In my previous post, I briefly introduced the three drives that govern our behaviour: the aggressive, pleasure, and generative drive. In this article I will explore how the generative drive—essential for productive behaviour—connects to the others.
To do so, I will make use of qualitative system dynamics modeling. I think this process is greatly intuitive, but if you feel you’re having difficulties interpreting the diagrams you can check out my article on reading qualitative system dynamics models here.
There are multiple pathways we can take to connect our drives, but I want to start with the aggressive drive and its interactions first.
In the previous article, we saw that our aggressive drive helps us put thoughts into action and make us do things in the world. We can say that the aggressive drive helps us to display generative behaviour.
However, we also saw that too much generative drive leads us to enforce our will on others and the environment: we become domineering. By neglecting others, our behaviour becomes destructive, rather than generative.
By using a comparative variable (aggression-dominance), we can integrate the above in the following diagram. You can see how the aggressive drive and generative drive directly contribute to generative behaviour, but also to destructive behaviour when the drives are out of balance.
We can follow a similar line of reasoning for the pleasure drive: when it gets too high, it leads to pleasure-seeking behaviour, such as checking your phone, eating chocolate, etc. While it does not manifest in the same way as domineering behaviour, pleasure-seeking behaviour can become destructive to ourselves.
When our pleasure drive is low, we become apathetic. We do not feel like doing anything, let alone something generative.
We can now see how the three drives fit together. We need the pleasure drive and aggressive drive to start doing things, but we need the generative drive to make sure these things are productive rather than the spawns of domineering or pleasure-seeking behaviour.
This model constitutes the core structure of the diagrams we will draw and explore in the following posts. For now, there are no feedback interactions, where a change in one of the model variable leads to a change in itself. This feedback aspect has tremendous explanatory power, and we will start exploring those tomorrow.
Next: Feedback loops and interactions between the aggressive, pleasure, and generative drive
