Results to date. The present practice of consensual labor arbitration, the so-called “Nine Percent” income tax act, eight commercially developed board games, some 125 therapeutic personality measures, 51 distinct educational programs (including the technique of teaching elementary schoolchildren foreign languages through folksinging), and more than 1,800 other useful discoveries or systems have come directly from the problem-solving sessions in the Arecibo caves and elsewhere and from research along lines suggested by these sessions.
Here are two examples:
The Nine Percent Law. After the California riots, priority was assigned to social studies concerning “involvement,” as the phrase of the day put it. Students, hereditarily unemployed aerospace workers, old people, and other disadvantaged groups who had united and overthrown civil government along most of the Pacific Coast for more than 18 months, were found to be suffering from the condition called anomie, characterized by a feeling that they were not related to the persons or institutions in their environment and had no means of control or participation in the events of the day. In a series of problem-pit sessions the plan was proposed which ultimately was adopted as the Kennedy-Moody Act of 1993, sometimes called “The Nine Percent Law.” Under this act taxpayers are permitted to direct a proportion of their income tax to a specific function of government, e.g., national defense, subsidization of scientific research, education, highways, etc. A premium of 1 percent of the total tax payable is charged for each 10 percent which is allocated in this way, up to a limit of 9 percent of the base tax (which means allocating 90 percent of the tax payable). The consequences of this law are well known, particularly as to the essential disbanding of the DoD.
The militia draft. After the 1991 suspension of Selective Service had caused severe economic dislocation because of the lack of employment for youths not serving under the draft, a problem-pit session proposed resuming the draft and using up to 60 percent of draftees, on a volunteer basis, as adjuncts to local police forces all over the nation. It had been observed that law enforcement typically attracted rigid and often punitive psychological types, with consequent damage to the police-civilian relations, particularly with minority groups. The original proposal was that all police forces cease recruiting and that all vacancies be filled with national militia draftees. However, the increasing professionalization of police work made that impractical, and the present system of assigning militia in equal numbers to every police force was adopted. The success of the program may be judged from the number of other nations which have since come to imitate it.
In recent years some procedural changes have been made, notably in giving preference to nongoal-oriented problem-solving sessions, in which all participants are urged to generate problems as well as solutions. A complex scoring system, conducted in Terre Haute, gives credits for elapsed time, for definition of problems, for intensity of application and for (estimated) value of proposals made. As the group activity inevitably impinges on personality problems, a separate score is given to useful or beneficial personality changes which occur among the participants. When the score reaches a given numerical value (the exact value of which has never been made public), the group is discharged and a new one convened.
The procedures used in the problem pits are formative, eclectic and heuristic. Among the standard procedures are sensitivity training, encounter, brainstorming, and head-cloning. More elaborate forms of problem-solving and decision-making, such as Delphi, relevance-tree construction, and the calculus of statement, have been used experimentally from time to time. At present they are not considered to be of great value in the basic pit sessions, although each of them retains a place in the later R&D work carried on by professional teams, either in Terre Haute or, through subcontracting, in many research institutions around the country.
Selection procedures. Any citizen is eligible to volunteer and, upon passing a simple series of physical and psychological tests designed to determine fitness for the isolation experience, may be called as openings occur. Nearly all volunteers are accepted and actually participate in a pit session within 10 months to one year after application, although in periods when the number of volunteers is high, some proportion are used in sessions in other places than Arecibo, under slighdy different ground rules.
In order to maintain a suitable ethnic, professional, religious, sexual, and personality mix, and as part of a randomizing procedure, about one half of all participants are selectees. These are chosen through Selective Service channels in the first instance, comprising all citizens who have not otherwise discharged their military obligation. Of course, the number thus provided is far in excess of need, and so a secondary lottery is then held. Those persons thus chosen are given the battery of tests required of volunteers, and those who pass remain subject to call for the remainder of their lives. As a matter of policy, many of the youngest age groups are given automatic deferments for a period of years, to provide a proper age mix for each working group.
Summary and future plans. The problem-pit sessions have proven so productive that there have been many attempts to expand them to larger formats, e.g., the so-called “Universal Town Meeting.” These have achieved considerable success in special areas, but at the cost of limiting spontaneity and interpersonal interaction. Some studies have criticized the therapeutic aspects of pit sessions as distractive and irrelevant to dieir central purpose. Yet experimental sessions conducted on a purely problem-solving basis have been uniformly less productive, perhaps due to the emergence of a professionalist elite group who dominate such sessions; as their expertise is acquired through professional exposure over a period of time, their contributions are often too conventional and thus limited. The fresh, if uninformed, thoughts of nonexperts give the pit sessions their special qualities of innovation and daring. Most observers feel that the interpersonal quality of the sessions cannot be achieved on a mass scale except with the comcomitant danger of violence, personal danger and property destruction, as in the California Cultural Revolution. However, studies are still being pursued with the end in view of enlarging the scope and effectiveness of the sessions.
In conclusion, we can only agree with the oft-quoted extemporaneous rhyme offered by Sen. Moody at the ceremonies attendant on the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the problem pits:
The pits are quirky, Perfection they’re not. The best you can say’s They’re the best we’ve got.
The Statement of Tina’s Problem
In Tina Wattridge’s head lived a dozen people, all of whom were her and all of whom fought like tigers for sole ownership. Pit Leader Tina moved among the group, offering encouragement here, advice there, bringing one person to interact with another. Mother Tina remembered, after a third of a century, the costive agony of childbirth and the inexpressible love that drowned her when they first laid her daughter in her arms. Tina the Spy eavesdropped and snooped and furtively slipped into the communications room to type out her reports on group progress. Homemaker Tina loathed the cockroach yellow paint on the walls of the main social room and composed unsent demands to the control authorities for new mats for the pool chamber, where the dank and the hard use had eaten them into disgraceful tatters. And all the Tinas were Tina Wattridge, and when they battled among themselves for her, she felt fragmented and paralyzed. When she felt worst was when one of the long-silent Tina’s came arrogantly to the fore and drove her in a direction she had long forgotten. It was happening now. She knew what a spectacle she must seem to everyone present, most of all to the other parts of herself, but she could not help herself; she was in love; could not possibly be in love; was.
And while she was numb to everything but the external love and the interior pain of reproach, her group was exploding in a dozen directions. She couldn’t cope; somehow she did cope, moment by moment, but always at the cost of feeling that there she had spent the last erg of energy, the last moiety of will and had nothing left—until another demand came. And they came every minute, it seemed. Bo
b Sanger shouting and trembling, demanding that the group be terminated and he be let to get back to his collapsing business. David Jaretski and Barbara Devereux screaming that their friend Dolores had blundered off into the caves to die. Marge Klapper (who should have known better!) whispering that she wanted to get out now, right now, to have the other man’s baby pumped out of her so she could go back to the man she was married to. And back and forth to the teletypes, sneaking in reports; and worrying about every person there; and most of the time, all of the time, with her mind full of Dev Stanwvck and their utterly preposterous, utterly overpowering love.
She could not sleep. She would lie down exhausted, more often than not with Dev beside her, and sometimes there would be sex, fast and total, and sometimes there would be his passionate attempt to explain and justify all of his life. Sometimes nothing but exhaustion alone; she would feel herself falling away into sleep and hear Dev’s breathing deepen beside her. And then some voice from the other room, or some memory, or some discomfort from the fold of the sleeping bag would come. Not much. Enough. Enough to pull her back from sleep, fighting angrily against it, and in a minute she would be wide awake with her mind furiously circling into a kind of panic.
Then she would get up, trying not to disturb Dev, trying to avoid the rest of the group, and head for the only place in the caves where she could have privacy, the toilets. And with the door locked, in the end stall, she would reach behind the flush tank and slide one piece of molding over another and take out the rough copies of her reports, trying to force her mind back onto her job.
Day 1, hour 2300. Wattridge reporting. Fein introduced
VD epidemiology problem; no group uptake. Sanger states problem of approaching bankruptcy in dental findings industry; n.g.u. Jefferson made no overt statement but indicates sexual inadequacy problem. Jaretski marital situation; wife has left him. Ittri despondent career status; attributes lack of education. Murtagh states criticism of Congressional election procedure; n.g.u. Group interaction in weak normal range.
They had all been strangers then. Dev Stanwyck’s name did not even appear in that first report!
Day 4, hour 2220. Wattridge reporting. Klapper and Belli hostility; fought with bats without resolution. Group effective in bioenergetics and immersion therapy. Some preliminary diagnoses: Devereux passive-aggressive, deep frustration feelings. Belli compulsive and anal-retentive. Stanwyck latent homosexual father-dominated. (Note: I have personal feelings toward Stanwyck. I think of him as a son.)
She flipped hastily through the pages of the notebook, trying to ignore the fact that somebody was silently moving around outside the toilet door, apparently listening. Then she found the page she was looking for:
Day 13, hour 2330. Wattridge reporting. Clique formation: Belli-Devereux-Jaretski: semisexual triad, some boding to rest of group. Stanwyck-Ittri, bivalent pairing, sociopersonal conflict vs. joint hostility to rest of group, little interaction. Fein-Klapper-Sanger, weak professional communality of interest in medical areas; unstable bond, with individual links to other group members. No overt sexual interaction observed. Problem-solving: Sanger received full group brainstorm but did not consider any proposal satisfactory; forwarded for analysis. Fein received approximately 30 minutes intensive discussion, no formal proposals but interaction taking place. Ittri: Has become able to perceive own failure to make use of adult-education and other resources, accepts suggestions for courses and new career orientation. (Note: Belli noticed in the pool that I was wearing my watch. I tried to persuade her that it was only an ornament and did not keep time. However, she told some of the others. Stanwyck in particular has been observing me closely, making these transmissions difficult even with blind-typing.)
And there it was, an absolute fraud! It hadn’t happened that way at all. It had been Dev Stanwyck who had noticed it first, Dolly Belli only a day later; and Tina remembered cringingly with what anger and passion she had blown up at Dolly’s half-joking question. It had stopped the questioning, all right; Dolly climbed out of the pool without another word, and her friends followed her. What else had it stopped: How close had Dolly been to opening up to the group at large?
And where had the anger come from? It was only when Tina had realized that the anger was all out of proportion to the stimulus that she had plumbed in her mind for another source and found it transferred from her own feelings about Dev Stanwyck.
Slowly she turned to a blank page and began her latest report:
Day 17, hour 2300. Wattridge reporting. Belli still missing. Tensions peaking. Group interaction maintaining plateau in high normal range. Sexual pairing marked: Jaretski-Devereux, Klapper-Fein (temporary and apparently discontinued), Ittri-Teitlebaum. Also Wattridge-Stanwyck. (Note: I find this professionally disconcerting and am attempting to disengage. I am too old for him!)
She put down the pencil and wrinkled her eyes; repentance oft I swore, yes, but was I sober when I swore? How could she disengage herself from someone a third her age who found that she turned him on? And how could she not?
The breathing outside stopped for a moment, and then Dev’s voice said, “Tina, is that you in there?”
She could not answer; some maiden shyness kept her from speaking while sitting on a toilet, or else she simply did not know what to say to Dev.
“I think you better come out,” he went on. “Something’s happening.”
Hassling Willie
In the main social room Marge Klapper was facing Willie Murtagh across a mat. Both were tense and angry, which troubled Marge more than Willie because she did not like to be professionally inept. The one-night stand with Jerry Fein had left her upset, especially as Jerry didn’t want to let it stay a one-night stand; she was angry; she wanted to get out to get rid of her souvenir of one other one-night stand; she wanted to go back to her husband and find out if the marriage could be made to work; and, most difficult of all, she wanted to do all those things while retaining her self-image as a competent professional intact. So she reached out for Willie:
“Do you want to fight?”
He stood angrily mute and shook his head.
She dropped the soft, inflated plastic bats and put a professional smile on her face. “Shall we push? Would you like to go in the pool?”
“No.” He wasn’t helping at all. He was uptight and souring the whole group with his tensions and giving her nothing to work on—nothing, she realized, except that intensity with which he was looking at her, as though hoping the next word out of her mouth would be what he wanted. So she tried again. She stepped up on the edge of the mat and said sweetly to Willie, “Would you like to try something with me? Let’s jump.”
Willie said, “Oh, Christ.”
“Go on,” Jerry Fein put in helpfully. “Shake the tensions out.”
“Stay out of this, Jerry!” Marge snapped. And then forced herself to relax. “Like this, Willie,” she said, jumping, coming down, jumping again. “Try it.”
He glowered, looked around the room and gave a halfhearted hop.
“Great!” cried Marge. “Higher!”
He shrugged and jumped a mighty leap, twice as high as hers. Then another. “Beautiful, Willie,” said Marge breathlessly. “Keep it up!” It was like an invisible seesaw, first Marge in the air, then Willie, Marge again; he began to move his feet like a Russian dancer, coming down with one knee half bent, then the other, turning his body from side to side. “Make a noise, Willie!” Marge yelled triumphantly, and demonstrated: “Yow! Whee! Hoooo!”
The whole group was joining in—anyway, that part of it that was in the room, all yelling with Willie. Marge felt triumphant and fulfilled; and then Tina had to come in and spoil it all.
“Sorry, Marge,” she called from the doorway. “Listen, everybody. Does anybody know where Barbie and David are?”
“In the pool?” somebody guessed helpfully.
“No. I looked everywhere.”
Marge panted angrily, “Tina, do you have to take attendance right now?”
“I’m sorry, Marge. But I’m afraid they’ve gone into the caves after Dolly. Is anyone else missing?”
The group looked around at itself. “Rufous!” cried Jerry Fein. “Where’s he?”
Dev Stanwyck, as always tagging along after Tina, said in his superior way, “We’ve already checked the sleeping rooms. Rufous is there. Anybody else?”
No answer for a moment, and then three or four people at once: “Bob Sanger!”
Tina looked around, then nodded grimly. “Thanks.” And she disappeared, Stanwyck hurrying after.
Nevertheless, the interruption had wrecked Marge’s mood. And hadn’t done any good for Willie, either; he was collapsed on the floor, staring into space.
“Well,” said Marge heartily, “want to get back to it, Willie?”
He looked up and said, “I know where they are. It’s kind of my fault.” He straightened up and said, “Hell, it’s exactly my fault. I was trying to get with that colored girl, and I said something I shouldn’t have. Dolly took it the wrong way and split for the caves, and I—well, I told David it was his fault, so he went after her. I didn’t actually think he’d take Barbie with him.”
In the Problem Pit Page 6