What's my motivation?

Notes from revising Doubleblind ...


So you're a wicked man and need an understrapper. How do you motivate him?

Fear and threats will only work so much. Eventually your moderate man will become resentful or may find a way to become a passive martyr. Or worse, he may become (dramatic chord here) less productive. And no organization, wicked or not, wants unproductive employees. How can you stay competitive with an unproductive martyr-in-waiting?

You could give him impossible choices within a designed framework and then appeal to his dormant morality, perhaps even encourage him to see himself as more humane than his colleagues.

Good old Skinner behaviourism.

S'pose, b'y -- a moderate man

"Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but you are useless for right." --Herman Melville, The Confidence Man.

It's passivity masquerading as awareness that Melville's on about. Though he hardly makes it easy on his characters. You can argue that Starbuck in Moby-Dick is such a moderate man. How does that affect your sympathy for him?

Moderate men -- and by "men," I mean all humans, regardless of which bathroom they pee in -- stuck with the Milgram experiment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Moderate men could smell crematoria but be surprised by their existence.

Moderate men obey without struggle, in a perversion of the human desire to submit to a higher spiritual authority. (This can get really tangly with atheism.)

From Milgram's article "The Perils of Obedience:"

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority." (Milgram, Stanley. (1974), "The Perils of Obedience". Harper's Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority. Reproduced at Wikipedia entry "Milgram experiment.")


I'm exploring this with several characters, most notably Keefer Breen and Dr. Josh Bozeman.

Opening and closing my collection The shadow side of grace, Keefer is at once capable of looking for patients in his job as a hospital personal care attendant, and of smacking a dying woman across the mouth. The context of Keefer's violence -- this violence being the only resort of someone truly powerless -- is intolerable conflict. In a later story, Keefer sits with a dying man going through a crisis of faith. He uses his hands all through the story -- gently. Does this later act redeem the former?

Dr. Josh Bozeman is the narrator/protagonist of Double-blind. His violent acts, much more subdued than Keefer's, come more from his obedience, from his "simply" doing his job. He's more educated than Keefer, speaks standard English, albeit with a southern American accent, but he is no better a man. (Given the choice, I'd much rather spend time with Keefer.) Josh's struggle is to get beyond his obedience to a lower authority, but he litters his path with other people's pain.

While both of these characters need to be sympathetic to make their stories work -- there's got to be something likable about them -- I want them to be more than that. I want the reader to feel the deeper empathy, the coldgut recognition: "Yeah, I can see myself doing that. Not proud of it, but I can see it happening."

I am not proud of my moderate moments. I'm determined there will be fewer of them.