#time outs

A chain of reasoning. Torture is bad. This is intuitively obvious, right? It bad. Torture is basically causing suffering for the sake of causing suffering, more or less, right? It can be for getting information or for just being a dick, but the point is, it’s causing suffering deliberately. Rather than having suffering come about inadvertantly while trying to do something else, like when you go in for dental work for instance. That’s suffering, but it’s not torture. But, the thing is, we have this thing called punishment (or “discipline”, usually when we’re talking about kids) that’s clearly causing suffering on purpose to make someone suffer so that they’ll do what you want them too but which for some reason is considered normal and ethical. And it’s not just things like spankings. Time-outs can be a “let’s take you into a less stimulating environment so you calm down” thing, but usually they’re not, they’re meant to be unpleasant. If they weren’t, it could just be “ok, you need a time-out now” no big deal, but what actually happens is it’s used as a threat: “if you don’t stop (whatever), you’re going to get a time-out.” It’s...a control thing. If it was just about calming down which again it’s usually not, it wouldn’t come with this “I’m angry/you’ve disappointed me” baggage, it wouldn’t be brought up as a threat, it would just be “oh yeah, people get upset sometimes, that happens.” And it’s not necessary, either. There are many situations in which people can’t be punished into better behavior: you can’t punish infants out of shitting their diapers or putting interesting things into their mouths, you can’t punish your roommate or your coworker or your boss, and sometimes people can’t do what you’d expect them to do because of developmental disabilities or other reasons. (Or choose not to, because they’re dicks.) When any of those happens, we find ways around it that don’t involve forcing the person to change their behavior: either we convince them to change voluntarily, or we figure out ways to keep their behavior from harming us, depending on the circumstances. There’s plenty of situations where we don’t rely on punishment, where punishment wouldn’t work. So, why do we, as a culture, think punishment is necessary?

hdjfjfjfhHf I will finish that fic.. for mammon