Coercion, Conformity, Compulsion: Thoughts on 'Liberation' and the Grief of Learning to be Human

 Today my therapist told me that I seemed to feel disempowered or stuck, or something, in my life. "Where is your freedom?" or some similar question was asked. I became visibly frustrated with the word freedom. 

I told her that I rarely use the word freedom. I don't talk much about liberation. I generally agree with what these words point to: the easing of  coercion and violence; the abolition of oppressive structures'; the reorganization of society. Yet I resist the language of freedom and liberation. 

I am reminded of an paraphrase Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts: 'most worthwhile pleasures fall somewhere in between helping ourselves and helping another.'

Much of the complexity I am trying to work through is implicated in that concise phrase.

I don't know what it would mean to be free or to be liberated because I don't know what it would mean to not be connected to others and thereby obligated to others.

I do not lament obligation. I think that the question is owing the right people the right things. 

Liberation, of course, doesn't imply complete dissolution of responsibility, relation, dependence, and obligation. These things are centrally human. They cannot be done away with without some consequence. 

I have often explored these questions around liberation in the language of 'roles', and how all of human life is structured by formal and informal roles. We play many roles throughout our lives. My grandmother's memoir that I was recently reading indeed begins with her listing all the roles she has occupied in her life. 

Roles are inherently normative, they imply rules and standards of evaluation. Oppression, the opposite of liberation, has something to do with the roles that are available in a society, how people are 'cast' in the different projects that constitute society. 

 

Liberation would probably have something to do with roles in society being more equitable, not the dissolution of roles as such. Our society is certainly too complex for the roles to just dissolve; the famines would be awful if there were no truck drivers or boat operators or grocery store employees. So the goal is the reorganization of role structures, or the division of labor, and not the dissolution of role structure as such. I am ignorant of anarchist theory, but I think I've heard that anarchism retains a place for roles, for the division of labor and cooperation. These exchanges and relationships are just freed from illegitimate hierarchy.  

The really difficult question really is that of hierarchy, of leadership. 

I want to find a way around or through these difficulties with the notion of liberation, and I want to do so by writing through three words: Coercion, Conformity, and Compulsion. It's not clear to me precisely how these words blend together, but it is clear to me that they do. In sussing out their overlap I hope to move from a negative to a positive understanding of roles and more complex understanding of what liberation would mean given that roles will persist.

 

Talking about roles is a way of talking about our needfulness, our lack of self-sufficiency, our necessary dependence on others around us. No human being can really live alone, totally apart from others. Because we are needful, necessarily social or political, we must take on roles. The notion of 'role', moreover, extends to any complex whole of parts. We thus speak of the 'role' of the drums in a song, the 'role' of those eggs in this recipe, or the role of a sentence in a paragraph. In each case we point towards a whole of parts, an interconnected and interdependent whole.

Humans are complex. We take on roles within ourselves (the role of anger, the role of my anxiety...); we take on roles for those around us; and there is a relationship between these intrapsychic and interpersonal roles. 

Coercion

 To speak of coercion is to speak of violence. To coerce is to induce or 'persuade' someone to do something through force or threat of force. Our society is rife with various forms of coercion. Economic exploitation is probably the most pervasive form of coercion in America, so much so that large swaths of the population don't really talk about it, or would defend it. I acquired but have not read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, a foundational book in economic theory. Smith, I have heard, regarded the fear of destitution as an important motivator in individual's participation in the market. It is reminiscent of Hobbes' state of nature in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.

So, coercion can be quite explicit, as when someone pressures someone to do something. Or, coercion can be quite diffuse, spread out in a network of assumptions, practices, and institutions. Capitalism functions certainly based on endemic and silent forms of coercion.

Conformity

The basic object or goal of coercion is 'conformity' in some sense. In individual cases we see someone pressuring someone else to 'conform' to their standards, expectations, or practices (i.e. someone who doesn't normally smoke accepts a cigarette after being pressured, conforming in that moment). Similarly, the background coercion of capitalism asks for conformity; for us to be a certain way, think certain ways, speak certain ways (which is to say the same thing three different ways). 

 

Conformity is peculiar or difficult because we also like a sense of belonging. Belonging may involve a similarity in opinions, appearances, or practices. But belonging is qualitatively different from conformity. The former would be 'authentic' or natural or organic or something like this; the latter 'inauthentic', false, fake, or something. 

What, then, does it mean to be authentic, natural, or organic?

It seems that he human being is by nature pretty conflicted, divided, confused, discordant.

I think that being authentic or natural has something to do with compulsion.

Compulsion

Compulsion is a peculiar concept in that it initially seems to bear a strong resemblance to conformity or coercion. We can imagine saying, for example, that 'that person compelled them to give them their money.' To compel, to be placed under 'compulsion', could mean to be coerced or made to conform.

Compulsion, however, also has other uses that reveal different aspects of the experience. We also speak, for example, of how a person, piece of art, or idea is compelling. To find something compelling is to find it interesting, exciting, and demanding of our attention. There is something in a person/text/idea that we respond to, or something in us that responds to it. It seems that both 'compelling' and 'compulsion' (obviously) share a common Latin root compellere a combination of com (together) and pellere (drive). To find something compelling or to be placed under compulsion both have something to do with things being 'driven together'. Curious. I'm not entirely sure what to make of the etymology as I was just looking into it as I was writing this.

This divergence between the meanings of compulsion and compelling is telling about human experience. It should help us see that some of the most important parts of life, are bound up with a peculiar kind of necessity and a peculiar kind of power(lessness). Aspects of life like love, deep thought, or creativity all possess a type of necessity in which a person, an idea, or a project is compelling, it simply appears to us as such, we find it beautiful. There is much choice involved in how we pursue a love, an idea, or a project. Analysis, reflection, and time often change what we once thought beautiful or worthwhile. But what strikes us as beautiful enough to be worthwhile possesses a strange sort of necessity. It simply is so for us. 

In acknowledging this peculiar necessity I am also implying a type of power(lessness). I put it with those awkward parentheses because I'm trying to convey the peculiar way in which this sort of necessity at first glance appears as weakness, as a fault or flaw, but turns out, on deeper reflection, to be the source of properly human strength and stability. 

 

I am thus formulating and arguing for something like the freedom to be compelled or freedom as the freedom to discern which compulsions are actually worthwhile. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man in which he well summarizes the essential task of ancient Greek ethics as 'to learn to want what one ought to want.' We will most likely not be free from desire. Thus it is important to develop desire, actively participate in the coming of desires, and understand why we desire what we desire.

This view of freedom can be contrasted with images of freedom that imply a detached manipulator or observer. It often seems to me that I encounter people talking about choices or experiences as if they should somehow have been living from a detached, rational perspective. We all know what it is like to look back and find our actions befuddling. It can be easy for us to scold ourselves, perhaps, say 'You should have done such and such...' The internet is awash with jokes about people anxiously rehearsing interactions or conflicts in the shower and beyond. This type of scolding is wrapped up with spurious views of freedom in which we suppose we should be god-like, manipulative, masterful, or the like. This type of freedom, I think, can also be associated with capriciousness, the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want, to shirk all attachments and responsibilities and to set out into some sort of fictional self-sufficiency.

This type of spurious view of freedom isn't what I sense in leftist or liberal accounts of 'liberation'. This spurious view of freedom appears more in something like Ayn Rand, or other far right circles. I think that what I've said so far, about the strange compulsory quality of important parts of our lives, should raise questions about the meaning of liberation. If some of our deepest qualities as humans involve compulsion, obligations, 'debts' (in our sense here), then what would it mean to be liberated? 

When I look at situations in which I or someone else doesn't understand 'what I was thinking', or I'm talking to someone who is upset with themselves, I get really curious about what in that situation was so compelling. We are not 'simply rational' and we should not expect ourselves to be. We have to accept that situations have structures independent of us. These structures are partly physical, like roads, buildings and tools, but also partly symbolic, made up of our bodily habits and processes, and the words and symbols we use to develop those processes throughout the day.We live in intimate relationship with these situational structures, and our body is intimately familiar with how they work (just talk to someone who struggles to pee in public, the body understands the situation).

It is unimaginable to me that we would be without relationships, networks, always blending coercion and compulsion (in our proper sense). The goal of a society would be to limit the coercion, and to place more people in positions of being able to pursue what they find compelling. This is perhaps just some 'aptitudes' psychological theory or something. But I think I'm talking about something quite different.

To accept this view of freedom as developing compulsions is painful. It is to accept that there are very real limits to human happiness and autonomy. It is to accept that happiness and autonomy are not simply identical. Obligation, intimacy, involvement, and intertwinement all loom large in all human lives. I am aware, after the fact, that my last sentence contains a highly relevant pun. I speak of us as intertwined, an image of threads. And I speak of how this question looms. I don't understand why that word means both of those things for us, i.e. a thing that weaves and a thing that waits ominously. 

I think it is easy to take refuge in images of freedom that promise 'liberation' from obligation or responsibility. To become deeply familiar with freedom as a type of compulsion one has to grieve, has to come to terms with the limits of this process we are all going through (living). I, at least, have had significant grieving to do to reckon with what I have learned as I've grown up. There is so much pain in the world and in my family line and in my own life, it was often overwhelming and too much to really look at. It still is sometimes. But I also have a deeply intimate relationship with all that pain and difficulty and really see it as a place to honor and live from. 

 

So I am pointing to a concept of liberation that makes room for all of these compelling qualities about human life. We are not free to choose our loves, and we are not free to deny the compelling quality of an idea or project. We are free to sense into the intricacies and complexities of the situations we are living in and through.

I suppose my model for this type of freedom is a strange fusion of two important thinkers for me: R.G. Collingwood and Eugene Gendlin. 

Collingwood speaks of the highest form of freedom as 'duty'. By duty Collingwood means something like what I've described above: acknowledging that the most important experiences are accompanied by a strange form of necessity in which we find things 'compelling' or not. Collingwood knows that situations have these structures, and believes that freedom is a practice of 'consulting the situation', trying as hard as possible to understand what situation we are in. Real thorough understanding of a situation, and one's self in that situation, generally comes along with a sense of what 'one has to do'. Thus Collingwood says that duty implies a tautological formulation: 'this is what I have to do because this is what I have to do.' 

Much of my writing above, I confess, reeks of my learning from Collingwood, who I read incessantly in the early 2010s. He speaks often and forcefully of the compulsory quality of thinking, the compulsory quality of really 'dutiful' action.

Eugene Gendlin, by contrast, is a profound philosopher who developed an embodied therapeutic-philosophical practice known as 'focusing'. I am currently being trained as a focusing-oriented psychotherapist, and recently had a paper on Gendlin accepted for publication. 

Focusing is a process whereby one engages in a quasi-meditative awareness of one's body. One will generally, with a companion or alone, sit down and bring their awareness into their body. Instead of staying in a meditative posture, however, one sort of gently inquires 'How am I doing? What am I really living with here in my body?' When one learns focusing one learns that the body will actually answer such questions in quite peculiar, detailed, and precise ways. 

It is important to note that in attending carefully to one's 'body' I do not just mean the physical body, for the body is not merely a machine. The body is also the situational body, aware of what room or space we are in, what day and time it generally is, and what we are up to. Our bodies are attuned to all of this and more that isn't or doesn't need to be in explicit awareness. So in going into 'the body' in focusing one is going into 'all of that' understanding of the situation that the body has. 

The essential concept of focusing is that of a 'felt sense'. When one goes into one's body and 'senses' into a certain situation or problem, one may encounter a peculiar 'felt sense' of a situation; some murky sense of 'something about that interaction...'. This may be a familiar experience. Can you recall a situation or relationship that was particularly difficult or striking, so much so that its hard to put exactly into words what the feel of it is? A felt sense is our 'bodily', funny feeling about 'what happened' or 'what that was'. 

Gendlin says a felt sense has 8 characteristics:

1. A felt sense forms at the border zone between conscious and unconscious.
2. The felt sense has at first only an unclear quality (although unique and unmistakable).
3. The felt sense is experienced bodily.
4. The felt sense is experienced as a whole, a single datum that is internally complex.
5. The felt sense moves through steps; it shifts and opens step by step.
6. A step brings one closer to being that self which is not any content.
7. The process step has its own growth direction.
8. Theoretical explanations of a step can be devised only retrospectively.

The process of focusing is about going back and forth between a felt sense of a situation and explicit formulation or symbol. So I may sit and attend to my body and invite my sense of 'that whole thing with my old friends and video games'. Immediately I can feel my body respond to my invitation to that situation. 

 

So I actually closed my eyes and took a few deep breathes and started paying attention to my body. I noticed how loud the clock ticks behind me sometimes, which I can barely notice now as I'm typing again. As I kept breathing and noticing my body I thought to myself 'What is it with that whole thing with friends and video games?'. I experienced a little sensation in my chest that quickly turned into an image of something strange, like a neck stretching up and down and twisting. I was curious and I thought to myself 'is this choking or something?' When that happened I got clearer about the image and I realized it was actually like a creature stretching to bite something and defend itself, and that it was actually sad when it went back from having to bite and defend. I sensed that for a moment and then it shifted again and got more detail and I was left with an image of a hedgehog in a hole in the ground that was like a little house with a wood floor and a little kitchen and chair and tv. And the hedgehog likes playing video games but every now and then has to go to his door to keep some foes from getting in, which he does not like to do. Especially because those same intruders are later just fellow hedgehogs to hang out with.

I felt all of this as interesting and enjoyable and kind of a relief. It was nice to sense into the situation and have these images come up and realize that they are actually communicating something to me. It's nice to know that this is really about feeling bad about having conflict with friends. My 'body' had responded to my inquiry once I had taken a moment to settle into it and really be there with my full awareness. 

You can also see how my process reflects aspects of the felt sense named by Gendlin. Border-zone, this was a situation where yeah, I sorta know sorta didn't how I was 'really' feeling about it (1). It presented itself to me as an unclear bodily felt whole (2, 3, 4), and steps emerged from it (5). Those steps took me in a direction where I could witness the process more clearly as opposed to the content (6), and it took me in a direction of having more understanding of my own sadness and my friend's difficulties (7). Lastly, after that process I'm able to formulate the situation differently in more theoretical concepts (8): 'Oh okay I'm sad because it hurts to have to fight back against one's friend because later you'll want to be close again'. The crucial point is that it wouldn't have been as impactful to simply deliver that theoretical formulation to me from the outset. In some ways that theoretical formulation is in some ways obvious. But what matters is that I went through those experiential, embodied steps to get there. We all know that it is really hard to persuade someone of something simply rationally. Therapists don't, and should not, simply tell someone what is wrong and what they should do. A therapist facilitates someone else's process, always by providing a safe non-judgemental environment, and sometimes through fancier things like focusing, emdr, mindfulness, or what have you.

The most important feature to highlight about focusing and the felt sense for my purposes is that it is experienced as compelling. A felt sense, Gendlin often says is 'exacting', 'demanding', 'precise', or 'intricately ordered'. Gendlin often uses the image of a poet who is trying to finish a poem. The lines written so far have a 'feel', a quality, and the poet has a felt sense of 'all that'. The felt sense of the lines 'implies' which line is next. The poet tries a line and can sense that the line does not fit. The felt sense is responsive in that it responds to our explicit or symbolic formulations. It will tell us what words are just right. You don't have to be a poet to experience this, nor even learn focusing. But being a poet or learning focusing hone precisely this capacity for engaging in refined or higher forms of compulsion.

So, to put Collingwood and Gendllin would be to claim that when one wants to act dutifully, one wants to act from full embodied awareness of the situation, or handle situations in a 'focusing' or felt sense oriented manner. 

This would mean really pausing and sensing into your deeper sense of things, not settling at immediate reactions. Immediate reactions are generally overly logical, conventional, or rigid. It is so easy to just be on autopilot, reactive mode, saying yes to this and no to that, shutting down this conversation and indulging that one. Duty, responsible and relational action, would involve pausing, slowing down, sensing into the intricacy of the situation as one experiences it in their body, and really trying to be precise about how they want to meet the situation.

 

Duty and felt sensing is compelling. This is a peculiar form of freedom in that it is the freedom to listen carefully to what one is sensing. What precisely is the role of rational thought is an absolutely burning question that I must bracket. For I believe there is a role for formal systems, rules, roles, so on. But I don't have space here. 

This notion of duty, or being intimate with situational intricacy, to me, is the closest I can come to understanding the meaning of liberation. To be liberated would not mean to be capricious, or 'simply' free of obligation, whatever that would even mean. We find that the spurious obligations of our society (boys have to...) can be transcended and subsumed by a higher form of obligation, one's obligation to our deeper sense of things, the real source of sources of understanding.

I want to close with another brief note about the grief of this all.

To 'be intimate with situational intricacy' is difficult, I think, because all intimacy contains an acknowledgement of separateness and weakness. I have been sitting with some sense that intimacy and love have so much to do with death and grief. To be intimate with another person is to be in such deep relation to mortality. It seems like such a pleasure to be able to be intimate and vulnerable with another person. But it also seems like there is a peculiar question that rises, which is can we tolerate how frail and strange and vulnerable human life can really be? I feel tremendous grief in asking that question, a tremendous difficulty in acknowledging how much intimacy and comfort matters, and how hard it is to be in need of others so deeply.

To  be liberated, for me, is to grieve a certain sense of freedom and independence that I don't think really exists. To be liberated is to be in relation to others and myself in a way that allows something deeper in me to show its continuity in public. Our society is not liberated because so many people experience so much violence, are forced into positions in which their deeper processes are not actualized, in which life is spent in fear and survival alone.

To ensure or promote other people's deeper processes is to address the material conditions of people's lives, i.e. their housing, their healthcare, their ability to access resources, proximity to family and friends, their conditions of labor, so on. 

The most therapeutic thing that could happen in this country would be a genuine revival of support for a decked out welfare state. This would mean overcoming the legacy of the cold war that has skewed the country so far right. 

And then I run into the problem that I seem to keep running into, and that I won't be pursuing: the nature of political process differs from these intricate processes of felt sensing, of dutiful activity.

Gendlin puts it well when he says that politician really only work with the 'cut up options', the flat as opposed to intricate concepts. Collingwood would say they've not yet discovered duty and are stuck in 'regularian' thinking. 

I have tried to point at some concept of liberation that would also be a form of grief. It would involve recognizing the pervasive role of coercion in human experience, and attempting to become a 'compelled' person as opposed to a coerced person. People don't generally choose to be coerced, and would of course want to pursue what is genuinely compelling. Addressing this question, how conditions can be established so that people are coerced less and compelled more, seems like where I'm going.