptance by a combination of charisma and media support.

People’s decisions and actions are  influenced by assumptions about what their cultural environment expects of them – or what its “cultural police” tell them it expects of them.

 Law and Order

Laws are the accumulation of decisions by power holders. They reflect political, religious and cultural prejudices. They are presented as providing justice, but arguably they also provide protection of the political status quo.

A Judiciary administers application of laws to actual situations, sometimes reinterpreting  the original intent. Members of a Judiciary may be biased or incompetent but overall the system usually operates to allow bad decisions to be overturned (not always quickly enough).

A necessary additional feature is an apparatus for enforcement of order (obedience to the law). This normally consists of administrators and enforcers (in nation states, a civil service backed by an army and police). The primary thrust of their activities is always preservation of “law and order”, which in reality means the status quo in distribution of power, resources and influence.

 Media

As described above, many people lack confidence in their ability to understand and/or control the problems which confront them – and many delegate responsibility for achievement of control to people who seem to understand the problems and have an approach to their treatment.

The means by which this process of persuasion and thence delegation occurs is partly via the media (TV/radio, newspapers and the internet). What most people gloss over is that the media is frequently not an objective source of information.

In newspapers it is rare to see a division between reports of the facts and opinion about the facts. In public broadcasting there is a tendency to respond to what appears in the press, and it is very difficult to prevent the introduction of bias by those reporting the news. On the internet there is a free-for-all in the publication of views, with little or no constraint over separation of fact (or pseudo fact) and opinion.

 Commerce

Important priorities for commerce are access to markets, share of markets, staffing issues and  overhead control. For the last two of these, of particular importance for this discussion are negotiation of staff conditions of employment and minimisation of liabilities due to taxation and legislation.

Commercial organisations trying to enter markets demand a free market. They place a premium on staff rewards and complain at malpractice by bigger competitors. Those with the major market share frequently operate the direct opposite of these policies. They attempt to restrict staff freedom and apply anti-competitive (and sometimes illegal) policies.

Quality and usefulness of the product or service are clearly factors in gaining market share but there is another. That is to influence people by persuading them that the products or services are highly desirable. A key way of achieving that is to associate them with people seen as role models (or trend-setters). Commerce encourages the emergence of “trend-setters”. Their possessions and actions becomes the “in thing” the for the masses who follow them.

 Research and Development

Progress in research and development in areas like energy supply, nutrition, communications, genetics, transport and armaments relies on five factors:

• Curiosity – people like to increase their understanding/control of their environment.
• Compassion – people want to relieve suffering due to illness, poverty and natural disaster
• Technical rivalry – some people want to outshine their peers or gain their admiration.
• Personal rivalry – some people want to control those around them.
• Commercial profit – people directing commerce place funding for research in areas where they see greatest potential profit for the money they have at their disposal,

Technical progress would occur even if it relied only on the first three factors, which are the ones most scientists seem to think are the driving force, but it is quite clear from history that the final two have a very strong influence on the direction and rate of progress.

 Commitment and Ruthlessness

A key factor in determining which activities succeed is the degree of commitment of the people involved in their execution. Commitment leads to those (the large majority) who are less committed ceding power to the individuals or groups who are committed.

Commitment which is not backed up by ability can be susceptible to defeat by less committed people who actually have ability. This is countered by the most highly committed with a recourse to ruthlessness. Things like following rules and ethical behaviour become secondary. The primary governing rule becomes “win by any means”.

 Objectivity and Dual Standards

People like to think that they make objective assessments of situations they face in their day-to-day lives. In reality objectivity is often difficult to achieve. Most facts about controversial problems are obtained via the media which, as already discussed is open to distortion.

Since most people like to believe that they are ethical and fair, how do they live with the bias in how they actually behave? The answer is a human tendency to apply dual standards – for example, many motorists react angrily (road rage) to mistakes by other motorists and yet commit the same mistake and expect it to be overlooked.

Put another way, people readily convince themselves of the idea: “One rule for the masses and another for me”. Most people like to convince themselves that they don't follow this pattern, but it is rare to find an individual who never succumbs to it.