How people love this analogy, the carrot to reward and the stick to punish. The visual image appeals, the dichotomy between reward and punishment is clear, and somewhere in their semi-conscious minds, there is an image of a child on a donkey, dangling a carrot before it, promising a reward that never has to be delivered.
If people are to base their philosophies on seaside amusements, they should at least look at the picture they are using. How does the carrot stay just in front of the donkey? On the end of the stick. The stick is not there as an instrument of punishment, but to support the reward. Negative reinforcement never works as well as positive. Of course, to retain your credibility with human beings, you have at some time to deliver the carrot. (There is a story of a greyhound who caught the mechanical rabbit and was electrocuted. It is not a reward, but a ‘promise’ of a reward, some might say.)
The desire to punish is deeply rooted in our collective, Puritan, unconscious. If we can show that someone else is bad, then we must be less bad. Jung explained well that we project the bad we feel within ourselves, outward to others.
Remember that guilt is not about feeling bad when you have broken a rule. It is the existential angst which might arise, for example, in a child feeling responsible for the divorce of its parents. In fact, there is in Germany a group of individuals struggling so terribly with their sense of Nazi guilt, that they can barely cope with life. They are the children of Nazi war criminals who were themselves too young at the time the war ended to be held in any way accountable for what their parents did. Yet they feel the guilt.
From guilt, follows the desire to punish oneself, and through punishment, the hope of expiation or forgiveness. How nice to be able to project that guilt and that punishment onto someone else, and keep only the forgiveness for yourself.
Everyone wants peace, it is only the terms of the peace people disagree on, (i.e. capitulation of the other side). Well, almost everyone. Sometimes war arises simply because enough people want it. For some, it is the only job they know. Ever heard of an ‘Offence Force’? All armies exist purely for defence.
In the classic Western novel, which includes most of them, the hero’s life is given meaning by the desire for revenge. He has a purpose in life, and to that purpose he can subordinate all other desires. It relieves him of ever having to confront his own mortality. As van Morrison sings, ‘you breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out, you never, never, never wonder why though’. Revenge is not a popular notion nowadays, so now we ‘focus’.
We are enamoured of the idea of war. We have of course, sublimated it, to a war on poverty, a war on crime, a war on drugs, and, forget not, the virtual war on terrorism.
A few years ago the United States spent $50 billion on a war on drugs. A real war, with lots of helicopters, guns and troops in Columbia. At the end of it, they had to admit, they had achieved nothing. They then brought out the stick, (the Columbians having swallowed the carrot), and threatened Columbia with trade sanctions. The response was simple. ‘You stop buying, we’ll stop selling’. Spend $50 billion on counselling drug users?
In my favourite movie, Hopscotch, the CIA agent has an insight. ‘Perhaps we are going about this the wrong way’, he says, ‘sometimes bullying people doesn’t work’. That soft approach might work for the CIA, but not for the rest of us. But perhaps we are going about things the wrong way. Despite what people say, children do not have high status in our society. This is because it will be many years before they earn money.
Add to that Freud’s very accurate description in ‘Totem and Taboo’ of why adults feel threatened by the young bulls, the myth of over-population, (some countries are now actually concerned about under-population), and the focus of attention adults have put on re-defining their roles as males and females, and no wonder the children are left behind.
An amendment to the child-abuse law, limiting the number of strokes a parent may belabour their child per day, and also excluding the breaking of bones or raising of blood from the welts, met with loud outcry from law-abiding parents who feared that their children would become so unruly that they could not be controlled. A social-worker explained that these, (still horrendous), limits had to be imposed because, whenever a case of child abuse was brought to court, the parents simply claimed they were exercising their parental duty to discipline their child, and the case was dropped.
So we focus on hunting down criminals after they have become adults, and spend vast sums on punishing them, putting them in jails, and releasing them with little chance of survival, only to catch them again. Yet most criminals of almost any strain, have had horrendous childhoods. This does not excuse, but it might explain.
There is a syllogism that runs, “What this person has done is unforgiveable. If I were to understand what drove him to do it, I might be tempted to forgive him. Therefore I will not try to understand what drove him to do it.’ Logically true, perhaps, but practically disastrous.
We approach the problem from the wrong end of the telescope because we do not want, enough, to solve the problem. We want to have bad people to punish. And anyway, the political implications of interfering with an adult’s right to raise it’s child as it pleases is far too controversial to approach. So we do very little to restore the inner balance of the unbalanced child, to protect them from trauma or support their emotional healing. But we all agree that criminals should be punished.
We can see the absurdity of the notion that we have to use a stick to raise a child when we look back at past accepted uses of the stick – to discipline slaves, employees, and of course, wives. All we ever teach by using the stick is that violence is an acceptable solution to conflict – which it is not.
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