Part 4: Face to Face Democratic Culture

The dialogue continues. My friend's latest reply, followed by my response:

3. Forget skill building and role playing, etc.. This assumes good intentions. I'm wondering more about actors as pretenders. Liars. Sociopaths, even. People who are good enough actors to fake their way through a process like T group. Who can fake authenticity. Who use language to manipulate and take advantage of people committed to candor and self-discovery and disclosure. Iago. Or just people who are seeking their own advantage at the expense of the group.

I wonder what happens to the "arrangements to support authenticity" if you do not, or cannot, assume that everybody comes to the party with good intentions. Because I think you cannot.

4. A sentence in a later chapter of The Kindness of Women focuses the television point and might be a place to start talking about the internet. Ballard is again talking about the 1960s: "The media landscape had sealed a Technicolor umbrella around the planet and then redefined reality as itself."

My response:

First, briefly, I wasn't so much talking about "role" playing, I was talking about "playing" with different modes and levels of expression. But on to your main stuff.

What happens if you fake, pretend, lie in t-group? Well, if you are a good enough actor to fake your way through, then you fake your way through. That's totally okay and permissible, if that's the way someone wants to go. If someone pulls the wool over everyone's eyes, congratulations. But let me tell you that person would have to be a really, really good faker. And, the self's intentions aside, no matter how pure someone's intentions are when that someone says something, no matter how authentic he or she is being, there is likely someone in the t-group who is going to be suspicious of that person and their intentions, at least or especially early on in the group's life. That's an interesting discovery in t-group. Intentions don't really matter for anything until people have satisfied their criteria for trust (and people typically need to keep resatisfying those criteria over and over as a group changes and new topics and levels of intimacy are plumbed). Whether good or bad, a person's intention is only part of the equation* -- each of the other dozen or so participants also carries a part of the equation, that is, in how they receive that person's words or actions. (To recur to your example: Iago needn't have been much of a problem had Othello only received him differently.) Part of what's so cool about t-group is that it's not just two perspectives dealing with this sometimes insoluble issue of trust in a world where intentions can't be known for sure, it's 14 different perspectives.

[*The equation for what, you might ask? The equation of wordly reality. That is a part of what's going on here for me: we are working with the presumption, what if the determination of what is "real" were a wordly standard and not a subjective or objective standard? We can't know your intention. We achieve (or do not achieve) trust; we live in a state of trust, or we do not. The world comes into being through our interactions and the dynamics of our emotioning and through the assumptions that we knowingly and unknowingly share. Iago's intentions and actions were something. Othello's intentions, assumptions, emotions and actions in response were something too. The lived reality that came about as a consequence of the resulting actions is not reducible to the intentions by any means.]

I have considered "pretending" in t-group as an experiment (being very consciously false and "acting"), but I have never done it nor seen anyone try it that I'm aware of. I would need to think more about why I've so far decided not to do it. (Maybe I will bring the topic up overtly in a t-group sometime). Mostly, I think, I am afraid about breaching trust -- but it's a very interesting topic. It's important I think that t-group is all talk and relating, with no extrinsic reward beyond that. Thus there isn't really any "advantage" to be gained by faking or lying. It's not really necessary to lie in order to hide, because one can always set boundaries, openly or privately, in deciding what to reveal or not reveal. What motive would one have to fake, lie and pretend one's way "through t-group"? It seems the only possible motive would be a desire to be liked, loved or admired, and so it would be a self-defeating proposition. The t-group itself wouldn't need to care, really, if someone were, as you say, to try "faking authenticity." You get to do whatever you want in a t-group, and then you suffer the consequences in yourself and in your relations with others, whatever those consequences might be.

So what I'm realizing is that, contrary to your assertion, good intentions need not be assumed at all -- and, in fact, in the way the theory of the course is taught, they are explicitly not to be assumed (or rather, the key is to become more aware of when people are making assumptions, and more aware of the status of assumptions as such). Part of the model that the t-groups are based on says that intentions and motivations are known only to the individual (and even then sometimes not clearly so). All each of us has to go on to make sense of the actions and words of others are our own observations of extrinsic behavior, our own emotional responses to such behavior, and the thoughts and judgments that come up for us. You cannot really know someone's intentions.

Moreover or nonetheless, people in the group do make assumptions one way or another regarding people's intentions. Some are more apt to assume than others - usually at their peril. Sometimes the people in a group do in fact assume that a person is acting from bad intentions. Then the group works with that and its consequences. Liars and sociopaths do show up in t-group. People with mental instabilities show up. I've heard of some fairly dramatic cases. T-groups agree not to permit violence or abuse - the facilitator's baseline job is to protect people from abuse, to make sure no one gets run roughshod over in a harmful way. In rare cases, people do get run over. I've never heard of physical harm happening to anyone in a t-group, but I have heard of rare cases where people have been psychologically traumatized. The worst a sociopath could do is to gain trust, find a person's vulnerable spots, and go for as much blood as he or she can; if a person doesn't have the psychological resources to brush something like that off, a person could get hurt pretty bad, I suppose. Good intentions aren't assumed. For my own part, I am interested in being real and authentic, and I believe in my own good intentions, and I am interested in finding out how I sometimes get in the way of what I most want -- which is probably more often a matter of poor assumptions rather than poor intentions. [And that is a very key point.]

[Yes - it's more often a level of poor assumptions rather than poor intentions. This may be where writing, print and mechanically-reproduced thought introduce or amplify dangers. The act of speaking and the act of trust-making in the moment are severed from one another. Wisdom is "received" without necessarily being relearned in the moment or giving space for the examination of assumptions and responses. We are invaded by propoganda. We are fed assumptions as if they were truth.]

But reconsidering what you were saying, I could see this issue of good intentions being pressed at another level. Now I'm thinking that you were right all along in one sense. For there is a way in which -- despite everything I've just been saying and without I think undoing any of it -- there is a way in which good intentions are in fact necessarily assumed. For me, this goes back to that thing I recalled saying to you in the BART station a long time ago [see first posting in this series], and it recalls Maturana's words about the necessary preconditions for the emergence of languaging: people have to want to hang around with one another, or they must in fact spend a lot of time together getting to know and experience patterns of being together and mutually-responding to one another and to shared circumstances and experiences, before language can possibly emerge. Similarly, for a group to sit together in a circle and agree to conduct themselves in the way prescribed by t-group -- that takes a lot of assuming of good intentions. For two people to agree to sit at a table together in striking distance from one another, that assumes a certain level of safety and trust. (In the genteel worlds of Stanford and the Bay Area, that's not all so hard to arrive at; what about in a world at war? You might not be able to bring people together in such a circle at all, and if you got them there, they might not be able to hold back from violence. I don't know.)

At some level, if you are to have a world at all, you must assume good intentions, at least provisionally, with no guarantees. Finally, you have to live with yourself as a person who assumes good intentions or a person who chooses to prioritize and live with fear and suspicion.