The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
737.
In times when man is led by reward and punishment, the class of man which the legislator has in view is still of a low and primitive type: he is treated as one treats a child. In our latter-day culture, general degeneracy removes all sense from reward and punishment. This determination of action by the prospect of reward and punishment presupposes young, strong, and vigorous races. In effete races impulses are so irrepressible that a mere idea has no force whatever. Inability to offer any resistance to a stimulus, and the feeling that one must react to it: this excessive susceptibility of decadents makes all such systems of punishment and reform altogether senseless. The idea "amelioration" presupposes a normal and strong creature whose action must in some way be balanced or cancelled if he is not to be lost and turned into an enemy of the community. _The effect of prohibition._ Every power which forbids and which knows how to excite fear in the person forbidden creates a guilty conscience. (That is to say, a person has a certain desire but is conscious of the danger of gratifying it, and is consequently forced to be secretive, underhand, and cautious.) Thus any prohibition deteriorates the character of those who do not willingly submit themselves to it, but are constrained thereto.
_"Punishment and reward."_--These two things stand or fall together. Nowadays no one will accept a reward or acknowledge that any authority should have the power to punish. Warfare has been reformed. We have a desire: it meets with opposition: we then see that we shall most easily obtain it by coming to some agreement--by drawing up a contract. In modern society where every one has given his assent to a certain contract, the criminal is a man who breaks that contract. This at least is a clear concept. But in that case, anarchists and enemies of social order could not be tolerated.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.