(December 14, 2024 at 10:39 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: 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:It's more likely that violence is simply another strategy, that some people are content to use, or as Clausewitz put it "War is a continuation of politics by other means" Violence has also rid the world of the Nazis and the Fascist militarists in Japan, so I whilst it requires enormous suffering, one cannot argue that it does not work, though subjective moral arguments can be offered as to when and how much violence is justified.
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.
I don't see point two sorry, is there any indication humans are moving away from violence as a means to achieve what they want? If so I must have missed this, just watch the news for a few days.
As to point 3, a non-violent alternative will only exist when all parties in a conflict are not prepared to use violence, once that changes the your choices are to acquiesce to the demands of the party prepared to use violence, or to try and match or exceed that violence. We already know from history that with some people and ideologies a peaceful resolution simply isn't possible.
