On Violence

[Paleophyte]

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.

A couple of problems with this:

(1) It assumes that violence and power, consent and coercion are mutually exclusive. Sadly, our history demonstrates that it's possible to have both. In-group power and consent producing out-group coercion and violence is a pretty common theme in our tribalistic little species.

(2) It assumes that progress is dependent on this single metric when the broad social patterns are complex and thorny messes. I don't think that it's going to be quite this reductible.

I suspect that violence is more of a symptom that something is going badly and unthinkingly wrong. The knee-jerk reaction of a frightened and angry beast.