Obedience dynamics

Posted by Tanos on Sun 25 Mar 07, 11:37 PM

In this post, I'd like to tie together the various concepts and terms that surround obedience in Master/slave and Ownership relationships. Words like resistance, reactance, discipline, rules, submission, and obedience refer to different parts of the puzzle, but don't have well-defined boundaries, and I'd like to suggest a consistent set of definitions and some new ideas to help visualise the various processes of obedience.

The first term I'd like to introduce is an "intent". An intent is the desire or intention to follow a particular course of action or achieve a particular outcome. For example, "I can eat cakes when I want", "We must always have some milk in the fridge", "I will go out on Friday" are all intents. In other words, an intent is an opinion about what is to be done.

Masters and slaves both have intents, and obedience dynamics describes the process that change slaves' intents, either into misalignment or alignment with that of their master. We can represent this with an intent graph, which is just a diagram showing the master and slave's intents on particular issues as points on the diagram - for example, on the question of slaves eating cakes. If we're only considering a single issue or question, then the intent graph is just a line.

Obedience and submission are the ease with which a slave's intent can be moved into alignment with the master's, and resistance is simply the reciprocal of obedience: the difficulty with which the slave's intent can be moved. "Being obedient" does not mean that the slave has the same intent as their master, but that when informed of the master's intent they promptly align themselves to it. Discipline is the overall structure of rules, rewards and penalties which the master creates to promote this obedience.

Being an "extension of the master's will" would require perfect obedience and zero resistance, but perfect alignment of intent would additionally require perfect knowledge about the environment and information the master bases his decisions and requirements upon.

The emotions surrounding reactance are then seen as one cause of resistance, whilst resistance can also arise from attitudes like false entitlement. On the other hand, conscious efforts and emotions like trust can diminish resistance.

If we are thinking about intents regarding two different issues, then the intent graph can be drawn in two dimensions, with the master and slave's pair of intents represented by points on the graph. One of the effects associated with reactance is that removing one choice ("cakes") can result in feelings of reactance that provoke the exercise of another choice - perhaps a choice that would not have been desired otherwise ("chocolate"). On a two dimensional intent graph, this means that the master enforcing obedience on one issue and moving the slave towards his intent, can result in the slave feeling reactance and paradoxically moving away on another, unmonitored issue - rather like stuffing a sleeping bag into a suitcase, and finding that wherever you push down, somewhere else pops up.

A purely reactance approach to this situation is to clamp down on all freedoms and try to induce the feeling of helplessness which is positive in the case of fundamentally willing slaves, and leads to a resumption of submission. But other alternatives are available to the master, including provoking the slave's reason to release the pressure of reactance by seeing, for example, that some feelings are false entitlements. This type of approach disconnects these detrimental linkages between the slave's various intents by removing the underlying reactance.

Just as it may be useful to consider how one slave's intents may be connected, similar processes can occur if more than one slave is involved. For example, forces of modelling and peer-pressure can cause one slave's misalignment or alignment of intent with their master to influence another slave, and applications of this include visible, ritualistic demonstrations of submission to promote an atmosphere of obedience within a household.

There are just a few examples, but I now think that all of the issues surrounding obedience can be slotted into this framework of resistence and intents, illustrated in a visual way with intent graphs.

Edited Sun 25 Mar 07, 11:47 PM by Tanos