Authority, Power, and Institutions

Personal Authority and Institutional Reform

Juanita D. Price and Carolyn Cutler Osborne

The work that we have done and the ideas on which our work has been based are of interest to people in academic institutions, but they were developed outside that setting. The basic set of our ideas came about as Juanita was figuring out how to cope with an abusive husband in the days before domestic violence shelters. We have developed and worked with these ideas in various settings, including two domestic violence shelters where we both worked as well as various college classrooms in which Carolyn has taught. We know that readers will find connections between our work and various liberational thinkers, some of whom we will mention by name in this paper. Yet we did not develop our ideas after reading these theorists; we come now to these theorists only after many years of working with our ideas. We have never found any theorist who has developed the same array of ideas that we have or explored the full range of implications that we find in our ideas.

The Power/Powerless Model

In writing about oppression, many theorists make reference to those who have what they call “power” (the reason for the quote marks will become apparent) in contrast with those who are therefore “powerless.” Those with “power” have control over their own lives, as well as the lives of other people. They make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the other people. Their “power” over other people causes these people to be oppressors. Oppressors have no interest in changing, in becoming non-oppressive, because they benefit from the oppression. Through oppression, they maintain their wealth, their “power,” their status, their kids’ opportunities to go to Ivy League schools, and so forth.

Where does this leave the “powerless”? Helpless. Actually, the Power/Powerless model causes all people to be helpless. Oppressors will always remain oppressive because of the position into which they were born and its benefits and the oppressed will always be oppressed because of the position into which they were born.

And, yet, we have to wonder if this model is borne out in history. If the oppressed will always be oppressed, then how did the abolitionist movement, and later the Civil Rights movement, get started? How did black liberationists achieve their various successes, such as changes in the US Constitution, changes in law, as well as changes in everyday interactions? How can the participation (and risk taking) of both blacks and whites be explained by a model that claims our inborn positions are immutable?

Structural Models of Change

One answer to the question of addressing oppression was developed by Marx and refined in various ways by other thinkers. We call this the Structural Model of Change because it suggests that new institutional structures can address the problem of oppression. Marx and Marxist thinkers deal primarily with economic institutions, suggesting that capitalist institutions are inherently oppressive and institutions that are owned by the workers would be liberational.
Other structural thinkers consider factors other than economics. For example, the movement to desegregate the schools is essentially structural or institution-focused in nature: if educational institutions are changed to include black and white children, then that will end the educational oppression of the so-called “separate but equal” school system. From the vantage point of fifty years later, we can see the fallacy of that thinking. In this paper, we will demonstrate why this thinking does not work and what kind of understanding explains the experiences of the Black Liberation movement and suggests effective means for action in the future. Before we get to that, we must consider more about the Structural Models of Change.

One of the hallmarks of structural thinking involves the number of people necessary to ensure the change of structures. Marx and Engels famously wrote: “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” The idea was that the proletariat would unite and we would eventually have socialism around the world. A similar idea is that of the workers’ strike. In both, a great number of people must be involved. A strike does not work if only two people picket. They would be summarily fired and life would continue as before.

While the banding together of the proletariat and the striking of workers have successfully created institutional changes, these new institutions have not been noted for being oppression-free. China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s is an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” advocated by Marx and, indeed, it was a dictatorship. One group of oppressors was replaced by another group of oppressors as the Red Guard went on rampages, children denounced their parents and teachers, and people were jailed without hope for a fair trial.
Strikes spurred the labor union movement here in the US. Labor unions did create some changes in company practices. For example, coal mines have become safer since the unions came into being. Miners are no longer being paid in script and ending up in increasing debt to the coal company as their careers progress. At the same time, the unions are not without their problems, including corruption. And, as corporations send their factory work to other countries that do not have the inconveniences of unionization, American unions are becoming obsolete. They no longer have the influence they once had.

The twentieth century was a grand experiment in institutional structures. During that time, we experienced the rise and fall of various forms of communism and fascism. Great Britain moved from being a top colonial “power” to experiencing the sun setting on its diminished empire. The US has experimented with various forms of capitalism, including the laissez-faire “trickle down” theory of Republicans in the last decades of the century.

All of these changes took place with the idea of benefiting people in some way. Mussolini caused the trains to run on time, which is a convenience. Communism was going to end economic oppression, yet the hoi-polloi of communist countries still had to stand in lines to get limited groceries while party members had easy access to the forbidden fruits of capitalism. Many countries got rid of colonial governments but their self-government has not created significant improvement in people’s lives. Trickle down economics was supposed to first benefit the rich and then benefit the rest of us. It didn’t.

And yet, this isn’t the whole story. When we think only in terms of structures, which can only be modified by large groups of people, we are missing out on what has truly made a difference for the good (and also for the bad) in history: the actions of individuals. How do we understand these possibilities while still taking into account the allure of the institution?

Authority, Power, and Institutions

In our article, “Games Intellectuals Play: Authority, Power, and Intelligence,” (Price and Cutler, 2001), we presented some new ways of understanding human relationships. These ways account for institutional behavior as well as individual behavior that defies institutions and creates change. We account not only for deliberately-planned institutions such as government, educational, and corporate structures, but we also account for ad hoc institutions such as racism.
We will review key ideas from that article here, demonstrate how they apply to institutions, and show how individuals can avoid being controlled by the institutions to which they belong. Our goal, as will be shown, is not “empowerment,” but the acknowledgement of the authority which we each can gain in our lives and which we can use individually to the betterment of our collective society.

Understanding Authority and Power

The word “power” is overused, overworked, and misunderstood. While “power” can imply control because it has been used for that meaning so often, its primary meaning is “energy.” If we allow “power” to be energy, we still have a word that implies “control”: “authority.” If we use both words, then we have some way of separating out the two elements that influence any kind of action whether it is action in the physical world or in the human realm.

All actions require energy in order to be completed. A ball cannot roll without energy, a bird cannot fly without energy, a bomb cannot explode without energy, people cannot move their bodies or share their ideas with one another without energy.

Along with energy, there is control. Some actions can take place without any kind of control. A severe storm such as a tornado has no control, nor does an erupting volcano or a furious two year old throwing a temper tantrum. Actions that use energy without control are destructive in nature.

All constructive actions use energy and control. That goes for the first baseball pitch of the spring, driving a car, talking to friends, and teaching children. There are destructive actions that are highly controlled such as Hitler’s bureaucratically efficient death camps. The nature of the control determines whether the action is constructive or destructive. Power has little to do with that—it is simply the mindless, amoral energy that allows a task to get done. Yet power is required for actions even if authority/control is optional; no action can take place without energy.

Therefore, it should be obvious that all human beings possess power, which is the essence of life. We have energy from our birth to our death.

What we don’t all possess is control, authority, and thereby hangs our particular tale. It is the getting and using of authority that determines the moral quality of our lives and our accomplishments. And it is not merely the getting of authority from an institution, although that can be significant, as we shall see.

Authority and power are the potential elements of any action that takes place. Yet there are two types of each of these elements: Personal and Positional. The power each of us is born with is Personal Power. Short of killing us, no one can take away our personal power. We will define Personal Authority shortly and will come to see its critical importance in all human endeavors. Suffice to say here, Personal Authority is the ability to control one’s own use of energy—it is self-control. No outside person can take away one’s Personal Authority.

In contrast to the personal elements, positional elements are granted to a person by outside entities and therefore can be taken away. Positional Authority is the authority that accrues, for example, from membership in an institution. A teacher has Positional Authority over his or her students and a boss has Positional Authority over the employees.

Positional Authority seems to be self-explanatory; the idea of institutional positions of control makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. Given present understandings of control, however, Positional Power seems less obvious. If authority is control, then there must be power, because without power, nothing happens. Therefore, Positional Authority finds itself over Positional Power. The boss commands something to be done and the employee in the Power Position uses his or her energy to do it. The role of Positional Authority is to command; the role of Positional Power is to OBEY those commands—to carry them out, to be the energy that makes the commands of the authority happen.

While the idea of command and obedience seems draconian to some, what accompanies the right of command is critical, and that is the responsibility to take care of the Power Position. Without power, energy, authority accomplishes nothing. We know that from labor strikes and we also know it when we are exhausted and no matter how willing the spirit is, the flesh is weak. We have no energy. If we fail to take care of our energy source (our own personal energy over which we individually have command or the energy of the person over whom we have command), then work will not get done because authority without power is impotent.

Of the four components, Personal Authority is the most important, most likely to make a difference, and the most difficult to attain. We are born with Personal Power. Our first job is likely to be one in which we are in the Power Position. Eventually, we may get appointed to an Authority Position (even if we are simultaneously the Power Position to someone else’s Authority Position).

Personal Authority, the ability to control the self, however, must be developed. Self control comes in four flavors: physical, intellectual, emotional, and ethical maturity. Physical self control is developed early and easily. When we are born, we are not able to control our physical bodies. By the time we are pre-school age, we are toilet trained and able to feed ourselves. As we get older, we gain even more physical self-control skills, such as those that allow us to ride a bicycle. All we have to do to gain physical maturity is simply to stay alive.

Intellectual self control involves being able to learn and to use knowledge. It takes a little more effort to develop intellectual maturity. This maturity not only involves cognitive development but also making choices about what to learn and then doing that. Intellectual maturity can be enhanced by being smart, however, it is important to understand the limitations on pure intelligence. White collar crime, computer hacking, Watergate, the savings and loan scandal, and the business scandals of Enron have all been perpetrated by smart people who lacked other important forms of self-control.

When we reach emotional self control, we are beginning to come into the real meaning of maturity. Emotional self control does not mean that people become unfeeling robots. Rather, people with emotional maturity make choices about how they express their feelings and how their feelings influence their actions. A performer facing a large audience for the first time may feel nervous and fearful. But if the performer has emotional maturity, he or she recognizes those feelings and still steps out on the stage. Fear does not stop the performer from accomplishing something. Likewise, an emotionally mature person may feel angry at another person or about a situation. Instead of throwing a temper tantrum or beating someone up, which are power tactics (they use energy but no self control), the emotionally mature person finds safe ways and safe places to express and deal with his or her anger.

The final type of maturity is the most important and the most difficult to attain. In fact, many people make it to physical, intellectual, and even emotional maturity without this attribute. And yet, without ethical maturity, we are not truly Adult. Ethical maturity consists of the ability to act based on the greater good, even if that action requires self-sacrifice. In other words, an ethically mature person makes decisions based on something much higher than personal benefit.
Adults have the four types of maturity and therefore they possess Personal Authority. Infants have no forms of maturity and they possess only Personal Power and not Personal Authority. Children are working on attaining maturity and any given child may possess aspects of maturity. A person, no matter how old, however, is not an Adult if he or she fails to possess ethical maturity. Therefore, we call a person who has Personal Authority (in particular, ethical maturity) an Adult and we call a person who lacks it a Child. This terminology we use despite the age of anyone so designated. If a young person makes decisions that reflect ethical maturity, that person is an Adult and if an old person fails to, that person is a Child.

One major implication of Personal Authority has to do with the Class system it creates. There are two classes of people: Those with Personal Authority and those who lack it. Adults and Children. Adults who have Personal Authority have a different set of rights from the Children who lack it: Adults have Adult rights, which are balanced by responsibilities. For example, Adults have the right to drive cars because they also have the maturity to handle the responsibility of driving safely. Children, as we will see, have one main right: to be the responsibility of a Parent. Finally, in the Adult/Child class system, second class citizens (Children) are expected to become first class citizens with a full array of Adult rights, merely by growing up.

Thus far, we have looked at individuals. However, it is relationships—interactions between two people—where things get interesting. There are two types of relationships: one is when both parties occupy the same position, such as two co-workers or two friends. The other is where people occupy different positions. While people occupying the same position can have their troubles, it is when people occupy different positions that the “fun” begins. Or work. We have identified two types of positions: Authority Position and Power Position. The Authority is always over the Power, so we call this the Authority/Power Relationship (APR). There are three types of APR’s—two are positive and one is the source of all forms of oppression, including the deceptive institution of racism.

What is key to the health of an Authority/Power relationship are the personal characteristics of the people who occupy the positions. The Adult possesses ethical maturity, which means he or she acts out of concern for the greater good rather than personal gain or self interest. The Child does not possess this type of maturity and primarily acts out of self-interest.

Adult to Adult APR

In the Adult-to-Adult APR, both positions are filled by people who possess Personal Authority. There is discomfort about authority among people who desire to end oppression, as if all forms of authority are oppressive. In actuality, authority can be constructive. A competent, ethical boss can not only be a joy to work for but can also be a source of comfort, particularly when the employee is doing a new task and taking some kind of risk. A competent, Adult boss is a source of wisdom and experience, which support the employee.

The real advantage of an Adult-to-Adult APR, however, lies in the fact that the person in the Power Position is also an Adult. This fact might be surprising—one generally thinks that the Authority Position is where decisions are made, but that is not true. Overall in this understanding of Authority and Power, we will come to know the particular weakness of Positional Authority and the relative strength of Personal Authority, particularly when someone is operating in a Power Position beneath Positional Authority.

Being an Adult means not being an automaton, blindly doing what the Authority says. This fact is recognized even if its implications are not understood. For example, the defense, “I was just following orders” is not likely to help the US guards in the Iraqi prison scandal. Whistle blowers were presumably given similar orders and yet chose not to follow them.

The fact of the ethical maturity of the person in the Power Position is what keeps this relationship healthy because an unethical action will not be taken. No one is perfect and even the best boss can make a mistake. When this happens, the Adult in the Power Position can either negotiate a different action by appealing to the boss’s ethical maturity or can choose not to do the task. Usually what happens when the boss is truly an Adult, is a negotiation and the boss changes his or her mind or redefines the task to accommodate the concerns of the employee.
In an Adult to Adult APR, the primary source of authority is Personal, not Positional, on the part of both people. The person in the power position acknowledges the authority of the other person not because of relative positions within an organization but because of that person’s wisdom and knowledge. A classroom teacher, in this instance, would recognize not so much the principal-ship itself but the personal qualities of the excellent person who filled that role. This principal would be not simply a source of work and district mandates, but rather a source of support for the teachers—in their dealings with children and parents as well as their putting into practice whatever required curriculum there is.

Parent to Child Authority-Power Relationship

The other positive APR is that between the parent and the child. Just as biological age does not indicate true maturity, biological parenthood is not the same as being a Parent. The conditions and demands of a child require something more than a mere Adult, which is why this relationship is called the Parent to Child APR rather than Adult to Child APR.

In the Parent to Child APR, the Authority Position actually creates the Power Position: whether by childbirth or adoption, the Parent creates the Power Position. In order to create this, a sacrifice is required: the Parent spiritually sacrifices his or her Personal Power to the Child and the two are essentially one at least at the beginning. The Parent has Positional Authority and Personal Authority and the Child has Positional Power and Personal Power. In fact, at this point the Parent owns the Child because the Parent is the sole source of Authority (Personal and Positional). The ownership is balanced by the sacrifice of Power to the Child.

If we have posited that no one can take away Personal Power above, how can this be, that parents sacrifice their Personal Power to their children? Consider the state of Parents when they bring an infant home. They go without sleep in their effort to make sure that the infant is clean, well-fed, and reasonably happy. They become exhausted in this process—that is one example of the sacrifice of Personal Power. And how does the infant communicate his or her needs? Using Personal Power: cry, whine, and kick power!

Both sacrifice and ownership do not last forever, but they are critical. First, sacrifice and ownership mean the two people are one and that when the baby hurts, the parent hurts. Anyone who has taken care of a child with an ear infection at 2 a.m. knows this helpless feeling. The ability to feel pain on behalf of the other is a safety feature in the relationship. An infant cannot do anything to care for itself. Indifferently cared for infants, such as those in orphanages, don’t always thrive because no one there is committed enough to feel their pain and to make the extra effort to comfort them. Ownership and sacrifice actually protects the infant. No matter how weary and frustrated a true Parent is, he or she does not take out those frustrations on the Child because to do so would hurt the child, which would hurt the Parent.

The other unique feature of the Parent to Child APR is that the Authority is required over time to give up its position. A Parent’s job is to help a child grow up, to develop Personal Authority. When the Child becomes an Adult, the Parent’s position and ownership disappears. Adults do not need to be owned. It is true that when the new Adult deals with problems and briefly needs a Parent again, the position might be taken up again until the crisis is over. But in general, the two renegotiate their relationship as an Adult to Adult relationship.

The most important relationships in any society are the Parent to Child APRs because that is how the next generation grows up. Unfortunately, a look at the news reveals how many people have created biological children but are not able to be Parents. And our society must deal with the results of that, with delinquency and on-going problems of immaturity, including drug and alcohol addiction, in the lives of people who should theoretically have become adults.

Deceptive Authority-Power Relationships

We have gone on at length about Adult to Adult APR’s and Parent to Child APR’s in order to be able to describe the insidious Deceptive Authority-Power Relationship. The Deceptive APR hijacks characteristics from the two positive APR’s in order to create the conditions for oppression. As we will see, this APR is responsible not just for annoying bosses but also for oppressive “isms,” including racism.

The major terms of the Deceptive APR come from the Parent-Child APR, only without the positive intentions or results. This is because the person in the Authority Position, who lacks Personal Authority, makes no sacrifice on behalf of the Power Position; the Authority Position person simply enacts the ownership principle without the sacrifice. In fact, the person in the Authority Position expects sacrifices from the person in the Power Position. In this way, the Overgrown Kid in the Authority Position benefits from the oppression he or she is able to visit upon the wretch in the Power Position.

Yet, the problems go even deeper. Many institutions are consciously created by people. Yet others exist that are not consciously created. They are an aggregation of a history of interactions between people based on false class systems. Deceptive APR’s steal the positive class system between the Adult and Child (wherein second class citizens are expected to become first class citizens) and create a model of immutable class. One class is superior and the other inferior, and nothing can change that. Even liberational “power theorists” play into this Deceptive APR by declaring that class controls consciousness and people from the oppressive classes cannot transcend their position to become nonoppressive. As will be seen, we are not promising that it is easy to grow up, but the good news is that it is possible.

From the Adult to Adult APR, the Deceptive APR wrenches its appearance. It appears that there are two Adults in this relationship. In fact, there are no Adults in this relationship. There is an Overgrown Kid (someone who is Adult-size and shape but who has failed to grow up and who benefits from remaining childish) in the Authority Position and there is a Manufactured Child (someone who has an interest in growing up but may not see how to do so because of the terms of the relationship) in the Power Position.

Deceptive APR’s are everywhere, and we can identify them if we are able to see not the external appearance of Adulthood on the part of oppressive people, but the psychological and spiritual reality of their immaturity. We also need to see the ways in which people are pushed into Childishness when they are victimized. And while we are at it, we need to see how our “I want it now!” society is based on Childish values.

What Is an Institution?

An institution is a collection of individuals among whom certain interactions have been “programmed” in the interest of performing specific tasks. An initial analogy for an institution is the computer chip. Circuits on the chip are set up such that when certain conditions exist, certain electrical circuits are open. When those conditions shift, “gates” open or close and make available a different array of electrical circuits. Electrons flow through the circuits that are open.
Every institution has its “programming.” The welfare office has procedures that “clients” go through in order for case workers to determine their eligibility for government assistance. Fast food joints have procedures for serving burgers and fries as quickly and efficiently as possible—these procedures allow these businesses to be “franchised,” or duplicated (in theory) the world around. Factories have lines for the systematic creation of goods. Schools have curricula for students and teachers to follow. Governments have laws that are obeyed or disobeyed and court systems to determine whether or not the law has been followed.

There are several problems with institutional “programming.” First of all, not every human being is as cooperative as an electron. An electron is mindless and doesn’t care where it goes in the circuit. People, in contrast, do care. And their circumstances may cause institutional programming to be inappropriate or even destructive. Perhaps a welfare applicant has a higher income than the cutoff point for welfare but also huge medical bills because her minimum wage job does not include health insurance. Perhaps someone on the hamburger line is ill and is not performing up to speed. Perhaps a nut doesn’t go on the way it is supposed to up the factory line and that is causing problems down the line. Perhaps a learning disabled student or the ordinary child with a passion for a particular topic needs a different curriculum. Perhaps a law is ambiguous when applied to a particular situation.

Secondly, as programmed structures, institutions are inherently amoral. They are a series of rules that govern the activities of every person who occupies the positions within the institution. There may be moral positions that have created the impetus for the rules, but an impetus or the spirit of the law cannot be institutionalized. We have seen that the rules cannot cover all possible cases, and, further, the rules are always interpreted by the people in the institution. Rules are always subject to the moral status of the person interpreting them as they are put into action.

So, for example, integration was a means for reforming the educational institutions of the US. This meant a change in the laws and rules in the interest of improving educational opportunities for blacks. How those rules and laws got enacted when it came down to drawing up school districts depended on the attitude of the people doing the creation of districts. Obviously many of them had a poor attitude about the change in laws and rules because it became necessary to institute busing, some years later, in order to achieve actual integration. And even after busing was instituted, schools that had both black and white students were not truly integrated; Carolyn recalls going to an “integrated” high school in which the highest tracks were predominantly white/middle class (with two token middle class black students) and the lower tracks were predominantly black and lower class (Appalachian) whites. Further, white kids had their lockers in one hall and black kids had their lockers in another hall.

A more positive example would be that of a worker in a battered women’s shelter that Carolyn ran. This worker was very much rule bound and typically had narrow, ungenerous interpretations of the rules. One night when the worker was on shift, it was extremely cold outside and a little dog found its way to the door of the shelter. This worker made the decision to bring the animal in out of the cold. When Carolyn found out about it, she was delighted that the worker had broken the rule about no pets in the shelter in favor of a greater ethical principle, the need to take care of the hurting. Of course, it would have been inappropriate for the worker to keep the dog at the shelter on a permanent basis, but the worker’s humane action that night made it possible to find a home for the animal the next day.

Morality is an aspect of Personal Authority. If a person occupying an institutional position has Personal Authority, that person’s work within the institution will be moral. First off, that person would probably not serve in an institution committed to doing something morally wrong. Secondly, within an institution with a morally neutral or positive purpose, this person’s work will be moral because of his or her Adultness.

Likewise, if a person in an institution lacks Personal Authority, his or her work will reflect that. We both worked in an organization that had at its head an Overgrown Brat. Even though the overall purpose of the organization was positive and even though we did our best to work to the benefit of the organization’s constituents whenever possible, the organization did not accomplish nearly the good it could have because of the handicap of its director.

Thirdly, institutions seduce Children, which is how institutions become self-sustaining. How many of us have the guts to say, “the job I hold is not necessary to the good of this institution and therefore I will find another job” or “this institution is no longer necessary for this community and therefore we will close it down and go do something else.” Most institutions are closed long after they should have been and with great regret that they couldn’t have lasted longer. Many institutions are top heavy with bureaucracy because it is much easier to create a job than to get rid of one.

Institutions seduce in many ways. First, there is money. The higher the salary, the greater the seduction. Then there is status within the institution. For people who lack Personal Authority, Positional Authority is the only control they get. Positional Authority looks real good to them because they don’t understand that with authority comes responsibility. They want to control others and the only way they are going to get to do that is through a Position because God knows their Personal approach is not going to get them anywhere. There is also the status of being associated with a particular group or company. There must have been a time when even the custodians bragged about working for Enron. Then there are perks. In the case of the university, the chief perk is a job for life (talk about institutional self-maintenance) once the prerequisite hoops have been jumped. There are people who will compromise every ideal they ever held in order to get tenure.

The result of the seduction is that the Child works first of all for institutional maintenance and only secondarily for the stated purpose of the institution. The welfare worker who acts as if it is her personal money she is “giving away” would be an example or the bureaucrat who is more interested in rule following than actually getting something done. These are people who attend to the letter of the rule at the expense of the spirit.

What Is To Be Done?

For all of their problems, institutions are also a convenience. Large scale human activities such as government, universal education, advanced medical care, the dissemination of ideas (media), justice, the provision of electricity and gas, and heavy manufacturing require institutions to organize getting the job done.

The key to using institutions in a positive way is Personal Authority. Personal Authority allows people to run institutions instead of being run by them. Personal Authority means that aspiring executives make choices to leave after they have done a reasonable job on a given day so they can be with their families instead of automatically staying just because someone else is staying or staying after work hours is one of the unwritten rules. Personal Authority means that teachers take a critical look at mandatory curricula and make informed decisions about how to supplement it according to the needs of the children in their particular classroom. Personal Authority means that as a boss, one takes seriously the need to take care of the workers in the Power Position, advocating on their behalf to the higher ups for reasonable working conditions and reasonable pay. Personal Authority means standing up for what is ethical even when that defies the terms of one’s Position.

The other aspect of the possibilities of individual action is that effective change can take place just with the intervention of one person. We know a person who was “low woman on the totem pole” in her workplace. She was constantly at the mercy of higher ups who were Overgrown Brats. With instruction from Juanita, she began to use Personal Authority tactics in her workplace and the whole tenor of the place changed for the better. When we worked for the Overgrown Brat mentioned earlier in this article, we were in the lowest job position of the organization. Yet we were able to make an intervention with the director that caused her to change how she dealt with people. She didn’t grow up but she also discovered that there were limits in how she could push people around. Our actions had an effect on the entire organization.

Deceptive APR’s can be dealt with in the same manner. The students who integrated the Arkansas school system carried with them an Adult dignity. They did not stoop to the dangerous, Childish tantrums of the white majority. They were few in number but large in the spiritual rightness of their stance, in their Personal Authority. This dignity won them individual supporters from the “other” side. This is a public example, about which books have been written. There are many examples that do not show up in books because such things are not understood well enough to be recorded. The fictional movie, Driving Miss Daisy, shows how the Personal Authority of an individual in two simultaneous Power Positions (one as employee and one as black man under deceptive white authority) can trump Positional Authority.

The above are examples of people in the Power Position creating changes. It is also possible (and this is where this perspective differs significantly from the determinism of structural thinkers) for those in Authority to institute Adult practices. A number of years ago, Carolyn became the director of a small battered women’s shelter. Prior to her taking that position, the shelter rules had represented a paternalistic approach to the clients of the shelter. In other words, the rules placed the clients in the position of Children. For example, clients were not allowed to eat or drink anything with sugar or caffeine in it. The sugar was kept in a locked cabinet and only the staff could open it. The result of these rules is that the clients acted like children: they kept on eating candy and drinking pop in secret. The shelter faced a bug problem because of the candy hidden in the bedrooms. Not surprisingly, the shelter was facing funding problems because part of the funding was dependent on how many clients it served, and there were many days when the shelter was empty.

The first thing Carolyn did as director was to rewrite the rules. She got rid of anything that placed clients in the Child position and she got rid of the lock on the cabinet with the sugar. She allowed coffee in the shelter. She made the assumption that clients were Adults until they proved otherwise. When there were problems with maturity, she dealt with those problems individually.

One of the results of considering the people served as Adults, is that eventually some of them joined the shelter staff. After Carolyn left her job as director, the shelter program got the opportunity to design and build its own building, becoming one of the few facilities around that was specifically designed to be a shelter for battered women. One of the people on staff at the time had been a client of the shelter during Carolyn’s tenure. This worker helped the team of architects to understand that family style bathrooms (with shower/tub and one toilet) would be more homelike and therefore better than institutional style bathrooms (with stalls) for the people living at the shelter. Because of her experience as a client, she was able to influence the structure of the building, to make it more comfortable for future clients. This is an example of how Personal Authority can make long term, permanent changes in an organization.

Likewise, people in the Authority Position of Deceptive APR’s such as racism can make choices not to operate under the terms of that position. Many people have made that choice: the white abolitionists who took risks on behalf of and opened their homes to freedom seekers, the reconstructionist Yankee school teachers who provided education for sharecropper children, the white supporters of the Civil Rights movement, white teachers who make a commitment to teach in urban schools.

Obviously, these people’s works are not entirely without problems. The alleged “president” of the Underground Railroad, Levi Coffin, who personally housed more than two thousand freedom seekers, held a paternalistic attitude toward the people he helped. Yet in terms of what counted for Personal Authority in relation to the racism of his day, he was leagues ahead of most white people. Likewise, the Quaker man who helped to support Harriet Tubman’s dangerous work also displays a paternalistic attitude in his writings about Tubman. Yet when she needed money, he always had it for her and he did admire her to a great extent. White liberal attitudes in the 1960s were better than those of racist whites of that time, but they are embarrassing to consider now. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, racism has become more subtle and the identification of its nuances is becoming more acute even if the identification process lags behind the process of being racist in secret ways.

Taking Action With Personal Authority

In our 2001 article, we outlined several principles for Personal Authority-based actions. These included:
· The main goal is to change a destructive authority/power relationship into an Adult to Adult relationship. This means that the person in the power position who is using personal authority will not be creating a reverse tyranny in which the original tyrant becomes the victim.
· The reason to change a tyrannical relationship is not only for the benefit of the victim but also for the ultimate benefit of the oppressor. No one benefits in a fundamental way by oppression even though some people appear to benefit or they benefit materially.
· The tactics which are being used are personal authority tactics. These tactics reflect emotional and ethical maturity--the maturities which are central to personal authority.
· The method of challenging tyranny focuses on the exercise of personal authority by the person in the power position; it does not have as a main focus the actions of the tyrant even though the results of the challenge are to limit tyranny. Thus, the person in the power position begins to exercise his or her adult rights in a way which reflects personal authority.
· The personal authority includes a recognition of the adult rights of the tyrant. In this way, the person who exercises personal authority places the tyrant in the position of living up to the adult status which he or she pretends to have (Price and Cutler, 2001, p. 492).

To this list, we would like to add a new concept: blamelessness. Blamelessness is irreproachable behavior; that is, it is actions that are recognized to be well within the rights of an Adult human being. At the same time, to be blameless is to be fearless in exercising those rights. It is also proactive, rather than reactive in nature.

For example, in her book, Womansearch, Juanita describes how she changed the relationship she had with her abusive husband by changing how she acted around him. She began this change by instituting what she calls a “turnaround,” in which she made it clear through her actions that she was not the victim he thought she was.

Normally when he was due to come home from work, she would find some excuse to stay as far away from him as possible for as long as possible. She would work in the basement or else in the attic. Anything to put off having contact with him because he was ugly in his interactions with her.

On the day of the turnaround, she changed all that. She simply stood in the doorway and waited for him to come home. When he drove up, he saw her in the doorway. He actually became afraid because of this vastly different set of circumstances. At some level, he knew that he had behaved badly toward her and that it was possible she was setting him up for revenge—she could have had a knife behind her back.

What makes this behavior blameless is that any Adult has the right to be anywhere in the house at any time. Yet she also had to walk over fear in order to do this because it seemed to her as if it might spark an altercation. Her pattern of behavior had been to avoid altercations by avoiding him, yet that had not worked. She was partly afraid that she would be volunteering for a fight by standing in the doorway. Yet avoiding him had not worked, so she knew she had to do something different.

He hesitated to come to the door, but since there were neighbors who were watching, he forced himself to leave the car and come to the house. Juanita’s words tell this part best:

He is taking his time, carefully and slowly closing the car door. I stand firm
and still quiet, waiting, but he will not even look in my direction at all. How
strangely GOOD it feels, watching him approach me, without the burden of fear
riding my back. He has now come all the way up the walk and stepped upon the
porch, without raising his eyes to mine.
We are face to face. I do not open my mouth, yet I continue to look dead at him. I make no move to step aside so he can enter. The silence is deafening.
He licks his dry lips. He looks at me queerly. This man is walking on eggshells around me. Hey—I used to do that around him! Now, grinning foolishly, he speaks—
“Uh…hi, Honey.”
Honey.
HONEY? Do tell—I haven’t heard that since God knows when. I been thinking all
this time that my name is Bitch, Slut, and Whore.
“Won’t you come in,” says I to him, stepping aside now to let him into his own house… “I have some things to tell you,” I say to him.
“Okay.”
So I begin speaking to him, softly and firmly. There is no need to shout. There is no need to abuse him with name-calling either. I am speaking without anger and without hatred. Nor do I speak with tears. The gist of my whole talk is that I am displeased with his treatment of me and my children and that I will not tolerate such behavior from him in the future—beginning right now. I also list a few specifics. I look directly in his eyes as I speak, except he avoids it.
His response is low-key. At first he doesn’t pay much attention to what I am saying; he is too busy worrying about how to escape or fight off the secret weapon he just KNOWS I have hidden somewhere in the house. But no, baby, it ain’t hid. It’s in your face—you just can’t comprehend it.
By the middle of my speech, [his] eyes are huge with disbelief. He does not understand how I can be saying these things to him and be so unemotional about it. He starts backing away from me but I follow him. Then he holds me off with outstretched hands and says that he understands that I must not be feeling well and will come to my normal self soon. But by the time I’ve got it all said, he is running out the door saying that I have lost my mind.
It was twelve midnight before he came back. He was quiet as a mouse, to avoid waking me (pp. 115-117).

This turnaround was only the beginning of a vast change in their relationship. She had to follow through in an Adult manner in order to keep the ground that she gained in this initial interaction. This relationship took place, as mentioned, before shelters for battered women existed, so she had no allies she could call upon. In those days, police officers had not received special training for dealing with domestic violence, so she could not even count upon protection from the police (even assuming they could get to her house before he hurt or killed her). Her consistent following through led her through some hair-raising times described in her book, but also kept her safe. By the time she elected to leave with her children, he knew that she and her children could not be victimized and he did not therefore try to stalk her or otherwise punish her for leaving him.

It is worth taking some time to analyze the turnaround for characteristics of blamelessness in order to elucidate the concept, keeping in mind that anyone who attempts a turnaround with an oppressive person had better be prepared to follow through and to deal with a great deal of resistance.

There is an old saying, “familiarity breeds contempt.” In oppressive relationships, the oppressor becomes familiar with a victim who is likely to use avoidance and other behaviors that are limiting to one’s exercise of Adult rights. In other words, it is an Adult right to be anywhere in one’s own house. But during the use of avoidance tactics, one gives up the rights to certain parts of the house in the interest of avoiding a fight.

Unfortunately, the fight finds the victim, if that is what the oppressor is interested in. It is often the case that the oppressor will look for an excuse to start something. Anything can become the pretext for getting into an altercation. Part of blamelessness is staying away from the traps oppressors set in order to pick a fight. In this case, Juanita made it impossible for him to look for a fight by setting the agenda of their interaction herself through meeting him at the door.

Another Adult characteristic is knowing when to respond and when to change the subject—that is, when to act instead of simply reacting. Children react. When they are asked a question, they respond to the question in the terms that are defined by that question. They can be easily “gotten” with questions on the order of that courtroom classic, “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Oppressors are often smart enough to place Manufactured Children in untenable situations by using such questioning tactics or otherwise defining the parameters of the interaction. Reacting, then, is being in the basement, putting off the meeting with the oppressor as long as possible. He comes looking and she reacts to the look on his face when he finds her. Acting is making a choice about when and how the meeting takes place, as in this case when she met him at the door.

There are other Childish tactics that oppressors expect from their victims that she avoided: speaking from anger, speaking from hatred, and crying. It is not always Childish to be angry, to cry, or even, possibly, to hate. But these strong emotions are not safe to express in the company of an abusive person because they can be so easily interpreted as Childishness. Part of emotional maturity is to know when and where one can safely and constructively express emotions. Juanita knew that she could not be emotional when she spoke with her husband.

In this sequence, name-calling gets mentioned twice: indirectly, we know that he has called Juanita various vile names in the past. And she mentions that in talking with him, she did not call him names. Name-calling is a Childish tactic. The reactive taunt, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” aside, names do hurt people who are childish enough not to be able to consider the source.

It is interesting that she allows him to speak first. Only after he greets her does she then invite him into the house. His house! Her standing there in the door is a message. She waits for him to respond to her message. He responds with a politeness she had not seen from him in a long time. She responds with politeness, too, inviting him in. She is not pushing him away, which is, of course, what anyone would desire to do to an oppressor. Yet when they feel pushed, they push back, and their pushing is dangerous. The only way to ultimately get rid of this guy is to approach him, but to create the terms of the approach by taking charge of the interaction, rather than to retreat. Her goal was to create the conditions wherein she and her children could leave safely. It was to take about six months of Adult treatment and Adult response to his resistance.

Another important point was his bafflement at the change in her behavior. He thought that she had possibly gone crazy and therefore he was in danger. A person who has Personal Authority knows what it is like to lack Personal Authority, because that person remembers lacking it. All of us lacked Personal Authority as children. In contrast, a person who lacks Personal Authority is not able to imagine the inner world of a person who is mature. All the husband could imagine is what he would do if he had been her. If he had received the treatment she had received from him, he would have been seeking physical revenge. That’s all he can imagine. Because his imagination was limited by his immaturity, her behavior was baffling—seeming crazy to him.

Her behavior was Adult and, interestingly enough, it elicited Adult behavior from him. He was polite and he actually listened. He knew that his behavior in the past had been ugly and that if, indeed, she did have a knife to kill him, that it would be with some justification. Probably that is what he would have done if the tables had been turned—bide his time until he could get the upper hand through violence. His politeness was partly an attempt to appease her and to stave off any violence she was ready to commit. It was as if he was saying, “See, I’m a nice guy.”

But there was also something deeper. Part of the Deceptive APR as we mentioned was the pretense that two Adults occupy the positions. When Juanita’s behavior became Adult, he had to pretend to be Adult as well in order to uphold this deception. He used a respectful name for her, and his behavior was respectful. It’s not that he was consciously thinking about upholding such a charade. This just happens to be what happens between people in oppressive relationships—oppressors hide the ugliness of the relationship from themselves through the pretense of being an Adult.

Juanita allowed him to act like an Adult, and even though she knew he hadn’t suddenly grown up in those few minutes, she did not place him in a Child position by demanding that he stay in one place and listen to her—she followed him as he moved about in his discomfort. Adults have the right to move about in their own houses. This is also a blameless tactic. If she had demanded that he stop and listen to her, he would have had an excuse to attack her—all the more fiercely for having suffered from being met at the door.

Juanita also gained grounds for herself through letting him know what he could expect in the future. This is part of the respect we pay to fellow Adults: we let them know what will happen when we have that information and they don’t. Her statements were probably much more believable because they were made without dramatic emotion. But they also laid the groundwork for her actions in the future. He would not be able to say he hadn’t been warned.

What is the “secret weapon” of the passage above? Adultness. Blameless behavior. He could not complain about her standing in the doorway. He could not complain about what she said because of how she said it. She was above reproach and also so far above his developmental level that she was safe. Her respectful behavior required him to be respectful of her because he had absolutely no grounds to do anything else.

Reforming Institutions

One of the many unfortunate side-effects of the overemphasis on behaviorism in psychology is that our tendency is to focus on details such as exactly what was said (thinking that the same exact thing could be said on another occasion with the same exact results) at the expense of the context in which it was said in relation to the underlying features, such as how deceptive relationships work. Some might say that Juanita’s account of dealing with her husband has nothing to do with a worker dealing with an abusive boss or someone who has an annoying neighbor or a student in a class with a tyrannical teacher or a person trying to cope with an obnoxious fellow church member or an academic dealing with a recalcitrant tenure committee or some combination of one of these plus racism.

First off, no matter what kind of institution one is dealing with, whether it is the institution of the family, a workplace, a place of worship, or ad hoc negative institutions such as racism, one has to realize that all human interactions take place in dyads. If you reform the relationship with a single person, that changes things. If you reform your relationship with multiple persons (within or across institutions), that changes things a lot. Some dyads are long term and it may take some thinking, praying, and time to change those relationships. Other relationships last seconds—the contact with someone in a grocery store, for example—and these relationships can be “changed” in that brief time.

Secondly, the wool must be pulled from the eyes of the person who wishes to change things. The deception must be seen through. This means being able to admit to oneself how horrible, ugly, and potentially dangerous a situation has been. This means curbing the tendency to make excuses for other people: “Oh, he is just stressed out,” or “She doesn’t really mean it when she does that.” Often we feel embarrassment for having put up with ugly behavior for so long, that we hide it from ourselves until it becomes extremely difficult to deal with. Deception remains as long as there is an interest in keeping it hidden. Shine the light on it so you know what you are dealing with.

Third, some kind of turnaround must take place. Before doing so, one must realize that in long term negative relationships, there will be great resistance to a change. No one should undertake a turnaround lightly. The key is to look for a place to create the turnaround. Standing in the door will not work in every situation, but the principle of changing avoidance behavior may open the door to creating a turnaround. It might be simple as visiting a boss’s office instead of waiting for him or her to visit you.

Fourth, committing to this path means committing to consistent Adult behavior. This means respecting other people’s Adult rights, including their right to make mistakes and to do things that you wouldn’t do. Some might be tempted to see this as a means for controlling other people. It most certainly isn’t, and thinking it is can be dangerous. One specific temptation is to become a pretend parent (often the Mommy) to an oppressive person and that definitely does not work.

Fifth, no one is perfect, but there are Adult ways and Childish ways of dealing with mistakes. The Adult way is to own the mistake: to tell on oneself to whoever is affected by the mistake as quickly as possible, and also to apologize for the mistake. Although apologizing to an oppressor may sound counterintuitive, in the right context, this can be a powerful strategy for making good things to happen. Common mistakes include being inconsistent about conditions after a turnaround. If you slip up on your consistency, an apology is in order. This is what allows you to remain blameless.

In sum, institutions are a convenience. We have schools because it is more convenient for specialists (teachers) to teach a whole lot of children than for families to teach their own children. It is convenient to eat at McDonalds anywhere in the world when one needs familiar food because of homesickness. It is convenient to manufacture items in an assembly line rather than one at a time. It is convenient to have a court system rather than having people administer justice on their own.

A chain saw is also a convenient item. If the chain is sharp, it can slice a lot as if it were a hot knife going through butter. But chain saws are also extremely dangerous.

The same is true of institutions. Wrongly used, they destroy.

How may they be rightly used so that we may benefit from their convenience? By populating them with people who are committed to Adultness. An institution’s convenience is only truly realized when ethical people are able to discern the right thing to do in each instance rather than blindly following a set of rules.