Violence is Your Comfortable Old Friend

by the subway philosopher™

In the battle for naming rights to the seemingly mythical Great Destroyer of Everything We Hold Dear, we appear to have forgotten that it does exist and it is coming.

It will be the stock market, wager the econo-doomers and survivalists. Fascism, predict the Communists. Communism, predict the Fascists. Men, say the feminists. Feminists, say men. Only politicians and psychologists lay claim, embarrassingly, to a brave new future lacking entirely in monsters (other than themselves).

They’re all correct, of course. Any grasping after power creates a threat to the vast majority of people. There’s no doubt, for example, that economists would destroy civilization through their technocratic calculus of ‘incentives’ were they to gain unimpeded access to the machinery of coercion. Ditto for the rest of the bunch, although no doubt most began by meaning well.

The threat behind them all, the monster if you will, is our dear old friend violence.

Consider a strong man. He can immediately dominate any one person physically; however, if he wants more power than that, he must expand and amplify the means by which he can apply force to others. The most effective mechanism is to create an institution – a guild, a tribal council, a bank, a league of city-states, an army, a corporation. But atop that institutional totem one finds the nation-state, thus far the uncontested supreme dispenser of violence and coercion. It is easier to rule a council than a tribe of individuals, so long as each council member rules some of the individuals.

Power is hierarchical and institutional. It concentrates at the top. As power grows, the means to acquire more power grows with it, and with more power comes more coercion and violence, often decked out in the sacred vestments of some ideology or other, implemented through what many are pleased to call law.

Western law rests on the assumption that it is merely a statutory declaration of the normal, regular, accepted, moral practices of the people – the common law, so to speak. The flaw in this new-fangled notion is obvious, however – law has long since superseded the practices of the people and become the ‘determiner-in-chief’ of those practices.

Unfortunately, this flawed concept provides a foundation for even greater levels of institutionalization and thus concentration of power – the super-state and the international or global state. Super-states and the global state govern all subservient institutions under the pretext that their laws merely codify the actual accepted pre-existing behaviors of such.

• Laws are weapons aimed at ordinary people.

With each successive layer of institutions come more laws, more control, more coercion, more violence, at ever greater remove from the people whose lives they affect. Inevitably, laws become weapons serving individual pursuits amplified through the power of institutions. Seen in this light, law in actuality is an expression of the will to power and thus the will to violence, a will shared by us all. When feminists, corporations, natives, psychologists, minority groups, etc. seek power and influence, they above all seek to shape the law and its consequent applications of violence.

The great excusers, many of whom are modern philosophers, have gifted us a thousand and one rationalizations for this state of affairs. Some institutions and states acknowledge their violence but justify it on an end-means basis – these are usually the overt utopians. Others mask the iron fist within the velvet glove of dubious notions such as tacit agreement and the consent of the ruled, or the greatest good for the greatest number, or ‘giving the people what they want,’ or ‘it’s for the children.’  Still others employ violence for the sake of violence, because they can – naked self-interest is king.

Ultimately however, dear reader, you are the primary source of violence in this world. When you vote for a city hall representative who promises a crackdown on speeders, you are choosing violence. When you consent to increased property taxes so your kids can be better educated, you are choosing violence. When you demand that the city do something about the homeless hanging around your neighborhood, you are choosing violence. When you complain about unlicensed taxis or hair-dressers, when you cry for a right unavailable to others, or when you ‘support the troops,’ you are choosing violence.

• Control is power. Who are you giving it to?

The more you call for control of this or that, the greater power you grant to the institutions which bind you. The more you demand law-based rights or protection or special treatment or intervention against some ‘other,’ the more power the state and its minions acquire. And as the local power base swells, so too does the power of each institution above on the ladder. Coercion and violence grow and concentrate along with it, at every level.

Consider this: orders from the person who leads a small tribal council are unlikely to result in deaths, or even many rules and punishments. But the decisions of a few people controlling the world’s economy through a supranational institution like the IMF can and do harm or kill millions, even as we all are forced to exist under the thousands of punitive rules implemented by the IMF’s various supporting institutions, right down to your neighborhood real estate association.

• Violence will lead to a utopia free from violence.

Violence starts with you, violence is the monster that routinely devours humanity, and violence is your comfortable old friend. You endorse coercion through physical force in the endless reiteration of an old and failed idea, that violence can and will lead to a utopia free of violence.  You like it that other people are forced to fund and comply with your preference for libraries/wars/anti-hate-speech tribunals/bike lanes/medical services/pension plans/family courts/unemployment insurance/school boards/roads/zoning bylaws/drug wars/equal rights/globalism.  And you do all that while claiming to hold the moral high ground.

But be careful of the violence you call for – you’ll almost certainly get it, and then some.