On Violence

[Belacqua]

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.

Hey, it's been a while! I hope life is treating you well.

In one of Zizek's books he talks about violence that's "below the line" and violence that's "above the line." 

"Above the line" just means that it makes the news, or people are aware of it and shake their heads about how it's something bad. "Below the line" is more like structural violence -- the stuff that our society needs to keep running, so we all just sort of ignore it. If we're aware of it at all. 

The below the line stuff might vary somewhat according to how we define violence. For example, the fact that to have our battery-powered devices there have to be lots and lots of people working in slave-like conditions in Africa seems like structural violence to me. The fact that the people of Iraq can never benefit from their country's natural resources because the US still steals all the profits. Not to mention for-profit jails where investors make more money if more people are incarcerated. 

And I'm not vegan or anything, but violence against animals is still violence. 

So your statement "violence and progress do not, and cannot, coexist" will seem silly to people who have no trouble ignoring or justifying the below-the-line violence. But for people who are aware of it and hate it, it means that what we see as progress is in fact not. Progress gained through oppression is not progressing anywhere, except toward greater inequality and injustice. 

A society that needs such structural violence to maintain the comfort of the more fortunate will seem like an advanced society to those who are comfortable. But seen from an objective distance, it is not a successful culture. 

The very least we could do is to be conscious of the structural violence and work towards its alleviation. But we just had a big-time political campaign, and neither side thought it worthwhile to bring up the problem. Though if one side had, I might have actually been moved to vote for somebody.