Thinking seriously about violence
A failure to take violence seriously is bad
Violence is a big deal. The evolutionary environment did not give us good intuitions for thinking about violence, so it's easy to think badly about it. Wrong instincts about violence can worsen your mental and physical life and encourage wrong or even fascistic political thinking about other people and society. I've come around to thinking that many people think badly about violence. I'm not sure how well I'm doing, but I feel pretty confident that each of these statements are true and healthy ways of relating to it, and I'll write more about each one:
To be a good person, you need to take the problem of violence deathly seriously
Violence does not transform you into a player in the game of history
Violent ideation is not a weapon you can use in battle on the astral plane
I’ll add to this post over the next few months. I’m expecting it to end up being pretty long. Some additional points I’ll add to this in the future:
Violence will spring up and can't be re-educated away
Complex, impersonal systems are required to reduce violence
Consequentialism or bust
Direct interpersonal violence used to be the norm
Violence and the state
A lot of this post will be obvious or repetitive, but I think a lot of correct thinking on violence is obvious and repetitive but still gets forgotten and neglected. This is my attempt to put a lot of obvious and repetitive but important ideas about violence in one place. I have trouble holding these in my head in extreme situations and it’s worth coming back to them and trying to write them out. I hope it’s worthwhile to read! My other posts so far have had very specific topics and focus. In this post I’m trying something new and throwing a bunch of different unrelated ideas that have been important to me at a big general problem and seeing what happens.
A note on the definition of violence I'm using: This post will only discuss violence in the context of direct, intentional actions with the primary goal of causing physical harm to someone else, either committed by individuals or states. I'll distinguish this from ideas like economic violence, where economic decisions harm people without the actors directly attempting to damage each other physically. Economic injustice is real, and violence is sometimes justified in response to it. However, if I don't distinguish between direct violence and economic injustice, the post will spiral into commentary on all forms of injustice, and it's already very long. One of the most common objections to writing about violence is that the author is "ignoring forms of violence which are less visible," which effectively demands to either account for literally all injustice in the world or stay completely silent on violence. You can talk about specific forms of violence without justifying other forms of evil. It’s true that things like private property, borders, and other aspects of the modern world involve implicit threats of violence, and so could be worthwhile topics for a post about violence. Still, any arrangement of society involves tacit agreements about when and how to use violence. I can't turn this post into a treaty on the exact correct distribution of all resources in addition to what I've already written.
Almost every section of this post will circle back to World War 2 and make the same points about it. I see World War 2 as the clearest example of justified mass violence, so it’s an especially useful reference point.
To be a good person, you need to take the problem of violence deathly seriously
Violence is real and a portal to hell. People can suffer from violence in ways many of us can barely understand, if at all. Brian Tomasik has a fantastic essay here on how easy it is to use narrative and mental tricks to avoid how horrific extreme suffering can be. Violence is not something we should play mental games with.
This applies to all forms of violence: interpersonal violence, violent crimes, unjust organized violence from the state, war, and atrocities. Violence from school bullies can leave the recipients shaken and changed for years. Being violently attacked or threatened by a stranger can permanently change your sense of self or relationship with where you live. Police violence against innocent people is at least as bad. Most of us can’t really imagine what war is like.
These facts all seem obvious, but many people lose sight of them. There's a romance to danger and an excitement about violence that many people haven't given up. It's easy to see violence as something bad that happens in a moment instead of as the beginning of a long process of pain and (if the victim is lucky) healing. It's easy to read about a murder and forget that every day for the next 60 years, there will be a person who is not there but would have otherwise been. It's easy to read about a violent assault and not hold in your head that for the victim, daily life will be different and much worse for a long time. War is especially easy to play mental games with compared to its actual brutality. It does not seem possible or worthwhile to react emotionally with the correct level of intensity to each instance of violence, but we should aim to respond with the correct ideas and ways of thinking about it.
Playing mental games with violence and behaving like it’s not a big deal is bad. It will cause you to be less careful about what policies and cultural practices work at protecting people from hell. A clear example of how bad a failure to think seriously about violence can get is pacifism during World War 2. If the US had not entered the war, as advised by pacifist groups at the time, fascism might be a permanent part of the international community. The world would include a lot more hell than it does. The reason we are not living in that hell is, in part, the simple reason that enough people in the US were thinking correctly about violence.
The rest of this post will be rules for thinking seriously about violence.
Violence does not transform you into a player in the game of history
There are specific strands of the left and right who discuss violence as if it gives you access to something more real than your day-to-day life. Everyday life is a veneer hiding the reality of violence, and by participating in violence, you break free and become an actor in the world rather than merely a spectator or pawn. The NPC meme is helpful in understanding people's fear of falling into inauthenticity. An NPC is an everyday person who is functionally unconscious and unaware of the real world. Some people tell a story where violence is your ticket out of life as an NPC, a way to become a player in the game of history rather than a pawn. In the story they tell, comfort and safety are lies or tricks. Violence is the truth.
This is dumb and wrong. Violence will not provide you with the sense of authenticity you're looking for, and it will rarely be the most effectual thing you can do to change history.
On the left, Marxism tells the story that underneath the superstructure of our daily lives and concerns is an economic base built on violence and oppression. What to do about this varies by how thoughtful the specific Marxist is. I don't want to misrepresent thoughtful academic Marxists on this. Instead, I'm trying to call out a pattern of thinking I see in Marxists who are less thoughtful about violence, which I'll call Marxism for Stupid People. Marxism for Stupid People says that because the reality of the world is violence, any violent act in the name of liberation is justified, is an authentic step toward liberation, and elevates the person who commits it to a player in the game of history rather than a mere observer. Most actual Marxist intellectuals have rejected this way of thinking; see, for example, Trotsky's condemnation of individualistic terror in favor of coordinated proletarian revolution. This passage from Days of Rage on the Weather Underground exemplifies Marxism for Stupid People: zero strategy, a desire not to be seen as a wimp, and a faith that you can move history forward by simply enacting violence.
By the first week of February 1970, all three Weatherman groups—San Francisco, the Midwest, and New York—were more or less in place. Everyone, at least in the leadership, understood what would come next: bombings. Perhaps surprisingly, there appears to have been no coordination among the three groups, no overarching plan of attack. Instead, the field marshals in each group—Howie Machtinger in San Francisco, Bill Ayers in the Midwest, and Terry Robbins in New York—mapped out their initial actions independently. Given Weatherman’s leadership culture, it is hardly surprising that a keen competition arose among the three men and their acolytes to see who could launch the first, and splashiest, attacks.
“The problem with Weather wasn’t that people disagreed with our ideology,” Machtinger says. “It was that they thought we were wimpy. The sense was, if we could do something dramatic, people would follow us. But we had to act fast. We had no idea what Terry and Billy were doing, they had no idea what we were doing, but everyone wanted to be first.” Adds Wilkerson, “That was the real problem: all these macho guys with their macho posturing, seeing who could be the big man.”
The extreme right's neuroses about violence are more obvious. Fascism's central premise is that good and virtuous people must use violence against diseased, weak, and evil people who have stolen the vigor of the population under the guise of procedure, abstraction, and neutrality. Violence against weak people is a cleansing and transformative act that strengthens a nation. The Anatomy of Fascism lists the fundamental patterns of fascist thought, all of which point to a simple worldview where violence and will ought to override reason and procedure:
A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;
The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
For a fascist, to refrain from violence is not only to be tricked and subdued by your enemies. It also means that you have lost your authenticity and vigor. If this thinking pattern is relatable, you should step back and ask yourself whether you should continue to think that way.
My argument against both the far left and right's conception of violence is simple. The evolutionary environment trained us to think of violence as a way to make things happen. We kill our enemies and take their stuff, and things get better. The evolutionary environment also trained us to eat as much sugar as possible. We should be wary about our impulses here. They make sense in bands of 100 people, not in a world of 8 billion people. A good question to ask yourself if you think violence is a path to impact is whether you have processed how many people are alive today. Take some time to look over this webpage. Of all the ways you could spend your time to have the most impact on the most people, to be effectual in history, how likely is it that interpersonal violence is your ticket to that effect?
What affects society is incredibly complex economic and social processes and individual decisions that mostly have nothing to do with in-the-moment interpersonal violence. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution had a much more significant effect on the lives of more people than most other humans or movements in the 20th century, mainly accomplished through boring scientific experiments.
Nazi Germany was the most systematically violent society of the 20th century, where very intense violence was built into every economic and political relationship. Individuals lurching toward whatever made them feel meaningfully violent in the moment could not have defeated Nazi Germany. In many cases, individual acts of terror could have made the state more popular. If you wanted to help end the systematic violence of Nazi Germany, you could not merely step into the realm of violence and escape the veneer of the everyday. This step does not exist. What was required to end Nazi Germany was a vast, coordinated war effort with millions of soldiers following carefully planned intricate orders, a massive amount of industrial capacity, and the willingness of specific actors to make gruesome trade-offs in decisions like firebombing cities or building the nuclear bomb to potentially use against Germany. Many instances of successful violence that made Germany less powerful likely felt meaningless to the participants. The mere fact that Nazi Germany was built on violence did not imply that all forms of violence committed by its enemies could harm it. Most could not, or could even help it.
Violence affects history, but this is mostly incredibly complex and coordinated violence, which feels meaningless to the individual participants. Imagine that two armies are fighting each other. One is full of soldiers who will override any intuitions they have if given orders from above. The other is full of soldiers not being commanded who will each individually act in whatever violent ways seem most meaningful. The coordinated army wins every time. There is no relationship between how personally meaningful violence feels and how much effect it has on history. Drone operators have a much more significant impact sitting thousands of miles away from battle than their targets have. The only way to be a player in history is to ignore most of your impulses toward what seems immediately meaningful and what will give you a ticket out of your emotional malaise and instead think and behave extremely strategically with lots of other people attempting to accomplish a similar goal regardless of how it makes you feel.
Justified violence does not come with plot armor
People have an innate feeling that there is some relationship between the rightness of a cause and the ease with which they can be violent for it. Consuming lots of media about superheroes and action heroes who effortlessly mow down their enemies might reinforce this impulse and cause people to imagine that actual violence is similar. Plot armor is the name for the tendency of characters to be invulnerable to death because they are necessary for the plot. Action heroes can kill hundreds or thousands of people, and throughout you know that they will be safe because they need to make it to the end of the movie. If you find yourself with an intuition that you or your side has plot armor because you're right and good, you should remember that this is false!
This long passage from For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War is an especially interesting description of the imagined adventure vs. the real meaningless brutality of actual violence. If you find yourself eager to engage in violence out of any sense that it would be adventurous and exciting rather than completely random, brutal, and meaningless, ask yourself how your experience would be different than the soldiers described:
To judge from their correspondence early in the war, most soldiers were “spoiling for a fight.” Rebel and Yankee alike, they clamored for a chance to “see the elephant”—a contemporary expression denoting any awesome but exciting experience. “Our boys are dieing for a fight,” wrote a recruit in the 8th Georgia. An officer in the 37th North Carolina told his wife that “our Men are allmost Crazy to Meet the Enemy,” while a lowly private in the 13th North Carolina wrote to his father that “the Company is all anxious to get in to a battle and they cannot go home with out a fite.”
…
The zeal of unbloodied troops for trial by combat was scarcely unique to the Civil War. Even in World War II, which Americans entered with less enthusiasm than most previous wars, soldiers seemed anxious for the fray. “The anticipation of . . . getting into a fight stimulates a powerful excitement, which the men habitually refer to as ‘eagerness,’ ” wrote two army psychiatrists during the war. “They become very restless for combat and impatient of delay. . . . The men seldom have any real, concrete notions of what combat is like. Their minds are full of romanticized, Hollywood versions of their future activity in combat, colored with vague ideas of being a hero. . . . They are not at all prepared for the nightmare experiences in store for them. . . . Combat is always a surprise and a shock, because there is no way of preparing for the emotional impact short of actual experience.”
Substitute Currier and Ives for Hollywood in this passage, and it would serve as an accurate description of Civil War soldiers. Many of them found their first experience of combat indeed a surprise and a shock. An Ohio soldier who had written home before his first battle that “Wee ar all big for a fight” told his wife afterwards: “Mary I went into the fight in good hart but I never want to get in another it was offal [awful] mary you cant form any idy how it was the bulets and cannon ball and shells flew thick as hail.” A private in the 6th North Carolina wrote his father after the first battle of Manassas: “Sutch a day the booming of the cannon the ratling of the muskets you have no idea how it was I have turned threw that old Book of yours and looked at the pictures and read a little about war but I did not no any thing what it was.” A Texan penciled breathless diary entries during and immediately after his first battle: “We are lying down in the dark, actually scared nearly to death. . . . We hear amid all the roar of the artillery zip-zip-zip bullets from the enemy. . . . Whoopee now comes the business. . . . Oh what is the matter—is this the end of the world?” A shell exploded nearby “killing one man and cutting off both legs of his brother. The one that had his legs shot off turned his body about half way to speak to his brother, not knowing that he was dead. As soon as he saw his brother was dead, he takes his pistol (a 6 Shooter) puts it to his head and killed himself.” Little wonder that a Virginia private could write, after similar experiences, that “I have seen enough of the glory of war. . . . I am sick of seeing dead men and men’s limbs torn from their bodies.”
Once they had seen the elephant, few Civil War soldiers were eager to see it again. Whether or not they had passed this test of “manhood” with “honor,” their curiosity about the nature of battle was fulfilled, their ardor for a brush with the enemy sated. Rebel and Yankee alike, a great many soldiers wrote home after their first battle in similar words: “I hope I will never be in another . . . no man can tell me any thing about war I have got a plenty.” “I am satisfied with fighting. I wish the War was “over.” “You can never realize the severity of battle and I hope it may never be my lot to go into another one.” A teenager who enlisted in the 9th Indiana Cavalry in 1864 with visions of glory in his head wrote after his first fight, against Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troopers, that he “got to see the Elephant at last and to tell you the honest truth I dont care about seeing him very often any more, for if there was eny fun in such work I couldent see it. . . . It is not the thing it is braged up to be.”
When the romance and glory of war dissolved in the soldier’s first battle, a veteran’s solemnity replaced the recruit’s eagerness. No outfit had been “more anxious . . . to get into a battle” than the 4th Alabama, wrote a captain in that regiment, but 190 casualties at First Manassas “has produced a visible change in the regiment. You hear much less hilarity and joyous songs. My own company has lost some of its best men.” After the 26th Virginia’s baptism of blood at Seven Pines, a lieutenant told his mother that “ ‘the boys’ are not the same romping fellows they were at Glo[ucester] Pt. but a seriousness seems to have come over them all. They say they all wanted ‘to get into a fight,’ but they have had enough of it, until necessity compels them again to it.” A veteran captain in the 1st Maryland (Confederate) noted in 1863, a few months before he was killed at Gettysburg, that new recruits to the regiment “think it would be a disgrace never to have been in an engagement. I can appreciate their feeling and could once have expressed myself the same desire but now all such romance has vanished from my mind.”
A way to think about what large-scale violence is actually like is to imagine yourself, your friends, and your enemies all sitting in a large field, all far away from each other. You cannot move or leave. Bullets are shot into the field from completely randomized machines at random times, between long stretches of nothing. Sometimes, the bullets hit your enemies, and they die, and maybe you feel good about that. Sometimes, they hit your friends, and your friends are really dead. Just as dead as if they were killed in everyday life in a car crash or died from cancer. You will never see them again. Sometimes, the bullets don't kill but cause incredible tortuous pain that your friends have to endure. This process lasts for months. You do not get a break. You are not able to think about much else. Eventually, one side loses enough people to surrender or lose everyone. Everyone else goes home and rebuilds. You're wrong if you believe that actual combat is less random than this. You’re wrong if you think that one side's righteousness makes them less vulnerable to the randomness of violence.
If you introspect and find any intuition that you carry that says that you could be, in any way, protected from the worst outcomes of violence by the virtue of your cause, you should try hard to change your intuitions.
Genuinely virtuous and just causes need to win. If they don't, the world can become hell. World War 2 had to happen. 20th-century fascism needed to be defeated, or the world would have been hell. Good causes need intense strategic thinking, sacrifice, economic and political power, and lots of believers. If you want your side to win, you must work intensely hard on those instead of allowing yourself to be lulled into the fantasy world of easy plot armor violence.
Violent ideation is not a weapon you can use in battle on the astral plane
This is self-evident, yet I find that more and more people need to hear it. Contemporary life can be scary and give you a bad feeling of being out of control. A soothing but wrong and deeply unhealthy way to try to feel control is to imagine that the main task of politics is identifying the bad guys in the world and then spending a lot of time fantasizing about harming them. Many self-identified radicals will not take many radical actions, but will sometimes drop their fantasies of violence and revenge in everyday conversations to show that they’re serious. It often comes across as if they genuinely believe that violent ideation is, in some meaningful way, making the world better, or at least making themselves more effectual, as if they're fighting a spiritual battle on the astral plane against their enemies. Not reacting to it is a good way to deflate someone’s astral plane violent ideation. They are looking for shock value, not serious intellectual conversation or response. Denying them your shock is similar to denying a narcissist attention. It deflates them and makes them focus on other things. If they stop seeing their violent ideation as an avenue to do psychic damage to others and to shock the people around them, they might stop and do something useful.
Peppering your beliefs with violent ideation is a way to make them seem more legitimate, as if you're capable of entertaining violence in a way your enemies are not. This is always an illusion of control and effectualness. The most successfully violent people I know (mostly in the military and Department of Defense) experience no violent ideation at all.
There’s an especially ugly tendency for astral plane warriors to grab onto any news about violence that the average person finds unpalatable and then associate it with their beliefs to give them an edge in conversations. There are times when extreme forms of violence are justified, but eagerness to talk about how big gruesome instances of violence are good and noble almost always comes off as a desperate attempt to coast on the status of the perpetrators as tough and authentic actors in history, so that people think of you in the same way. This is always visibly desperate, and you can tell that the person saying it must really want to be a part of something big and important and latch their everyday concerns to it. It’s a form of worshipping human sacrifice as a prayer to the universe to transform you into an effectual person.
The world involves grizzly trade-offs where horrific hellish violence is sometimes morally required because it is better than the alternative. Keeping our hands clean is impossible if we want to be truly ethical
World War 2 is filled with examples of violence and horror on levels we can barely understand. Many of them also had to happen. Pacifism in World War 2 would have meant a permanent place in the global order for fascism. War is a grizzly horrific trade-off. Around 55 million people died during World War 2, many because America specifically decided to join the war. If America had not joined the war, many more people would have died, but the specific people who died would have been different. America entering the war was thus a decision to cause millions of deaths that would otherwise not have happened to prevent a much greater number of deaths and fascism from taking over Europe. To pretend that we do not have to make gruesome trade-offs like this is effectively to decide that it is better that more people experience hell than that we involve ourselves in morally ugly decisions. The depths of suffering are so deep that we need to make trade-offs to reduce them as much as possible if we want to be good people.
There is a way of talking about questions of violence, as if every side involved is evil for even considering the problem, and the solution is to merely reduce our influence over the world and shift the responsibility for violence to other people. This is very bad. It punishes people who take the issue of violence seriously for the sake of pretending that we can escape intense ethical trade-offs. There are probably times when we can escape trade-offs and avoid violence altogether, but there are also times when pretending we can avoid trade-offs is throwing away our responsibility to prevent hell for other people.
Distinguishing between necessary and unnecessary violence is hard. Part of the reason it’s hard is because of our illusions about violence’s relationship to what’s important. Feeling like we’re committing necessary violence is intoxicating, it gives us a sense of importance as actors in history. Part of the reason making gruesome trade-offs is so distrusted is that it is perceived as pretending to have some great and noble reason for violence when none actually exists, one of the most natural ways people are evil. This distrust is justified, but it doesn’t justify total pacificism. There are too many examples in history of good people needing to get their hands dirty to prevent horrific evil.
George Orwell’s description in Homage to Catalonia of a surprisingly effective nonviolent tactic used against fascists in the Spanish Civil War. This is a clear example where the necessity for violence against very specific fascist troops was in fact an illusion and by soberly examining options, a nonviolent solution was strategically better:
They say it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man, and at this rate it would be twenty years before I killed my first Fascist. At Monte Oscuro the lines were closer and one fired oftener, but I am reasonably certain that I never hit anyone. As a matter of fact, on this front and at this period of the war the real weapon was not the rifle but the megaphone. Being unable to kill your enemy you shouted at him instead. This method of warfare is so extraordinary that it needs explaining.
Wherever the lines were within hailing distance of one another there was always a good deal of shouting from trench to trench. From ourselves: 'Fascistas --maricones!' From the Fascists: ''Viva Espana! Viva Franco!'--or, when they knew that there were English opposite them: 'Go home, you English! We don't want foreigners here!' On the Government side, in the party militias, the shouting of propaganda to undermine the enemy morale had been developed into a regular technique. In every suitable position men, usually machine-gunners, were told off for shouting-duty and provided with megaphones. Generally they shouted a set- piece, full of revolutionary sentiments which explained to the Fascist soldiers that they were merely the hirelings of international capitalism, that they were fighting against their own class, etc., etc., and urged them to come over to our side. This was repeated over and over by relays of men; sometimes it continued almost the whole night. There is very little doubt that it had its effect; everyone agreed that the trickle of Fascist deserters was partly caused by it. If one comes to think of it, when some poor devil of a sentry “very likely a Socialist or Anarchist trade union member who has been conscripted against his will--is freezing at his post, the slogan 'Don't fight against your own class!' ringing again and again through the darkness is bound to make an impression on him. It might make just the difference between deserting and not deserting. Of course such a proceeding does not fit in with the English conception of war. I admit I was amazed and scandalized when I first saw it done. The idea of trying to convert your enemy instead of shooting him! I now think that from any point of view it was a legitimate manoeuvre. In ordinary trench warfare, when there is no artillery, it is extremely difficult to inflict casualties on the enemy without receiving an equal number yourself. If you can immobilize a certain number of men by making them desert, so much the better; deserters are actually more useful to you than corpses, because they can give information. But at the beginning it dismayed all of us; it made us fed that the Spaniards were not taking this war of theirs sufficiently seriously. The man who did the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how much better we were fed than they were. His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative.' Buttered toast!'--you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley--'We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!' I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying.
I have to admit that I have ugly impulses toward violence against fascists. I can feel myself looking for reasons why it might be preferable to kill them. This is a very bad aspect of my personality, partly because it makes me less effectual at actually reducing the threat of fascism. The only way to correctly decide what violence is justified when is completely divorcing the question from any lingering violent ideation, carefully following the other rules in this post, and soberly weighing the consequences of acting and not acting. Orwell was correct both to identify uses for nonviolence in the Spanish Civil War, but also to later correctly identify pacifism in World War 2 as functionally equivalent to fascism due to the brute reality on the ground:
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.