124 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
Second, the punishment may be too harsh. If Johnny gets a very severe
beating for his misdemeanor, then this experience will be so painful that
Perceiver strategy will be unable to establish a mental connection between
„bait‟ and „hook.‟ Instead, the experience of punishment will remain
blocked off in Mercy strategy, just like the core of a multiple personality.
This also limits the effectiveness of public discipline. Punishing criminals
can only act as a deterrent to crime if the punishment is not too severe. If
the penalty is inappropriately harsh, the result will be fear and not
conscience.
Third, the personal environment may change.
Joe average citizen may believe very strongly in
balanced budgets and government cutbacks, but
when his own Mercy internal world has to
identify with experiences of smaller paychecks,
higher taxes, and cuts in government services,
then the emotional glare of these experiences
may be too much for Perceiver belief to handle.
Suddenly, social welfare becomes a bigger issue
than fiscal responsibility. By the same token, a
struggling socialist who becomes rich can easily
discover capitalism.
In a related example, think of the religious
leader who preaches the belief system that
divorce is wrong and must be punished. What
happens if his own daughter gets divorced and decides to marry again?
Will his Perceiver belief survive intact, or will the Mercy emotion of
identifying with divorce in the family overwhelm his Perceiver confidence?
Remember Henry VIII of England. His Mercy emotions confronted the
Perceiver standards of his society. The Protestant Reformation in England
was triggered by precisely this struggle.
Fourth, the probability of punishment may be too low. The problem
with the statement “Smoking causes cancer,” is that not everyone who
smokes will die of cancer. Therefore, a person can always say, “But it will
not happen to me.” Let us analyze the mental processing behind this
statement. When a person smokes, he is identifying with a certain situation;
he is pulling emotional experiences associated with smoking into his
internal world of Mercy thought. If researchers come up with the fact that
smokers are likely to get cancer, then this information will be remembered
by automatic Perceiver strategy as a fact which is reasonable. We now
have a collision between the Mercy internal world and Perceiver automatic
thought. Obviously, emotion will win over reasonableness. It is only when
the fact about smoking is pulled into the internal world of Perceiver
strategy as a belief that it has any chance of affecting personal feelings
about smoking. In other words, conscience will only survive if the smoker
believes that he could develop cancer.