Violence is a core theme of my writing. I spend a lot of time talking about it, not only in terms of how it can be bad and how to protect yourself from it, but also how it’s foundational for civilization and necessary for allowing us to live in peace and safety. The United States, the West as a whole, claims to eschew violence, deeming it to be below us and contradictory to our values.
What’s actually happening is this: we’ve become so civilized and socialized to where we have a complicated, uncomfortable relationship with violence. We’re all aware violence is all around us, we know people use violence all the time, we’re even aware violence is sometimes necessary. It’s just that our attitude towards it changes depending on who and whom. We readily accept the fact that swarms of “youths” ravaging entire neighborhoods is just another Saturday night, blacks reacting violently to the mildest of provocations is simply the natural order of things and it’s up to us to take pains to avoid it.
This is wrongheaded. The reason why we cannot have nice things in America isn’t because of a lack of care, compassion, nor kindness. If that were really the case, we wouldn’t bother helping anyone at all, paying taxes, spending on charity, none of that. The real reason why we cannot have nice things in America is because we’re not willing to pay for it and I’m not talking about higher taxes.
Instead, the price we’re unwilling to pay is violence, because we’ve been successfully indoctrinated into thinking that violence is bad, only bad people engage in violence, good people don’t, and besides, there’s always a better way, isn’t there?
No, not really. Humans follow the path of least resistance. If talking it out was much easier and less painless, we’d have done that for most of history. But we haven’t, because it’s not. The reality is, if a person thinks they can exploit and leverage an advantage, such as strength, over someone else, they will. Even when talking it out, everyone’s always looking for an opening, an advantage to exploit. Nobody ever truly approaches one another looking to be on equal ground. It takes civilization, culture, and society to get a person to resist their natural impulses. Kindness doesn’t come naturally.
It’s not sufficient, either. Social relations cannot be governed entirely by sympathy any more than they can be run on the assumption that people will always do the right, decent thing. “Humans aren’t perfect” is the natural state of affairs. It cannot be allowed to become an excuse for malignant, anti-social behavior. We’re not talking about innocent mistakes any reasonable person can make, either. We’re about things like crime and predatory behavior.
Kindness works when everyone understands what it means to be kind, understands when someone is being kind, and understands it’s not an excuse to take advantage of someone. This is why kindness should never become an ideology, as so many liberals have made it into. First, everyone would need to adhere to it, but more importantly, once it becomes an ideology, it must be enforced with violence.
It’s important that we offer kindness autonomously, without feeling forced to do so, and that we feel our efforts are effective.
Kindness, once it becomes enforced, no longer has any meaning or value. It becomes just another form of control, which seems to be what a lot of people want. More importantly, even when not coerced, kindness only works, only means anything, if the those benefiting from the kindness of others understand it’s not an entitlement, that attempts to exploit kindness will be met with some kind of reciprocity to establish consequences both for deterrence and to prevent transgressors from ruining it for everyone else.
Either way, violence is the common denominator. It’s because we ignore the reality of violence, it’s centrality to not only governance, but social relations in general, that things have become so dysfunctional in modern society. I think everyone, liberals included, understand violence is necessary to an extent. But to accept this is to confess, in accordance with contemporary prevailing values, that they’re bad people, so they pretend like violence isn’t the foundation of civilized life, while also inconsistently picking and choosing when violence matters, for good and for ill.
X account Chad Crowley had an excellent long post which motivated me to write this essay:
Violence is the iron life of law.
The West is collapsing because too many of its people live in a fantasy world, separated from reality.
They have been taught to believe civilization is maintained by sentiment rather than force. It is not. Nations that forget this do not become more humane. They become prey.
Every legal order, tax demand, police command, and prison sentence rests on force, or the credible threat of it. The state rests on it, and so does civilization itself. Civilization is the organization of force into order. Strip that away, and “law” becomes nothing but a suggestion.
The extent to which supposedly educated people struggle with this concept baffles me. It proves that not only is there a difference between knowledge and wisdom, our most educated populace ever may, in fact, not even be knowledgeable.
Our Most Educated Populace Ever really does believe governance in a liberal democracy is, even when it works properly, compromise reached through deliberation:
This is the great fiction of liberal society. It teaches people to imagine politics as a seminar and government as a neutral referee, when in reality law is never floating above human conflict. Law is made by those who possess power, and political power is organized force. It is interpreted by those who serve that power and enforced by those willing to act on its behalf.
Here’s the dirty truth about compromise: it can only work when both sides have something to offer the other. When there exists a power imbalance, no compromise can be had. In fact, neither side, even the weaker side, has anything to gain through compromise alone. For compromise to be worthwhile, each side needs to have something to gain, but this implies both parties come to the table as equals.
Look at it this way: let’s say you’re a manager at a workplace. Let’s say you tell an employee you need them to do something, which you absolutely have the prerogative to do. Let’s then say they refuse because they don’t like the assignment. As manager, you have every right to discipline, maybe even fire, them. It’s not up to employees to choose what assignments to complete and which ones they get to reject.
But instead, let’s say, out of a desire to avoid conflict, especially if the employee has a strong personality you cannot match, you accommodate their wish, and pass on the assignment to someone else. What happened here? Was that compromise? Or was it capitulation? The whole point of this mental exercise is to get you to understand what we often think of as compromise is anything but.
There are also things one should never compromise on. For example, border security, but the lesson here is that when there exists a power imbalance, not only can no compromise be had, there’s no reason to compromise. Applied to politics, once one side has more power than the other, once they have control of government, there can be no compromise, because having more power than the other side was the whole point.
Crowley goes on to explain that all players involve embrace violence to one extent or another, they just play word games to give it legitimacy or render it illegitimate:
That does not mean violence is always wise or useful. Quite the opposite. Under present conditions, it is usually futile. The Regime possesses overwhelming force, and even more importantly, it possesses the ability to define the meaning of force. Its violence is called “order.” Your resistance is called “extremism.”
This is why people must learn to distinguish between violence the system fears and violence the system permits.
The current protests in Belfast, for example, or the riots in American cities during the Summer of Floyd, were not allowed to unfold simply because the state lacked the will to stop them. They were allowed because they served a purpose.
Over the Independence Day weekend, the far-right group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., to the chagrin and horror of our leftist Regime. It was, however, an entirely peaceful protest. No violence occurred. Yet, liberals in both the establishment and public called for action to be taken against Patriot Front. For a peaceful protest.
Meanwhile, protests for left-wing causes, many of which involve some level of violence, are characterized as peaceful when they’re anything but, and both the media and political leaders provide them legitimacy. What explains the difference? Like Crowley says, it depends on the purpose they serve. The ability to organize, draw attention, and disrupt, if need be, amounts to political power. Leftist protests are, therefore, allowed greater freedom of maneuver until they get out of hand and force authorities to act, while right-wing protests are forced to stay on the straight and narrow, since they’re considered illegitimate and therefore impermissible.
The uncomfortable truth is that violence solves problems. The question everyone’s actually asking is who’s allowed to use violence, how much of it, and why:
Has America, for example, become more free since the summer of 2020? Has the state become less tyrannical, less censorious, less aggressive, and less eager to treat its own people as enemies?
The answer is obvious to anyone willing to see it. That is, in fact, the very point. Violence does solve problems, just not necessarily yours. It solves the problems of whoever has the power to define it and instrumentalize its consequences for its own purposes.
That is why the childish slogan “you can’t solve problems with violence” is so absurd.
History was not built by debate-club etiquette. States are born through violence, preserved through violence, and destroyed when their monopoly on violence fails.
The serious man does not worship violence, least of all if he has known it firsthand. Nor does he pretend it does not exist. He understands it as the foundation beneath politics, then acts with discipline and realism in a world ruled by power.
The question is not whether violence solves problems. It does. The question is who benefits from it, and whether you are acting with judgment or walking into a trap set by your enemies.
Of course, most Americans believe everything they learned in school (the little knowledge they do retain, that is), so they think it’s bad that the state is born, preserved, and destroyed via violence. That’s the wrong lesson, again. The right lesson is that functional statehood is achieved when a) Monopoly on violence is established; b) Rules are clearly defined and consistently enforced; and c) Compliance of the governed exists. Remove any one of those three pillars, and you have a problem.
The problem in the U.S. isn’t that the state doesn’t possess a monopoly on violence. It most certainly does. Monopoly on violence is often misunderstood to mean that only the state can exercise violence. It actually means that in addition to freely exercising violence, it dictates who else can dictate violence and when. The American state most certainly does that. Nor is compliance of the governed in any way in jeopardy. People like to think it is, but it’s not. The problem is that the rules aren’t clearly defined, nor are they consistently enforced. Increasingly, the rules very much come down to who? and whom?
The U.S. is on its way to becoming an empire. At least, it sure seems like it. One of the things an empire must establish is a precedent that only it can exercise force legitimately, only it can decide who gets to exercise force legitimately. There’s no such thing as a “liberal empire.” I think future left-wing administrations will try to maintain a veneer of liberal democracy while also very much affording their side license for violence. It’ll be met by resistance from the Right, who’ll, as the Trump administration has, put the brakes on the ability of the Left to liberally (no pun intended) employ violence for political purposes.
This struggle will carry on for at least a few more election cycles, before things get sufficiently out of control, a constitutional crisis occurs, or the collective weight of every single crisis threatens the state’s legitimacy. At that point, someone will step in to finally break the cycle. It means the end of the republic, it means the end of democracy as we’ve known it. But is that really the worst thing ever?
Democracy doesn’t fail because we stop believing in it or anything stupid like that. It fails because even democracy needs someone to be in charge. Yet our form of democracy expressly fights against anyone being in charge, while everyone is in charge. What ensues is a non-stop power struggle, which is absolutely not what democracy was supposed to be. It was never supposed to be organized power struggles. But that’s what it’s become. And that’s why it fails, resulting in tyranny, which cannot be resisted democratically. Only power can defeat power.
Democracy’s rise wasn’t peaceful, either:
Monarchy wasn’t replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.
Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.
He’s talking specifically about mass liberal democracy, which is the only form of democracy we regard as “real democracy.” He says, quite accurately, that it became possible only because the peasantry suddenly had a powerful weapon on their hands, with which they could forcibly resist monarchies like never before. The means of implementing democracy came before the philosophy did. I have a saying: humans evolved to act first, rationalize later.
It’s not just about having the means of violence, of course. That’s like saying guns, not people, are the problem. Ultimately, it comes down to whether the status quo is working for you or not:
When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people's minds, and those who can’t effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.
And they’ll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.
This isn’t some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either “the status quo works for me, so I don’t want you to upset it”, or “I suck at violence, and I don’t want to have to fight”.
In other words, democracy as we know it today was the convergence between means (guns) and necessity (this isn’t working out for me). That might be an oversimplification, but that’s what I’m trying to do here: make things as simple as possible as to make it easier to understand.
The most you might get someone to admit in a moment of vulnerability is that politics is a substitute for violence: instead of fighting it out, we’ll talk it out. But nobody really contemplates any further on what that means. The talking is simply a means. What are they talking about, exactly? They’re talking about how organized violence as practiced by the state will be utilized and to what ends.
He doesn’t want you to ask “Is democracy really want we want, or is it simply a means of creating a just and free society? And what if it doesn’t?”
He doesn’t want you to ask “Hey, wait a minute, aren’t lynchings and gang rapes the ultimate form of democracy?”
No, he just wants you to clutch your pearls, shriek “oh my ears and whiskers” and follow him down onto the fainting couch.
Think about it this way: once a vote has been held, how would the outcome be enforced? If you have to think long and hard about it or come up with some convoluted answer that side-steps the role violence plays, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
One of the most difficult things for a person to accept is how easily they take it all for granted. When not forced to fight for your survival every single day, as our ancestors once upon a time had to do, you end up thinking you’ve figured everything out, that you’re the smartest people who ever lived, and that people in the past were all bigots and ignoramuses. In reality, not having to fight for survival daily suppresses the very instincts that have allowed people to survive for so long in the first place.
It’s a good thing we don’t have to live without constant exposure to violence. But we should also be clear-eyed and honest about the trade-offs that come as a result of it. There are always, always trade-offs.
Why Are There No Civilizations Without Violence?
We often associate the state of being civilized as being non-violent. This is incorrect - to be civilized is to have properly channeled and compartmentalized violence for constructive ends. This is what distinguishes the civilized from barbarians and savages. How else would you fight them off, anyway? You can’t negotiate with those for whom unrestrained violence is a way of life, who instinctively believe might makes right, or for whom the only moral consideration is that they get what they want no matter the cost. Societies never survive without violence.
It’s not just about fighting off those trying to come over the walls. It’s just as important to fight off those within the walls. Today, the West has more to worry about the latter than the former, but we’ve become highly vulnerable to the threat within, including from our fellow countrymen, because we’ve taken the belief that life is precious to extreme logical absurdities:
There are certain philosophical principles that destroy any high-level civilization which holds them.
One of them is the idea that human life isn’t precious.
But the other is that human life is so precious that no attack on property, reputation, trust, or peace of mind can ever justify violent retaliation.
…
Because the moment you place violence off limits, then people who wish to harm others, who take joy in harming others, have now been given a free pass to do so in absolute safety.
Taboos against violence alone create neither order nor safety. Violent people or those who find violence useful have always used it regardless of society’s attitude towards it. The problem is our collective attitude towards it, the fact that we worry more about what people think about violence rather than the violence itself. In America, we more harshly judge a person who has something to say about the criminal than the criminal themselves, because the only cultural value we’re allowed to have is non-judgment.
We also downplay the severity of property crimes like theft, even robbery, because we think it beneath us to value things over life, without bothering to contemplate the implications of doing so:
If all of your property is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can steal or destroy all of your property, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.
Anyone who thinks this sounds absurd should ask themselves why they think so. Is it because it’s flawed reasoning? Or is it because it exposes the flaws in the lies we tell ourselves as a society, such as It’s Just Property, It’s Not Worth Anyone’s Life, Including That Of The Thief?
By the way, if it’s just property, then the fact that someone would risk their lives and the lives of others over it means it’s actually worth as much as human life, no? Value isn’t inherent, after all. A stack of rocks in the middle of the desert isn’t worth anything until someone dumb enough to pay money for it comes along. Likewise, your phone isn’t worth anyone’s life until someone risks violence to steal it. Then it’s worth someone’s life, like it or not. It may not be worth your life, but it’s worth someone’s life.
More:
If your entire reputation is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can dedicate my life to slandering and character assassinating you, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.
If all of your peace of mind is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can terrorize you night and day, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.
If all of your trust is worth less than a hair on my head, then I can betray that trust over and over again, until no one trusts anyone, because you cannot stop me without harming a hair on my head.
And if I can destroy all of these things, then enough people like me can destroy civilization itself, because civilization is made of property, peace, trust, and reputation.
Liberals will counter with one of two arguments. One is that everyone knows how to act like a kind and decent person, and that’s all that’s needed for civilization to survive and thrive. What liberals leave out is the part about how people need to be socialized, guardrails put up, and transgressors need to be dealt with. If standards of behavior are so self-evident, then the punishment for failing to act properly should in fact be quite severe. This is yet another example of failing to think the implications through.
A second counter-argument: there are no social standards except what two parties consent to. This is, of course, total nonsense. This reduces every social relation to a contractual affair, which is absolutely not how things demonstrably work in the real world. Even in chaotic, dysfunctional America, there are clearly rules of the road when it comes to social interactions, particularly between strangers. Sometimes, the rules don’t make sense. For certain groups, like blacks, immigrants, and Muslims, the rules are suspended. But for everyone else who opts in to the system, rules exist.
And no, nobody actually believes the rules ought to be suspended for anyone. It’s just that our government, society, our whole national identity, centers on civil rights and we’ve been made to fear and loathe violence so much, that we simply don’t resist, at least after a certain point. There are a lot of lies we’re forced to live by just to maintain a facade of tranquility, a veneer of civilization.
I don’t know how long this can go on for. I’ve quit trying to predict a backlash and so should everyone else. Blackpilling as it might be, the truth is we can keep going on like this for years, maybe even decades on end. Nothing says anything has to change. Our societies are so addicted to comfort, anything that jeopardizes our access to it is rejected by most.
When people fight against racism, prejudice, or any of these popular causes, what they’re really fighting for is to maintain their own comfort. When we condemn those who righteously exercise violence to maintain order, we do so because the thought of hurting others troubles us so deeply. If it’s not our own hands we don’t want to feel crashing into someone’s face, we don’t like seeing others doing it.
Yet, none of would be here today had those who come before us refused to partake in violence:
Why are there no civilizations without violence?
Because without violence, there is no civilization.
It calls to mind something Dr. Samuel Huntington once said, famously:
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
Liberals would consider this an indictment against the West. It’s not. Again: humans evolved to act first, rationalize later. We’re just better at both and created something everyone benefits and enjoys. That’s what bothers liberals and Third Worlders - that they couldn’t do better even if they had everything they needed to do so.
Here’s a liberal trying to get one over:
There’s no denying it - Europe was an extremely violent place for most of its history, as much as any other place on Earth. Yet it also created the most advanced civilization in history, the origin of the most powerful country to ever exist - the U.S. - and is the place so much of the world lusts after and seeks to plant their feet. Maybe, unlike so much of the world, violence in Europe amounted to something worthwhile in the end?
Or is that not the lesson he was expecting?
The Foundation Of All We Are
Violence makes us uncomfortable and for good reason. However, we mustn’t battle this discomfort with denial or attempts to overcompensate. The truth is, a society which denies the necessity of violence and rejects it wholeheartedly wouldn’t last very long or soon find itself under the jackboot of a society that has no such internal struggle.
Look at it this way - today, we fetishize so-called “indigenous” societies. Yet, indigenous cultures are known, first and foremost for their warrior culture. Nobody seems troubled by the fact indigenous societies fought for the survival of their tribes through violence, and maintained order within through violence also.
Societies are in large part defined and differentiated by their varying attitudes on violence. America and the West have spent over two generations now trying to convince the world that there’s a better way than through violence, despite being more effective at using it than other civilizations. In the end, by condemning and eschewing violence, America and the West is making an open invitation to both the world and bad actors within that nothing stands in their way, not even the people charged with committing violence on our half to protect us.
I’m belaboring the point, so I’ll leave you with this interesting video I found on YouTube of two men discussing why civilization cannot exist without violence:
If you’re still struggling with getting the point, maybe a discussion between two individuals might help. I think they explain it all very clearly and answer any questions that might come up in any such discussion.
Over to you. What do you think is the role violence plays in civilization? Why does there exist such a taboo against violence despite the fact it’s so central to both the creation and survival of civilization?
Let’s discuss it in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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Irrespective or what liberals proclaim, they embrace violence in any form that benefits them. Antifa riots? Check. Inner city black violence? Check. The violence of the leftist machine of government against a man who stopped an attack on a NYC subway and the perp died? Check. It is the "conservative" main stream that runs from it even if the violence in question is just standing up to the mob politically. "We cannot behave like them" they bleat while being beaten deaf dumb and blind by violent forces from the left. In modern times we have never seen a better example than what much of Europe has become while their children are beaten and their women are raped by the hordes the left finds so convenient to import. Closer to home the "conservatives" have stood by in places like Oregon where laws are passed to sexually mutilate children without their parents knowledge or consent and the Republican minority, who COULD stop it, continue to show up for work pretending that by being there they influence the outcome when all they really do is provide the numbers needed for legislative business to take place. But it sure is good for fund raising.
"democracy as we know it today was the convergence between means (guns) and necessity (this isn’t working out for me). That might be an oversimplification"
As you know, Max, I teach the American Revolution. It's not an oversimplification at all. There are 2 key points though:
1) "for me" -- the case for overturning the system is personal. It has to be hurting you directly in a meaningful way (or at least you have to believe it is.)
2) Only about 1/3rd of the colonists actually believed "it wasn't working for me". It was a cross-section of aristocrats and merchants (elite and middle-class in our modern terms).