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Conceptual Foundation

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— Comments below by Ari Cowan

The Violence Integrative Prevention and Restoration (PAR) Model is an outgrowth of my curiosity about the singularly odd experience of being in the world. My interest stemmed, in part, to my personal and family associations with violence and its consequences. I started working in earnest in the area of violence reduction and prevention in the Fall of 1990, went on to initiate the Family Health Institute (a four-year project of the Physicians for Social Responsibility) and its violence response educational programs, and now devote my efforts to refining the PAR Model and developing practical tools from the model.

Basic Questions

In the course of my explorations, I encountered a number of basic questions. These include:

• Are human beings “things” or “processes” or both?
• Is there such a thing as “now” and, if so, what is its duration?
• How much of reality are we conscious of – how much do we miss?
• What is the nature of “experience” and how (and by whom) is it created?
• What role does language play in creating my experience and concept of reality?
• What are the basic (ontological) questions of existence human beings face and why do the answers to these questions often change over time?
• What role does power play in sculpting human experience?
• What kinds of power do human beings traffic in and which are healthy, unhealthy, or benign?
• What is violence?1
• What causes violence; under what conditions does violence appear?
• What is the relationship between power and violence?
• What is the process which leads to violent acts?
• What causes peace; under what conditions does peace manifest?
• Why are some people violent and others not?
• Is the way in which we describe violence and structure our responses to it outdated and in need of rethinking?

The result of this process, along with a number of sudden and inexplicable realizations, is the development of the PAR Model and its derivative cousin – the Integrative Power Management (IPM) Model.2

Conclusions

The model is based in part on my conclusions following the questions above, some of which are listed below:

1. Human beings do not have a conscious experience of “absolute reality.” Any reality that one constructs in their mind is made of concepts and events which have passed. Our experience of reality is the experience of transactions and relationships. This provides a foundation for restructuring “reality” – including the experience of violence – with enormous creative flexibility.
2. Human beings must have an experience of power in order to survive. Healthy forms include the power inherent in love, belonging, survival, freedom, choice, creativity, realization, and transcendence.
3. Violence is any human act resulting from an intention to do harm or any act to gain inappropriate or unjustified self-serving power and control which results in harm.
4. The traditional “punitive” model for dealing with violence – an approach that is more than 10,000 years old3 – may be outdated, inefficient, and ineffective.
5. We use language to describe reality to ourselves and others: change the language and the reality changes. Language has a role in describing violence both as a concept and a process.
6. Violence is an unhealthy strategy to gain power by those who experience the absence or loss of power. They suffer power deficiency. Those experiencing sufficient power are not violent.
7. Fear can drive power deficiency or deprivation. The greatest fear human beings face is death.4 Those who have no fear – meaning fear of deprivation or loss of any kind – are not violent.
8. Taking power away from people who are violent aggravates their power deprivation.
9. Ordinary people do not commit acts of violence against others – they commit these acts against objects.5 Central to human ability to commit acts of violence is an “objectification/action” process in which the recipient of violence must be converted conceptually from a human being to an object.
10. Violence is a thought form which is malignant, addictive, infectious, and self-mutating.
11. Violence, like any disease, has its antecedents, risk factors, and vectors of transmission. Many of these have been identified through research and experimental verification.6
12. Individual and collective violence can be reduced or stopped through the application of public health protocols once a practical language for describing the malignancy and responses created from that language are applied.
13. Progress in reducing and eliminating violence is inhibited by ineffective models and approaches, myths, beliefs, and assumptions.

Influences

Among the significant voices which have influenced my work are: Adyashanti; Marcus Aurelis Antonius Augustus, Karen Armstrong; William E. Barrett, PhD; Ernest Becker, PhD; Eric Berne, MD; Neils Bohr; John Briere, PhD; Milton Erickson, MD; Johannes Eckhart, OP; Michel Foucault; Mohandas Gandhi; Howard Gardner, PhD; René Girard, PhD; Jeff Greenberg, PhD; Hafiz; Thich Nhat Hanh; Martin Heidegger; Søren Kierkegaard; Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Alice Miller; Debra Neihoff, PhD; Elaine Pagels, PhD; Steven Pinker, PhD; Plotinus; Tom Pyszczynski, PhD; Otto Rank; Rūmī; Daniel J. Siegel, MD; Sheldon Solomon, PhD; Ken Wilbur; Ludwig Wittgenstein.7

Notes

1. “Violence” is something of a muddy term – one that confuses many people (based upon the head-scratching in my classes and lectures). There is a remarkable absence of discussion about what the term really means. It’s frequently confused with “injurious” and related terms.
2. The IPM is applied where questions of power arise, but where violence is not a consideration.
3. The growth of agricultural societies, beginning approximately 13,000 years ago, gives me a starting point from which violence, according to the definition used in the PAR Model, is clearly evident. For example, the Indo-European tribes living on the steppes are believed to have routinely descended upon and devastated their neighbors in surrounding regions.
4. Refer to the work of Ernest Becker, PhD and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Denial of Death, and other works, including The Birth and Death of Meaning and Escape from Evil. Becker discusses immortality schemes such as religion, heroism, and notoriety.
5. This conclusion does not apply to those individuals who are physiological basis for violence (such as those suffering from Huntington’s Chorea), severe mental disorders, or psycho/sociopathology.
6. For example, the experimental work of Sheldon Solomon, PhD (Skidmore College, New York), Jeff Greenberg, PhD (University of Arizona), and Tom Pyszczynski (Colorado University at Colorado Springs).
7. One should not assume that, because I’ve been touched by these voices, I’ve understood or interpreted them correctly

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