I find people at the lower levels who talk about believing that
war is not a solution to man’s problems. A person centralized in the
E-R system will say that . . . but if you study it . . . he’s saying
it simply because it is to his personal advantage at this particular
time not to have war. He really doesn’t believe that war is not to
be done. You see this in particular today. I run into this myself: we
must not have war in
Vietnam
, but oh, boy.
if those Egyptians start anything in
Israel
, we’re gonna
have it. He really doesn’t believe in not having war. The Vietnam
war may be psychologically remote from him or too damn close to him
and he doesn’t have to go there and this is a very important
personal event in his life. I find that even the absolutistic
pacifists in the D-Q system really are not pacifists. It’s only a
matter of time and circumstance before they flop over the become the
most war-like hawks. When they flop they become incredibly war-like
human beings. So notice some of the indications . . . some of the
things which have come about.
There is one other thing I should mention. I have been working
in the direction of trying to develop some means of assessment which
would in theory enable an individual to assess the degree of operation
of all of the systems in a person at one time so that you see in
essence how much of his behavior is C-P behavior and in respect to
what, how much of it is D-Q or E-R and so on. I’ve run into a
problem and I can’t get it solved. This is one of the things which
is making me reluctant to hurry out with the book that I am working
on. And . . . that I don’t know whether or not I’m going to solve
it. The problem is this. With any methodology I’ve been attempting
to use the one thing that stands out that is diagnostic of a person
being in the C-P system is that he tells me to go to hell. He won’t
have anything to do with it. I can’t get any data except facts.
Statement:
(by a teacher) I have kids at school doing the same thing to me. Every
time I try to reach out and try to get some classification, the kid
says to me, “Screw you!” (
Graves
)
Yeah, screw you . . . but only in stronger words! I just
can’t get this one solved and I don’t know what to do about it.
I have found that by and large, if I can get him before he is
14 and before he’s become a teenage sophisticate, I can get some
data and I have some fairly decent data in respect to what the C-P is
like in his thinking in children of that age. Once he gets beyond that
age of 14, I just can’t get anything out of him. I just can’t
solve this problem. If any of you
have an ideas as to how to solve this problem, I sure would like to
know what they are.
Question:
Don't you need to have some kind of authoritarian system before the
C-P will cooperate?
Dr.
Graves:
Well, I’ve got the most authoritarian set up in the world and
that is prison system but they tell me to – forget it, bud! I’ve
almost come to the point of saying; “Look, this is the diagnostic”
. . . but this is no good if you are going to carry on a statistical
program of research.
You might be interested, as we begin to pursue this, just what
are some of the data that I have along this line. Suppose that I go at
it in a simple questionnaire form. What are the kinds of things that a
person that typifies the person in the D-Q system and what are the
kinds of items that will eventually have to work into a questionnaire?