Lately Iīve been contemplating the human animal, as always, and a new angle occured to me which I hadnīt previously considered. Excited, I followed this angle until it seemed to resolve itself into another apparent dead end. However, I havenīt dedicated enough time or effort to the theory to say for sure whether there is something there, or whether it is completely bunk so I leave that final conclusion to you, the reader.

It seems to me that much of human interaction involves getting other people to do things for you. Indeed, much of your success as a human being, and your overall place in society is decided by how much influence you eventually wield. To this end, the obvious question is, how, fundamentally, do people influence others to do things for them? When you say, "hey, get me a beer out of the fridge!" why will the person to whom you directed the comment jump to your command?

It occurs to me that there are two main "schools of motivation" that people can draw from and that all conceivable acts of coercion fall within these two schools. I have labeled the schools, for lack of a better terminology, "Threat of Force" and "Promise of Love."

Therefore, applying this philosophy to our above command (Hey, get me a beer out of the fridge!), you can see that the servant will respond A. Because he is afraid the master will beat him if he doesnīt. or B. Because he is afraid the master will not have sex with him if he doesnīt.

Threat of force.

Promise of Love...or sex depending on who the comands are directed at.

Now, itīs my suspicion, although I havenīt done any lengthy scientific studies to prove this, that you would find there are some commands that "Threat of Force" is ill suited to invoke, and some commands that "Promise of Love" will not invoke. For example, based on the nature of human beings, you cannot be a head of state operating on "Promise of Love" entirely. When it comes to items of survival, "Promise of Love" is simply not as effective because love doesnīt mean anything to you if youīve starved to death or something.

On the other hand, "Promise of Love" is far more effective when it comes to doing things like asking for directions. "Threat of Force" is completely useless there because the servant knows the master is probably going to get lost with bad directions and will have no way of coming back to actually act out on his threat. However, flirting with somebody is far likely to get you a good set of directions.

It would be easy to sit here and suggest that men generally use "Threat of Force" to motivate people and women use "Promise of Love" but I donīt know if that is entirely true. Where itīs easy to see examples of that...Pamela Anderson gets what she wants with "Promise of Love" and Adolf Hitler gets what he wants with "Threat of Force" there are also inversions, Tom Cruise--"Promise of Love", Hillary Clinton--"Threat of Force."

However, I think it would be fair to say society probably does generalize and assume men are all the "Threat of Force" type.

Now, this brings me to the interesting part of all this. That being that the idea of "Threat of Force" is not necessarily a bad thing even though it is perceieved as a bad thing. In fact, "Threat of Force" has no more potential for destruction than "Promise of Love" does, itīs just that human nature again has that pesky problem of misiterpreting things.

There are just some situations in which getting something done requires that you use force and that more people will be hurt if the force is not used. Thatīs fairly basic.

However, I think our human race has the tendency to equate "Threat of Force" with something bad and therefore men in general are regarded in lower general esteem than women. A man who is willing to kill a deer to save his family from starvation can never escape the stigma of having killed. Whereas a woman who loves her family unflinchingly right up to the point where they starve to death is somehow completely free of reproach.

This is completely unfair.

But, whatever.

Everybody has the option of using either "Threat of Force" or "Promise of Love" to influence people, itīs just that some people are so ugly or so weak that they canīt get one or the other of the paradigms to work.

I donīt know, this idea seems kind of interesting to me, but maybe it seems redundant to you. Thereīs a lot more I was intending to say, but Iīm getting tired. Iīll leave it to you, or maybe come back to it later.

Chau...