In reply to my Avoiding Coercion essay, I got a question about the need for creativity and thinking of good questions as part of the process. In March 2012, for the beginning of infinity list, I clarified:
There is no simple method of creating questions. Questioning stuff is creative thinking, like criticizing, and so on.
The point of this method is that it's so trivially easy. Anything that relies on thinking of good questions is not reliable. We don't reliably have good ideas. We don't reliably notice criticisms of ideas we consider. We don't always reach a conclusion for some tricky issue for days, years, or ever.
If avoiding coercion required creative questions, imaginative critical thinking, and so on -- if a bunch of success at all that stuff was required -- then it wouldn't be available to everyone, all the time. It would fail sometimes. There's no way to always do a great job at those things, always get them right.
But one of the big important things is: we can always avoid coercion. It's not like always figuring out the answer to every math problem put in front of us. Every math problem we're given is soluble, and given infinite time/energy/attention/learning/etc we could figure it out. But the problems which threaten coercion aren't like that. They don't require infinite time/resources. We can deal with all of them, now, reliably, enough not to be coerced.
That is what the article is about. What is this simple method that we can do reliably without making a big creative effort.
Now the method doesn't 100% ignore creativity. You can use creative thought as part of it, and you should. But even if you do a really bad job of that, you reach success anyway (where success means non-coercion). If you have an off day solving math problems, maybe you don't solve any today. But an off-day for creative thinking about your potentially coercive problems need not lead to any coercion.
The method doesn't require you to be thinking of good questions as you go along. If you do, great. If you don't, it works anyway. Which is necessary to reach the conclusion: all family coercion is avoidable, in practice, today, without being superman.
(I weakened the claim from dealing with all coercion because I don't want to comment on the situation where you get abducted by terrorists at gunpoint or other situations with force in them. That's hard. But all regular family situations are very manageable.)
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