Coercive Power

CoercivePower is ThreatForce?, one type of power which shares the stage with ExchangePower? (based on barter) and IntegrativePower? (aka NonViolence the way that Gandhi taught it).

Moved from PowerVersusAuthority:

[...] CoercivePower, also known as ThreatForce?, based on fear (and *only* fear - the consequence is, in effect, inconsequential, for once you've exercised the threat, you have lost your power) [...] -- JasonFelice

The notion that the fear of something loses its power after having experienced it is ridiculous. On the contrary, experiencing what's threatened can enhance fear by 1) demonstrating that the threat is real, and 2) demonstrating that the reality of the experience is worse than the person imagined. In the case of torture, repeated application tends to enhance fear, not dilute it. -- AnonymousCoward

I see. Some threats are cheap to escalate, then. (However, I do believe that without the escalation of the threat, exposure will more generally reduce fear -- after all that is the theory behind BehavioralTherapy?.) There was a bit of sloppy thinking there on my part, let me clarify:

I was not meaning to suggest you had lost your ability to threaten, or effect coercive power in general. You may be able to maintain your ability to escalate the threat level (TheFifthDiscipline's ArmsRace? pattern). I simply meant that any iteration in a coercive power game in which you conclude by enacting your consequence was a loss for you if you are maintaining your attention on your original request. If you are committed to the original request, and committed to influencing by coercive power, you must replay the game after you've enacted the consequence (e.g., "Now are you willing to talk?", or after the elections "We would like you, new Iraqi government, to not produce WMD."). -- JasonFelice

Escalation doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the ability to repeat, ad infinitum. The problem is that you've made a completely invalid generalization from behavioural therapy. Behavioural therapy works in very narrow circumstances where the fear is never allowed to be debilitating and the patient is allowed to recuperate in between sessions in order to reflect and assimilate the experience. A psychotherapist does everything possible to make sure the patient gets over their fear. A torturer does everything possible to train the victim to fear them, to break the victim a little more completely after each repetition, to never let the victim regain their balance, to continuously escalate the fear itself without ever having to escalate the stimulus. The essence of torture is the exact opposite of behavioural therapy, and to treat the two as the same is insane. -- Anon

Hold on, hold on... what I'm getting is that you are reacting to my "for once you've exercised the threat, you have lost your power" in my initial post, and then my suggestion that escalation is necessary to maintain fear, right? I'm guessing that as you read these comments, you're frustrated because of a need for working from a common understanding. Does that sound about right? -- JasonFelice

Ummm, nope, sorry. I really do understand you completely. It just happens that your thinking is wrong since it's based on faulty assumptions.

You're arguing that if the USA nukes Baghdad in order to try to achieve something else, then after going through the threat there won't be any Baghdad to nuke a second time around and that particular threat will be gone. What I'm suggesting is that this nuking of Baghdad is extremely exceptional and not at all representative of coercive threats in general. What's more representative is bombing a few power and water stations in order to cause a deadly plague of dysentery. This is something you can do again and again and again until eventually the population is completely subdued and broken, either psychologically, socially, industrially or technologically.

To further the analogy along, when a psychotherapist does behavioural therapy with a patient, this is akin to lightly bombing Baghdad every generation or so, causing slight casualties and letting the population rebuild stronger after each time, and hell, even paying reparations so that they have the money to rebuild. In contrast, torture is akin to bombing Baghdad every week, over and over and over and over again, never letting the population rebuild between sorties, and stealing all their resources so that rebuilding wouldn't have been possible anyways. -- Anon

So would it be accurate to say that you are looking for acknowledgement that not all threats are backed up by consequences which render the threat physically unrepeatable? And further that if a consequence to a threat is physically unrepeatable, that is coincidental and not a property of the threats or consequences of coercive force? --JasonFelice

Pretty much. Here it would be useful to separate threat as speech act, maybe threatum, and threat as what is threatened, maybe threatans? :) Yes, these are really horrible names but I'm adapting from explandum and explanans for 'putative explanation' and 'what seeks to be explained'.

You use 'consequences' for the threatans and that's pretty much standard terminology but I can't accept it because it isn't consonant with the normal usage of 'logical consequences' or 'natural consequences'. I don't think it's acceptable for us to speak as if criminal powerhungry mentality is a given. We should never lose sight of the fact that threatans are almost always artificial and illegitimate.

There are exceedingly severe constraints that threatans have to meet before they're considered just, proportionality of the threatans to the offense is only the first. It seems to be the difference between a businessman and a criminal that the former respect proportionality. Businessmen rely on violation of the other constraints, which are that the offense and the threatans must have the same essence (eg, money to a banker doesn't have the same essence as money to a beggar) which underlies the principle of restitution, that the offense and the threatans be naturally connected which underlies the principles of containment and rehabilitation.

So to get back to torture, beyond a certain level of atrocity, the effectiveness of the threatum has nothing to do with the nature of the threatans. So for example, sensory deprivation is supposed to be highly effective in torture (and also driving people insane) but it's endlessly repeatable and "harmless". And as you said, the repeatability of the threatans has nothing to do with the properties of the threatum and certainly has nothing to do with the essence of threata (ums?) or the essence of the threat (illegitimate or just). -- Anon

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