Three Controllers

I’ve been working in a juvenile detention center since I finished at Maple, and haven’t trained with Forall for a while. But the main thing that comes to mind is the way he spoke about history. He said that there are three drivers of history: the Church, the Market and the State.

The Church is religion, ideology, values, worldviews and similar things. As I trained with him, I gradually saw that while institutions are included in the meaning of this word Church, the main thing is that any way in which people make a claim about reality, and how you should live in that reality, is the Church. Then people gradually build institutions around it.

The Market is the economy, which seems straightforward until you learn his definition of the economy. Well, actually, he defines it in lots of ways, now that I think of it, so this may not be the main way, but he does say that the economy is the interface between values and nature. Once I was driving him to Morrisville so we could do some work on the way there and back, but we talked about this also, and I remember him saying that what life does is turn nature into desires. I asked him, “What is nature?” in hopes I could catch him unawares and he’d just tell me. He did the thing he usually does, and either answered the question, or didn’t, I couldn’t tell. He said that the true purpose of the Church is to show us how to find the answer to that question, so if Maple is any good, then my training should allow me to know for myself. Maybe that was empowering, or annoying, I don’t know.

Anyway, the Market is how we turn Nature (whatever that is) into what we want. But the other way is probably more clear: the Market is the interface between Nature and our values.

The State is how we make the Market, and the rest of the world, follow the Church even when it doesn’t want to.

But usually it does want to, since people have to be motivated by something, and they are motivated by values. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to change people’s values, and the Churches of history have gotten really good at that. If people didn’t have values, they wouldn’t do anything, so the Market would fail. So usually, the Market just does whatever the Church tells it to do, but when it doesn’t, the State tries to control it. And the State tries to get everyone else to follow its Church also.

The main way that he tried to get us to understand history was to ask how each of these controlling forces would see a certain event and what each would prefer and push for. He said that whatever got their approval, and helped them to work together the most, was the course of action chosen.