Chimping Out: Make yourself too expensive to harm

**Make yourself too expensive to harm** https://bryantmcgill.com/book-chimping-out Civilized language has made the word _price_ sound vulgar anywhere near love, family, friendship or human dignity, as though introducing accounting into a relationship somehow cheapens the person being discussed. The opposite is true, because behavioral pricing is a theory of human worth as human beings actually practice it. Consequences reveal the value one person has assigned another. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-consequences-reveal-practiced-human-worth) Your behavioral price is what another person believes you are worth, measured by what they expect harming you to cost them. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-behavioral-price-expected-cost) That cost may be the loss of access to you, the loss of a relationship, the arrival of witnesses, the preservation of evidence, the refusal of a coalition to remain neutral, damage to reputation, intervention by an institution, or simply the discovery that you can leave and will not return. Money is almost irrelevant to the idea; valuation is the entire idea. Seeing the value of every soul is God's job, not mine. Human beings price one another constantly, and their behavior reveals the valuation. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-human-behavior-reveals-valuation) A person may call you priceless and still price you at zero if experience has taught them that abusing you costs nothing. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-priceless-priced-zero) Another person may dislike you intensely and leave you untouched because the consequences are obvious. People do not have to love you to leave you alone. They only have to understand that harming you is priced beyond what they are willing to pay. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-price-harm-beyond-willingness) The most dangerous relationship is therefore not necessarily the one containing the most hatred, but the one containing the cheapest harm. The deepest danger in a toxic relationship is not hatred. It is zero-priced harm—in other words, consequence-free harm—because every injury that costs the aggressor nothing teaches them what they can do again. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-zero-priced-harm-teaches-aggressor) A person insults you and keeps your companionship, betrays you and keeps your confidence, humiliates you and keeps your loyalty, violates a boundary and keeps the same access, disappears when you need them and returns to find the door standing exactly where they left it; eventually the nervous system on the other side receives the lesson even if nobody consciously announces it. Every time someone harms you without losing anything, they learn something about the price of harming you. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-harm-without-loss-teaches-price) What you repeatedly absorb without consequence becomes information about what can be done to you. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-consequence-free-absorption-becomes-information) This is why pleading can fail even when the plea is perfectly understood, because comprehension and deterrence are different things: the other person may understand exactly how much something hurts and have simultaneously learned that your pain changes nothing important for them. The person who repeatedly crosses your boundary may understand it perfectly. They may have simply learned that crossing it is free. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-boundary-crossed-for-free) That is the moment when kindness becomes subsidy, forgiveness becomes financing, reconciliation becomes restored access at the old rate, and your tolerance becomes a discount offered to the person purchasing your suffering. Deterrence begins when that price changes, and deterrence should not be confused with revenge. Revenge asks what someone should suffer after harming you. Deterrence asks what they must expect to lose before they try. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-revenge-deterrence-prices-attempt) Revenge looks backward toward injury; deterrence rearranges the future by changing the environment in which another person's appetite must calculate. Documentation raises prices because denial becomes harder, witnesses raise prices because isolation becomes harder, allies raise prices because the target is no longer socially alone, independence raises prices because control can be escaped, mobility raises prices because captivity becomes uncertain, and enforceable boundaries raise prices because misconduct begins consuming access. A boundary is not merely a statement about what you dislike. A boundary establishes what access, privilege, relationship, or protection disappears when the line is crossed. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-boundary-establishes-what-disappears) This is why you do not make yourself expensive by becoming cruel. You make yourself expensive by becoming consequential. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-consequential-not-cruel) Threatening everyone is not strength, retaliation is not resilience, and becoming the more frightening animal merely reproduces the structure you were trying to escape. You have to make yourself too expensive to harm. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-too-expensive-to-harm) The humiliating part is discovering how often affection has almost nothing to do with the calculation. Love is not a substitute for deterrence. Someone can love you and still harm you whenever harming you remains cheaper than restraining themselves. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-love-not-substitute-deterrence) Families do this, lovers do this, employers do this, friends do this, institutions do this, and whole societies do it whenever the suffering imposed on somebody else has been priced below the convenience, pleasure, status, territory or advantage gained by imposing it. Your kindness should never become the discount another person receives for hurting you. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-kindness-not-discount-hurt) Forgiveness without repricing—in other words, without changed consequences—can become a subsidy for repetition. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-forgiveness-repricing-subsidy-repetition) Reconciliation without repricing—without changing the access that made the harm affordable—is renewed access at the old rate. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-reconciliation-repricing-old-rate) The sentimental interpretation asks why someone who loved you could keep doing something that hurt you; pricing literacy asks the more useful and more insulting question: what exactly did hurting you cost them? The question after betrayal is not merely whether they loved you. The uglier question is what they believed it would cost them to betray you. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-expected-price-betrayal) Once that question is understood, civilization itself begins to look different. Laws against assault, locks on doors, contracts, courts, restraining orders, professional sanctions, witnesses, police, prisons and reputational consequences are all variations of the same ancient intervention: attach a cost to an appetite before the appetite acts. Civilization works by making certain forms of predation expensive. Personal safety often begins by doing the same thing at human scale. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-civilization-makes-predation-expensive) Law is civilization attaching prices to appetite. A boundary is the individual doing locally what civilization does collectively. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-law-prices-appetite) The point is not that every human being secretly wishes to attack everyone around them, but that civilized restraint cannot be understood without noticing how much architecture has been constructed specifically to ensure that exploitation, coercion and violence are no longer cheap. Human beings become extraordinarily well behaved when misconduct becomes expensive, and astonishingly primitive when someone else's suffering becomes cheap. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-human-behavior-cheap-suffering) The jungle discovered the arithmetic long before us: weakness invites calculation, isolation lowers retaliation, coalition changes the ledger, and opportunity expands where consequence disappears. You were never supposed to become more frightening than the predator. You were supposed to become more expensive than the opportunity. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-expensive-than-opportunity) Civilization survives by raising the price of the animal. Surviving a person sometimes requires you to become that high price. [∴](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-civilization-prices-animal) Beneath the apology, beneath the affection, beneath the moral story and beneath the civilized costume, the calculation remains, and beneath the calculation, **the animal remains.** --- Topic routes [Behavioral Pricing](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Behavioral+Pricing) · [Pricing Literacy](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Pricing+Literacy) · [Deterrence Pricing](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Deterrence+Pricing) · [Antifragility](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Antifragility) · [Boundary](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Boundary) · [Enforcement Credibility](https://bryantmcgill.com/wiki/Enforcement+Credibility) · [Reminder](https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-bryant-mcgill-too-expensive-to-harm)