On Violence

[Thumpalumpacus]

Hello, I hope everyone is doing well—it's been a while. Here are a few disorganized thoughts I've had this week, based on current healthcare events:

1. Violence is an impoverished conception of power. That's because true power can only come from social consent, and to achieve consent you must communicate, negotiate, and persuade others—not coerce them. Violence is thus the absence of strategy; and without strategy you will always have the illusion of change but never the certainty of progress.

2. As such, violence and progress do not, and cannot, coexist. They are inverse measures of each other, such that you can predict the state of one by observing the state of the other. Nor can progress rationally precipitate from violence, because you cannot lend yourself to wrong you condemn and hope to move beyond the place where you started.

3. Finally, my conclusion is that no matter how justified violence may be in a given situation, IF a nonviolent alterative exists the nonviolent one will always outperform the violent one.

Violence is recourse when words fail. Given that it too is a form of communication, and ideally the last recourse, violence is what happens when talking fails.

I think you may be right -- violence may be an absence of strategy. The other thing is that violence, of the threat of it, may in itself be a strategy. I know plenty of street guys who will make its threat part of their being able to walk away; I've traded shots with them myself. They use the threat of violence as a means of coercion, if it can work. They might get busted chops or jail terms when they don't adjudge the situation accordingly.

There are some situations when there is a nonviolent alternative exists, but it will not out perform a violent response anyway. When you are being attacked, for instance.

We'd most of us like to talk things out, but there are some people who just ain't being talked out of their rage. Guy who bit off half my ear, for example. I don't regret a single punch, and I'm glad his left eye was about half out of its socket. Not because I wanted to hurt him, but because without hurting him I might not be here to write this post. He wanted to kill me and the only thing that stopped him was my violence.