Nobody is anti-violence

Let’s just get this straight. Nobody is anti-violence. Everybody who exists is a violent, all organisms require resources (energy) in order to survive, which are finite. One organism consuming these resources denies the same resources to other organisms in the present, and to future organisms. Even at the most basic level, occupying a part of space is denying it to anybody else. The violent nature of being a living organism is made much more apparent when resources or space are scarce. Most people are imbeciles incapable of thinking abstractly, so in case you’re like most people, let me give you a few simple examples to help illustrate this point. An example for resource scarcity - water in a desert. Example for space scarcity - if there is only one, narrow way in or out of somewhere, like a doorway, then the person blocking that doorway is violent.

If you demand “rights” you are being violent because what you’re saying is that you want to be allowed to do X and you want the police/military to put in prison anybody who would prevent you to do X, and if the person resists, you also want the police/military to beat or kill them, if necessary. So no, you’re not anti-violent, you’re just too weak and/or too cowardly to do the violence yourself so others do it for you.

To conclude, nobody is anti-violence. The difference between people is what purpose we are willing to use violence for, but everybody is violent.

Questions for your argument to make sense so we can go on with this discussion:

What does violence or violent mean?

How are organisms not resources in-themselves?

How does the problem of scarcity (desire or goal vs. resources available) imply violence?

Is the law not intended to allow the most choice, in so far as that freedom does not inhibit the ability of someone else doing what they want as well?

Not all rights and freedoms enforced by the law in all countries are punishable by imprisonment in all countries. Rehabilitation proves much better than the primitive world you seem to want to live in. Just because someone breaks the law, police and military do not automatically beat or kill them. The goal is to detain them, but we live in a historical situation where fear and socio-economic divisions are causing serious problems. The problem is not the divisions and fear, its poor leadership that democracy perpetuates after a country establishes its violent roots. A society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting and security carried out by idiots. You make some valuable points, but you offer no change or solutions. You may even prefer violent humans over negotiating ones. Your logic is messy.

I agree with op, no questions for me here.

Venture wrote

Why were there violent roots?

Human birth is a violent act … for both the mother and the infant. Is this true for all animals in the animal kingdom? I think not. Suggests humans are the most violent creature on the planet.

Isn’t the essence of the notion “civilization” simply an attempt to harness and subdue our violent nature?

Our violent nature manifests itself in all spheres of life … culture, religion, politics, economics and so on and so on.

Where is our violent nature leading us?

The ‘zenith’ … the destination … for the journey of our species … is inevitably self destruction … is there any other potential outcome?

Tom,

The pace to reach the zenith without understanding the nature of why we exist is in full throttle. What’s the rush I ask? Progress. :laughing:

What happens when ignorance is no longer bliss? Another type of violent birth? O:)

What the hell happened.jpg

Reducing everything to “all-is-violence” does not justify using it. That’s like saying, we are all just a bunch of animals, so we should act like animals, and the more animal-like, the better. Only those with diminished brain capacity would advocate for physical violence (because that’s all they can really do).

I would say that violence is doing something that is in conflict with the interests of other organisms. Because we all must consume resources to survive, and resources are finite and oftentimes scarce, by consuming resources we are denying them to others. This is just how it has to be. We should accept our violent nature instead of lying and bullshitting about being “anti-violence” while conveniently being protected by the violence of others (police/military).

They are.

Maybe if you’re libertarian, I am not because that is an inferior way of social ordering as it includes the freedom to be degenerate, which results in rapid spreading of degeneracy as it’s much more easier to be degenerate than not, it’s the path of least resistance.

And if you can’t detain them and they reject your authority, then you have to beat them into submission or even kill them, right? The reason that people let themselves be detained is because they know what happens if they don’t.

I’m describing reality - ‘all organisms are inherently violent’ is what I’m saying, whether somebody considers this “justifiable” or not, doesn’t matter, it’s how things are. Since all of us here are existing organisms we’re all already using violence so if you truly think violence is unjustified, blow your brains out to avoid being violent.

I guess then that every single organism that ever lived has diminished brain capacity, because we’re all physically violent. Some are better at being violent than others, true, but we’re all violent.

Hyperbole is so satisfyingly simple and effortless, isn’t it?

No wonder it immediately leads into ideology.

Can’t be more satisfyingly simple and effortless than your post.

This is really simple stuff. 1 bottle of water in the desert with just enough water to give energy to 1 person to get to the nearby town. There’s 2 people, if they share the water they both die. How do they decide? Do they argue, and how would that argument even look like? Do they fight? Flip a coin? Do they decide to settle it with some sort of a game? Whatever method they choose at least one of them has to die so the violent end is unavoidable. This is the inherent violence I am speaking of. All life is governed by natural selection, which is inherently violent. I know, I know, this is a hard thing to accept. Some, like Ecmandu, have gone insane due to their inability to accept this. And yet, it is what it is.

I agree that it’s much more likely act aggressively under certain conditions, however, the fact that one acts in a way that would be considered violent under different conditions does not mean that that person is violent. The circumstances change the rules of the game. The same action can be appropriate in one place, and inappropriate in another. The same action can be disgusting under certain conditions, and pleasurable under another. The significance of an action is context-dependent, if that makes sense. People can fixate on arbitrary contexts wherein they form a judgment of an action using one arbitrary context (e.g. a natural environment or being sober), and maintain that judgment for different contexts.

Anyway, it’s confusing to think of acts of necessity as violence and I don’t see why anyone would consider their own existence as violence on Earth. Maybe they would first have to buy in to the idea that all the actions and requirements associated with survival & growth were negative.

I think violence is usually associated with malice…

What do you think?

You said it.

Only if you think of violence as negative in and of itself (as most of us have been indoctrinated to, whilst conveniently the state can go about threatening with violence and doing violence as much as it wants), I don’t. Violence is a tool.

Consider this situation:

I’m sitting in the living room, watching a movie on TV, minding my own business. My little brother and his friends come, and they want to watch the TV too. I’m about 17-18, they are about 11, 12, 13 or so. They tell me what they want to watch, I tell them nope, I’m watching a movie. They take my remote and switch the channel, I tell them to return it. They don’t. I tell them nicely once again to return it, or I’ll slap them all around the room. They ignore my warning, I grab the hand of the kid with the remote, take the remote, and physically remove him from the room by pushing him and kicking him in the ass. The other kids willingly exit the room.

This is another example of what I’m talking about. Resource (in this case a TV) is scarce. There’s many of us who want it. How do we decide who gets it? Should we say that I get it cause I was there first? Or cause I’m senior? Should we say the kids get it because there were more of them, so they democratically out-voted me? Such methods may work if you manage to indoctrinate or persuade others into your preferred standard, or if you are both rational so you can argue and come to a compromise that suits you both more than fighting, but that’s not always the case.

So who was the violent one? Were we not all violent? I had the daring to take the resource (TV) for myself, so I was violent. They had the daring to challenge me, so they were violent too. And if my father had came, I would probably have had to stop watching TV myself.

Would you say that any of us were malicious? I don’t know, not sure about it myself.

Violence and anger generally is a reaction to fear. In the correct settings this can be a useful tool to us. We all have the capacity for violence, and it’s a good thing in one way because it has kept us alive as a species. It is only comparatively recently that we have become the apex predator on the Earth and if you look at how many simian species societies conduct themselves, you will see that on a more basic level they work in a very similar way in terms of how their social structure and interactions work on a day to day basis. They too will often have the capacity for violence, either within their own group for status, or towards another group for space and resources, or towards a dangerous predator, for instance a group of monkeys chucking rocks at a big cat. As human beings we have to deal with the result of layers upon layers of evolution, often working in contradictory ways, and in ways that contradict how we feel about how an enlightened society should work. For instance, there is a reaction that we all share to threat that doesn’t really help us in many modern settings, we all have a freezing behaviour that manifests itself when we are startled, like when we’re about to get ran over and oftentimes the first reaction is to freeze to the spot and pull a stupid face, possibly in an attempt to hide from the danger or play dead. This I think is a very ancient behaviour that predates when we were human beings by a long, long time, but is a behaviour we all share that oftentimes doesn’t fit with what we think the logical behaviour should be. By the same token I think we can safely say that violence and aggression (Which I believe is a later layer of evolutionary behaviour than the freezing type reaction) are behaviours that we use when we perceive threat, and are rooted in fear.

The problem comes when these reactions don’t fit with societal norms or perceived acceptable behaviour. For instance, I can become fearful and aggressive in large groups, supermarkets or generally busy places (I think I’m a bit Asperger’s), I know this is wrong, and I’m reacting to a threat that only really exists in my mind, but none the less, it feels real and the reaction is something that I can manage, but not control. Triggers will vary based on your genetic make up, personality type, and the environments that you have grown in (Yes I appreciate there are a myriad of factors at play here, but lets keep it simple) which means that it seems that we all have the capacity for violence, certainly i know from my own experience that when i have been struggling with life in general that my behaviour changes, and i go into what i call survival mode, which when i was in dangerous environments where my survival wasn’t certain, or where i was hungry then my behaviour became much more selfish and potentially explosive if i feared for my own personal safety or ability to gather the required resources to stay alive. This is perfectly natural behaviour, and in a world where animals eat other animals or compete for resources makes a great deal of sense. I think we all have the capacity for both types of behaviour, however the degree, how it manifests itself and the triggers vary from individual to individual, although we are all bound by many of the same fears and expectations. It is true to say though, that whilst we are all capable of extreme acts of violence possibly resulting in murder, on the whole, if you give somebody a gun and ask them to kill somebody else, they will be extremely reticent to do so. As we have learnt from wars past, and army conditioning techniques the process of getting one human being to willingly kill another one is actually really difficult, and only a very small percentage of soldiers will find this kind of action comes reasonably naturally to them. It varies from person to person, the ‘need’ for one person to be violent compared to another changes based on what the perceived threat is and how one person reacts to compared to another, although it is also true to say that a collection of individuals can be manipulated en masse to be bastards to another group of individuals for a number of reasons, usually based on perceived threat and competition for resources. There are times where i would advocate violence, to protect my own or somebody else’s life against a predator/violent individual for instance. I know though, that in an ideal world, there would be no need for me to do this, but just because we decided to be civilised one Thursday morning as a society, doesn’t mean we can just overwrite millions of years of genetic code, genetic code that has kept us alive as a species. Oftentimes this contradicts what we think a civilised society should consist of, but the idea of a civilised society is a reasonably recent manifestation and for a vast majority of our existence as modern humans we were hanging on by our fingernails, shitting ourselves at the idea of being eaten by predators unable to live in groups of more than 100-150 individuals.

I think the point is here that we can be neither but both simultaneously. The idea of violence repulses me, however i have been violent in my past, and i enjoy watching boxing. This is a mix of necessary but contradictory factors that weigh down on us all of the time and whilst we are all bound by the same fears much of the time, how we react to that can vary on an individual basis and i don’t think there is any way we can say for sure that humans are predominantly either violent or non-violent. Both behaviours come quite naturally to us, but are based on the individual stimuli from situation to situation and person to person. I very rarely see violence on a day to day basis, but i know that on a day to day basis, somewhere in the world for a myriad of reasons, people are shooting the shit of each other, being cruel to each other and generally acting like dicks and i guess you’ll see similar contradictory behaviour in any city centre on any given Saturday night. I don’t think this is any either or situation, but rather a neither but both.

Okay, so what’s the point of philosophizing about it? Just accept that you’re an animal already, and that’s all that you are, and will ever be! Live like an animal, like nature intended you to be! After all, you don’t get to define yourself, nature does. Right? And being a rational, self-created man is just an illusion.

Humans ARE animals. More importantly for this thread, we are living organisms, and thus inherently violent. We can’t defy natural laws.

Do you think being rational/self-created means not being an animal or defying natural laws? Because since we are unavoidably animals and can’t defy natural laws, it would just mean that being rational/self-created is impossible.

“I have always laughed at the weaklings who thought they were good because they had no claws.” --N

Suicidal Animal Gods…