I'm terrible at disciplining living things. Which is why I'm uncomfortable with raising dogs from their puppy age. Even the idea of raising a child is pretty thoroughly terrifying to me, though that can change later on. I prefer to visit, or at least babysit, whether animal or child. I'm that permissive "Uncle" that comes along and spoils the kids/animals and then splits.
But then there comes a point where you have to deal with contradicting wills. If the will of the animal or child contradicts your own will - which I sometimes abide by personally - or the will of others - which I am less predisposed to tolerate - then you must be able to resolve the contradiction. Traditionally this is done with discipline, or the raw application of force and the appeal to authority.
It seems distasteful to pair animals and children in this context, but both are living things which are not fully socialized in the human world. Both must learn to exist harmoniously within a given social system - which can pose all sorts of complications if the social system chosen is at tension with the dominant social system, or if the given social system chosen has reached a point of instability. This process of socialisation is done through intuition and the feedback mechanisms provided by an authority who can exert force, not to mention the basic feedback mechanisms located in the immediate environment.
This is precisely the point at which I falter, because it is difficult for me to exert my will directly. More specifically it is difficult to exert force. Not because I lack strength or skill, but because I haven't the will myself. I cannot even act "tough" because I don't believe it inside, so that if I try to bluff and feign, a child or animal will know instinctively that it is only bark. The same goes for the wills of adults, which is another story altogether.
Nevertheless I do come across problems, such as having to deal with a misbehaving 80 lb pitbull. In this case, I am living with the dog, and spending a lot of time with it as it develops, so I have a responsibility to see to it that it behaves, both to spare me agitation, and to spare everyone else in the household.
I do apply light discipline, but where I am weak, I attempt to alter the bounds within which the dog exercises his will. I attempt to preserve the dog as a living thing with its own volition, but with limits. There are many ways to do this. It means above all paying attention to the various states the dog reaches, and connecting those states with the dog's circumstances.
You begin to notice that the dog commits various behaviors because of certain states, which are influenced by various circumstances. I've made observations myself, and I've learned from roommates who have spotted other patterns. For example, if the dog is hungry, or hasn't been outside in a while, he will act up. If you act a certain way with the dog, he will act up. If more people come to the house, or there are certain noises inside or out, he acts up.
Alter the parameters of the environment so less of these events happen, and the dog is less likely to act up, reducing the need of direct discipline.
It isn't possible to control all of the environment of course. In an unstable environment populated by unstable people (myself included) it is impossible to remove all of the stressors and agents of agitation. Consider the way in which this society is structured - and the way it progressively becomes destructured. You have colonies of small fortresses, surrounded by steel fence, many of them patrolled by aggressive and alert dogs. In a poor neighborhood, many people keep aggressive dogs outside because they make for inexpensive and effective crime deterrents. Terrible but true.
These dogs savagely bark whenever we walk past. It upsets our dog, because he's very friendly and wants to be liked by other dogs, but there's nothing else that can be done. They are there to stay, barking and pacing, inheriting the madness of the society they are part of. One looks around and simply sees madness, but there it is, relentlessly bubbling up through the pitiless forces of history. And we still must go on walks.
Hmm, back to discipline. Disciplinary force is useful in some contexts, but as a blunt instrument it can make quite a mess. If the disciplining actor misunderstands the violator, the violator will become confused, even resentful. This is also how you introduce double binds in human beings. For a developing animal or human, feedback is still very important to learn to harmonize with the social environment, but it takes effective, skilled feedback to achieve the best results. This is also how I work with ants.
As a living thing matures, and develops an orbit of its own, then it is time to back away and let it run its course. Further, one must contextualize these efforts: is one attempting to harmonize with a whole, and what is the nature of that whole? Or is one simply attempting to exercise one's own power through an alternative means of instrumentalization? The naked exercise of power is dangerous: where another detects it, one will attempt the same means to overpower you, which means beginning again the cycle of fragmentation. To locate one's self in others though is to encourage that tendency in reciprocation.
These methods are far from perfect. I'm learning everyday. And maybe I'll reach a point where I am no longer able to learn. But I do feel I must attempt to actualize what I think I am, in relation to a world that is, whether or not the exercise itself is absurd.
You could criticize these methods as passive aggressive, but then passive aggression has aggression as its opposite: it still implies an individual ego attempting to assert itself solipsistically, whereas what we are talking about is the individual ego asserting itself by identifying itself with the whole, yet nevertheless attempting to move the whole in a general direction. Yes, it is still a form of manipulation: all living things manipulate their environments. But it is a form of manipulation that acknowledges the power of billions of years of evolution of co-existing life systems, and the stability of that process, and allows greater units of life to take care of themselves, reducing fragmentation.
Anyway, I have the vague sense that these alternative methods have at their base a gradual mass redirection of the collective will. The power of the individual will has become exhausted, for it no longer moves in tandem with the mass; it is impossible to sustain the illusion of the efficacy of individual power. Ayn Rand's (more about her another time) fountain-head of human egos has burst forth like a geyser towering into the air, and at its zenith, with nowhere left to go, has sprayed in every direction, meeting the walls of its limitations, finally flowing back together into the base.
And so now, for the will to express itself, it must seek out the movements of other wills, identifying those wills with its own. It must realize itself as part of the whole, yet still existing as a distinct entity.
As a side note, in its own complicated and convoluted way, I think Christopher Nolan's Inception was trying to communicate the metaphysics of this changing expression of the will, just through the framework of an enormous contrived jigsaw puzzle, dressed up with Hollywood violence and action. It was impossible for the protagonists to force a decision on their target directly, which necessitated instead a manipulation of the dream world of the unconscious to bring about the decision in a softer manner.
Right then. It has occurred to me that these alternative methods, though not nearly
as refined, are not entirely different in principle to the practice of permaculture. Permaculture already enjoys a rich body of work in which practitioners have perfected various methods, but I have yet to see detailed accounts of these principles put to work in other spheres, though I'm sure they do exist. That said, when one sets out to implement a metaphysical principle in the real world, one encounters numerous moving parts and elements which went previously unseen. Bringing general principles into concrete practice is a complex and multifaceted process and one can expect endless repetitions of trial and error before a passable implementation is worked out.
That said, nothing I write here about positive, practical actions should be taken seriously for now. Check back in 30 years; if I'm still alive, and am still doing philosophy alongside mindful practice, I should have a stable body of advice worked out. Hah!
And well, after that, assuming a given body of work is successful and even worth reading, mass implementation of specific advice alters the world in such a way that the advice may no longer apply in its static form, and that is ignoring the fact that language drift may render the advice altogether incomprehensible, or at least adulterated. And of course, there's probably nothing radically new about these suggested methods either. I'm sure these same forms have been exercised at other periods throughout human history.
Oh well. Philosophy does seem sort of insane, much like many other human endeavours. But I do enjoy doing it. What was that about Sisyphus?
