Perceiver Perceiver
Fact Fact
Perceiver Thought Mercy Thought
A B A B
a good a worse a bad a better
experience result experience result
Perceiver internal world can also be believed with varying levels of confidence.A
It is the interaction between Mercy emotion and Perceiver confidence which makes conscience unpredictable. Earlier, I defined confidence as the level of emotion which a fact can handle without falling apart. Let me illustrate this definition now with a practical example. I remember one lab in Engineering school in which we took small rods of various metals and inserted them into testing machines which pulled these rods apart until they snapped. The goal was to see how much tensile stress the material could handle without failing. I suggest that confidence is like the strength of a material. It measures the level of emotional stress which a fact can endure without shattering. If a Perceiver belief has insufficient confidence to handle a specific level of emotion, then the link of conscience will fail—
the mental connection between cause and effect will be broken. Of course, breaking a mental link between „smoking‟ and „cancer‟ does not mean that
„smoking does not cause cancer.‟ It only means that Perceiver strategy no longer believes that „smoking causes cancer.‟
If Perceiver strategy is like an observer sitting in the Perceiver room looking through the window into the Mercy room for connections, then emotion could be compared to the brightness of each experience. If the emotional „light‟ is too strong, then Perceiver thought becomes „blinded‟
and can no longer discern connections. You can see now why Perceiver strategy is often tempted to „close the curtain‟ on its window into Mercy strategy. The constant glare of emotion from next door creates confusion and makes it hard to think.
Conscience is a Perceiver fact which connects cause and effect.
This fact ties together emotional Mercy experiences.
Mercy feelings can disrupt Perceiver facts which form conscience.
I suggest that there are many ways in which Perceiver confidence can be overwhelmed by emotional pressure. Let us look at some of the more obvious ones. First, the „bait‟ may be too desirable. As the saying goes,
“Every person has his price.” Suppose conscience says, for example, that
„stealing is wrong.‟ This rule may survive a ten dollar bill on the ground, but what happens if I run across a roll of one hundred dollar bills sitting there just asking to be taken?
A A fact initially enters the internal Perceiver world when I believe that it is definitely true and reliable. However, once in, it stays in, and is modified by other facts. After a while, I may no longer fully believe it.
Second, the punishment may be too harsh. If Johnny gets a very severe beating for his misdemeanor, then this experience will be so painful that Perceiver strategy will be unable to establish a mental connection between
„bait‟ and „hook.‟ Instead, the experience of punishment will remain blocked off in Mercy strategy, just like the core of a multiple personality.
This also limits the effectiveness of public discipline. Punishing criminals can only act as a deterrent to crime if the punishment is not too severe. If the penalty is inappropriately harsh, the result will be fear and not conscience.
Third, the personal environment may change.
Joe average citizen may believe very strongly in balanced budgets and government cutbacks, but when his own Mercy internal world has to identify with experiences of smaller paychecks, higher taxes, and cuts in government services, then the emotional glare of these experiences may be too much for Perceiver belief to handle.
Suddenly, social welfare becomes a bigger issue than fiscal responsibility. By the same token, a struggling socialist who becomes rich can easily discover capitalism.
In a related example, think of the religious leader who preaches the belief system that divorce is wrong and must be punished. What
happens if his own daughter gets divorced and decides to marry again?
Will his Perceiver belief survive intact, or will the Mercy emotion of identifying with divorce in the family overwhelm his Perceiver confidence?
Remember Henry VIII of England. His Mercy emotions confronted the Perceiver standards of his society. The Protestant Reformation in England was triggered by precisely this struggle.
Fourth, the probability of punishment may be too low. The problem with the statement “Smoking causes cancer,” is that not everyone who smokes will die of cancer. Therefore, a person can always say, “But it will not happen to me.” Let us analyze the mental processing behind this statement. When a person smokes, he is identifying with a certain situation;
he is pulling emotional experiences associated with smoking into his internal world of Mercy thought. If researchers come up with the fact that smokers are likely to get cancer, then this information will be remembered by automatic Perceiver strategy as a fact which is reasonable. We now have a collision between the Mercy internal world and Perceiver automatic thought. Obviously, emotion will win over reasonableness. It is only when the fact about smoking is pulled into the internal world of Perceiver strategy as a belief that it has any chance of affecting personal feelings about smoking. In other words, conscience will only survive if the smoker believes that he could develop cancer.
Finally, the time span between crime and punishment may be too great.
In order for conscience to operate, Perceiver thought must notice a connection between cause and effect. One could say that the Perceiver observer looking through the window into Mercy memory has only a limited attention span. Two Mercy events may in fact be connected, but if enough unrelated experiences slip in between, Perceiver thought, which is so easily interrupted, will be distracted and never notice the connection.
We can see this happening in the North American system of justice. The length of time needed to get a case to court is so long that justice often becomes a side issue. Instead, the process of appeal and counter-appeal turns into a game of its own, completely separate from the real world of crime and punishment.
Let me summarize. In order for conscience to be an effective deterrent, the punishment must produce sufficient Mercy pain. But, the Perceiver connection which creates conscience will only survive if the penalty is not too painful, the temptation not too pleasant, and the length of time between these two events not too great. This means that three principles should be followed whenever conscience is being programmed. First, the right amount of discipline should be used. Either too much or too little will produce undesirable results. Second, the right amount of time is required.
On the one hand, if consequence follows action too closely, then there is no need for Perceiver belief—automatic Perceiver thought is sufficient. On the other hand, if these two are separated by too long an interval, then Perceiver thought also will not notice connections between cause and effect. Finally, as conscience is being formulated, the mind should be shielded initially from excessive emotional pressure. Otherwise, emerging Perceiver strategy will freeze, mesmerized by the glare of Mercy emotion—and stop noticing connections.
Assuming that We are Different
We have seen that an effective conscience requires a solid Perceiver connection; Perceiver thought must know that there is a link between cause and effect. It is not comfortable for us as humans, though, to live with conscience. We have therefore evolved various ways to eliminate it.A The most simple method—and a quite common one—is to deny, using strong emotion, that some principle is valid.
A If life is built from bricks of conscience, then denial of conscience is a choosing of death. However, this is a Perceiver principle, and it can be overwhelmed by the glare of the moment.
Perceiver belief is easily confused by feelings; a strongly emotional denial can therefore be quite effective. However, this only removes a single rule of conscience. It is like using a handgun to shoot at a target.
Much more effective is to use Perceiver strategy itself to cripple Perceiver thought; this generates a mental „bomb‟ which obliterates the target and everything around it.
I suggest that this „bomb‟ works by attacking the implicit Perceiver assumption which lies behind