All Direction Is Redirection

Two conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand, purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he does not have it, or if, though he has it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person who has no eyes to see. While the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli that direct as well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all, participate in the direction that their actions finally take. In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human nature. To take into account the contribution made by the existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them economically and wisely. To speak accurately, all direction is but redirection; it shifts the activities already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies that are already in operation, one’s attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.