The carrot and the stick

Is the carrot the best way to get the expected behavior from someone? And when our western societies promote this strategy over the stick, is it for good reasons? Is it more ethical to use the carrot than to control people through pain?

When I think about the best strategy to use in order to get an expected behavior from someone, the stick is my first choice, not the carrot. I don’t consider the carrot as a bad strategy, it’s just I am less used to it. Maybe it’s my personal education that makes me think this way.

But I recognize that our western societies of consumerism and entertainment tend to promote the carrot more than the stick nowadays. This is a far more positive approach. At least in terms of wording.

Therefore, I often feel guilty for using the stick strategy when the mainstream approach is now the carrot.

But I can’t totally discredit the stick either. My intuition tells me to go beyond this simplistic view.

Watching an interesting documentary on Arte (a European television) about George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, I found a very good illustration of this dilemma. Huxley and Orwell had a very different vision of the future. And even if it’s a bit oversimplified, to me Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four represents the stick while Huxley’s Brave New World represents the carrot.

In this documentary, David Brin, gives the following description of Huxley’s vision:

Huxley warns that we might move to a society that controls us all through pleasure, not pain. And that is a civilization that might be very hard to escape. Who will rebel against pleasure?

George Orwell, Aldous Huxley : "1984" ou "Le meilleur des mondes" ?. Philippe Calderon and Caroline Benarrosh. 2017. (Accessed on December 13th, 2020).

So, even if the carrot strategy currently prevails in our right-thinking democracies, we have to remember that it is still a means of coercion. And this one may be more insidious than the other.