Compliance Is not Closeness

Punishments are feedback loops, something that tells us that certain actions are discouraged. Depending on the context, the impact, and the stakes, the feedback loops are defined. A child scribbling on the wall, an employee screwing up a product release, and a disobeying student are all punished, but in different ways.

The society that we’re a part of also tries to leverage punishment to prevent actions that can harm the society. On a governance level, this is the part undertaken by our judicial system. Why a student disturbing a class in school is asked to stand outside the class (or sent for detention) has one obvious reason, which is to shape the behavior of the student himself. The deeper reason, though, is to tell the entire classroom about the consequences of “misbehaving.” For any system, whether a household, a classroom, a company, or a country, punishment is a form of control or governance.

Punishment should be a response, not a reaction. The difference matters. A response is intentional, and it should be connected to the behavior itself. It serves a purpose beyond the punisher’s emotional state.

A reaction is a discharge. It’s what happens when the punisher is overwhelmed and the “punishment” is really just them offloading that onto someone else. In an abstract sense, it’s their way of protecting themselves.

This distinction is often missed. A child who makes their parent angry is “punished” immediately. They’re scolded, or (threatened to be) slapped as a way to punish. In some relationships, people change their behavior to punish their partner, like giving them the cold shoulder. Fundamentally, these actions also lead to a behavior change, so they can be called punishment. But situations arousing these emotions / actions occur often in our lives, and if abused excessively, a person can grow apathetic toward them.

This is the cost of reactive punishment. The nervous system starts to build tolerance for it. The child who gets yelled at daily stops registering the yelling; the employee constantly criticized stops taking feedback seriously. You’ve burned through the correction tool and can’t use it when it actually matters.

One must be very clear on when they’re using the construct of punishment for encouraging behavior change / as a feedback loop, and when they’re using it to secure control over another individual, because these two look similar but have very different outcomes for the person on the receiving end.

This also determines how authentic people are in 1:1 relationships with you. If there’s a fear of punishment or control, they will avoid exposing parts of themselves that they can be punished for. At first, this looks like small things. A partner not mentioning a purchase, a child lying about a grade, an employee not flagging a problem early. But over time, the hiding gets deeper. The person starts performing the version of themselves that doesn’t get punished, and that performance becomes the relationship. The strange part is that after long enough, they may not even know what they actually think or feel on certain topics, because they’ve learned to filter it out before it reaches awareness. This is the paradox of gaining control: you get compliance, but you lose the person. You can keep someone close through fear, but you can’t be close to them through it. Whatever honesty exists in the relationship exists in spite of the control, not because of it.