On Violence

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

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:

Doing grand, thank you.

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.

This is utter nonsense and shows an ignorance of the historical record. Violence, properly executed and controlled, is a phenomenally effective means of achieving power, and there's nothing 'impoverished' about it.' The claim that true power can only come from social consent is likewise misinformed - why is power so derived more true than power achieved via violent methods?

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.

That's a charming notion, but clearly a made-up one. How can you explain the observed fact of violently repressive societies than nevertheless made tremendous progress (the United States, for example)?

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.

Like Chamberlain's bit of paper stopped Hitler, right?

Boru