Blog - David Helkowski
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Decoersion and Incentives

I talked previously about Decoersion. Go check that out for context.

In that description I explained that something is coercive or not based on whether there is force to make a person agree or act the way you want or not.

That is insufficent to cover what I actually mean by coercion. That -is- the definition of the word "coercion" that people know though, so I shall introduce a new word: "coersion".

This word does not match the classical definition, because I'm extending it to include attempts to convince people to do something by using incentives.

My definition of "coersion": "Any attempt to get someone to do something where: 1. They don't want to do it 2. They can be convinced ( with disincentives or incentives ) 3. The requestor or collaborator of the requestor enacts the disincentives or incentives"

By including incentives in decoersion, this vastly expands the implications of believing in and following docersion as a moral stance.

Why? Because:

You may recall in raising children in the past it was considered okay to punish them in order to "train" them to behave well. One common mechanism of this was spanking.

Eventually spanking was forbidden and is considered abusive these days. I seem to recall something about the U.N. being involved in banning spanking.

The result of punishment being discouraged and/or banned in child raising is that many parents and teachers turned instead to incentives.

I mention this because if we decide that incentives are coersive, and we decide that for ourselves coersion is unacceptable, then what do we do to raise children?

We share knowledge with them and demonstrate what we believe. We tell them what we believe, but we do not enact basically anything in response to whether they do or not not do what we think they should.

That is the nature of manipulation. Changing what you do based on whether someone does what you want or not. It doesn't matter in my view if the change you make is "only positive". It matters that you are being conditional.

You might reasonably now think "Well how can that possibly work with money? Isn't the whole way all jobs work 'I'll give you X if you do Y' ?"

I will attempt to explain how the current economic systems can still work even when following decoersion, but first I will ask you something more fundamental. Why are you convinced that humanity and society need money and "jobs" in the first place?

That is likely to radical for you and you can't wrap your mind around that though, so I'll go down some reasoning that you are more compatible with.

The question is, by my definition, is it coersive to pay someone to do something?

Put another way, if you want to build a deck, is it coersive for the builder to ask you to pay for the materials? Obviously not.

Work can be viewed as having a cost. Depending on what the work is, it has a cost in being able to do that. First of all, every person has a finite amount of time in their life, and it takes time. Second it can required having spent extensive time learning and developing skills.

So when does the payment become coersive? As far as pay goes we already have a word for that. A bribe. Under decoersive belief though, a bribe isn't just something clearly stated as a bribe. It's any payment higher than the typical understood pay rate for that type of work.

But what about my definition. I said that any incentive is coersive. The key thing to understand here is that being paid a fair rate for work is not an incentive. It's not a bonus. It's an equal exchange.

You might then jump at this and say "Exactly! See, when someone doesn't want to do something, raising the pay is just making it so there is an equal exchange to make up for them not wanting to do it. Heck, that's just the going rate for having someone do something like that that they don't want to!"

There is an easy answer to that, which is that the first part of my definition, targetting having people do things they don't want to do, is weighed the heaviest in the definition.

Another criticism may be "But David, what if you don't want to work at all? Many people don't! How do we get them to work then!?"

Help them. Work to assist them to improve their training and/or mental state till they -do- want to work. If they don't want to work, it's my opinion that there must be a reason, and society is failing them if it just goes "not our problem."

Decoersion is not mildly different from the normal. It's radically different.

All of the following are considered coersive under decoersion:

This may seem absurd to you. So I'll give you some examples of what is going on that I have an issue with.

Thanking

Suppose you ask someone to help you with something, and they do a good job. You thank them. What if they did a bad job? Do you not thank them for helping?

Take it a step further. Suppose they were unable to help you. Are you still thankful for them? Do you thank them for not helping you? Of course you don't. They may then feel bad that they couldn't help you.

My claim is that if you didn't thank them every time they -did- help you, they wouldn't feel bad when they can't help you. You've conditioned them to, in some way, need to help you to feel good to get the praise. When they can't? They'll feel worse.

Praise

Consider praise. Your child scores high on exam. You praise them.

What if your child is an imbecile and always does bad? Do you not praise them for what they do?

What if you have two children. One is smart and one is dumb.

Consider the harm to the "dumb child" seeing the "smart child" get praised all the time.

Awards

This is the same situation. I've been in this situation at work many times. I work my ass of doing various stuff. People I consider lazy jackasses then get awarded for doing stuff I consider subpar, while I get no award, no praise.

Promotions based on performance

Suppose you are great at the job you should be promoted to, but your performance at the job below that level is bad. Should you not be promoted?

Guilt

Does beating yourself up for failure help you somehow?

Even more so imposing guilt onto others does not.

Shame

Shame causes people to hide and to be hurt. It does not help them.

Punishment

Extensive studies have been done showing that punishment doesn't actually work. Reform is needed, and you don't accomplish reform with punishment.

To be continued.