i have a question

[thebestoffense]

i guess it's okay if you don't want to answer it because of what happened today with the punishment thing? it is kind of about that.

i saw some of you guys arguing with the daligig about it. so i guess this is going to sound super dumb to some of you? but i don't get it so here goes.

is there a way that you guys get people to do things they don't want to do without threatening to hurt them or something? i am pretty much on board with that being a cool idea, because being tortured and maybe dying if you do something wrong just by accident would really suck, but i really can't think of a way that it would actually work.

Comments

[zouichi]

Yes. Through appeals to reason or sympathy. Or a sense of justice or duty. There are all kinds of ways to persuade someone to help you without threatening them with injury or death.

[thebestoffense]

oh. i thought there would be some other kind of fear involved?

i think i have seen some of those before but they were not all that very useful in some cases.

[zouichi]

Fear?

Let's put it this way. When I'm in a fight, the last thing I want is for my allies to be motivated solely by fear.

[thebestoffense]

i don't know, speaking as a person who is afraid of what i guess is kind of a lot of things? it is a pretty decent motivation tool.

like what are we all doing all this stuff for? cause we're all scared that we might die or our worlds are gone forever or lots of other things that people might be feeling scared about.

[zouichi]

I can't really speak for anyone else, but I'm doing this because I feel it's the right thing to do. If there's a chance my world can be destroyed, I have a responsibility to the people who died to try to bring it back for them.

You can try and force people to do what you want by threatening them, but by doing so, you risk retaliation. Look at the Daligig and how much resentment they've built up against them. Not just on the ship, but across many worlds.

In my opinion, the people I would most like by my side are those that choose to be there. It doesn't matter how many or how few there are.

[thebestoffense]

but it's worked hasn't it? we've just had to do what they want us to do because if not they'll hurt us or somehow stop us from doing the things we want to do.

if there is a better way then i think they should have done that instead? but i don't know of those things would have worked for all of us because there are lots of different people here.

[zouichi]

No, it hasn't worked. Look at what happened to the previous crew, and look at what's happened with us. They can only control us up to a point. And the more information we obtain on them, the more clear it becomes that they're not infallible. If the ship hadn't pulled Yavek out of the way, he'd be dead by now.

There is no one thing that's guaranteed to motivate everyone. I don't even think that should even be a goal. Like I said, I'm only interested in people that want to fight with me. As far as I'm concerned, keeping people here against their will is counterproductive. If they don't want to stay, they should be allowed to go.

[bequiet_hescreamed]

As the person above said, you can't effectively motivate everyone all the time. The fact that the Daligig are even aspiring to such a goal only proves how little they understand those they enslave.

Fear is a particularly bad motivator in the long term, because the more a person is tortured and threatened the more she comes to expect it. Eventually it either backfires or the person loses her sanity and can't work for you anymore. The only reason the Daligig use fear is because it's easy - all living creatures are afraid of certain things, so the Daligig don't need to change their methods to deal with different species.

There's no substitute for it, though - you can't compromise and find something else that's just as easy and works the same on everyone, because fear is a compromise. The fact that the Daligig don't seem to realize that is regrettable for them.