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There are entire Game Theory textbooks dedicated to grappling with the question of when and how one engages in violence. Because broadly speaking, violence is bad. The destructive social forces inhibit socio-economic development, degrade global quality of life, propagate disease, and cause catastrophic shortfalls of critical goods and services.
Whether you’re working at the micro-scale of domestic abuse or the macro-scale of the bombing of Hiroshima, you’re talking about a gross net negative for everyone involved.
But if a detente is one-sided, or a violent actor is free to act uninhibited, there are huge immediate rewards for looting and pillaging your neighbors, pressing ganging people into forced labor, and seizing neighboring property at gunpoint. It works great for perpetrators who engage in violence unchecked. Its only a problem when the perpetrator runs into a countervailing force.
But then over the long term, the violence takes an increasing toll. People don’t build in neighborhoods that they think will be bombed. They don’t invest in communities that are fracturing and falling apart. They don’t befriend people they feel they can’t trust or work alongside people they’re terrified of.
Go look at Yugoslavia before and after the wars of the 1990s. Huge unified economy capable of operating on par with France or Italy, only to be splintered by violence and reduced to a near-pre-industrial state for over a decade. Who won the Yugoslav Wars? Who benefited from Bosnians and Serbians and Albanians and Croats pounding their plowshares into swords and slaughtering one another?
People talk about a “Peace Dividend” and you can see it in any country that’s avoided a protracted military conflict for a generation or more. You can’t be a successful country if you’re always trying to hold one another at gunpoint.
I really like your comment. Gave me lots to think about. I don’t have much to say in return, other than that, and that your comment is really well written. I don’t find many comments on here that are a pleasure to read; most long ones are incoherent rambling, or canned talking points.
Thanks for providing something for my brain to chew on and making it palatable.
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
Violence works best if you are much much stronger than the other party.
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
The areas of the US that are most successful are those most insulated from social conflict. Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing or are left to flounder in the face of industrial abuse, mafia violence, or unchecked domestic violence do much worse. Comparing Ferguson, MO to neighboring St. Louis illustrates this dynamic. One neighborhood is alternately brutalized by the city police and left exposed to domestic crime, dragging its socio-economic state into the gutter. The other is judiciously policed and socially supported by state and private largess, resulting in a far healthier and happier population.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
And those countries suffered immensely. Meanwhile, Britain itself endured pockets of chronic crime and substance abuse specifically in areas that hosted military bases and other enclaves. The country saw an explosion in wealth inequality during its economic peak with the new wealth almost entirely accruing to the aristocracy. Victorian England was a hellhole for the Dickensian proletariat.
Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing
Chicken, egg
Both of those are just chicken, egg
Chicken, egg
The police trace their roots to military officers, cattle rustlers, and plantation overseers.
The conception of police-as-civil-servant intent on discouraging violence rather than initiating it is a relatively new one.
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Very wise, you should reincarnate as a 2nd century Chinese warlord
China’s a great example of the Peace Dividend in action. You get a generation or two of peace and the country explodes with riches - both physical infrastructure and flowering culture.
Then warlords start poaching the wealth of the nation and the country plunges down into poverty, famine, and epidemic, immolating decades of social process.
After the burn out, you get a peaceful renaissance, and the country flowers again like a forest after a wildfire.
“Violence is not the answer” says country that won its place in the world through violence.
The USA would still be a colony of Britain if it wasn’t for a violent revolution.
The USA would still be a native american land if millions of people had not been wiped out by Europeans
The Native Americans would have been much better off if they had simply strangled Columbus and all his crew the moment they made landfall…
I get the humor in what you say, but it’s worth noting that the Native American civilizations were collapsing due to disease brought by earlier European visitors by the time Columbus set sail.
Granted, history probably would’ve been largely the same if Columbus’ expeditions were unsuccessful, given the English, French, Dutch and Spanish appetites for empire building
There’s a saga that is about “what if Columbus arrived to America but never got back to Europe?”. It’s “the tale of the feathered serpent”.
That sounds super neat. When I google it I find these books amongst other more confused seeming results. Is that the right ones or is it something else?
Yeah, I found the same books, and they don’t seem like the right one.
You can say that about almost everywhere white explores showed up
And it’s true!
No it wouldn’t
The historical record says that if violence isn’t working, you’re just not using enough of it.
There are PLENTY of examples where violence wasn’t the answer. Those moments made gradual changes that didn’t have epic struggles with heroic figureheads, so they’re boring, they’re not obvious, and nobody talks about them.
There are a lot more examples in history where violence was used as a tool to oppress, threaten, conquer, destroy, or completely wipe out, by great and powerful entities.
Violence is sometimes the answer, if used by cool heads on specific targets with plans on what to do afterwards.
The problem with the fetishization of non-violence is that it ignores that most transformative non-violent social movements have occurred concurrently with violent co-movements. Ghandi preached non-violence, but at the same time, violent Hindu radicals were running around slitting the throats of every British official they could get their hands on. MLK preached non-violence, but the Black Panthers were waiting in the wings, offering a much more unpleasant option if MLK failed.
Violent social movements have very real tangible value, but their value isn’t in the violence itself. We’re not going to change the health insurance system through pure violence, no matter how many CEOs lay dead on the streets of Manhattan.
On the other hand, non-violent social movements rarely succeed either. Even the most modest, centrist, and conciliatory of reforms are derided as extreme or “Communist.” Look at Obamacare, a reform designed from the ground up to NOT disrupt the profits of the insurance or healthcare industries. This was a modest market-based reform that was originally a Republican reform plan. The right spent a decade going nuts calling it the second coming of Mao. And they still oppose it to this day. In the end it tinkered around the edges, but it was hardly transformative change.
The real value of violence is that it makes modest peaceful reforms much more palatable. The civil rights amendments and acts passed in the 1960s and 1970s would have never passed if there were only peaceful movements behind them. They amended the damn constitution! That took people on both sides of the aisle saying, “damn, we really need to change some things. This is getting out of hand.”
And that kind of broad bipartisan consensus that reform was needed was only possible because of the threat of violence. Violent radicals like the Black Panthers made MLK palatable to middle America. Without them, MLK would have just been another radical socialist to be demonized. And even then, they still killed him anyway.
The real value of violent social movements is that they make non-violent social movements possible. In fact, without violence, non-violent social movements rarely succeed. You need BOTH violence and non-violence if you want to make substantial change to the system. The violence puts the fear of God into the placid middle classes and wealthy corporate interests. This allows the non-violent reformers to show up with a solution to the problem that allows these centrist factions to feel that they’re not giving in to the violent radicals. Violence and non-violence are two sides of the same coin. And they are both essential.
It seems the technique you’re describing is a kind of societal “good cop, bad cop”. Similar scenario to an interrogation too (trying to get information from someone who does not want to share the information) because in this case the challenge is “how to get people to share the capacity for self-determination, quality of living, and dignity when they clearly prefer to hoard it, even to the detriment of others”.
Exactly. No group has ever won rights by asking nicely. The truth is that it doesn’t actually take too large a portion of a population, acting together, to cause a society to come screeching to a halt. Law, order, and the right to private property can only be maintained if the vast, vast majority of the populace is willing to peacefully go along with the status quo. If tomorrow 10% of the population wakes up crazy and decides to just start setting everything they can on fire, we’ll be back in the Stone Age within a month. Most meaningful reform has come down to forcing those with power to choose between modest, but potentially painful reform on one hand and “watch as we burn it all down” on the other.
The black population would not have been able to credibly win against the white population if an all-out eliminationist race war had been sparked in 1950s America. But ultimately, they didn’t have to be able to win such a war to create a credible threat of intolerable violence. The black population alone couldn’t win a total war against the white population, but any kind of wide-scale race war would have completely collapsed the American economy and society. And such a war likely would have had factions receiving military support from US adversaries such as the Soviet Union. The threat of the Black Panthers was essentially, “we may not be able to win an all out war against our oppressors, but if push comes to shove, we can turn the US into another Vietnam.” Compared to that potential nightmare, the modest and quite understandable reforms that MLK demanded seemed quite reasonable.
Same thing with workers’ rights. “Give us an 8 hour workday” seemed extreme in isolation. But if the choice was, “give us an 8 hour workday, or we burn this factory to ashes” or “give us the right to unionize, or we can start listening to those literal Communists over there promising to bring out the guillotines…” well suddenly an 8 hour workday or a right to unionize doesn’t seem so extreme.
It is very much a good cop bad cop dynamic. It’s no coincidence that unionization, workers rights, and redistributive economic programs peaked when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power. Literal Communism is a philosophy that can appeal to downtrodden groups anywhere. And when the Soviet Union was ascendant and actively fomenting socialist revolutions and violent uprisings across the globe, they were able to serve as the “bad cop” that allowed modest reformers in the US to be the “good cop” pushing for various reforms and social programs.
Thanks, that’s got me thinking
“If you will not listen to us, you will have to talk with THEM”.
apart of me still holds out that we don’t need this type of system to push progress, taking america for example, this will not go well and many lives will be lost as there will be “both sides” and they will stay divided. The propaganda machine from Eurasia has worked. There plans are moving quite well, and i for one, will not play into that hand.
Lives are already being lost. Today, approximately 186 people will be murdered by their insurance companies through the wrongful denial of life-saving, medically necessary care. By raw body count, Brian Robert Thompson killed far, far more people than Osama Bin Ladin ever did. The health insurance industry racks up a 9/11 worth of deaths every 16 days or so. That is how many people are currently being murdered by the private health insurance industry.
I understand that’s a problem you guys are facing the US. But what will you achieve with violence? You know what trump will do. This is not going to play out like the movies. I can’t sway what your choice will be, but i fear for everyones lives who participate in a civil war with US government, and russia will swoop in and support as Putins plans have intended.
This is a long term struggle that will take far longer than the next Trump term. And what can Trump really do? I’m expecting what violence to occur to be more acts like Luigi’s. I’m not expecting some rebel army to form up and lay siege to Congress or to United Healthcare’s corporate headquarters. Instead, the path will be similar to other periods of political violence that were contemporaneous with nonviolent social movements in US history.
There were people killed in the name of worker’s rights. There were people killed in the name of women’s suffrage. John Brown killed in the name of abolition. Black civil rights had acts of violence done its name, as did the women’s and queers rights movements. Mostly these took the form of random small-scale acts of violence by individuals and small groups.
We’re not talking about a civil war here. These are isolated acts of stochastic violence. We’re talking one or two individuals occasionally taking out a CEO, assassinating a politician, setting a building on fire, planting a bomb, etc. That’s the kind of violence we’ve had in similar historical settings. We’re not going to have some American ISIS that you can wage a bombing campaign against.
Remember, America is absolutely awash in firearms. Someone doesn’t need to join a formal terrorist group to commit an act of terror. They can just go buy a perfectly legal AR-15 and commit an act of terrorism with it. Giant acts of mass murder probably require a more organized group, but no one is going to try and commit a 9/11 scale attack in the name of health insurance reform. Giant attacks with huge collateral damage aren’t really the kind of thing that appeals to people who are ultimately motivated by a desire to save lives. Expect more Luigis, not more Bin Ladins.
There is no organization for the US government to wage war on. Imagine every school shooting being substituted for a shooting against the health insurance or other industry. That’s the kind of scenario that could happen if this anti-corporate violence became widespread. Sure, Trump can lock up a Luigi and throw away the key, but that was going to happen anyway. It’s not like anyone commits one of these attacks thinking they’re just going to be able to go back to their lives afterwards.
What can Trump really do? Is he going to start arresting people for posting pro-Luigi comments on social media? You going to try to prosecute half the country? There aren’t enough jails to hold everyone. And any such crackdown would only create a bunch of sympathetic figures that would serve to radicalize the populace and swing public opinion even more in the direction of meaningful reform.
Look at what has already happened. One act of violence, and the national conversation has entirely changed. Each act of violence turns up the national temperature just a little bit, and makes peaceful reform that much more palatable. We’ve already seen several new reform bills introduced into Congress in the wake of the shooting. As things continue to degrade, as health insurance becomes ever crueler, as wealth inequality grows ever higher, the national temperature will continue to slowly rise, one act of random unpredictable and unpreventable violence at a time. Eventually some critical threshold will be reached, and the political center, which desires stability above all else, will be moved to finally embrace meaningful reform. This is the pattern that has happened with every major social movement in American history, and it is likely what we will see eventually in this case.
I understand your points, but if we are to believe trumps demeanor, what’s to stop him going full authoritarian, and throwing political protestors into camps? he seems like he want’s to do it with immigrants, what’s stopping him from doing that? This where i enter the thought of civil war. The average person will be complacent, and trumps supporters will join in as a para-military group. YOU will be labelled a terrorist regardless of pulling a luigi. Its not up to you to make that up, its up to the media and the government.
Sure, that may be possible. But again, that would just serve to radicalize people further. If people are being labeled terrorists and put in camps just for venting on social media, expect the level of violence to multiply a hundred fold. People will avoid posting on social media out of fear, but people will be so enraged that the number of people actually willing to resort to violence will increase a hundred fold. Currently Luigi is the rare exception. Put someone’s brother in a camp for posting a picture of Nintendo’s Luigi, and they may pick up a gun.
And yet, there still wouldn’t be a civil war. There won’t be armies fighting each other on a field of combat. There won’t be an ISIS to wage war on. There would be multiple Luigis per day, each one acting independently, utterly unpredictable and utterly unpreventable. This would make Trump look completely weak and powerless. And even if everyone was too afraid to say it, most of the population would be supporting the Luigis.
In a nation with widespread access to highly lethal firearms, the government simply cannot prevent single individuals from going on killing sprees. Sure, if a group of people plan an elaborate plot, that creates an opportunity to intervene. But in a case like Luigi’s, it was planned entirely in one man’s head. There’s nothing the government can do to prevent such random lone gunman attacks.
And this is why I wouldn’t expect Trump to start arresting people just for social media comments. Ultimately it would multiply violence a hundred fold, and it would make Trump look weak and ineffective. And that’s the last thing someone like Trump wants. I would instead expect pressure to be applied to social media companies to wield the ban hammer more vigorously, but actually arresting people for venting on social media seems very unlikely.
You don’t have to look to movies, to see what violence can achieve. And it’s not violence alone that makes the change.
Exactly. It’s the combination of peaceful movements and violent movements that make change possible.
Non-violence is often and most effectively a direct threat of imminent violence.
Or as a promise for the cessation of ongoing violence.
with plans on what to do afterwards.
True. You always need a plan what to do after success.
Violence is always a valid answer. It’s just not always the best answer. The problem with violence is it’s been proven time and time again to be impossible to control and hold to a limited use since there are no cool heads at that point. Nor do specific targets exist-- just collateral damage.
And no successful revolutionary has ever had a sound plan for after the victory beyond “I want the power now.” And they can either hold the power or not. But the idea of “for the good of the people” gets put to the side pretty quickly.
Source?
History.
Give me an example.
To quote the onion, violence is never the answer, if you ignore all of human history.
“Violence is bad” statements are in the same vein as “stove is hot”. Both are told to children because they cannot properly gauge the consequeces of using it, but are naive and condescending when told to adults.
Violence is bad but sometimes it’s needed.
A hot stove has it’s uses as well.
The answer is obviously codifying the position of power that violence granted you in a set of laws, hoping they won’t be challenged by further violence
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Whenever violence is involved, either both sides are violent, or violence wins.
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When neither side is violent, violence is not the answer.
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Now both sides look at #1 and ponder if the other side is ready to be violent.
I think killing people through apathetic business practices that are specifically designed to maximize profit over human life is not just murder, it’s genocide.
I also believe that a justice system that is curtailing law for the wealthy based on some sense of increased personal worth compared to that of a “lowly commoner” goes against the fabric of our nation and is a personal attack against the culture of our country. I also believe that anyone lending support to these traitors are themselves traitorous filth that deserves to be imprisoned in a public gallows to send a message that that behavior will no longer be tolerated.
short answer though, yes violence begets violence.
It’s murder for profit, don’t dilute the term genocide. The last thing we need is people calling everything genocide and making the literal genocide in Gaza seem more normal.
idk, murdering people based on their genetic predisposition to healthy living standards seems more of a literal definition of it.
I do understand (and agree with) your point though.
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As many people say, the horror of the Nazis wasn’t just that they killed so many people, but that they industrialized it, turned it into an inhuman factory process like they were mass-producing shoes.
In a similar way we have modern corporations that have brought neo liberal styles to the idea of murder. Instead of the industrial style of the Nazis, this style serves to alienate the murder from the murderer, putting a price tag on deaths and profiting from the lives they’re destroying all veiled by the size of these companies and the corporate double-speak that places all the lives they have control over into their sterile profit-centered game they play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
a political policy wherein violent struggle is encouraged rather than suppressed. The purpose is to create a general feeling of insecurity in the population and make people seek security in a strong government.
🤔
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Violence is not the answer.
Violence is more of a question.
And the answer is YES! GET THINE AXES KITH AND KIN! WE GOT A DUMBASS TO GO FUCK UP!
“Do you want to be next? DO YOU?”
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Anyone who believes that violence doesn’t solve anything has clearly never paid attention.
The answer is violence, but to advocate for peace in principle.
Peace and principle… or else
I thought we were supposed to learn from history and NOT repeat it.
Learn from history and do it better this time
yeah, and although sometimes violence is required sometimes, its best we avoid that.
Violence is not the answer. It is the question, and the answer is YES
Everyone knows violence isn’t the answer…its the question. And the answer is yes!
Further reading: How Nonviolence Protects the State
I haven’t read it yet but I read another book by that author
