Philosophy

[ColdJ]

As an attempt to not derail other threads, I am starting this new one, so that those who think deeply about Life, The Universe and the Awareness Thereof, have somewhere to put their well thought out views on all topics that don't violate the Forum guidelines.

Rule 1: There will be no posts stating that someone else's post is wrong.

Rule 2: In any post you make you make it clear that it is your opinion and the way you feel about the subject matter.

This is not a thread to have a fight. If you disagree with what is said in a previous post then you make a post expressing how you see the subject from your point of view.

 

To start I am copying in a post by @SunlitZelkova that I would like to express my point of view on, in relation to the subject matter.

As I like to take my time to make a well considered response, and reread what I have written before I post, this may take several hours.

So if you see this before I write my view, just know that it will appear at some time.

 

 

19 hours ago, ColdJ said:

I am lucky enough to live somewhere where information and news about what is happening in the world is freely available. So here we do talk about the state of humanity of the entire world. If we narrow it down to just those known to have access to nuclear missiles. Then America, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and even the UK are all talked about constantly. If we widen it to those who don't have nuclear missiles then we could be here for some time. The average person doesn't even realise just how many armed conflicts are going on in the world at any one time, they just get the ones that the news cycle deems to be important. No person on this forum has lived in a time when there hasn't been a hand full of small wars going on, somewhere on the planet.

The number of countries that has nuclear weapons is so small that their actions can't be said to be representative of humanity, assuming humanity is defined as all human beings and not "this subset of human individuals arbitrarily designated as humanity."

To make a statement in such a way is very inaccurate. Much in the same way that the behavior of countries with nuclear weapons is exaggerated to represent all of humanity, encapsulated in statements like "humanity points nukes at each other," one could also exaggerate the number of countries that have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (a majority of them!) and say "humanity does not point nukes at each other."

Neither statement is accurate, but the former is extremely common for some reason. It's very dramatic and not very observant, IMO.

19 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Considering how philisophical you are, this statement chills me. Especially since reading your stuff makes me miss @kerbiloid most of the time.

Not having empathy for any living creature but Humans, does not make it a sport.

If two radicalised teens with semiautomatic rifles enter a school and bet with each other who can kill the most people, that doesn't make it sport.

I have grappled with the issue of violence for a while.

The second line in your quoted reply is correct. I never stated that lack of empathy for non-human animals is what made hunting a sport.

The third line in your quoted reply is also correct, but confusing to me, as no one here has claimed that humans killing humans is a sport.

The reason my example was so blunt is because in dealing with the issue of violence, specifically killing, I find that people tend to use too many euphemisms that hide what they are actually doing.

Take nuclear war for instance. Both academic and layman's discussion of the subject is littered with words like "countervalue," "deterrence," "force multipliers," and "strikes." Only in very limited instances is the actual, specific concept of killing ever brought up.

The attitude of people to nuclear weapons would be very different if people were to use different language. I prefer to talk about it in terms of toddler killing, as I was very affected by the story of Tetsutani Shinichi. Obviously, no nation is going to give its enemy a heads up it is going to massively use nuclear weapons and give them days or weeks to evacuate children. Because one of the subsets of targets for nuclear weapons referred to as "countervalue" involves bombing places where civilians live, using nuclear weapons inherently is going to involve killing "some" toddlers. There is no nuclear strategy that involves solely targeting remote areas and even then these areas aren't really that remote. Civilians will die.

Taking into account that that is what "nuclear weapons use" really is, that anyone might go "but..." and still advocate for such weapons gives a much better idea of what kind of problem nuclear weapons are. It has nothing to do with the physical weapons, it has to do with people. An ICBM does not launch without someone (technically two someones) to turn the key(s).

I'm going to set aside the issue of nuclear weapons because my method of thinking about them is so morbid it might violate forum rules if I expand on it in length.

------

I will instead turn to my own thoughts and beliefs about violence in general. I do so not to convince anyone to change their opinion, but simply to shed more light on why I was able to create the sentence "Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species."

Violence is a very vague term. An action that might be violent in one context can be "peaceful" in another context. Take for instance pinning someone down and injecting them with a tranquilizer. A random person doing this against a random person would be regarded as violence, but a paramedic using specially designed techniques to do so on a person in danger of harming themself would be regarded as "peaceful" (or at least, beneficial to the "victim" in a way the former example does not possess).

Violence is thus not really a specific set of physical actions but rather a conceptual action. This conceptual action is use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in. At its most extreme, this means changing the state of a living person into that of death, but more commonly it involves attempting to inflict less-than-lethal pain on a person so that they will change their behavior in one way or another.

People who commit violence and people who aim to stop violence have existed for thousands of years. They have come up with hundreds of thousands of explanations as to why either they themselves commit violence or, why those who do commit violence "actually" do so, as part of an explanation as to how violence can be stopped.

Explaining violence in either way raises some issues. For one thing, it involves splitting the whole human population into "violent people" and "non-violent people." This is bound to make any explanation wildly inaccurate because it involves trying to simplify the behavior of billions of people. There is no "violent people club" or "non-violent people club" where everyone gets together and makes a final decision on whether to act in either way. Individuals are making their own decisions, using their own methods of calculation, weighing their own values, influenced by their own personal perception of the world, which is influenced by a myriad of varying factors.

This of course just isn't satisfying. No one sees an act of violence and comes out of it unchanged, not now wondering about why such a thing would happen. Some might fall back on their preconceptions about violence and say something very simple like "Oh yeah, that's just the way the world is!" but on the other end of the spectrum people will be left spending their entire lives trying to decipher why such a thing happened.

Trying to explain "bad" things and "good" things in the world is a massive subject that encompasses much of the intellectual heritage left behind by now deceased generations of humans. Some explanations catch on and spread around the world, in rarer cases people come up with their own explanations. There is no true, concrete explanation for such things. Although one can put much pageantry into their explanation, in reality it is all just individuals doing their own thinking about the question and then settling on one answer and declaring it to be true (although it may not be true, because they themselves made it up).

I will share my explanation, or rather understanding, of the questions: Why do people commit violence and can it be stopped, and if so, how?

I shall answer the first question first. I have spent much time racking myself over the question of why people commit violence. My understanding of various subjects does shift as I gain new information, but my current understanding is that violence is just a choice and nothing more. This is best explained using two examples.

Quote

Example 1: Person A and Person B live in a valley. Person A finds a shiny rock in the river that runs through the valley. Person B wants it, but Person A says he can not have it. So Person B climbs into a tree and drops an anvil on Person A (I'm using a cartoony method here to avoid making this too morbid... I did say I prefer to be blunt but I'm not sure where the forum rules are when it comes to such language, so because I want to share my thoughts I'm forgoing my desired manner of writing). Person B now has the rock.

Example 2: Person C and Person D live on the coast. Person C finds a shiny shell on the beach. Person D wants it, but Person C says he can not have it. Person D asks if they can share it, but Person C says no. So Person D gives up.

The most classical explanation of why the situation in Example 1 evolved the way it did is that "Person B is evil" or "Person B has no ethics," while the most classical explanation of why the situation in Example 2 evolved the way it did is that "Person D is good" or "Person D has ethics."

Such classical explanations come with very, very dangerous implications. "Ethics" are implied to be the reason, or logic, that should govern an individual's thinking about things, including (and sometimes especially) violence. Ethics dictates that it is not right to kill someone to get their shiny rock.

Seemingly unbeknownst to champions of ethics, this explanation just justifies violence. If the only reason someone should not kill someone is because "it violates ethics," that implies that it is okay to kill someone if it does not "violate ethics."

Now let's illustrate how this is dangerous by putting our alphabetical characters into a single scenario, Example 3:

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Person A and Person B live in the valley and Person C and Person D live on the coast. An earthquake occurs, destroying the environment that Person C and Person D depend on for food. They head to the valley and ask Person A and Person B if they can begin to live there and gather food, but Person A and Person B say no.

There is no other location where food can be found in this hypothetical world. Person C becomes sick and needs food to get better. Person D's understanding of ethics is that it would violate ethics to not take action to improve Person C's health. Person D believes that Person A and Person B have violated ethics by refusing to offer them food. Therefore Person D reasons it does not violate ethics to kill them and begin living in the valley. And so he does.

Ethics, or rather, "reason" and "logic" are somewhat like violence in that they are concepts, with the sole difference being that violence reflects a concept put into physical action committed by an individual, while reason and logic don't automatically dictate the physical action an individual might commit. Reason and logic can be used to explain physical phenomena happening outside of the individual's control, or might dictate what an individual does not do. This can be as extreme as dictating that a person not think in a certain way, rejecting entire lines of thought (in fact it might be said this is a characteristic of "reason" and "logic," to sort out what should be thought about and what should not be).

Although differing, "reason/logic" and "violence" are both alike in that they are simply ideas in the mind of the individual. On average, people will tend to think about these very basic concepts in a grandiose fashion. As I said earlier, people like to put a lot of pageantry into their explanations about the world.

Even without this pageantry, in reality, "reason/logic" and "violence" are just thoughts in an individual's mind. Lack of reason/logic, or "ethics" in individuals is not a credible explanation for why people commit violence, because reason/logic, or "ethics" can be used as a justification to commit violence.

Because of this, my understanding is that violence has nothing to do with what people think about it. It is simply a choice to move one's appendages about in a manner that can be causally connected to the death of another individual. Asking "why" people commit violence is not a question of what their "reasoning" was, or whether they had "reasoning" at all, but if it is even a question to be asked at all, it can really only be truly answered in terms of physical phenomena ("why is the duck not moving?" as a literal question of what is going on in the duck's body that is causing it not to move). Because any "reason" that one finds is completely made up by whatever individual being is examined. It doesn't have any correlation to reality.

So now for the second question: Can violence be stopped, and if so, how?

The answer to the first question is disheartening. If there is no true reason why people commit violence, if it is all in the heads of individuals, surely it can never be eliminated? "There will always be wars," "History is just a long saga of people knocking other people over the head," etc. etc. Is that all we are left with?

No. I don't believe that.

Violence can be stopped by interrupting the process that it is. What does that mean?

Recall my definition of violence:

Quote

Violence is thus less so a specific set of physical actions rather than a conceptual action. This conceptual action is use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in. At its most extreme, this means changing the state of a living person into that of death, but more commonly it involves attempting to inflict pain on a person so that they will change their behavior in one way or another.

Does anything in this definition lend credence to the conclusion that violence is "inevitable" or "can't be stopped?"

"Use of physical means to change the state in which someone else is in" is essentially what violence is. That is two objects: 1) use of physical means 2) changing the state in which someone else is in.

It should be obvious, but there is nothing "inevitable" or "unstoppable," or even "natural" (as many who try to downplay the problem of violence will claim violence is) about "changing the state in which someone else is in."

This may seem hard to fathom. Isn't it natural for humans to try and control each other? Whether we do it out of hubris or for genuine protection, it is a human trait!

Such an assumption does not lie within reality. Humans do not try and control each other as a matter of course. After all, rarely if ever does the guy over on the other end of the counter at the sandwich shop pester you to the point of inflicting violence on you so that you put ketchup on your sandwich.

At a much more lofty scale, in the present day humans do try and control other things other humans do: how they go about getting food, how they go about thinking about the world, and so on and so on. But like the choice of condiment to put on a sandwich, these things are not "actually" important. They aren't real. Or rather, the idea that one person ought to decide how other people should engage with these topics is not real. It is simply something that someone thought of.

This again, may seem hard to fathom. So much of the present day world is built on people trying to make everyone else think or do things a certain way. Looking back into history can help to understand how such a trend is not inherent to human behavior.

Archaeological evidence has revealed that the "revolution" of agriculture did not consist of hunter-gatherers throwing down their bow-and-arrows and planting roots (literally and figuratively). In many cases, it involved people simply leaving these communities for different places where they could live the way they wanted to (that is, subsisting off agriculture instead of hunting and gathering). The first serious farmers did not feel the need to threaten their neighbors into also adopting the same way of life lest they kill them, and likewise hunter-gatherers did not feel a need to kill those who desired to go somewhere else and cease hunting. Early farmers and hunter-gatherers existed alongside each other in Europe for thousands of years.

That's not to say the past was a utopia of respect and civility. Because hunter-gatherers occupied the most bountiful parts of the environment, in some cases farmers would inadverdantly settle in poorer areas that couldn't indefinitely sustain their communities, resulting in their collapse. Hunter-gatherers did sometimes raid farming communities. But this death and violence was not caused by people hurting each other specifically because some of them wouldn't act the way others wanted them to. Early farmers did not settle in bad places because hunter-gatherers literally forced them to (told them to or threatened them to do so), and neither did hunter-gatherers raid farming communities "because they were farmers." It should also be noted I am not talking about a universal "war" of farmers and hunter-gatherers, I'm just citing examples of how bad stuff still happened despite the main topic (physical coercion over thoughts and ideas) not being a factor in it. I'm not trying to paint a picture of a happy State of Nature.

Anyways, how exactly does all that translate into stopping violence?

What it means is that humans do have the capacity to not attempt to "change the state in which someone else is in." There is no "law" or "behavior" that dictates that humans must do that: it is an idea and a choice, and nothing more.

Unfortunately, most people are completely unaware of this. They feel they "have" to do things, or they "have no choice." This is in fact a common explanation cited by those who do commit violence about why they did it.

This goes both ways however: not only do those who might commit violence have a choice to "not change the state in which someone else is in," but so too do those who do not commit violence have a choice to "not change the state in which someone else is in."

Wait, what? People who don't commit violence have that choice too?

Yes, they do, particularly those who don't commit violence and also oppose others doing it. Because "opposing others doing something" is also an attempt to "change the state in which someone else is in."

This goes back to what I said about trying to use "reason/logic" to justify non-violence or explain why people shouldn't commit violence. That is an example of trying to "change the state in which someone else is in."

At best, further attempts to "change the state in which someone else is in," even when advocating for people to not do something like commit violence (which in theory should "give people the right to be in the state they want to be" and thus be good, right?) further propagates this "culture of control" that makes people think they must control others, and thus results in individuals thinking they "must" do things or "have no choice." At worst, it can escalate into trying to "change the state in which someone else is in" using physical means... maybe using restraints, but most catastrophically, using violence to "stop violence:" in which case people just end up committing violence and forfeit their original goal.

All of this is not reason/logic explaining why one should not commit violence (and of course, also not explaining why they should commit violence!). Violence is a simple choice. The only way violence can be stopped is by individuals making the choice not to commit it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Taking away a weapon and making up grand narratives about why violence should not be committed will not stop violence. Because human appendages are weapons and we can't ban arms (pun intended), and individuals have their own minds they can use to make up their own narratives.

Prologue

This all sounds very incredible (in the sense of "not credible") from a secular point of view. I'm basically saying that unless people who do commit violence choose not to do it, they can't be stopped, and that the "correct" way for anyone to stop violence is to not commit it. This implies sitting back and letting others commit violence.

Using animals because I'm getting into territory that for the forum, is too morbid to talk about using humans...

Should a mama wolf let her cubs be killed by a bear so that she can "stop violence?" is perhaps a question that might be posed to counter my understanding. I know because I posed myself this question.

Personally, I still am not convinced that committing violence to stop violence is worth it. This just propagates the "culture of control" and obsession with "reason/logic." At the very worst, trying to categorize between "good violence" and "bad violence" can lead to all sorts of nasty ideas like dehumanizing categorizing between "valuable people" and "targets."

I am aware this is simply viscerally unacceptable to the average person. I believe my conception of how violence ought to be stopped is not so much an obvious "fairytale for children" as a lot of moral arguments tend to go, but more so an enormous challenge for the individual.

I myself can only take my own belief so seriously and sincerely because separately, my understanding of reality and the nature of life and death is radical and wildly incongrous with present day mainstream conceptions of these subjects.

As I said, only individuals can make the decisions needed to stop violence. Not a subset of individuals making decisions for other people or ordering them about. The power to figure out one's own path to peace with all individuals, not just "nice guys" to the exclusion of "bad guys," only lies in their own minds. Not in someone else's "reasoning" or "logic."

EDIT- And I'd like to share that for me, that means valuing and holding in high regard even the people who do fail to find that path or have already failed to find that path.

EDIT 2- Just to reiterate, this is intended to shed light on how I was able to write the sentence "Like shooting hoops, but the basketball is a bullet and the hoop is the body of a different species." I hope it is of use in providing some understanding of my thought processes.

Edited 1 hour ago by SunlitZelkova

[ColdJ]

So the following is how I see things based on my upbringing, environment and life experience.

I have long ago come to the conclusion that I am atypical when compared to the majority of Humans that live on the planet. As such, many who read what I write, may have difficulty seeing my view or disagree with it. I am used to it. I tend to absorb more details when I see something, and see patterns that often mean I can predict the likely shift in world trends, roughly 2 years before those that are meant to be in charge do. I assume this is just some genetic quirk I was born with. It is basically a useless gift, because the majority refuse to believe you and by the time it comes to pass they have forgotten that you saw it coming.

Anyhow, so I was always confused why others couldn't see what I could. Now I just accept it.

To the subject of this post.

22 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

The number of countries that has nuclear weapons is so small that their actions can't be said to be representative of humanity, assuming humanity is defined as all human beings and not "this subset of human individuals arbitrarily designated as humanity."

I fully agree. Sadly this minority have the weapons to wipe out all the rest in a very short time and care more about their wants than the long term costs.

25 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

The third line in your quoted reply is also correct, but confusing to me, as no one here has claimed that humans killing humans is a sport.

It was put in as an example because a large amount of people seem to be unable to see anything else that is not Human as being anything more important than an inanimate object. It is hard to make a point to people if they would happily shoot anything that is not Human and never spend a minute of thought thinking about it. I personally have watched animals in nature, going about their day. I am lucky enough to live on a valley that is full of life. They are not programs going on a set routine everyday, They think and adapt as the situation requires, they nurture and bring up young. And they are smart enough to not invent things like taxes. They hunt, but only to survive.

39 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

I have grappled with the issue of violence for a while.

First off, I read everything you wrote, I am just going to try to give you straight answers based on my point of view. Taking in to account that the way I look at things may be an extremely minority point of view.

 

For a start, to me, the way you are contemplating these weighty issues feels very: Black and White or trying to fit things into defined boxes.

This is the way I see Humans and the world they have forced into the way they want it to be.

 

Every human is an individual, and though environment plays a heavy role into the way they percieve and believe, the chaotic mixture of their genetics and the way that mixture ended up in when they were ready to be born, plays a big role into what sort of mental human being they will become.

 Some people are born with genetics that are outside what we consider to be the majority, I don't say the "Norm" because I don't believe there is a "Norm". In some this comes out as a genetic disease, in others, the inability to empathise with any living creature (Sociopath), in some the want to harm all living creatures(Psychopath). I truly believe that the way you are born affects who you are attracted to or whether you are attracted to anyone. And medical science has shown that some mixtures end up with physical attributes in combinations that the majority do not.

The point being that humans come in so many variations that you can't get it down to good and bad. If someone tried to get a number for how many versions there are, it would be huge.

Now I am going to put down some of the likely larger groupings of Humans and how the way they were born affects their thinking.

Sociopaths: Only care about their own wants and are happy to hurt and kill others without a thought to further their agenda. Think every dictator, king, emperor, warlord etc from history and many of the country leaders of today.

Psycopaths: Like any exuse to kill, if they can get the job they will be found as the right hand man of the Sociopath.

Lackeys: They like being able to dominate others but don't want to risk being the top person. These are the type the Sociopath will employ as extensions of themselves.

Mercenaries: They do have some empathy but their greed for wealth and the want to not have to do general labour overrides. Most often, if they live long enough, they start to regret things they have done.

The average human: They want to just get on with life but when the others who are violent press them into service they follow because they don't want themselves or those they care for to be killed. They don't rise up for fear that nobody else will do the same. Usually an example is set to show them that those who say no get executed.

The cowards: Those who constantly fear for their own lives and crave protection, they will sell any body out to save themselves.

 

Now this of course is a very limited subset and example, but speaks to why there is so much violence in the world. If we tried to fit many of the other subsets in we would need to write a large book.

Authors have postulated the idea of having a grand Sociopath that they set to killing all the other Sociopaths and Psycopaths, and then once they are done they die. Always of course leaving those left with massive guilt over what they allowed to happen.

 

So the reason you find it hard to quantify is because you can't just pick 2 random humans and expect them to act a certain way. Their genetics and upbringing are both needed to be known, to know what they are likely to do in any given situation. Sorry, but there really is no simple way to stop violence in the world. Take heart though, It may not be obvious, but the world is actually less violent than it used to be. I live in a suburb, there are many suburbs, I can freely travel through suburbs to others without being challenged or coming up against fortifications. Other suburbs are not always raising armies in attempts to take over neighbouring suburbs. Very slowly, but surely, the need to work together and the birthrates of those who work together are shifting the balance.

The takeaway I hope you will see is that the majority of humans do not just become violent on a whim. Sadly there are enough who aren't the majority, that do, that it can feel like it is common for human beings.

 

1 hour ago, ColdJ said:

Violence is a very vague term. An action that might be violent in one context can be "peaceful" in another context.

Being atypical I don't see it that way. To me violence is always violence, even if the person being violent thinks they are doing it for the greater good.

A large part of society feels they have a right to do something to someone because they believe that their Ethical Rules are superior. (I will expand on this further down.)

For a moment I will clarify my understanding of something that I am not sure if the Forum will let me. It starts with an R and ends with an E

Most people tend to jump to the conclusion that it only relates to a sexual act, but that is just a sub group of the entire meaning.

It is the forcing of an individual to do something against their will, also to to something to someones body against their will. This could be as simple as shaving off someones eyebrow because the individual who does it thinks it is funny. It is a violation of an individuals right to choose what happens to themselves. Societies through a belief in certain ideologies are constantly commiting this crime because they believe their set of ethics overrides an individuals right to choose for themselves.

Now in cases where what an individual is doing is causing harm to others, you can argue that the need to protect the majority overrides their personal rights. Which is valid, but if they are hurting ony themselves then we really have no right to stop them because we believe a certain thing.

So in the example of injecting someone. Someone doing so without consent, is violence and the thing I described. In the medical version, if the person is themselves being violent and causing harm to others and wants to live, then you can justify overriding. If they aren't and just want to leave then you can't.

2 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Take nuclear war for instance. Both academic and layman's discussion of the subject is littered with words like "countervalue," "deterrence," "force multipliers," and "strikes." Only in very limited instances is the actual, specific concept of killing ever brought up

Those sort of terms are used by those in power that don't want to acknowledge what they are actually doing. The academics use those terms because they approach it from a clinical view point, rather than a realistic one.

They all know that one launch from one major power will cause all the so called counter launches and there goes life as we know it. People who openly do bad things and make poor choices due to narrow agendas, always try to obsfuscate what they are doing. The average person is aware but doesn't want to get on the bad side of those with so much power.

Sadly it would only take 1 Sociopath and 2 Lackeys to end the world right now.

 

Ethics vs Morals.

Ethics are a set of agreed upon rules, set out in a society, that hold their definition of right and wrong. There are no world wide ethical rules. What is believed to be ethical in one place is not guarenteed to be in another.

What hand you can eat with, whether you can stone a thief, what is considered theft, can you kill a home intruder, what is the allowed level of punishment for a crime, how you treat your jailed individuals, can you settle a dispute through a duel etc. All come under the ethics of a society.

Morals are not defined by ethics but can be influenced by them. Morals are sense of what is the right thing to do vs what is the wrong. I feel the killing of, or the being violent towards another human being is wrong, because I know I wouldn't want it to happen to me. I treat others with respect because I would like to be treated with respect myself.

Having a low set of morals is generally where we get people willing to do harm to others on a whim. Sociopaths basically have no morals.

I hope I covered enough @SunlitZelkova, if you have specific things that you want to get someone else's perspective on, I will do my best to try.

[SunlitZelkova]

@ColdJ You are free to believe what you wish to believe, and free to think what you wish to think. I say that to reiterate my point in my post that you copied over that I am simply sharing my own views, not for the purpose of convincing others to begin espousing my views.

There is one thing I feel a need to directly respond to in your reply. After that, I am going to expand on a subject you brought up in your reply, but not as a direct "counter" or "reply" to your own conceptions of the subject, but rather on the subject in general and how it relates to my views on violence, as an addendum to what I already wrote for the purpose of perhaps providing some understanding of how I was able to write a sentence comparing living things to basketball hoops, or rather, some understanding (even if there is still disagreement with) what a person who does write such a sentence thinks like.

10 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Take heart though, It may not be obvious, but the world is actually less violent than it used to be. I live in a suburb, there are many suburbs, I can freely travel through suburbs to others without being challenged or coming up against fortifications. Other suburbs are not always raising armies in attempts to take over neighbouring suburbs. Very slowly, but surely, the need to work together and the birthrates of those who work together are shifting the balance.

My own conception of violence leads me to a different conclusion. I feel that efforts to gauge the "prevalency" of violence tend to mischaracterize the problem.

As much as the modern, data driven mentality of the average human being tends to prefer characterizing problems in the form of a number ("how much money do I have," "how many apples do I have," "what are the values on the stock market right now," etc.) I don't think this approach is desirable when talking about violence.

"Violence" is not like "apples." If one transports apples in an open-top truck, one can lose a few a still say they got all the apples to the market. To say there is "less violence" and that is somehow good misses the point of what violence really is: a spacially miniscule event involving an interaction between a small number of people. "Less violence in the world" is not a good thing for someone actually encountering violence: because if that person is killed, their world is completely over (and in a metaphorical sense, so is the "world" over for anyone who loved that person).

I don't look at my region, which was once the site of settlers attacking the indigenous people who lived in the area, and think "there's less violence, and that's great and is an improvement" because from the point of view of someone being murdered there has been no "improvement:" they are about to die.

I'd also like to point out that ratios are a poor tool for gauging the "severity" of the problem of violence. One might argue that when compared to the ratio of those killed with the total human population 10,000 years ago compared to the ratio of those killed with the total human population in the present day, "less people are dying" but that's not the point. Not only are the hopes and dreams of scores of individuals still being snuffed out, technology has allowed it to occur on a massive scale unimaginable to people 10,000 years ago. The number compared to the total population is meaningless: larger numbers of people are dying than ever before, and therefore in my view, the world is a much more violent place today than it was before.

------

I will now turn to a subject raised in your reply, but try to deal with the subject in general rather than as a direct response to your reply. It may sound like I am responding to your reply, but the subject you have raised is used by many people when talking about the issue of violence, so if anything it is a reply to you as well as the tens of thousands, if not millions of people who think about violence in such a way, but I am commenting on the subject itself, not on the choice of others to think about the subject in a certain way. I'd like to reiterate: all are free to believe what they wish to believe, and free to think what they wish to think.

A second disclaimer is that I am going to be talking about violence within the "explanation arena" that people spar in to try and figure out the causes of violence. Sometimes, I will deliberately forgo my own reductionist view about the cause of violence to examine other explanations and point out flaws in them (and to a lesser extent, merits).

When talking about violence, there is a tendency to dehumanize those who commit it in a myriad of different ways. At its most extreme it can mean reducing people who commit violence to literal demons or monsters, and at the most casual level, it can take the form of deriding such people as "sick."

To me, this is one of those explanations that is filled with pageantry and is quite satisfying from a personal point of view. It works well as a coping mechanism for dealing with living in a world where even when living in a peaceful area, images and reports of violence are transmitted via radiowave directly within earshot or "eyeshot" of an individual.

What it does not work very well as is a method of thinking about violence for people who are actually charged with "stopping" violence. This can mean leaders, but also any concerned individual trying to help others in their community.

For one thing, this type of thinking leads to an extremely narrow set of imagineable options for how to "stop" violence. If one declares the person they are dealing with to be "sick" or "have a disorder" (mental or genetic), there is only a limited set of actions that can be taken to stop them, because the person is inherently going to act in a certain way and "can't be changed."

Second, this type of thinking exemplifies the person or persons trying to "stop" violence. If the person they are dealing with is "sick" or "is a monster," the people dealing with this person are automatically cast as "doctors" or "heroes." This type of self-glorification is not conducive to problem solving because it forms a major barrier to self-introspection if something doesn't work out, and at worst it can lead to the would be problem-solvers declaring that anything they do must be correct and cannot be wrong, because they are "sane" and "heroic."

I am highly skeptical any attribute of human biology can be attributed as a cause of violence, because the average person indeed has a propensity for violence if pushed in such a direction. The common thought experiment used to think about this is the trolley problem. A trolley is approaching a rail junction, and in either branching line, a person is tied to the tracks. A third person does not have time to untie either of them, and so must switch the tracks either way. This is a good way of framing the issue, because while the third person makes the decision with the intention of saving a person, even if the third person does not consciously recognize it, he is simultaneously making a decision with the intent of killing a person.

People hurt other people because they thought they were doing good by doing so. Obviously (although sometimes not to the perpetrator), they were not doing good for the person they were harming, but they were doing good for someone else or themself. At the highest level, this might mean a leader starting a foreign conflict or beginning an internal purge because the benefit to the nation and/or themself outweighs the value of human life, and at the lowest level, this might mean a person killing another one because whatever they feel will arise out of that for themself: self-gratification, the slain person's valuables, not having to deal with them, or whatever: outweighs the benefit of leaving them physically unharmed and trying to find another solution.

Any person is capable of making such a calculation in favor of violence. If placed into my "mama wolf and cubs vs. bear" example I mentioned in my original post, I believe that virtually every single person, if placed into such a situation with human children, is going to make the decision to kill the bear (who would also be a human).

That's still violence. It isn't anymore justifiable, excusable, or "right" just because the individual being slain is "sick" or "a monster" or "a sociopath," or a "psychopath."

I feel that trying to fit those who commit violence and those who don't into different categories just creates cause for violence, as I said in my original post (this is why my explanation eliminates categories and boils the cause down to a simple, uniform choice for all individuals). This is because what defines a "sick" person or "a monster" is very relative, if not indefinable. Especially as it relates to killing, violence is violence. It isn't a problem that can be weighed in numbers, as I said in my direct reply to ColdJ. King A is no less monstrous than King B because even if one side's actions resulted in fewer casualties than the other, individual people on both sides of a conflict are dead. Their worlds are over, and so are the worlds of those who loved them. The effect is equal, no matter what scaffolding or pageantry is used by those outside of the act of violence (the king, or people who don't know and really care about the deceased individuals) to explain why it was "justifiable" or is "good."

This is compounded by the fluidity an individual can ride when making these definitions. Arguments for attacking a specific group of people, when seriously examined, have just as much nuance and sophistication as arguments for categorizing "bad" people (like people who commit violence). In the former case it is just blatantly obvious that all of the logic and reasoning given as justification for violence against a specific group of people don't correspond to reality at all, even if the words are placed into grammatically correct sentences and the subjects are discussed in a logically coherent manner.

The main reason that is so is because people who aren't involved in the drafting of such justifications obviously aren't going to agree with the views of those who did draft them. But when these people draft their own justifications for their own solutions to problems: like, say, defining violent people as "sick:" they are just as immersed in their own view as people who draft justifications for attacking specific groups of people. That is to say, it has no correspondence to reality. It simply corresponds to the way the people drafting it see the world: whether their way of seeing it is actually in line with reality or not.

If the guideline people use for deciding whether something is "moral" or "ethical" is A) if it is written in a grammatically correct, official sounding way and B) if the proposed solution to the problem makes sense and sounds viable, virtually anything becomes acceptable because anything can be made to sound moral or ethical if given enough effort. A dramatized example of an extreme attempt at this can be seen in the film Conspiracy (2001), in which the word "evacuation" is used in place of killing.

This can't be boiled down to genetics, upbringing, material wealth, or anything else. One can not explain a decision that doesn't make sense, because there is no sense in the decision. If there is no sense then, how was the decision made? It was a simple choice, regardless of the pageantry created after-the-fact to explain it.

After-the-fact pageantry is perfectly fine as a personal coping method to explain violence. It is also the chosen method of the average present day human for thinking about those who commit violence. But it is important to note here that none of this plays any role in addressing violence before it happens.

If the goal of an individual is to make themself feel better "about violence" then these "categorizing" methods of thinking are great. If the goal of an individual is to "stop" violence, I don't think they are useful, because such categorizing is the very method of thinking by which people often choose to commit violence. When such a method of thinking catastrophically escalates, it results in fighting violence with violence, which is nonsensical and if taken seriously results in the total failure of the individual to "stop" violence.

"Categorizing" methods of thinking are useful, I would like to emphasize that. Individuals are sometimes more likely to cope better with a situation or event with their own personalized explanation for it. But "categorization" is basically just a scientific sounding alternative, or option, in a series of choices that includes blaming demons. All are equally divorced from reality and are not a reliable means of formulating solutions to "stop" violence; they are a reliable means of thinking about violence after it has happened but can not be counted on to prevent it.

[ColdJ]

@SunlitZelkova

As I believe myself to be atypical I cannot speak to how a majority may see things, I can only say how I see things.

I believe that though most human beings are capable of violence, the majority actively choose not to be if they feel they can avoid it. "What about armies?" someone may say. Armies are made up mostly of average humans who are either pressed into service or have been indoctrinated from a very young age to believe that their country or Ideology is better than and more important than others that differ. And though once they have seen conflict they may not feel so strongly about it, they feel that if they say no, they will be punished or killed, so self presevation overrides their moral instincts.

I made a point of delineating between Ethics and morals in my last post. Ethics are the majority agreed about rules of a particular society, while morals are the inherent feeling of an individual of what is right and wrong. This may not match up with Ethics of their society.

All the fancy words made up to justify violence in a society were created by Sociopaths. "How can they all be Sociopaths?" someone might ask.

Sociopaths naturally end up as leaders because of their nature. They will happily do whatever it takes to get the power and position they want. They will then create laws to justify their actions. This is actively happening in full view of the world right now, but due to the majority of human nature, that same majority will not rise up to stop it.

(I am going to make a point of this as I have run into emotional bias before where people think they know exactly who I am referring to and get upset over it. The world is a big place, just because what I have said makes you think of a particular individual, that does not mean that that is who I was referring to. That is on you, not me.)

Am I saying that all leaders are Sociopaths? No I am not, but humans are very good at holding on to what they consider traditional, even if it is bad. And so they keep following bad laws because they have been around a long time.

I would never kill someone on a whim or plot to kill them, that being said, if I or those I care about were in mortal danger from someone, I probably could kill them in order to protect my self interest. I would also hate myself and be haunted by it for the rest of my life.

For me, violence is violence, there is no good or justifiable violence. But violence is what happens when you have a choice and choose to physically hurt someone. If someone in authority doesn't exhaust all possible alternatives and jumps to causing physical harm, then they are violent. I have seen too many arrests where force was excessive or deadly when there were clear options that were less harmful.

4 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The common thought experiment used to think about this is the trolley problem.

See, I would have jammed it half way and derailed the train. There is a chance that eveybody might die but it is not a certainty. Where as the other choice would make sure that someone did die.

I would rather take the chance that everybody ended up hurt but alive, rather than making sure someone died. (Makes me think of the movie "I Robot" and why the detective ended up hating robots.)

4 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

If the guideline people use for deciding whether something is "moral" or "ethical" is A) if it is written in a grammatically correct, official sounding way and B) if the proposed solution to the problem makes sense and sounds viable, virtually anything becomes acceptable because anything can be made to sound moral or ethical if given enough effort. A dramatized example of an extreme attempt at this can be seen in the film Conspiracy (2001), in which the word "evacuation" is used in place of killing.

That relies on every human being being sheep, that never question why things are the way they are.

I have seen far too much change in the expanding of human rights in just the last decade to believe that all humans will just do it because it is written.

I won't break my moral code just because the law says it is acceptable and I don't think you would either.

When I said that on balance the world is less violent, it is true that for those sufferng from violence it makes no difference, but there will never be a sudden stop to violence unless the entire living world gets snuffed out. Violence is part of nature.

The slow lessening of violence on the whole may not save the person who is suffering right now. But it may be that thousands more who could also have been suffering at the same time, are not.

Always question it, always bring it up, because it is all those like you that are lessening it slowly, which is better than not at all.

 

[Mr. Kerbin]

ever just for no apparent reason at all, look at your hand and think “wow, I am so glad as a insignificant speck that could die at any second that I have the mind (which I may never truly understand) to see the raw wonder of it all”? or is this just me that spontaneously gets happy about existing?

Edited yesterday at 04:22 AM by Mr. Kerbin