My students had never heard about the locus of control, but they always found it a very accessible idea. In terms of our classes, it worked simply enough. Locus sounded a bit odd, but they could see its connection to location making the phrase location of control. They could easily identify the best place for this location. If it's our control we want to find it within us, to feel we live and act with an internal locus of control. Then our actions and their consequences form a direct part of our life. We take responsibility for what happens either positive or negative. That sense of responsibility works as an integral part of our freedom and our learning and our choices of action. The locus of control speaks very clearly about the nature of our relationship to the self.[34]
I offered the following hypothetical situation to my students.
Imagine that through dint of some accident or good fortune I become recognized by the police and the powers-that-be as a really great guy—truly exemplary. Someone so deserving of respect because of my fulfilling my role of whatever type, that I get awarded a special pass. Because of this pass, I could never receive a traffic ticket again—no matter what I did.
The question I posed next came naturally from the situation. How would I drive?
Students spoke quite enthusiastically about how I would drive all the way from speeding anywhere I liked, to running any and all red lights, even to driving on the sidewalk if it suited me. I could drive like a madman. I could do anything I liked.[35]
When I did that, where would I locate my locus of control when I drove without the pass? Did I control my driving out of my choice to drive carefully because it was the right thing to do, or did I drive that way only because I feared the punishment of receiving a ticket and all the grief that went along with a ticket? My control of my driving, the location of that control, would have been in the hands of the law and the conformist dominator model that validated and substantiated the law. Once I had the pass, I could act out in any way I wanted because the fear of the police and their punishment would have gone. That would mean in turn that my driving found its basis not in my considered acceptance of driving safely within a complex system of interdependence of conduct that we find in traffic. It found its basis in my subordination to the dominator model's conformist enforcement and my fear of that enforcement.
My students recognized that if such a thing could happen, the pass would make no difference to an individuating person who acts from an internal locus of control. She/he would drive based on the idea of personal safety and the general roadway welfare. She/he would take full responsibility for her/his actions with or without the presence and thus threat of the police and the tickets they distribute in aid of forcing and enforcing order. The individuating woman/man needs no force to coerce appropriate actions. That person reflects on the nature of such actions and makes choices accordingly. That person lives with the locus of control within her/him and makes free choices that keep that person within the moral sphere.