compassion vs. coercion

Perhaps the most fundamental division in one’s posture toward the world is that of compassion versus coercion. When faced with something you do not like or understand, do you try to make sense of it and nudge it in a more helpful direction, or do you inflict escalating levels of violence upon it until one of you relents? One sees the latter in Parenting with punishment, Gardening with pesticides, communities with prison and policing, and most clearly among nation-states with war—all examples of coercion, all of which backfire, inevitably if not immediately.

Taoism and the Tao Te Ching in particular advocate for wu wei or “not forcing,” counseling against the self-defeating logic of coercion. But what does that look like in practice? Coercion is ultimately a failure of imagination, a frustration with the world being some way we judge bad and our inability to make it better. The alternative to coercion is compassion (or care), a three-step process of:

1. Looking inward to understand your own judgment and the unmet need it stems from. Is my kid singing obnoxiously about poop actually a problem that requires a solution, or am I feeling annoyed about something else and just need to feel like I have some control over life? If you can just be okay with something, choose to. But if the actions of others could cause real harm…
2. Seeking to understand why things or people are the way they are, what unmet need of theirs their behavior is meeting (or trying to). Yesterday my kid was digging in the dirt with a piece of rusty rebar she found outside. Tetanus is no joke, and I needed her behavior to change for her own safety. I could yell at her or threaten punishment (coercion), damaging our relationship just to reduce a little risk, or…
3. With their consent, helping them meet that need in a way that also meets yours, for example getting her a more effective, less dangerous digging tool like a shovel and explaining why I’d like her to use it instead, reinforcing our relationship.

Not all examples are this easy, so I hope to document some of the harder ones as I figure them out.

Institutions prefer coercion to compassion because it’s short-term efficient (and because we allow them to)

Maria at the blog Crooked Timber writes in “Coercion vs. Care” observing a tragic, frustrating scene at the airport in which the airline had chosen to staff a busy check-in counter with just a single, overwhelmed employee whose only option to “ask for help” was to direct an amply-staffed security force to inflict violence upon passengers. We know from studies of animals under Stress that bullying and stressing others out is a reliable way to reduce one’s own stress, so you can imagine what resulted from this situation. If only the airline had hired just a single additional employee at the counter, they’d have happier employees, less-traumatized customers, and could likely even save money by hiring a smaller security force! So why didn’t they? I suspect it’s partly the logic of capitalism that costs be minimized as much as possible to pad quarterly profitability, no matter the costs to the business or society (as externalities) in the long term.

In the public sector, we see this play out in cities’ responses to homelessness. There is an abundance of evidence that the least expensive, most efficient solution to homelessness is, yes, to house people, yet cities routinely refuse to do so, instead choosing to overwhelm their police forces and hospitals with the responsibiliy and degrade the quality of their public spaces with anti-human design.