Once upon a time, in the very far East, there was a tiger who lived in a jungle beside an ancient temple.
Every day, resting in the striped shadow of a palm frond, the tiger watched the monks at the temple as they went about their business.
The monks swept the floor of the temple clean with grass brooms.
They polished the statues, offering little prayers as they worked.
The monks lit candles and incense that filled the temple air with fragrant smoke.
And then, after chanting a word that means “peace,” the monks sat down to meditate with great concentration for a very long time.
The tiger squinted his eyes and yawned, and his great fangs glinted in the summer sun.
He wondered what the monks were thinking about while they meditated.
So, after the monks finished meditating and prepared their simple, meatless dinners of lentils and rice, the tiger crept closer to the temple and listened to the monks talking.
One of the monks seemed to be in charge, and the other monks listened to him intently as he spoke.
The tiger noticed that some light-skinned strangers who were wearing unusual garments had arrived to visit the monks and hear them speak.
The monk who seemed to be in charge spoke about the importance of peace and non-violence.
All of the monks nodded quietly, and the strangers nodded too.
Then, he spoke about enlightenment.
And all of the monks nodded quietly, and the strangers nodded too.
And then, the most important monk said something in passing about “opening a third eye.”
All of the monks nodded quietly, but the strangers seemed to get very excited.
And the tiger got very excited, too.
The tiger returned to the jungle, thinking about non-violence and this third eye.
“I want a third eye,” thought the tiger.
“If I had a third eye,” he thought, “imagine what I could see!”
But then, something occurred to the tiger that troubled him.
All of these monks were peaceful and they ate a plant-based diet and they meditated every day for many long hours, but even the most important monk only had two eyes.
The tiger shook his head.
“If these monks work so hard every day and they still only have two eyes, how can I expect my third eye to open?”
And then, the tiger chuckled to himself. The answer was so simple.
“The monks are only people,” the tiger realized, “but I am a tiger, and tigers are grrrreat.”
So it was at that moment, as the sun set behind the ancient temple, that the tiger began his meditation.
He meditated all night, and the moonlight cast striped shadows over him through the fronds of palm trees as they moved gently in the breeze.
When the monks rose the next morning, the tiger was still meditating.
“See,” he thought, “I am already ahead of them.”
The tiger meditated on peace and non-violence, but he found it very difficult to meditate on the absence of a thing.
“What is peace,” he wondered, “but the absence of violence?”
“What character does peace have unto itself?”
“It seems as though peace is an empty space or a pregnant pause — an ellipsis…”
“Now I am getting too philosophical,” smiled the tiger.
“I need to try harder.”
After many hours of meditation, the tiger felt thirsty, and he made his way down to a stream.
He drank his fill of water and listened to the conversations of the birds as they flew from branch to branch above him, looking for insects and worms to kill and eat.
“Two-eyed savages,” he sniffed. “They’ll never reach enlightenment.”
But just then, he saw movement downstream as the dense foliage rustled.
A spotted deer poked out its head, looking around to see if it was safe to drink some water.
The tiger was hungry, and he licked his lips.
Normally, he would begin stalking the spotted deer — waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.
Then he would sink his teeth into its neck, as blood splashed onto his fur, and crush its windpipe.
He would pressure the deer down to the ground with his weight and hold it firmly until it succumbed to darkness.
Then he would drag it to a secluded spot and tear it open, digging out its warm liver and kidneys — all of the good stuff, first.
“My,” sighed the tiger, “thinking about this is making me awfully hungry. I had better stop. I will never reach enlightenment this way.”
So the tiger turned around and walked into the jungle until he could no longer see the deer.
Then he tried to chew on some leaves. They were pretty disgusting, but he kept at it.
“I just have to get used to it,” decided the tiger.
He tried digging up some plant roots because he had seen men do that, but the roots were very dirty, and they didn’t taste very good.
Then, the tiger returned to his spot under the palm fronds and resumed his meditation.
This went on for several days.
During breaks from his meditation, the tiger tried eating all kinds of plants.
He choked on various grasses and leaves and even flowers.
After watching the monkeys, he decided to try some bananas, and the tiger had to admit that bananas were not bad.
Still, no matter how many bananas he ate, the tiger remained hungry.
And he started to feel very sick, and very tired, and very weak.
And it was very difficult for the tiger to concentrate during his meditations.
Then, one afternoon, as he was feeling perfectly awful, the tiger had an idea.
“The monks don’t eat grass and bananas,” he thought, “they eat fluffy white rice!”
“Maybe rice is the secret.”
“I know where the rice grows, but I don’t know how to make it fluffy.”
“I should go get some of the fluffy rice.”
The tiger was certain that this was the solution.
So he returned to his meditation and waited until after the monks had eaten their meal.
After the stars appeared in the blue-black sky, the tiger crept toward the temple through the shadows cast by the moonlight.
Quiet as a kitten, he snuck into the temple kitchen and carefully rummaged for leftover rice.
He found a few grains of fluffy rice on the floor, but the monks had cleaned their pots and bowls.
The tiger became very upset.
He was SO hungry.
Just then, he heard movement outside the kitchen, and the tiger quickly hid in the shadow behind the open door.
One of the monks walked in, carrying a lantern to light his way.
The monk looked around the room.
And it was at that moment that the tiger’s hunger overcame him.
He lept out from the shadows and pounced upon the monk, who screamed and dropped his lantern, which smashed on the floor.
The tiger sunk his teeth into the monk’s neck and ripped the skin open.
Warm red blood sprayed out of the monk with each beat of his panicked heart.
The tiger shook the monk violently and crushed him down to the temple floor.
And as the monk struggled to take his last, coughing breaths — the tiger ROARED.
The fire from the lamp had spread and the growing blaze lit the room with a wild flickering light.
Other monks appeared and shouted and ran away, but the tiger stayed, gorging himself on the monk’s still-moving meat.
The hungry tiger ate and ate and he had never felt more alive and he wasn’t sorry or sad because, after all, he was a tiger.
The tiger had forgotten about his quest for enlightenment.
But then, some men from the village appeared at the door of the flaming kitchen — and they were armed with guns.
The men shouted, and one of them shot at the tiger, and a bullet grazed his shoulder.
“OWWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRR,” the tiger roared.
The tiger jumped up quickly and ran out of the kitchen through the other door.
“Now these men are trying to kill ME!”
The tiger ran back toward the jungle, away from the burning temple. .
The men chased him, firing their guns.
Bullets smashed into the trees and sent bark shrapnel flying past the tiger.
But tigers run faster than men, and the tiger disappeared deep, deep, deep into the darkness of the jungle.
Exhausted but no longer hungry, the tiger sat down to meditate once more.
His wound was still bleeding, but not much, and it didn’t really hurt.
But the tiger was frustrated and confused.
A monkey swung down near him — but safely out of reach.
He stared at the tiger, and seemed curious or possibly concerned.
So the tiger told the monkey what had happened.
The tiger told the monkey how he had tried to meditate upon peace and non-violence like the monks, and how the monks refused to eat meat, so he also refused to eat meat, because the monks seemed very wise.
The tiger told the monkey that he was trying to find enlightenment, and the monkey rolled his eyes.
The tiger grrrrrumbled, and he said to the monkey, “You know, it’s strange. The monks preach non-violence and it is true that they remained peaceful.
But it is also true, you see, that those peaceful monks had no problem fetching the men from the village to use violence against me.”
And, at that, the monkey shrugged and swung back up into the tree.
Some leaves fell from the branches above, and the tired tiger’s eyes followed one of them as it floated lazily to the ground.
When he looked up again, the jungle was transformed.
Everything around him appeared as if in a dream — depths were uncertain and the jungle sparkled with prismatic light.
The air itself seemed as though it were alive.
And that is when the Great Tiger revealed himself.
The Great One looked down at him with a thousand piercing eyes and unfolded a thousand paws.
He was resplendent in stripes of every color, and The Great Tiger was everywhere all at once—beautiful and terrifying.
The Great One roared in a roar that came from all sides, and the tiger could feel his bones rattle inside him.
And then, the Great One spoke to him calmly in a voice that felt as though it had come from the beginning of time and moved through our tiger toward the distant and unknowable end of all things.
The Great One said:
“You will not find what you seek in that burning temple.
Those monks live in error.
They are able to remain peaceful only because they are protected by the men of the village.
They may seem wise, but they are delicate cubs looked after by a ferocious mother.
I will tell you about violence.
Violence is a form of energy — it can be neither created nor destroyed.
It moves from one creature to another, changing state and form, but peace—true peace in life—is an illusion.
A whispered trick of the dragon.
The only true peace comes in death, and even death provides for the living, and the violence continues.
The worm feeds on death’s decay, growing fat until the peaceful dove brings death from above, snatching it from the soil, and swallowing it whole.
And when the eagle catches sight of the dove, he strikes like lightning — crushing it in his talons.
The wild grass draws life from death and waste, and the deer feed on that grass.
But, as you have discovered, tigers do not feed on grass.
It is the role of tigers to feed on deer.
You see, the monks in your temple teach peace, but reality has not changed to accommodate their delusion.
They discovered that prayers and incense alone will not dissuade hungry tigers from eating them.
Men can only keep tigers away by threatening them with violence.
And the world of men works the same way.
The monks in the temple pray for peace, but peace is only achieved in the world of men when one group of men becomes so powerful through wealth or valor that they make rules against violence which can only be enforced by the threat of violence.
So peace, to the extent that it exists at all, is the product of violence.
The threat of violence is the gold standard which guarantees that the laws will be obeyed, and that tigers will not invade the temples and villages of men.
Violence is neither good nor is it evil. It simply is.
Violence is an ocean in which one can swim or drown.
Violence is not a god to be worshipped but a fundamental reality of the universe, a constant that one must recognize and respect if one is to achieve true enlightenment.
The tiger listened to the Great One and contemplated His words of wisdom…
He took a deep breath and felt something tingle in the center of his forehead.
And then, like a flower unfolding to greet the morning sun, the tiger’s Third Eye opened.
And when the tiger’s Third Eye opened, he found that he could see the world just as before, but with greater clarity and understanding.
He sensed three words forming between his black lips and his barbed tongue, and he whispered:
“Violence is golden.”
The meditating tiger returned to all fours, surveying the jungle as the first rays of sunlight penetrated the morning mist, and he said out loud—to no one in particular:
“I wonder where that deer went.”
And the tiger started his day.
And that, friends, is the story of how the tiger opened his Third Eye.
Originally published online 2022 as part of the CHEST Magazine project.
Men have created the vast majority of human culture. For thousands of years, men painted almost all of the paintings and sculpted almost all of the sculptures. Until recently, men wrote most of the songs and poems, as well as the plays and all kinds of books. It was men who designed all of the castles and cathedrals, the pyramids, and the Parthenon — almost all of the structures we have ever associated with beauty and high culture.
In the Twentieth Century, the arts became associated with the subversion of masculine culture, but for most of human history, the opposite was true. The arts celebrated heroic masculinity and masculine achievement and demonstrated a distinctly masculine eye for beauty.
Men crafted the cultures of countless civilizations in their own image. In fact, that has been one of the major feminist critiques of patriarchal culture. Feminist John Berger’s 1972 series Ways of Seeing famously discussed the “male gaze” and how men’s desires and interests have influenced the character of art throughout human history.
Today, we see women and feminist men creating culture in their own images. By contributing their own perspectives, women have enriched and expanded the scope of human expression and undeniably created beautiful and moving works of art. But it is not women’s job to inspire masculinity in men. It also makes sense that a lot of what women want to see most simply won’t appeal to masculine men.
In recent years, a large number of men have come to view the arts as feminine or effeminate pursuits, despite the fact that the creation of culture has been a predominantly masculine endeavor throughout recorded history.
Men see the arts as being hostile to masculinity, and they often are.
There are many reasons for that, but I believe that one of them is that masculine men, for the most part, stopped creating culture.
Men ceded the territory of cultural creation to women and effeminate men and cultural and political subversives.
I believe that part of the reason why has to do with a phenomenon described in anthropology as “sex pollution.”
Sex Pollution
Sex pollution is a concept found in cultural anthropology — specifically in the work of Mary Douglas.
In her book Purity and Danger, she examined some of the different ways modern and more primitive peoples determine what is clean and unclean.
Douglas explained that “dirt is essentially disorder.” When we clean something, we are “positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea.”
When something or someone is determined to be dirty, it has been contaminated by a thing from a different category. Until it is cleaned or purified, it is partially out of order.
In Douglas’s words, “rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience.” What is out of order becomes alien, dissonant, and suspect, making everyone else uncomfortable.
Sexual pollution occurs when the sexes interact in a way that blurs or offends boundaries between males and females, and disorder is created between the sexes.
In the case of men, it is usually believed that sexual pollution weakens virility and diminishes their masculine power.
Some readers may be familiar with the primitive practice of constructing “menstrual huts” that separate menstruating women from men. Tribes that engaged in this practice viewed menstruating women as impure or tainted in some way, and believed that their feminine impurity could infect or pollute the masculine energy of the tribe’s men — ultimately weakening them and making the tribe as a whole more vulnerable.
Menstrual huts are a simple example of a practice dealing with the concept of sex pollution. There are a wide variety of other ways that cultures have sought to contain female energy to maintain an ordered separation of male and female sexual identity.
Symbolically speaking, masculine identity always represents the creation of distance and separation from the feminine, the safety of the nurturing mother, and a protected womb-like existence. Virility is established and maintained by venturing away from the world of women and out into the wild, dangerous world of the men who contend with danger and uncertainty at the edge of the cultural perimeter and beyond. Establishing a masculine identity always means establishing that men are not women through the creation or revelation of contrast between the sexes.
Not all cultures appear to be equally concerned with sex pollution. Concerning the different levels of concern regarding sexual pollution in various cultures, Douglas observed that:
“When male dominance is accepted as a central principle of social organisation and applied without inhibition and with full rights of physical coercion, beliefs in sex pollution are not likely to be highly developed. On the other hand, when the principle of male dominance is applied to the ordering of social life but is contradicted by other principles such as that of female independence, or the inherent right of women as the weaker sex to be more protected from violence than men, then sex pollution is likely to flourish.”
Douglas compared and contrasted various primitive cultures to support this statement with regard to sex and sexual contact.
Feminist economist Claudia Goldin advanced the theory one step further in 2002, applying the idea of sex pollution to the workplace. Goldin theorized that men discriminate against women in occupations that have remained dominated by males because “new female hires may reduce the prestige of a previously all-male occupation.”
I first read this many years ago and recognized its truth and naturalness. Since then, I have repeatedly observed this phenomenon play out in different cultural spaces.
Simply put, when females enter a previously all-male space, it becomes “polluted” and loses the value it once held as a space that was sacred or exclusive to men.
The mixed space no longer serves the purpose of affirming the masculine identity. Because men and women interact differently with the opposite sex than they do with the same sex, the entire social dynamic of the space is altered by the presence of any female.
This ultimately holds true whether she means to disrupt the group intentionally or is just trying to become “one of the guys.” In response to the introduction of a female presence, men become less interested in that space or sometimes even become hostile to it.
The same is often true of behaviors, articles of clothing, particular brands of products, and so forth. If a particular thing or behavior becomes closely identified with females, males will spurn it and shame other males for behaving that way or having that thing. This can be entirely cultural and have absolutely nothing to do with the intrinsic aesthetic or conceptual masculinity or femininity of the object or behavior.
No matter what it is, “men shouldn’t do that because women do it” or “men shouldn’t have that, enjoy that, or wear that because women do.”
To borrow some of Douglas’ language, expand her theory of sexual pollution, and orient it in a contemporary context, I’m going to say that:
In a society where sex roles are uncertain and male dominance is not accepted as a central principle of social organization, when women or extremely effeminate men become heavily associated with an interest, an action, a behavior — or even an object or product — many men will respond by making it taboo and consider it a form of sex pollution to maintain a distinct masculine identity.
You can observe this happening all over the world right now concerning all kinds of trends as they emerge, especially in the online world, where new practices become gendered quickly.
In the “manosphere” and the broader movement of men who have taken an interest in identifying and perpetuating masculine identity, there is an obsessive concern with differentiating between “alpha” and “beta” behavior. “Alpha” has become a marketing buzzword that essentially means “masculine” and “beta” is its antithesis, which indicates submissiveness and pollution by the feminine.
Real masculine social hierarchies are far more complex and flexible, and I’ve often contended that “alpha” is not a fixed “type” but a social role that shifts as a man moves from group to group. A man who takes the lead role in one group may not be the obvious leader in a more accomplished group of men, and he will naturally take a subordinate role to the leader of that group.
“Alpha” and “beta” classifications indicate that men are either winners or losers, but masculinity is not “zero-sum” in male groups. All of the men who are not the leader, or “alpha” — in the zoological sense — are not necessarily or even usually completely feminized supplicants. The “second in command” (which would correspond to “beta” in the Greek alphabet) is not the same as the lowest-ranking member of the group. Military hierarchies are far more representative of the way that men actually organize and rate themselves socially.
However, the awkward and simplistic practice of identifying men as either “alphas” or “betas” is an attempt to create and maintain boundaries between the masculine and the feminine or not-masculine in a world where the boundaries between the sexes are increasingly confused.
The “Man Cave” as a Response to Sex Pollution in the Cultural Space
According to Douglas’ theories about sex pollution, there are likely to be more rules about sex pollution and a greater concern with transgressions if “the principle of male dominance is applied to the ordering of social life but is contradicted by other principles such as that of female independence.”
In a society where the boundaries between male and female identity are firm and relatively unchallenged, men can demonstrate an interest in a broader range of things and exhibit a wider range of behaviors without having their identities as men come into question. A middle or upper-class European man in pre-feminist Europe was able to show an interest in all sorts of things that might be considered “feminine” now — because the different status of males and females was taken for granted.
In a far more nervous post-feminist America, where women do most things and are present in most spaces, the domain of masculine identity has dwindled substantially. I believe that, as Goldin suggested, when women enter a space and create a significant presence there, it becomes somewhat “polluted” for men. This applies to cultural as well as physical or occupational spaces. As women expanded their social and occupational roles and interests, and extremely effeminate, openly gay men — men who are viewed as being sexually polluted by the feminine — wielded more public influence, men abandoned what they identified as sexually polluted interests, social roles, and occupations.
I believe that this is, in part, why masculine men have slowly abandoned the arts over the past several generations.
Women and effeminate men showed more interest in the arts and established a bigger presence in that cultural space, so masculine men abandoned the arts, retreated to more safely masculine, “un-polluted” spaces, and created boundaries around the arts by socially stigmatizing them.
The joke of the “man cave” represents a masculine cultural redoubt — a dwindling collection of cultural interests and aesthetics that women and effeminate men simply didn’t care enough about to claim for themselves.
Men, who created all of the arts and the vast majority of human culture, have retreated from their roles as culture-creators and settled for a corner in the basement or garage where they can construct sad little altars to the superficial and caricatured masculine culture that remains solely “theirs” and therefore, “unpolluted.”
Men invented and wrote epic poetry, theater, and opera, but “man cave” culture elevates only professional sports and the occasional action movie—and, for younger men, certain video games.
Men wrote the great symphonies, but those are far too fussy and suspect for the culture of the man cave — which, depending on locale, is more or less limited to country, rock, and rap.
Men created all of the wines and liquors in the world, but in America, the only safely masculine drinks are beer and whiskey — which are elevated and celebrated as symbols of the “manly” culture of the man cave.
Men designed most of the buildings that have ever been built — men created Baroque, Classical, Egyptian, and even modernist architecture — but somehow every man worth being called a man today is supposed to dream of living in a log cabin.
Women don’t care much for cigars, so men take up smoking them as symbols of manliness (or not-womanliness).
The culture of the man cave includes backyard grills and tools, trucks and motorcycles, race cars, guns, hunting implements, and cartoonish representations of cowboy and lumberjack aesthetics.
Beard care products and beard fetishism have also worked their way into man cave culture, as most women (to date) remain unable to grow thick and luxurious beards.
The point here isn’t to suggest that there is anything wrong with any of these things individually but merely to demonstrate how limited and one-dimensional the scope of masculine culture and identity has become.
It makes sense that guns and trucks and hunting implements and tools would remain important aspects of masculine culture because they’re directly related to the evolutionary roles of men as hunters and fighters and builders. Those things should be part of masculine culture.
However, for masculine men to resume their roles as creators, connoisseurs, and patrons of culture at every level of society, the scope of masculine culture needs to include more than that.
Otherwise, we will be left with a culture in which masculine men wield no influence or authority.
Whatever your thoughts on how the world “should be,” we have no choice but to deal with it as it actually is in the present.
Complaining about the culture produced by others may identify issues and concerns, but the best and ultimate solution is to “do it better.”
If you don’t like the culture that is being created, it is your responsibility to make better culture yourself or help other men create culture by commissioning art and supporting artistic endeavors that better reflect your values and aesthetics.
To do this, men will have to overcome the barriers they have constructed around the arts in response to unconscious or semi-conscious concerns about sex pollution.
We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation in which women are everywhere doing everything. There’s almost nowhere to go that they don’t go and nothing to do that women don’t do, either. If men are to resume their role as culture creators, the only solution is to begin building our own parallel networks of sympathetic support and separate institutions. History is full of art “movements,” and men clearly need their own right now.
The alternative is to continue to rely on women, feminist men, and opportunistic Hollywood types to create the storylines and aesthetics — the dreams — of the future.
If you let people who hate you craft your dreams for you, do not be surprised if they are nightmares.
This 2016 essay has become a reader favorite, so I am republishing it on the new site today.
Don’t kill your ego. Sacrifice Yourself To Yourself.
Bruce Lee wrote that: “Punches and kicks are tools to kill the ego.”
It sounds like mountaintop mysticism, like some far-out, far-eastern form of overdubbed, white-bearded enigmatic enlightenment.
It’s become a training cliche. Whether you are training with weapons or weights, someone will eventually tell you that your ego is your enemy.
The problem with that is, your ego is also — you.
People tell you to kill your ego because they want you to get out of your own way. They want you to stop acting like you already know everything, because by seeking out training, you’ve already acknowledged on some level that you don’t know everything.They want you to leave your status or perceived status in the world behind, so that you can submit to the learning process as a student — with no chip on your shoulder and nothing to prove.
They want you to train with humility and avoid hubris — an ancient Greek concept describing a man who overestimates his own power or status and brings himself into conflict with natural law, which is, from a mythopoetic perspective, the will of the gods. His hubris eventually leads to his downfall. In the case of training, a man’s hubris makes it more difficult for him to learn and grow as a practitioner — his hubris becomes the cause of his stasis.
Conceit, hubris, arrogance…this kind of ego-tism is only one negative connotation of the word ego, which also describes a much broader concept of self.
“Ego” is actually a Latin word for “I,” sometimes translated as “I, myself.”
The Twentieth Century use of “ego” in English to mean “self” stems from the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud, who used the simple word “Ich,” also “I,” in German. This seems less editorial and more in keeping with the Latin “I, myself.”
In the Freudian model, the super-ego, or Über-Ich is the ego above and beyond the self. It’s the part of the conscious and unconscious self that absorbs and processes collective identity as well as the demands and the norms of the group, culture, society — tribe.
If you train on purpose — if you train because you want to train — your training is driven by the ego.
Voluntary training is endured in the service of the ego, with the ultimate purpose of validating the ego, increasing self worth and improving social status. You train because you believe that you are good enough to be better, and worth improving. Or perhaps you see yourself training for the sake of others, for the group, to protect them or fulfill a role you believe you are good enough and able to fulfill. If you train for honor — to be worthy of your peers, your ancestors, your gods — you train because you believe yourself to be capable of honoring them. (1) This too, is a product of your ego.
The ego, in both the broadest and the psychoanalytic sense, describes your conscious mind. It makes up the bulk of your “I” or “Ich.” Your ego is what separates you from dust in the wind. It’s the part of your mind that is awake, sentient, self-aware. To whatever extent you are the master of your own fate and the captain of your soul, the “you” is your ego. It is your ego — inseparable from any knowable version of “you” — that perceives and processes information about the world around you, evaluates that information, and selects a direction or course of action. It is the ego that manifests will.
Men train in the service of a higher version of the self, imagined and willed into existence by the ego. Training is self-creation — becoming — not self-destruction.
The aspects of the ego which must be destroyed or contained in training are self-imposed scripts and limitations and habits which may impede the progress of your self-development.This is a pruning of the ego — a sacrifice of old growth to stimulate new growth.
This pruning may be painful as you clip away or brush aside cherished ideas about the talents or even perceived limitations that you believe make you special.
People seem to take almost as much pride in the untested reasons and rationalizations they’ve dreamed up for why they can’t learn in a certain way or do a certain thing as they do in untested delusions of grandeur — especially in this slave age that prefers victims to victors. Often, their perceived limitations are like those of a boy who believes he can’t swim or doesn’t like swimming because he fell in a pool once and didn’t know what to do.
The world is also full of men who want to tell you how much they used to lift or how fast they used to run, before they got “old” or suffered some injury that elite athletes work through all the time. “Limitless potential” is a fantasy, but most people set their own limits long before they come anywhere close to the top end of their potential.
While some believe they can’t when they can, many others believe they could when they probably couldn’t. Millions of doughboys overestimate their ability to fight because they won an altercation in high school once — or worse, because they’ve watched a lot of videos of fights and think they “have a pretty good idea of what they’d do.” You can find them second-guessing professional fighters and quarterbacks in bars and in front of television sets all around the world.
To truly become the kind of men who know they have the ability and the conditioning to do what these men merely believe they can do, these couch captains would have to abandon their self-authored fictions about themselves. They would have to go through a process of failing and looking stupid before they even started to look like they knew what they were doing — much less became truly capable of performing as they’ve imagined.
To train successfully, you must be willing to sacrifice portions of your present self-concept to a future, higher version of the self created by your ego. It is your ego, god-like, that is initiating and driving the process of self-transformation and becoming. This process requires you to exchange something you have for something you want. Nothing worth anything is truly free, and everything worth having requires some kind of sacrifice.
Instead of “killing your ego” — instead of fighting yourself — approach training as a sacrifice of a part of yourself to a higher self.
This is the way of Odin.
Odin is usually depicted with a missing eye, because he sacrificed one of his own eyes to the giant Mimir in order to drink from his well of wisdom. He sacrificed a portion of his superficial sight for a deeper, higher way of “seeing.” .
In another tale, Odin disguised himself as a farmhand and labored through a growing season, doing the work of nine men to gain access to Óðrœrir, the mead of poetry and inspiration. To get the mead, the hooded wanderer eventually had to seduce the giantess Gunnlod, whose name translates roughly to “invitation to battle,” and slam her out for three nights in a row. (It must have been a rough three nights.)
Odin is perhaps best known for his self-directed ordeal hanging from the world-tree Yggdrasil, wounded by what was (presumably) his own spear. After hanging without food or drink for nine nights, the runes reveal themselves to him, and from them he gains magic and a greater understanding of the universe.
While this scene is superficially Christ-like, and it makes sense to wonder how much Christian imagery and intent colored any of the surviving stories of pre-Christian European pagans, the stark difference here is in Odin’s motivation.
The spirit of Odin’s ego-driven self-sacrifice is captured in the following lines from the Hávamál:
og gefinn Óðni
sjálfur sjálfum mér
a sacrifice to Odin
myself to myself
The Hávamál is known as “the sayings of the high one” — sayings attributed to Odin himself. The majority of the first 138 verses pass down practical advice for living, as if from a grandfather or a wise old king. These lines about the sacrifice of self to self are found in a distinctive portion of the text that reads as if the speaker has slipped into a trance. In this dream state, the high one recalls his initiation into the mysteries of the runes, through starved meditation, while hanging from the world tree (2):
Veit ég að ég hékk vindga meiði á nætur allar níu geiri undaður og gefinn Óðni sjálfur sjálfum mér á þeim meiði er manngi veit hvers hann af rótum rennur*
Við hleifi mig seldu né við hornigi nýsti ég niður nam ég upp rúnir æpandi nam féll ég aftur þaðan
I know that I hung on a windy tree for nine full nights wounded with a spear a sacrifice to Odin myself to myself on that tree which no man knows from what root it runs*
None made me happy with loaf Or with horn I looked down below I took up the runes Screaming I took them And then fell down from there
Odin’s martyrdom is a self-martyrdom, done in the service of no one but himself, for reasons of his own. He sacrifices himself to reach a new level of understanding, and through that understanding becomes a higher version of himself.
Odin acknowledges that he doesn’t know everything, and instead of sitting on his throne sipping mead and marveling at his own creation, he pushes himself out of his own comfort zone and forces himself to do what he believes to be necessary to know more and become better. The Allfather could easily compare himself to other gods and humans and all of the lesser creatures, and be satisfied. But Odin doesn’t measure himself against others, he measures himself against himself.
The opposite of Odin wouldn’t be a giant or a dwarf or a man — or even the wolf who swallows him and ends his life. Odin’s opposite would be the person who tells you to “just be yourself” or to “be happy just the way you are.”
The story of Odin is a challenge and a reminder that no matter who you are or what you’ve achieved, you can do more, learn more — you can make yourself better in some way.
The practice of Odinism requires no worship of Odin with kneeling prayers.
One who practices Odinism acknowledges the worthiness — the original meaning of the Old English word, “weorðscipe” — of the Odinic ideal by embodying Odin. A man becomes Odin by acknowledging the worth of the way of one who is always seeking, always improving, always willing to sacrifice a piece of himself to become more, to become better, to do more.
All training requires some kind of sacrifice of self to self. Of something you have for something you want. Of something you want to do now for someone you want to be later. It may even be a part of you that you cling to, some idea about yourself that you’ll have to give up temporarily or permanently, because it is preventing you from becoming who your ego believes you can become.
When you’ve decided what you want to learn or what you want to do or how you want to transform yourself — work to remove the internal obstacles that are preventing you from achieving mastery or realizing that goal.
Be the loosener your own fetters.
Determine what you have that you need to give up — time, money, work, habit, comfort — and sacrifice it on the bloody altar of that vision.
When you are tempted to feel burdened or victimized by the hunger of your vision for sacrifice, remember that you are the visionary — the father of it all.
You are the god, the priest, the slaughter and the harvest.
(1) For more on training for honor, read my essay, “Train for Honor” in the collection A Sky Without Eagles.(2014)
I’ve done my best to mimic the reconstructed Old Norse pronunciation in the recorded version on that page, albeit with my own quirks and dramatic inflections.
It was the Marine Corps’ birthday. I drove out to have drinks with some guys who had just wrapped up a day at the range. My salty friend “Buck” gave a buoyant but unapologetic reading of Commandant John A. Lejeune’s 1921 memorandum to the entire restaurant. I’ve never been in the military, so I looked on like a buzzed and confused anthropologist. Sometime after the snipers had punished each other with inventively sadistic tequila shots, Buck challenged the table.
“Can anyone tell me a time when “ego” is a good thing?”
Buck is both mischievously and purposefully argumentative. He is also a genuinely decent human being and he’s surprisingly open-minded for a dude who you can barely picture without a lump of chaw in his lower lip. He went around the table, patiently hearing nods and objections.
I argued that, in the Freudian sense, the “Ego” is the rational aspect of the conscious mind. It is your Ego that makes conscious decisions and chooses to regulate your behaviors. It’s responsible for both positive and negative choices.
If you are self-aware and acting consciously, your Ego is giving the orders. The Ego is the captain of your ship. If your Ego is “bad,” either your captain is making bad decisions, or he’s not running a tight ship. He’s allowing the primal, semi and sub-conscious desires of the “Id” take the helm.
“Jack, I knew you’d come up with some technicality.”
Freud actually used the German word “Ich” — meaning simply “I” — and early translators latinized “Ich” as “Ego,” which means approximately “I, myself” in Latin. The Ego is the only “Self” that you can fully know. Your Ego is…YOU.
Buck was using Ego as many martial arts instructors do: as a synonym for arrogance, hubris, narcissism, or “egotism.”
Both narcissism and egotism suggest a passionate desire to maintain and enhance overestimated views of oneself. This “bad,” “unhealthy,” or “unproductive” ego protects delusions of grandeur at the expense of accurate introspection and growth. It’s a floundering and vulnerable regime that relies on patriotic songs instead of learning from its competitors.
If, in the words of Kipling, you “trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too” — then in this sense you have a healthy ego which is confident but also open to criticism and the possibility of acknowledging error or room for improvement. Not all criticism from everywhere — that’s insanity — but valid criticism from experienced,knowledgeable or trusted sources. And perhaps the occasional gibe from the peanut gallery that rings true.
What men generally mean when they criticize Ego is that your confidence is unbalanced by humility. The word “Ego” has become a conversational shorthand for “lack of humility” and “delusions of grandeur.” To point out that it means more than that according to the Austrian who popularized it (in translation) may seem a touch pedantic. But it doesn’t bother me because I’m a stickler or a Freudian. It bothers me because it drifts linguistically toward self-denial and mixes with a spiritual self-denial that usually wafts in from eastern philosophy and which generally smells a lot like patchouli and marijuana.
Westerners have long been possessed by a certain neophilic orientalism that regards everything from the east as being more authentic or spiritual or “deep” — almost solely by virtue of it being exotic and non-western. Slap some Sanskrit on your strip mall yoga studio and suddenly you have more wisdom to offer than all of the Greeks and Romans combined.
A wide variety of (mainly) eastern schools of thought seem to equate enlightenment with the acceptance of the idea that the self is an illusion. Each of their varied adherents will find some detail in this to quibble with or say that I am misrepresenting something. That’s fine.
I’m willing to accept the notion that the self — the Ego, even — is a construction of the brain. Some kind of survival mechanism that helps us make sense of the world. The Self — or Ego — is, in some biological sense, an “illusion.” But only insofar as everything else is, too.
We process the world through our senses. Our eyes perceive something as being a certain color because it reflects a certain wavelength of light, based on various physical properties. If we can’t perceive color, is it real? Is everything the same color? Is color even a relevant property of a thing?
Totally deep, right?
Like, “woah…”
I can accept the idea that the only Self that I know is in some sense an illusion — that my Ego is a hallucination of my brain — but practically speaking, I still have to interact with the world as a differentiated individual. So I’m not sure what utility there is in focusing on that idea.
My Ego, — myself and I — work together to create and recreate this thing that we are, over and over again. To rewrite its mission and its script, to find and elaborate on its themes and make it a coherent and compelling work of art that stands on its own.
Until it doesn’t. As a carbon-based life form, yes, I’m made of the same stuff as other living things. I will return to the earth and the darkness, and — broadly speaking — the universe, whether I like it or not. But I’m in no particular hurry. I’m connected to all things and I am part of some big picture, but I am also differentiated and singular. I am not a tree or a woodpecker. I am a man. More than a man, I am me. And this consciousness, this sense of self, this Ego — is part of my nature.
A tree wants — insofar as it is able to want — to be the biggest and fullest tree it can be. It is shaped and stifled by environmental factors that promote or limit its growth. It may be surrounded by rocks and attacked by insects and parasites, it may weather storms and droughts, but it is a living thing struggling to live and it will do everything it can to become the most magnificent manifestation of its potential that it can.
Of course, there is no part of your brain called “Ego.” Freud’s structural model of the mind is just that — a model for thinking about thinking. It is an intellectual tool — a technology. As with all tools, its value is tied to its utility. Philosophies and religions are all technologies.
Focusing on the inevitable dissolution of my Self or Ego may be appropriate in hospice, but I question its utility for living life.
If you choose a path, make sure it is taking you somewhere that you want to go. Are you seeking your own truth, or some unknowable objective truth about the mind and the meaning of life, or are you seeking a truth to submit to? Are you looking for something useful or are you looking for something or someone to follow? Are you looking for a set of rules or some comfort?
While I struggle to see how useful becoming one with the universe and focusing on the illusory nature of reality is useful to the individual in a practical sense, I so see why someone in a position of power would promote it. The erasure of identity lends itself to a broad —and today, globalist — collectivism. It taps into our Dionysian desire to disappear into the darkness of collective (un)consciousness. To speak with the same voice and think with the same mind.
Like Littlefinger, “Sometimes when I try to understand a person’s motives I play a little game. I assume the worst. What’s the worst reason they could possibly have for saying what they say and doing what they do?”
If you’re not real and not important, if your goal is disappearance, then why does anything matter? It seems like a pretty good way to get people to accept simpler lives, and to be happier with less opportunity. It seems like a pretty good way to control people and convince them to accept the fate you’ve chosen for them. It seems like a good way to get people to accept your authority. Why not? What difference does it make?
It makes one wonder if these leaders really practice, in their hearts, the same religion they proscribe to their people. I tend to doubt it. Why would you assume that the leader who wants you to kill your Ego is altruistic?
I’m not saying that Gautama Buddha Manson-family mind-fucked generations of millions, but I’m not saying he didn’t.
“Say my name, say my name…”
It is possible that…the man who wants you to forget your Ego may also want you to remember his own…
Maybe you’re ok with that. Maybe that’s what you want — to fall into a thing and give it control and let it shape you. To become one of the king’s men and ride one of his horses.
Maybe it’s not. Either way, that’s none of my business.
That’s for your Ego to decide.
In Freud’s model, the Ego never really goes away — it simply chooses to repress thoughts and urges that do not conform to its aspirational “Ego Ideal” or which have been deemed unacceptable within its social environment.
I haven’t read Ayn Rand’s Anthem since I was a teenager, but kicking this problem around took me back to the communist dystopia she created, wherein the characters were limited to plural pronouns, like “we,” “our” and “they,” and men had names like “Equality 7-2521.” The protagonist, rebels and eventually discovers a book from “The Unmentionable Times.” In that book, he encounters, for the first time in his life, the word “I.” Recognizing his individuality, he decides to give himself the name Prometheus.
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of the freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.
But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.
What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word “We.”
When men accepted that worship, the structure of centuries collapsed about them, the structure whose every beam had come from the thought of some one man, each in his day down the ages, from the depth of some one spirit, such spirit as existed but for its own sake. Those men who survived those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they had nothing else to vindicate them–those men could neither carry on, nor preserve what they had received. Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom perish on earth.
What Rand suggests here is that the desire to realize one’s individual potential and to be recognized for it actually drives competition, discovery and innovation. The daring men who discovered continents and planted flags on the North and South poles all wanted to make names for themselves. They were competing to be the known and remembered as the first and the best. This competition to be known and esteemed has driven invention and cured diseases. Before the art world lurched toward a dreary and hypocritical communism, most of the great paintings were signed. Rembrandt and Da Vinci call out from the grave, saying “recognize that I did this!” You know that Dali and Picasso wanted you to remember their names! They would have told you themselves! What man would break his own bones shouldering 800, 900, or 1000 pounds if no one would ever know he did it?
Keep your quizzical kōans and subservient mantras and send me men, send me EGOs who would die to get their names up on the board of life! I want a world where men still want to DO DEEDS and be remembered for them.
Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one’s self;
But a noble name will never die,
If good renown one gets.
Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies one’s self;
One thing now that never dies,
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.
— Hávamál
It’s a manly concern — to want to piss on trees and wipe your dick on the drapes. To inseminate the world. To leave evidence of your existence. To claim mountains and build monuments. To become Ozymandias, booming from the grave: “Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair!”
The sands of time may wipe away all of these works, and someday the sun will swallow the Earth, but if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be here and I’m going to keep trying to write my Ego’s name on the world. I’m not here merely for the experience. That’s a participation trophy. If you’re into that, that’s cute, but I’m here to make a mark.
As Rand observed, it is this Ego — this Ego in competition with other Egos — that in many cases pushes us to invent and overcome and break the shackles of our minds and bodies. The Ego motivates. It is this Ego, this I, this ME who says — who insists — “I AM somebody,” “I AM worth something,” “I have an idea,” “I want to be heard,” “I want to be free.”
That’s when Ego is a good thing.
And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.
The primary role of Thor is the primary, evolutionary role of all men — to protect the perimeter inhabited by his people and to do battle with chaotic forces that threaten its order, prosperity and continuity.
It is only when that zone of security has been established and maintained that any of the civilized joys of life can develop and be experienced in their fullness. Without security, there is no art, no love, no higher learning — only anxiety and the struggle to survive.
Thor is a guardian — protector of Asgard, of sailing ships, of crops and the common folk. In Dumézil’s tripartite ordering of Indo-European societies, he is a manifestation of the warrior archetype. He is the hammer of the gods and the people — the juggernaut of the Kshatriya — a crushing force set loose on malevolent jötnar and all encroaching forces of chaos and disorder.
In the words of Longfellow, his “eyes are lightning” and his name means “thunder,” with an origin reaching through the Proto-Germanic “Þunraz” all the way to the
Proto-Indo-European tongue of the steppe.
To fight and protect — this is the role of Thor. He is a warrior. That is his job and his duty.
But what does it feel like — to experience being thunder? What does it feel like to be a terrible rumble in the sky that seems to shake the very earth?
It sounds like it feels pretty good. It sounds like it feels like power and winning.
Nietzsche wrote that, “…a living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength…”
This is the joy of Thor, of being Thor, of being the personification of thunder itself. To have strength and exert it — to use it. To bring the BOOM.
This isn’t Thor’s duty or his higher purpose, it is simply what he is and what he does. In the stories about Thor, he is always revving his engines, looking for a reason to do what he really wants to do and to be what he really is. He’s chomping at the bit, waiting for an opportunity to become Þunraz. And when the god of thunder becomes thunder, I imagine the corner of his grimace turns upward just a bit.
Because it feels good to exert strength. Because it feels good to BE thunder.
One might call the gods projections, or mysteries, or eternal truths. In some sense, they represent aspects of ourselves. They are pieces of human nature.
Strength is one of the defining characteristics of Thor, and it is also one of the defining characteristics of men. Greater average strength is one of the qualities that distinguishes men from women. All men are not stronger than all women, but most men are stronger than most women. Strength differentiates men, and greater strength helped us to perform our differentiated role and responsibility throughout the majority of our evolutionary history. Men needed to be stronger to protect their territories and the more vulnerable members of their tribes and families.
But this strength, this virile potentiality, is also part of what we are. Having and using this greater strength is a joy in the way expressing any of one’s talents can bring great satisfaction. In the way that an artist fulfills his potential in painting the best painting he is able to paint, or a mother is fulfilled when she puts everything she has into raising and nurturing a child to the best of her ability, a man fulfills an aspect of his potential when he discharges his strength. He becomes more of what he is, and there is a magnificent joy in that becoming.
Several years ago, I wrote that I “train for honor.”
I was looking for a higher reason — beyond mere narcissism or physical maintenance — some greater purpose for training. It has always been the job of men to be strong and to demonstrate that strength, and in an age where weakness is encouraged and even celebrated, I considered strength training of any kind to be a revolt against the modern world. I wrote that I trained to be worthy enough to carry water for my barbarian fathers — for men who lived harder lives in a harder world. That I trained to avoid being a living, breathing embarrassment to their memory. I wrote that training for honor meant training to earn the respect and admiration of my spiritual peers and the men who I myself admired as exemplars of masculinity and the tactical virtues.
It is important — even defiant in this rootless age — to express this kind of commitment to the memory of your ancestors. In this emasculated era where even the word “honor” — when employed solemnly and seriously in its traditional patriarchal sense — has become socially taboo, to show a commitment to earning and maintaining your reputation within an exclusive group of men is absolutely radical. Today, I do train to be an example to men in my circle, to earn and reaffirm their respect and esteem, and at the very least, to avoid embarrassing them or making them look weak by association. Training to honor your peers and to honor the memory of your stronger forebears are both high, purposeful and significant motivations for any kind of self-improvement. And, if you recognize yourself to be in your own honest and self-aware estimation that “Exhibit A” of modern male weakness and dissolution, these are probably the best reasons to begin training, and begin training hard. If you have been training for a long time and you are thinking about stopping your training to rest on your laurels and regale eye-rolling youths with stories of how strong you used to be — about how much you benched in 2003 — these are probably the best reasons to keep training. Until you fucking die.
But the truth for me today is that I like training. In fact, I love training. It’s actually my favorite thing to do and the hours I spend in the gym are usually the best and happiest hours of my day. I don’t have to force myself to train. I have to force myself to do things that make me money so that I can keep training.
The possibility of shame and dishonor is a powerful motivator. The possibility of disappointing men who I respect and men who respect me and men who look up to me in some way is a powerful motivator. And yes, the disgraceful prospect of being the withering, ignoble end of a line of stronger and harder men should get your ass into the gym.
Shame and dishonor are negative motivators. And they work. But they are tolerances. Baselines. Your back against a wall covered in spikes.
The attainment of honor is a positive motivator. Self-improvement, self-creation, self-revelation and becoming the best version of myself that I can be at any given time — those are positive motivators.
At this point in my life, I want positive motivators.
I want to do things because I am passionate about them, because I love doing them, because they give me a sense of fulfillment. I train because I love being strong. I love feeling strong. I train because I want to be mighty and beautiful and because I believe that it is good and RIGHT to be mighty and beautiful. I train because — like every righteous living beast — I want to discharge my strength as hard as I can for as long as I can.
When I walk into a gym I want to train for no one else and compared to no one else.
I want to train because I’m alive and I want to feel alive.
Because I’m a man and it feels good to be a man.
Because I’m strong and it feels good to be strong.
Because I want that one moment every day when I am fucking THUNDER.
Because I want to know and feel the JOY OF THOR.
!:ÞUNRAZ:!
THE CHALLENGE OF THOR
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I am the God Thor, I am the War God, I am the Thunderer! Here in my Northland, My fastness and fortress, Reign I forever! Here amid icebergs Rule I the nations; This is my hammer, Miölner the mighty; Giants and sorcerers Cannot withstand it!
These are the gauntlets Wherewith I wield it, And hurl it afar off; This is my girdle; Whenever I brace it, Strength is redoubled!
The light thou beholdest Stream through the heavens, In flashes of crimson, Is but my red beard Blown by the night-wind, Affrighting the nations! Jove is my brother; Mine eyes are the lightning; The wheels of my chariot Roll in the thunder, The blows of my hammer Ring in the earthquake!
Force rules the world still, Has ruled it, shall rule it; Meekness is weakness, Strength is triumphant, Over the whole earth Still is it Thor’s Day!
Thou art a God too, O Galilean! And thus singled-handed Unto the combat, Gauntlet or Gospel, Here I defy thee!
This essay was originally published online in 2014, but it is no longer available. A reader recently requested a link, and I thought I’d re-share it. If you like this essay, I developed this theme in my book Becoming a Barbarian, which I personally believe is best in audiobook form.
(I’m not sure exactly what the Shoshana bit is all about. If I remember correctly, it was about some feminist walking around New York City complaining that men thought she was attractive, and said so. I used to comment on things like that. Now I try not to pay attention to the “hot topic” of the week. Because I really don’t care.)
I. Don’t. Care.
These three magic words could end so many arguments.
Most appeals in the name of social justice rely on an underlying assumption of universal altruism. They assume that you care if something bad happens to anyone, anywhere, and advise you to take some sort of action to ease or prevent their suffering.
People react by questioning whether or not that stranger, somewhere, is really suffering, or if they are suffering any more than anyone else. They examine the circumstances of the alleged suffering and the motives of the people bringing the alleged suffering to light.
They argue about the details and the proportion of the suffering and point out their own allegedly comparable suffering or the suffering of some person or people who are allegedly suffering more.
Once you’re arguing, they’ve already got you.
Once you’re arguing, you’ve agreed that you could care, or would care — that you should theoretically care — given satisfactory evidence and argumentation.
But what would they say if you stopped pretending to care at all?
There would be no point in arguing about the details.
Of course, as normal humans, we can always imagine ourselves in another humans position. We can empathize with others — that’s what makes movies and novels work. But we can’t really care about the suffering of every single man and woman on the planet. The idea that we should is insane and inhuman. So much of what people say they care about is just emotional pornography that can springboard them into an acrobatic display of moral and political posturing.
I see all of this propaganda online telling me what is NOT OK, and how I am supposed to feel about strangers and other groups of people. If they get me to agree that I care about these strangers and their unhappiness, Im supposed to accept responsibility for that unhappiness and do whatever I can to alleviate it.
This is all manipulation — a political plucking of one bit of human suffering out of an unimaginable expanse of human suffering, all to serve this agenda or that one.
Some kid in Africa probably got his head sawed off with a butter knife while some chick named Shoshana experienced the nightmare of catcalling in New York City. No one cared, because they werent told to care. Given their perceivable social class and sex, the guys who were expressing their admiration for Shoshana have probably experienced far more brutality than being propositioned for sex. And no one cared when it happened. Shoshana is just the squeaky wheel who wants to be lubricated with your tears.
If we really cared about everyone, we would never even register feelings or microaggressions or First World problems because our brains would be blown out from watching Third World ultraviolence. We’d be watching and liking and sharing nonstop videos of prison rapes and basement executions and reading stories about sex slavery and child prostitution. We’d be OUTRAGED at the injustice of it all, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Those things are happening right now and they have more or less been happening at varying levels for all of human history.
(If violence is actually decreasing worldwide, as Steven Pinker suggests, then it is probably in part because due to high incarceration rates and widespread fear of sanctioned violence threatened by increasingly omnipotent surveillance and police states in the First World. And omnipotent surveillance states are NOT OK.)
The reason that people care about the same thing at the same time — whatever todays outrage or viral video is — is that we have all have to pick and choose. We decide, if not consciously then by our choices, that one persons suffering is more important than another. Who we — or maybe you, because I’m not talking about me here — decide to care about is almost completely arbitrary. Whatever human tragedy passes our eyes or ears.
I don’t care what happens to everyone, everywhere.
I don’t care what happens to strangers.
It’s an admission that sounds barbaric and unspeakably taboo.
It’s taboo because people have been conned into believing that they are supposed to do something they can NEVER do — care equally about everyone, all around the world.
I care about what happens to my friends and my family and my tribe. I care, and even at this point I am using care very loosely, about the kind of people I generally like, respect or support. People who are like me, or who are like the people I like.
When someone registers an opinion or tells me I am supposed to care about something, if I am even thinking about caring, I look them up. I ask myself if I would be interested in what this person had to say if they were sitting in the same room with me.
Sometimes, I would. Usually, I would not. I probably wouldn’t even have a drink with them, or give them a single moment of my time.
If they’re telling me that something bad happened to them, I have to admit that in most cases I probably don’t care. Why should I care about the suffering of this stranger instead of that one?
If they’re telling me that I should change, I ask, “why?,” and if the only answer is to theoretically prevent the alleged and future suffering of some other group of people I dont know or care about…then…my answer is: “why bother?”
I’ll change to some extent to gain honor in the eyes of men I respect, personally or in the abstract, but why would I change to prevent the unhappiness of some stranger?
This idea that we are all each other’s shepherds, that we are all responsible for the happiness of all humankind, is paralyzing nonsense. At best, it keeps men busy arguing about things over which they have almost no control. At worst it makes men vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation by people who have already decided that they are disposable rubes — like naive retirees giving away their savings to charity grifters or high-living evangelists. Men end up giving away everything worth having to people who are ideologically incapable of even acknowledging their sacrifice.
I’m not encouraging people to stop caring about anyone, I’m encouraging them to stop trying to care about everyone. If you say you love everyone, you don’t really love anyone. Love is a choice, a discriminatory act.
If you don’t pick your team — if you aren’t willing to draw a line between who you care about and who you don’t, between “us” and “them” — then you’ll be like all of these other suckers who care about whoever and whatever they click on every morning.
Care passionately, but discriminately.
And if you don’t really care, then say it.
“I don’t care.”
It’s simple, but powerful.
It’s liberating, but also dangerous and heretical.
The idea that we are all in this together and are working in good faith to solve the world’s problems is an illusion that traps us in a crisscrossed, impenetrable web of synthetic yarn. If you pull that fuzzy pink string — that completely unwarranted assumption of universal good will — civil society collapses into a Hobbesian war of all against all where no one trusts anyone.
When, free from our attachments to everyone, everywhere, we find ourselves adrift in a staggering, confused mass of drooling and covetous humanity, we can make sense of it all and find our bearings only when we form discriminatory alliances and new tribes built on trust, common interests and mutual admiration — instead of being bound by the great lie of love for all neighbors.
A lot of people like to think they are “non-violent.” Generally, people claim to “abhor” the use of violence, and violence is viewed negatively by most folks. Many fail to differentiate between just and unjust violence. Some especially vain, self-righteous types like to think they have risen above the nasty, violent cultures of their ancestors. They say that “violence isn’t the answer.” They say that “violence doesn’t solve anything.”
They’re wrong. Every one of them relies on violence, every single day.
On election day, people from all walks of life line up to cast their ballots, and by doing so, they hope to influence who gets to wield the axe of authority. Those who want to end violence — as if that were possible or even desirable — often seek to disarm their fellow citizens. This does not actually end violence. It merely gives the state mob a monopoly on violence. This makes you “safer,” so long as you don’t piss off the boss.
All governments — left, right or other — are by their very nature coercive. They have to be.
Order demands violence.
A rule not ultimately backed by the threat of violence is merely a suggestion. States rely on laws enforced by men ready to do violence against lawbreakers. Every tax, every code and every licensing requirement demands an escalating progression of penalties that, in the end, must result in the forcible seizure of property or imprisonment by armed men prepared to do violence in the event of resistance or non–compliance. Every time a soccer mom stands up and demands harsher penalties for drunk driving, or selling cigarettes to minors, or owning a pit bull, or not recycling, she is petitioning the state to use force to impose her will. She is no longer asking nicely. The viability of every family law, gun law, zoning law, traffic law, immigration law, import law, export law and financial regulation depends on both the willingness and wherewithal of the group to exact order by force.
When an environmentalist demands that we “save the whales,” he or she is in effect making the argument that saving the whales is so important that it is worth doing harm to humans who harm whales. The peaceful environmentalist is petitioning the leviathan to authorize the use of violence in the interest of protecting leviathans. If state leaders were to agree and express that it was, indeed, important to “save the whales,” but then decline to penalize those who bring harm to whales, or decline to enforce those penalties under threat of violent police or military action, the expressed sentiment would be a meaningless gesture. Those who wanted to bring harm to whales would feel free to do so, as it is said, with impunity — without punishment.
Without action, words are just words. Without violence, laws are just words.
Violence isn’t the only answer, but it is the final answer.
One can make moral arguments and ethical arguments and appeals to reason, emotion, aesthetics, and compassion. People are certainly moved by these arguments, and when sufficiently persuaded –providing of course that they are not excessively inconvenienced — people often choose to moderate or change their behaviors.
However, the willful submission of many inevitably creates a vulnerability waiting to be exploited by any one person who shrugs off social and ethical norms. If every man lays down his arms and refuses to pick them up, the first man to pick them up can do whatever he wants. Peace can only be maintained without violence so long as everyone sticks to the bargain, and to maintain peace every single person in every successive generation — even after war is long forgotten — must continue to agree to remain peaceful. Forever and ever. No delinquent or upstart may ever ask, “Or Else What?,” because in a truly non-violent society, the best available answer is “Or else we won’t think you’re a very nice person and we’re not going to share with you.” Our troublemaker is free to reply, “I don’t care. I’ll take what I want.”
Violence is the final answer to the question, “Or else what?”
Violence is the gold standard, the reserve that guarantees order. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. Violence transcends the quirks of philosophy, religion, technology and culture. People say that music is a universal language, but a punch in the face hurts the same no matter what language you speak or what kind of music you prefer. If you are trapped in a room with me and I grab a pipe and gesture to strike you with it, no matter who you are, your monkey brain will immediately understand “or else what.” And thereby, a certain order is achieved.
The practical understanding of violence is as basic to human life and human order as is the idea that fire is hot. You can use it, but you must respect it. You can act against it, and you can sometimes control it, but you can’t just wish it away. Like wildfire, sometimes it is overwhelming and you won’t know it is coming until it is too late. Sometimes it is bigger than you. Ask the Cherokee, the Inca, the Romanovs, the Jews, the Confederates, the barbarians and the Romans. They all know “Or else what.”
The basic acknowledgement that order demands violence is not a revelation, but to some it may seem like one. The very notion may make some people apoplectic, and some will furiously attempt to dispute it with all sorts of convoluted and hypothetical arguments, because it doesn’t sound very “nice.” But something doesn’t need to be “nice” in order for it to be true. Reality doesn’t bend over to accommodate fantasy or sentimentality.
Our complex society relies on proxy violence to the extent that many average people in the private sector can wander through life without really having to understand or think deeply about violence, because we are removed from it. We can afford to perceive it as a distant, abstract problem to be solved through high-minded strategy and social programming. When violence comes knocking, we simply make a call, and the police come to “stop” the violence. Few civilians really take the time to think that what we are essentially doing is paying an armed band protection money to come and do orderly violence on our behalf. When those who would do violence to us are taken peacefully, most of us don’t really make the connection, we don’t even assert to ourselves that the reason a perpetrator allows himself to be arrested is because of the gun the officer’s hip or the implicit understanding that he will eventually be hunted down by more officers who have the authority to kill him if his is deemed a threat. That is, if he is deemed a threat to order.
There are something like two and a half million people incarcerated in the United States. Over ninety percent of them are men. Most of them did not turn themselves in. Most of them don’t try to escape at night because there is someone in a guard tower ready to shoot them. Many are “non-violent” offenders. Soccer moms, accountants, celebrity activists and free range vegans all send in their tax dollars, and by proxy spend billions and billions to feed an armed government that maintains order through violence.
It is when our ordered violence gives way to disordered violence, as in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that we are forced to see how much we rely on those who maintain order through violence. People loot because they can, and kill because they think they’ll get away with it. Dealing with violence and finding violent men who will protect you from other violent men suddenly becomes a real and pressing concern.
A pal once told me a story about an incident recounted by a family friend who was a cop, and I think it gets the point across. A few teenagers were at the mall hanging out, outside a bookstore. They were goofing around and talking with some cops who were hanging around. The cop was a relatively big guy, not someone who you would want to mess around with. One of the kids told the cop that he didn’t see why society needed police.
The cop leaned over and said to the spindly kid, “do you have any doubt in your mind about whether or not I could break your arms and take that book away from you if I felt like it?”
The teenager, obviously shaken by the brutality of the statement, said, “No.”
“That’s why you need cops, kid.”
George Orwell wrote in his “Notes on Nationalism” that, for the pacifist, the truth that, “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf,” is obvious but impossible to accept. Much unreason flows from the inability to accept our passive reliance on violence for protection. Escapist fantasies of the John Lennon “Imagine” variety corrupt our ability to see the world as it is, and be honest with ourselves about the naturalness of violence to the human animal. There is no evidence to support the idea that man is an inherently peaceful creature. There is substantial evidence to support the notion that violence has always been a part of human life. Every day, archeologists unearth another primitive skull with damage from weapons or blunt force trauma. The very first legal codes were shockingly grisly. If we feel less threatened today, if we feel as though we live in a non–violent society, it is only because we have ceded so much power over our daily lives to the state. Some call this reason, but we might just as well call it laziness. A dangerous laziness, it would seem, given how little most people say they trust politicians.
Violence doesn’t come from movies or video games or music. Violence comes from people. It’s about time people woke up from their 1960s haze and started being honest about violence again. People are violent, and that’s OK. You can’t legislate it away or talk your way around it. Based on the available evidence, there’s no reason to believe that world peace will ever be achieved, or that violence can ever be “stopped.”
It’s time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. History teaches us that if we don’t, someone else will.
Originally published on Arthur’s Hall of Viking Manliness (now offline), Nov 11, 2010.
Muitas pessoas gostam de pensar que são “não-violentas.” Geralmente dizem “abominar” o uso da violência, e ela é vista de forma negativa pela maior parte delas. Muitos falham em diferenciar entre a violência justa e injusta. Alguns tipos vãos e hipócritas gostam de pensar que foram criados acima da cultura sórdida e violenta de seus ancestrais. Eles dizem que “a violência não é a resposta”. Dizem que “a violência não resolve nada”.
Eles estão errados. Cada um deles confia na violência diariamente.
No dia da eleição, pessoas de todas as esferas da vida formam fila para irem às urnas e, ao fazerem isso, esperam influenciar em quem empunhará o machado da autoridade. Aqueles que querem acabar com a violência – como se isso fosse possível ou desejável – freqüentemente procuram desarmar seus concidadãos. Na realidade, isso não acaba com a violência. Meramente dá à máfia do Estado um monopólio sobre ela. Isto torna você mais “seguro”, desde que não irrite o chefe.
Todos os governos – de esquerda, direita ou outro – são, por sua própria natureza, coercivos. Eles têm de ser.
A ordem demanda a violência.
Uma regra que no fim não é apoiada pela violência é meramente uma sugestão. Os Estados contam com leis endossadas por homens prontos a promoverem violência contra os infratores. Todo imposto, código e requisição de licenciamento exige uma progressão crescente de penalidades que, no fim, devem resultar na tomada de propriedade a força, ou no aprisionamento por homens armados, preparados para utilizarem a violência em caso de violência ou desacato. Toda vez que uma mãe de futebol [1] ergue-se e exige penas mais duras para aqueles que dirigem alcoolizados, vendem cigarros a menores, são donos de pit bulls, ou não fazem reciclagem, ela está peticionando ao Estado que ele utilize da força para impor sua vontade. Ela não está mais pedindo gentilmente. A viabilidade de toda lei de família, armas, zoneamento, tráfego, imigração, importação, exportação e regulamentação financeira depende tanto da disposição, quanto dos meios do grupo para exigi-los através da força.
Quando um ambientalista exige que “salvemos às baleias”, ele ou ela está, na realidade, argumentando que salvar às baleias é tão importante que vale a pena fazer mal aos seres humanos que fazem mal às baleias. O ambientalista pacífico está peticionando ao leviatã que autorize o uso de violência no interesse de proteger leviatãs. Se os líderes de Estado concordassem e manifestassem que, de fato, era importante “salvar às baleias”, mas se recusassem a penalizar àqueles que trazem mal a elas, ou se recusassem a impor estas penalidades sob a ameaça de uma violenta força policial ou ação militar, o sentimento expressado seria um gesto sem sentido. Aqueles que queriam trazer mal às baleias sentir-se-iam livres para fazê-lo, como é dito, com impunidade – sem punição.
Sem a ação, palavras são apenas palavras. Sem a violência, leis são apenas palavras.
A violência não é a única resposta, mas é a resposta final.
Podem-se fazer argumentos morais e éticos, apelar à razão, emoção, estética e compaixão. As pessoas certamente são movidas por estes argumentos, e quando suficientemente persuadidas – contando, é claro, que estes não sejam excessivamente inconvenientes –, elas comumente preferem moderar ou mudar seus comportamentos.
Contudo, a submissão voluntária de muitos inevitavelmente cria uma vulnerabilidade que fica à espera de ser explorada por qualquer pessoa que desconsidere as normas sociais a éticas. Se todo homem baixar suas armas e recusar-se a pegá-las de volta, o primeiro homem que pegá-las pode-rá fazer o que quiser. A paz somente pode ser mantida sem violência contanto que todos mantenham o poder de barganha e, para manter a paz, cada pessoa, em cada geração sucessiva – mesmo depois que a guerra tenha sido esquecida há muito –, deve continuar a concordar em permanecer pacífica. Para sempre e eternamente. Nenhum delinqüente ou presunçoso poderá jamais perguntar “Ou então o que?”, porque em uma sociedade verdadeiramente não-violenta, a melhor resposta disponível é “Ou então acharemos que você não é uma pessoa muito legal e não teremos nada a dividir com você”. Nosso encrenqueiro estará livre para responder, “Não me importo. Vou tomar aquilo que quiser”.
A violência é a resposta final à questão “Ou então o que?”
A violência é o padrão ouro, a reserva que garante a ordem. Na realidade, ela é melhor que um padrão ouro, pois a violência possui um valor universal. Ela transcende as peculiaridades de filosofia, religião, tecnologia e cultura. As pessoas dizem que a música é uma linguagem universal, mas um soco na cara dói da mesma forma não importa qual língua você fale, ou que tipo de música prefira. Se você está trancado em um quarto comigo e eu agarro um pedaço de cano e gesticulo para atacá-lo com ele, não importa quem você seja, seu cérebro de macaco vai imediatamente entender “ou então o que”. E, desta forma, certa ordem é alcançada.
O entendimento prático da violência é tão básico para a vida e a ordem humana como a idéia de que o fogo é quente. Você pode usá-lo, mas deve respeitá-lo. Pode-se agir contra ele, e algumas vezes controlá-lo, mas não desejar que ele desaparecesse. Como um incêndio, algumas vezes é sobrepujante e você não sabe que está vindo até que seja tarde demais. Às vezes é maior que você. Pergunte ao Cherokee, ao Inca, aos Romanov, aos Judeus, aos Confederados, aos bárbaros e aos Romanos. Todos eles sabem “Ou então o que”.
O conhecimento básico de que a ordem demanda a violência não é uma revelação, mas para alguns parece ser como tal. A própria noção disso pode tornar algumas pessoas apopléticas e alguns tentarão furiosamente disputá-lo com todos os tipos de argumentos enrolados e hipotéticos, pois não soa muito “legal”. Mas algo não precisa ser “legal” para que seja verdadeiro. A realidade não precisa se curvar para que acomode à fantasia ou a sentimentalidade.
Nossa complexa sociedade se baseia na procuração de violência ao grau de que muitas pessoas comuns no setor privado podem vagar pela vida sem realmente ter entendido ou pensado profundamente sobre a violência, pois estamos removidas dela. Podemos nos dar ao luxo de percebê-la como um problema distante, abstrato, que está para ser resolvido através de uma estratégia magnânima e programação social. Quando a violência bate na porta, simplesmente fazemos uma ligação e a polícia vem “parar” a violência. Poucos civis realmente tomam tempo para pensar que aquilo que realmente estamos fazendo é pagar um bando armado com dinheiro de proteção, para que eles venham e façam ordenadamente a violência a nosso favor. Quando aqueles que fariam a violência contra nós são levados pacificamente, a maioria de nós realmente não faz a conexão, nem mesmo afirmamos a nós mesmos que a razão pela qual o perpetrador permite ser preso é por conta da arma no quadril do policial ou o entendimento implícito de que ele será eventualmente caçado por mais e mais oficiais, os quais possuem a autoridade para matá-lo caso ele seja considerado uma ameaça. Isto é, se ele for considerado uma ameaça à ordem.
Existe em torno de dois milhões e meio de pessoas encarceradas nos Estados Unidos. Mais de noventa por cento delas são homens. A maior parte deles não se entregou. A maioria não tenta escapar durante a noite pelo fato de que existe alguém em uma torre de guarda pronto para atirar neles. Muitos são infratores “não-violentos”. Mães de futebol, contadores, celebridades ativistas e vegetarianos free-range, todos mandam seus dólares de imposto e, por procuração, gastam bilhões e bilhões para alimentar um governo armado que mantêm a ordem através da violência.
É quando a nossa violência ordenada dá lugar à violência desordenada, como acontece em conseqüência de um desastre natural, que somos forçados a ver o quanto confiamos naqueles que mantém a ordem através da violência. As pessoas pilham porque podem e matam por pensarem que poderão escapar impunes. Lidar com a violência e encontrar homens violentos que irão protegê-lo de outros homens violentos subitamente se torna uma preocupação real e urgente.
Certa vez um amigo relatou-me a história de um incidente contado por um amigo de sua família, que era um policial, e acho que ela prova este ponto. Alguns adolescentes estavam passeando no shopping, do lado de fora de uma livraria. Eles estavam jogando conversa fora e falando com alguns policiais que estavam rondando. O policial era um cara relativamente grande, não era alguém com quem você iria querer se meter. Uma das crianças falou ao policial que ele não via motivo pelo qual a sociedade precisava da polícia.
O policial inclinou-se e disse ao pequeno menino, “você tem qualquer dúvida em sua mente se eu poderia ou não quebrar seus braços e levar de você este livro, se eu o quisesse?”
O adolescente, obviamente abalado pela brutalidade da declaração disse, “não”.
“É por isso que você precisa de policiais, menino”.
George Orwell escreveu em seu “Notas sobre o Nacionalismo” que, para o pacifista, a verdade de que “Aqueles que ‘renunciam’ a violência podem fazê-lo somente porque outros estão comprometidos com ela em seu nome” é óbvia, mas impossível de aceitar. Muito da irracionalidade provêm da inabilidade em aceitar nossa dependência passiva da violência para a proteção. Fantasias escapistas do tipo de “Imagine”, de John Lennon, corrompem nossa habilidade de ver o mundo como ele realmente o é, e de sermos honestos com nós mesmos sobre a naturalidade da violência para o animal humano. Não há evidência que apóie a idéia de que o homem é uma criatura inerentemente pacífica. Há substancial evidência que apóia a noção de que a violência sempre foi uma parte da vida humana. Todos os dias, arqueólogos desenterram um novo crânio primitivo com danos feitos por armas ou traumas por pancadas. Os primeiros códigos de leis eram chocantemente horrendos. Se nos sentimos menos ameaçados hoje, se sentimos como se vivêssemos em uma sociedade não-violenta, é somente pelo fato de termos cedido tanto poder sobre nossas vidas cotidianas ao Estado. Alguns chamam isso de razão, mas nós poderíamos muito bem chamá-lo de indolência. Uma indolência perigosa ao que parece, dado o quão pouco a maior parte das pessoas diz confiar nos políticos.
A violência não provém dos filmes, videogames ou da música. Ela vem das pessoas. Já é hora delas acordarem da névoa de seus anos ‘60 e começarem a ser honestas novamente sobre a violência. As pessoas são violentas, e isso é OK. Você não pode legislar para acabar com isso ou desconversar. Baseado na evidência disponível, não há razão alguma para acreditar que a paz mundial será algum dia atingida, ou que a violência possa ser “impedida”.
Já é hora de largar as preocupações e aprender a amar o machado de batalha. A história ensina que, se não o fizermos, alguém o fará.
[1] N.T. “Soccer Mom”. Expressão norte-americana referente às mães hiper-participativas.
SPANISH
La Violencia es Dorada
Translated by Leo Molina López
A mucha gente le gusta pensar que “no son violentas”. Generalmente, dicen “aborrecer” el uso de la violencia. La violencia es vista negativamente por la mayoría. Muchos fallan en diferenciar entre la violencia justa y la violencia injusta. Algunas personas, esas de ese tipo hipócrita y vano en especial que se las da de su supuesta superioridad moral, gustan de pensar que se han elevado por encima de la sórdida y violenta cultura de sus ancestros. Dicen que “La violencia no es la respuesta”. Dicen que “la violencia no resuelve nada.”
Están completamente equivocados. Todos y cada uno de ellos depende de la violencia. Todos y cada uno de los días de su vida dependen de ella.
En la jornada electoral, personas de todas las esferas de la sociedad hacen fila para tachar sus tarjetones, y al hacerlo, esperan influenciar quién será aquel que porte el hacha de la autoridad. Los que quieren acabar con la violencia –como si eso fuera posible o incluso deseable— a menudo buscan desarmar a sus conciudadanos. Esto en realidad no le pone fin a la violencia. Apenas le da a la mafia estatal el monopolio de la violencia. Esto te hace sentir “más seguro”, siempre y cuando no le saques la piedra al que manda.
Todos los gobiernos –de izquierda, de derecha u otros— son por naturaleza coercitivos. Tienen que serlo.
El orden demanda violencia.
Una regla que no es apoyada por la amenaza de violencia no es más que una sugerencia. Los Estados cuentan con leyes que son ejecutadas por hombres listos a llevar la violencia a quienes rompen las leyes. Todo impuesto, todo código y todo requerimiento de licencia necesita de una progresión creciente de penalidades que, al final, deben resultar en la expropiación o en el aprisionamiento llevadas a cabo por la fuerza, por hombres armados y preparados a usar la violencia en caso de resistencia o no cooperación. Cada vez que una soccer mom se para y pega el grito en el cielo pidiendo mayores penas a conducir en estado de embriaguez o a la venta de cigarrillos a menores o tener un pitbull o reciclar; ella está pidiendo al Estado que use la fuerza para imponer la voluntad de ella. Ella ya no está pidiendo por las buenas. La viabilidad de todas las normas del Derecho de Familia, las prohibiciones al porte de armas, la ley de tránsito, la ley de inmigraciones, la ley de importaciones y exportaciones, y las regulaciones financieras dependen tanto de la disposición como de los medios del grupo llamado a ejecutar esa orden, por la fuerza.
Cuando un ambientalista protesta para que “salven a las ballenas”, él o ella está en efecto haciendo el argumento de que salvar a las ballenas es tan importante que vale la pena hacerle daño a los humanos que le hacen daño a las ballenas. El pacífico ambientalista está peticionándole al leviatán que autorice el uso de la violencia con el interés de proteger leviatanes. Si los líderes del estado estuviesen de acuerdo y expresaran, de hecho, que es muy importante “salvar a las ballenas”, para luego rehusarse a penalizar a aquellos que dañan a las ballenas y declinara el imponer por la fuerza estas penalidades bajo la amenaza de una policía violenta o de acción militar; el sentimiento expresado por este político sería insignificante. Aquellos que querrían hacerle todo el daño que quisieran a las ballenas estarían en la libertad de hacerlo, como se dice, con impunidad –sin castigo.
Sin acción, las palabras se quedan en palabras. Sin violencia, las leyes son solo palabras.
La Violencia no es la única respuesta, pero es la última respuesta.
Uno puede hacer todos los argumentos morales, éticos y apelaciones a la razón, a la emoción, a la estética y a la compasión. Las personas ciertamente son movidas por estos argumentos y cuando están lo suficientemente convencidas –teniendo en cuenta, por supuesto, que no sean excesivamente inconvenientes—la gente a menudo escoge moderar o cambiar sus comportamientos.
Sin embargo, la sumisión voluntaria de muchos inevitablemente da lugar a una vulnerabilidad que espera ser explotada por cualquiera a quien le dé igual las normas sociales y éticas. Si todo hombre entrega las armas y se niega a volver a tomarlas, el primer hombre en levantarlas puede hacer lo que sea que quiera. La paz solo puede ser mantenida sin violencia hasta tanto todo el mando en cada generación sucesiva –incluso cuando la guerra haya sido ya olvidada—debe seguir aceptando permanecer pacífica. Por siempre y para siempre. Ningún delincuente preguntará jamás, “¿Y si no qué me harás?”, porque en una sociedad verdaderamente no violenta, la mejor respuesta que se tiene a la mano es “Y si no es así, pensaremos que no eres una muy buena persona y no querremos compartir más contigo”. Nuestro revoltoso es libre de responder, “No me importa. Tomaré lo que quiera.”
La Violencia es la última respuesta a la pregunta, “¿Y si no qué me harás?”
La Violencia es el estándar dorado, la reserva que garantiza el orden. En realidad, es mejor que un estándar de oro, porque la violencia tiene valor universal. La violencia trasciende los caprichos de la filosofía, de la religión, de la tecnología y de la cultura. La gente dice que la música es el idioma universal, pero un puñetazo en la cara duele igual, sin importar el idioma que hables o la música que escuches. Si estás atrapado en un cuarto conmigo y yo agarro un tubo y hago como si fuera golpearte con él, sin importar quién seas, tu cerebro de mono inmediatamente entenderá “¿y si no qué?”. Así es como cierto orden es alcanzado.
El entendimiento práctico de la violencia es tan básico para la vida y el orden humanos como la idea de que el fuego quema. Puedes usarla, pero debes respetarla. Puedes irte en su contra y a veces puedes controlarla, pero jamás puedes, por más que quieras, lograr que desaparezca como si nada. Como los incendios, algunas veces es abrumadora y no sabes que viene sino hasta cuando es demasiado tarde. A veces es más grande que tú. Pregúntale al Indígena, al Cherokee, al Inca, a los Romanov, a los Judíos, a los Confederados, a los Bárbaros y a los Romanos. Todos ellos bien conocen el “¿Y si no qué?”.
El conocimiento básico de que el orden requiere de la violencia no es una revelación, aunque para algunos si parezca. La sola noción puede poner a unos apopléjicos, otros intentarán disputarla furiosamente con todo tipo de argumentos enredados y rebuscados, simplemente porque no suena “bonito”. Algo no necesita ser “bonito” para que sea verdad. La verdad no se acomoda a las fantasías ni a los sentimentalismos.
Nuestra compleja sociedad depende de la violencia (proxy violence) hasta el punto en que la persona promedio del sector privado pueda pasarse la vida sin siquiera tener que entender ni pensar profundamente acerca de la violencia. Estamos removidos de ella. Podemos darnos el lujo de percibirla como un problema abstracto y distante que es resuelto a través de una magnánima estrategia y por la programación social. Cuando la violencia viene a tocarnos la puerta, simplemente hacemos una llamada y la policía viene a “detener” la violencia. Pocos civiles rara vez se toman el tiempo para pensar que, esencialmente, lo que estamos haciendo es pagarle a una mafia armada una tarifa de protección para que venga y ejerza ordenadamente la violencia en nuestro nombre y favor. Cuando aquellos que ejercen la violencia hacia nosotros son llevados pacíficamente, la mayoría de nosotros no hacemos realmente la conexión, ni siquiera nos reafirmamos a nosotros mismos que la razón por la cual un perpetrador se deja arrestar es por el arma en el cinto del oficial o el entendimiento implícito de que eventualmente será casado por más oficiales quienes tienen la autoridad de matarlo si es estimado como una amenaza. Esto es, si es considerado una amenaza al orden.
Hay aproximadamente dos y medio millones de personas encarceladas en los Estados unidos. Más del noventa por ciento de ellas son hombres. La mayoría de ellos no se entregaron. La mayoría de ellos no intentan escapar de noche porque hay alguien en la cima del panóptico, de la torre de vigilancia, listo a disparar al menor movimiento. Muchos son criminales “no violentos”. Soccer moms, contadores, celebridades, activistas y veganos, todos juntos pagan juiciosamente el dinero de sus impuestos e indirectamente (by proxy) gastan billones de billones para alimentar un gobierno armado que mantiene el orden por medio de la violencia.
Es cuando nuestra violencia ordenada y legitimada da paso a una violencia desordenada y deslegitimada, como en el desorden sobreviniente a un desastre natural, que estamos forzados a presenciar cuánto dependemos de aquellos quienes mantienen el orden a través de la violencia. Las muchedumbres saquean porque pueden y matan porque piensan que se pueden salir con la suya. Lidiar con violencia y encontrar hombres violentos que te protejan de aquellos otros hombres violentos, de repente se vuelve una preocupación real y urgente.
Un amigo una vez me contó una historia sobre un incidente vivido por la familia de un amigo que era policía. Esta historia expresa muy bien el punto. Unos adolescentes estaban todos pasando el rato en el centro comercial, justo afuera de una librería. Estaban molestando y estaban hablándole a unos policías que estaban rondando por ahí. El policía era un tipo relativamente grande, no alguien con quien te meterías en particular. Uno de los chicos le dijo al policía que él no sabía por qué la sociedad necesita a la policía.
El agente se le acercó e inclinándosele al larguirucho chico, “¿tienes cualquier duda en tu mente de si yo podría o no romperte los brazos y tomar el libro que tienes en las manos si se me diera la gana?”
El adolescente, obviamente sacudido por la brutalidad de lo que acababa de oír, respondió, “No”.
“Es por esto que necesitas policías, amigo”.
George Orwell escribió en sus “Notas sobre el Nacionalismo” (Notes on Nationalism) que, para el pacifista, la verdadque reza, “Aquellos que ‘abjuran’ de la violencia pueden hacerlo porque otros están cometiendo violencia en su nombre”, puede ser obvia pero les es imposible de aceptar. Mucha sinrazón se sigue de la inhabilidad de aceptar nuestra dependencia pasiva de la violencia para garantizar nuestra protección. Las fantasías escapistas como las evocadas por el “Imagine” de John Lennon corrompen nuestra habilidad de ver el mundo tal y como en realidad es y no nos dejan ser honestos con nosotros mismos sobre la naturalidad de la violencia para el animal humano. No hay evidencia que apoye la idea de que el hombre sea una criatura inherentemente pacifista. Hay evidencia sustancial que apoya la noción de que la violencia ha sido siempre parte de la existencia humana. Todos los días, arqueólogos descubren otra calavera primitiva con evidencias de daños de armas o de traumas fruto de la fuerza bruta. Los primeros códigos legales eran chocantemente horrendos. Si nos sentimos menos amenazados hoy, si nos sentimos como si viviéramos en una sociedad no violenta, es solo en razón a que hemos cedido tanto poder sobre nuestras vidas al estado. Algunos denominan esto “razón”, pero podríamos llamarlo también “pereza”. Una pereza peligrosa, parecería, dado cuán poco las personas de hoy dicen confiar en los políticos.
La violencia no viene de las películas, ni de la música, ni de los videojuegos. La violencia viene de la gente. Es hora de que las personas despierten de su obnubilación sesentera y empiecen a ser honestos en cuanto a la violencia de nuevo. Las personas somos violentas, y eso está bien. Puedes derogarla o hablar tratando de racionalizarla. Basados en la evidencia disponible, no hay razón para creer que la paz mundial será alguna vez alcanzada o que la violencia podrá alguna vez ser acabada.
Es hora para dejar de preocuparnos y empezar a amar el hacha de batalla. La historia nos enseña que si no lo hacemos nosotros, alguien más lo hará.
Beaucoup de personnes se réclament de la « non-violence ». Généralement, les gens revendiquent leur « refus » de l’usage de la violence, et la violence est perçue négativement par une majorité. La plupart refusent de faire une différence entre une violence juste et injuste. Certains, particulièrement pédants, s’enorgueillissent d’avoir dépassé la « culture de la violence » de leurs ancêtres. Ils disent que « la violence n’est jamais la réponse », qu’elle « ne résout jamais rien. »
Ils ont tort. Ils sont tous dépendants de la violence, dans leur vie de tous les jours.
Lors des élections, des gens de tous horizons font la queue pour déposer leurs bulletins, et ainsi ils espèrent influencer qui maniera la hache de l’autorité. Ceux qui souhaitent mettre fin à la violence – comme si c’était possible ou même souhaitable – cherchent souvent à désarmer les citoyens. Cela ne met absolument pas fin à la violence. En fait cela donne aux gros bras de l’État un monopole de la violence. Cela vous donne la « sécurité », dès lors que vous n’ennuyez pas le patron.
Tous les gouvernements – de gauche, de droite ou autre – sont par nature coercitifs. Ils se doivent de l’être.
L’ordre a besoin de violence
Une règle qui n’est pas appuyée, au final, par la menace n’est rien de plus qu’une suggestion. Les États reposent sur des lois appliquées par des hommes prêts à user de violence contre les hors-la-loi. Chaque taxe, code et obligation requiert une échelle progressive de punitions qui, au final, doivent se traduire par la saisie des biens ou l’emprisonnement en cas de résistance ou de refus d’obtempérer.
Chaque fois que Monsieur Dupont demande que la conduite en état d’ivresse, vendre des cigarettes aux mineurs, posséder un pit-bull ou ne pas appliquer le tri sélectif soit puni plus sévèrement, il demande en fait à l’État d’utiliser la violence pour imposer son point de vue. Il ne demande plus gentiment. L’existence de n’importe quelle loi : sur la famille, le port d’armes, l’urbanisme, la circulation, l’immigration, l’import-export ou la finance dépend à la fois de la volonté et des moyens que se donne le groupe pour faire respecter l’ordre par la force.
Quand un écologiste demande que nous « sauvions les baleines », il ou elle est en fait en train de dire que sauver les baleines est si important que cela justifie de faire du mal aux humains qui font du mal aux baleines. L’écologiste pacifique demande en fait au Léviathan d’autoriser le recours à la violence afin de protéger des Léviathans.
Si les dirigeants approuvent qu’il est en effet important de « sauver les baleines », mais refusent ensuite de punir les baleiniers, ou n’assortissent pas ces punitions de mesures coercitives par des actions policières ou militaires, « sauvez les baleines » ne restera qu’un vœu pieux. Les chasseurs de baleines pourront continuer en toute impunité, puisqu’ils ne risqueront rien.
Sans action, les mots restent des mots. Sans violence, une loi n’est qu’un vœu pieux.
La violence n’est pas la seule solution, mais c’est la dernière.
On peut convaincre grâce à la morale ou l’éthique, en appeler à la raison, l’émotion ou la compassion. Les gens peuvent être touchés par ces biais, et peuvent être persuadés – à condition que ce ne soit pas trop contraignant — de modérer ou modifier leur comportement.
Toutefois, la soumission volontaire d’un grand nombre d’individus finit toujours par créer une vulnérabilité exploitée par ceux qui n’ont que faire des normes sociales ou morales. Si chacun jette son arme à terre et refuse de la ramasser, le premier à la récupérer peut faire ce qu’il veut.
La paix sociale ne peut être maintenue que si chacun veut bien la respecter, et ce à chaque génération si chaque individu – même après que la loi du plus fort ne soit plus qu’un lointain souvenir – accepte de ne pas utiliser la violence. Pour toujours et à jamais. Aucun criminel ou malfrat ne doit jamais demander « Ou sinon quoi ? » car, dans une société entièrement pacifiste, la seule réponse possible serait « Ou sinon nous penserons que tu n’es pas très gentil et nous n’allons pas partager avec toi. »
Qu’est ce qui empêchera notre fauteur de trouble de dire : « Je m’en fous. Je prendrais ce que je veux. » ?
La violence est la dernière réponse à « Sinon quoi ? »
La violence est l’étalon-or, la réserve qui garantit l’ordre. En fait, elle est même plus importante que l’étalon-or, parce que la violence a une dimension universelle. La violence transcende les frontières philosophiques, religieuses, technologiques ou culturelles. Certains disent que la musique est un langage universel, mais un coup de poing vous fera mal, quel que soit votre langue ou le genre de musique que vous écoutez.
Si vous êtes enfermé dans une pièce avec moi, que j’attrape un pied-de-biche et que je fais mine de vous frapper avec, peu importe d’où vous venez, votre cerveau reptilien va immédiatement comprendre « sinon quoi ? ». Et à partir de là, un certain ordre se crée.
La compréhension de la violence est aussi basique pour un être humain que l’est l’idée que le feu brûle. Vous pouvez l’utiliser, mais vous devez la respecter. Vous pouvez la combattre, et parfois la contrôler, mais vous ne pouvez pas la faire disparaître. Comme les feux de forêt, parfois elle est inévitable et vous ne la verrez arriver que quand il est trop tard. Demandez aux Cherokee, aux Incas, aux Romanovs, aux Juifs, aux Confédérés, aux Barbares et aux Romains.
Ils ont tous connu « Ou sinon quoi ? ».
L’idée simple que l’ordre nécessite la violence n’est pas une nouveauté, mais pour certains, ça semble l’être. Le concept pourrait même rendre folles certaines personnes, qui chercheront alors toutes sortes d’arguments tordus pour contredire ce fait, parce que cela ne serait pas très « gentil ». Mais quelque chose n’a pas à être « gentil » pour être vrai. La réalité ne plie pas devant le sentimentalisme ou les rêves éveillés.
Notre société compliquée s’appuie sur une violence par procuration afin qu’une large majorité des gens puissent vivre toute leur vie sans avoir à s’en soucier ou même y penser, parce qu’on les en a éloignés. Nous pouvons nous permettre de la concevoir comme un problème lointain, abstrait, qui peut être « résolu » grâce à des mesures et des réformes sociales. Si jamais elle vient frapper à la porte, nous passons un appel téléphonique et la police vient pour « arrêter » la violence. Bien peu se rendent compte que ce que nous faisons est en fait de payer des mercenaires pour qu’ils usent de la force à notre place.
Quand des criminels se rendent pacifiquement, la plupart d’entre nous ne réalisent même pas que, si c’est le cas, c’est à cause de l’arme que porte le policier ou du fait que s’ils n’obtempèrent pas ils seront pourchassés, voire abattus, s’ils sont considérés comme une menace. Une menace pour l’ordre public s’entend.
Il y a environ deux millions et demi de prisonniers aux États-Unis. Plus de 90 % d’entre eux sont des hommes. La plupart d’entre eux ne se sont pas rendus. La plupart d’entre eux n’essaient pas de s’échapper parce qu’il y a des gardes dans une tour prêts à leur tirer dessus s’ils essaient. La plupart sont des criminels « non-violents ».
Tous les Messieurs Dupont, comptables, artistes engagés et maraîchers végétariens payent des impôts, et par procuration donnent des milliards pour nourrir un gouvernement qui maintient l’ordre grâce à la violence.
C’est quand cette « violence légitime » laisse la place à la loi du plus fort, dans le chaos d’une catastrophe naturelle par exemple, que nous ouvrons les yeux sur notre dépendance envers ceux qui maintiennent l’ordre par la violence.
Les gens pillent parce qu’ils le peuvent, et tuent parce qu’ils pensent qu’il n’y aura pas de punition. Dans ce genre de situation, trouver des hommes violents pour vous protéger d’autres hommes violents devient une affaire de survie.
Un ami me racontait une histoire à propos d’une de ses connaissances, un policier, qui je pense résume cela clairement.
Quelques ados traînaient près d’un centre commercial, devant une librairie. Ils faisaient les andouilles et narguaient les policiers locaux. L’un des agents était un vrai costaud, pas le genre de personne à qui vous voudriez chercher des noises. L’un des garçons lui dit qu’il ne voit pas pourquoi la société a besoin de policiers.
L’agent se penche vers lui et dit à cet adolescent maigrelet : « Est ce que tu as le moindre doute sur le fait que je pourrais te casser le bras et te voler ton livre si j’en avais envie ? » Le gamin, visiblement secoué par la brutalité de la question, murmure : « Non. »
« C’est pour ça qu’on a besoin de policiers, petit gars. »
George Orwell écrivait dans Notes sur le nationalisme que, pour le pacifiste, la vérité que « ceux qui refusent la violence ne peuvent le faire que parce que d’autres acceptent de la commettre en leur nom » est évidente, mais impossible à accepter. Beaucoup d’irrationalité découle de l’incapacité d’accepter notre dépendance passive à la violence pour assurer notre protection.
Des contes de fées dignes de la chanson « Imagine » de John Lennon corrompent notre capacité à voir le monde tel qu’il est, et d’être honnête avec nous-mêmes sur le côté inhérent de la violence dans la nature humaine.
Il n’y a aucune preuve pour avancer que l’homme est un animal pacifique.
Il y en a par contre beaucoup qui permettent de penser que la violence a toujours fait partie de notre quotidien. Chaque année des archéologues découvrent de nouveaux crânes avec des séquelles laissées par des armes ou des coups de poing. Les premiers codes civils étaient incroyablement brutaux.
Si nous nous sentons moins menacés aujourd’hui, si nous avons l’impression de vivre dans une société non-violente, c’est uniquement parce que nous avons cédé tant de notre pouvoir sur nos vies de tous les jours à l’État. Certains appellent cela de la logique, mais cela pourrait tout aussi bien être de la paresse. Une paresse très dangereuse qui plus est, vue le nombre de personnes déclarant ne pas faire confiance aux hommes politiques.
La violence ne vient ni des films, ni des jeux vidéo ou de la musique. La violence vient des gens. Il est temps de sortir de notre rêve soixante-huitard et de recommencer à être honnête à propos de la violence. L’homme est violent, et c’est normal. Aucune législation ne permettra de la faire disparaître. Au vu des preuves que nous possédons il n’y a aucune raison de penser qu’il puisse un jour exister la « paix dans le monde », ou que la violence puisse être « stoppée ».
Il est temps d’arrêter de s’inquiéter et d’apprendre à aimer la hache de bataille.
L’histoire nous apprend que si nous ne le faisons pas, d’autres le feront.
GERMAN
Gewalt ist der Goldstandard
Translation by Michael Strauch
Viele Leute behaupten von sich gerne, dass sie nicht gewalttätig sind. Generell behaupten Menschen von sich, dass sie den Einsatz von Gewalt verabscheuen und Gewalt wird von den meisten Leuten als etwas Negatives gesehen. Viele schaffen es dabei nicht zwischen gerechter und ungerechter Gewalt zu unterscheiden. Viele von ihnen, insbesondere eitle selbstgerechte Typen denken gerne, dass sie über die brutalen, gewalttätigen Kulturen ihrer Vorfahren hinausgewachsen sind. Sie sagen „Gewalt ist keine Antwort“ und behaupten „Gewalt löse keine Probleme“.
Sie liegen falsch! Jeder Einzelne von ihnen verlässt sich auf Gewalt, und zwar jeden einzelnen Tag.
Am Wahltag versammeln sich Menschen aus allen Schichten der Gesellschaft um ihre Stimme abzugeben und dadurch hoffen sie einen Einfluss darauf zu nehmen, wer in Zukunft die Gewalt ausüben darf.
Diejenigen die der Gewalt ein Ende bereiten wollen, so als ob das tatsächlich möglich oder gar wünschenswert wäre, bemühen sich oft ihre Mitbürger zu entwaffnen. Dies führt jedoch nicht zu einem Ende der Gewalt, sondern gibt lediglich den Dienern des Staates ein Monopol darauf. Es macht dich „sicherer“ solange du nicht den Boss anpisst.
Alle Regierungen, Linke, Rechte oder andere, arbeiten von Natur aus mit Zwang. Das müssen Sie auch. Ordnung erfordert Gewalt Eine Regel, die nicht am Ende auch mit Gewalt durchgesetzt werden kann ist nur ein Vorschlag.
Staaten verlassen sich auf Gesetze welche von Männern durchgesetzt werden, die bereit sind Gewalt gegen Gesetzesbrecher anzuwenden.
Jede Steuer, jeder Strafzettel und jede benötigte Genehmigung, verlangt nach ansteigenden Sanktionierungsmaßnahmen welche zu guter Letzt mit der gewaltsamen Beschlagnahmung von Eigentum oder der Gefangennahme durch gewaltbereite, bewaffnete Männer, welche bereit sind diese Vorschriften, im Falle von Zuwiderhandlung oder Widerstand, mit Gewalt durchzusetzen, enden muss.
Jedes Mal wenn eine Hausfrau aufsteht und härtere Strafen für betrunkene Autofahrer, für den Verkauf von Zigaretten an Minderjährige oder für Fehler bei der Mülltrennung fordert stellt sie beim Staat einen Antrag darauf ihren Willen mit Gewalt durchzusetzen. Das ist keine höfliche Bitte mehr.
Die Brauchbarkeit jeden Familiengesetzes, Waffengesetzes, Verkehrsgesetzes, Gewerbevorschrift, Einwanderungsgesetzes, Ein- oder Ausfuhrgesetzes und jeder finanziellen Vereinbarung hängt sowohl vom Willen als auch der Fähigkeit der Gruppe ab die Einhaltung der Vorschriften mit Gewalt zu erzwingen. Wenn ein Umweltschützer verlangt dass wir „die Wale retten“, dann trifft er effektiv damit die Aussage dass das Retten der Wale so wichtig ist, dass es dazu berechtigt Menschen Gewalt anzutun die Walen Gewalt antun. Der friedliche Umweltschützer beantragt bei der Regierung den Einsatz von Gewalt zum Schutz der Wale zu genehmigen. Wenn die Staatschefs zustimmen würden und sich dahingehend äußerten dass es in der Tat wichtig sei die Wale zu retten es dann aber ablehnen das Verletzen von Walen unter Strafe zu stellen oder sich weigern diese Strafen unter der Androhung eines gewalttätigen Polizei oder Militäreinsatzes zu vollstrecken wären ihre Äußerungen nur eine bedeutungslose Geste. Jene die den Walen schaden wollten könnten dies weiterhin ohne Furcht vor Bestrafung tun.
Ohne Taten sind Worte nur Worte. Ohne Gewalt sind Gesetze nur Worte.
Gewalt ist nicht die einzige Antwort, aber es ist die endgültige Antwort.
Man kann moralische Argumente bringen und ethische Argumente und an den Verstand, an Gefühle, an die Ästhetik und an das Mitgefühl appellieren. Menschen lassen sich durchaus durch solche Argumente beeinflussen und wenn man es schafft sie zu genüge zu überzeugen – natürlich nur wenn sie sich dadurch nicht zu sehr in ihren eigenen Interessen eingeschränkt fühlen – werden sie sich oft entscheiden ihr Verhalten anzupassen oder zu ändern.
Allerdings führt die bewusste Unterwerfung der Massen zu einer unvermeidbaren Verwundbarkeit die nur darauf wartet von einer Person die sich nicht um soziale und ethische Normen schert ausgenutzt zu werden. Wenn jedermann seine Waffen niederlegt und sich weigert sie aufzuheben dann kann der erste Mann der sie aufhebt tun was er will. Frieden kann nur so lange ohne Gewalt aufrechterhalten werden, wie jeder sich an die Vereinbarung hält und um den Frieden zu erhalten muss jede einzelne Person, in jeder nachfolgenden Generation – selbst nachdem Krieg lange in Vergessenheit geraten ist – sich weiterhin friedlich verhalten. Bis in alle Ewigkeit. Kein Krimineller oder Halbstarker darf je die Frage stellen: „Was sonst?“ Denn in einer tatsächlich gewaltfreien Gesellschaft ist die bestmögliche Antwort darauf „sonst denken wir das du keine besonders nette Person bist und wir werden nichts mit dir teilen“. Unser Unruhestifter kann darauf einfach entgegnen „Mir egal, ich nehme mir was ich will.“
Gewalt ist die endgültige Antwort auf die Frage „Was sonst?“
Gewalt ist der Goldstandard, der Garant für das Einhalten der Ordnung. Faktisch ist sie besser als der Goldstandard denn Gewalt hat einen universellen Wert. Gewalt überstrahlt die Eigenheiten von Philosophie, Religion, Technologie und Kultur. Man sagt das Musik eine universelle Sprache sei aber einen Schlag ins Gesicht versteht jeder gleich gut, egal welche Sprache er spricht oder welche Musik er bevorzugt. Wenn du mit mir in einem Zimmer festsitzt und ich mir ein Rohr schnappe und damit eine Geste mache als ob ich dich schlagen werde dann ist es egal woher du bist, dein Reptilien Gehirn wird sofort verstehen „was sonst“. Und dadurch wurde ein gewisses Maß an Ordnung erzielt.
Ein praktisches Verständnis für Gewalt ist für menschliches Leben und menschliche Ordnung so unabdingbar wie das Wissen darum, das Feuer heiß ist. Du kannst es benutzen, aber du musst es respektieren. Du kannst dagegen arbeiten und manchmal kannst du es kontrollieren aber du kannst es nicht einfach wegwünschen. Manchmal ist Gewalt unbändig wie ein Lauffeuer, und du bemerkst sie nicht bis es zu spät ist. Manchmal ist es größer als du. Frag die Cherokee, die Inka, die Romanovs, die Juden, die Konföderierten, die Barbaren und die Römer. Sie alle wissen „Was sonst“.
Das Anerkennen der Tatsache, dass Ordnung Gewalt erfordert ist keine Offenbarung, auch wenn es manchen so erscheint. Alleine die Vorstellung davon, führt bei Manchem fast zu einem Schlaganfall und einige werden versuchen mit allen Arten verworrener und hypothetischer Argumente zu widersprechen… weil sich die Aussage „nicht sehr nett“ anhört. Aber Dinge müssen sich nicht „nett anhören“ um wahr zu sein. Die Realität verbiegt sich nun mal nicht nur um sich sentimentalen Wunschvorstellungen anzupassen.
Unsere komplexe Gesellschaft verlässt sich in einem Ausmaß auf die Gewaltausübung durch Stellvertreter, dass viele Privatleute durchs Leben gehen können ohne jemals das Prinzip der Gewalt zu verstehen oder sich tiefergehend damit befassen zu müssen, weil die Auswirkungen so weit von ihnen entfernt wurden. Wir können uns leisten dies als weit entferntes abstraktes Problem zu sehen, welches sich durch edle Strategien und soziale Programmierung lösen lässt. Wenn die Gewalt an unsere Tür klopft erfordert es nur einen kurzen Anruf unsererseits und die Polizei erscheint und stoppt die Gewalt. Die wenigsten Zivilisten nehmen sich die Zeit um sich klarzumachen, dass wir eigentlich nur eine bewaffnete Bande dafür bezahlen um an unserer Statt systematisch Gewalt auszuüben. Wenn jene die uns Gewalt antun wollten sich ohne Gegenwehr abführen lassen stellen die meisten nicht einmal den Zusammenhang dazu her, dass der Grund dafür das der Täter sich widerstandslos verhaften lässt, die Schusswaffe am Gürtel des Polizisten ist oder das implizite Verständnis, dass er sonst letztendlich von mehr Polizisten welche die Berechtigung haben ihn zu töten falls er zu einer Bedrohung wird, gejagt und zur Strecke gebracht würde. Als Gefährder der Ordnung.
In den USA gibt es ungefähr zweieinhalb Millionen Gefängnisinsassen. Über 90 % davon sind Männer. Die meisten von ihnen haben sich nicht freiwillig gestellt. Die meisten von ihnen versuchen nicht des Nachts auszubrechen aufgrund der Tatsache, dass jemand in einem Wachturm sitzt der bereit ist sie zu erschießen. Viele sind keine gewalttätigen Kriminellen. Hausfrauen, Buchhalter, Fernsehstars und Bio Veganer bezahlen Steuern und ihre Stellvertreter geben Milliarden und aber Milliarden aus um eine bewaffnete Regierung zu finanzieren welche die Ordnung durch Gewalt aufrechterhält.
Erst, wenn unsere geregelte Gewalt durch ungeregelte Gewalt, wie zum Beispiel nach einer Naturkatastrophe, abgelöst wird, werden wir gezwungen sein zu begreifen wie sehr wir auf jene angewiesen sind, die die Ordnung durch Gewalt aufrechterhalten. Menschen plündern weil sich eine Gelegenheit dazu ergibt und Menschen morden weil sie denken, dass sie damit durchkommen.
Einen Weg finden um mit Gewalt umzugehen und gewaltbereite Männer zu finden die dich vor anderen gewalttätigen Männern beschützen wird plötzlich zu einem sehr realen und dringenden Bedürfnis.
Ein Bekannter hat mir einmal eine Geschichte über ein Vorfall erzählt von der ihm ein Freund der Familie der Polizist war berichtet hat und ich denke diese Geschichte verdeutlicht den Knackpunkt des Ganzen. Ein paar Teenager sind im Einkaufszentrum vor einer Buchhandlung abgehangen und haben sich mit ein paar Polizisten unterhalten die dort auch gerade Pause gemacht haben. Einer der Polizisten war ein ziemlich breiter Typ, nicht gerade jemand mit dem du dich anlegen möchtest. Einer der Jungs sagte zu ihm das er nicht versteht wozu eine Gesellschaft Polizisten braucht. Der Polizist lehnte sich zu dem eher schmächtigen Jungen hinüber und sagte: hast du irgendwelche Zweifel daran das ich dir die Arme brechen und dir dein Buch wegnehmen könnte, wenn mir danach wäre? Durch die Direktheit der Frage sichtbar erschüttert stammelte er: „Nein“. „Deswegen brauchst du Polizisten mein Junge.“
George Orwell schrieb in seinen “Notes on Nationalism“ das für den Pazifisten die Wahrheit der Aussage: „Jene die der Gewalt abschwören können dies nur weil andere in ihrem Namen Gewalttaten begehen.“ zwar offensichtlich, aber unmöglich zu akzeptieren ist. Viel Unvernunft entspringt der Unfähigkeit zu akzeptieren, dass wir uns passiv auf Gewalt zum Zweck unseres Schutzes verlassen.
Realitätsferne Vorstellungen im Stile von John Lennons „Imagine“ verderben unsere Fähigkeit die Welt als das zu sehen was sie ist und zu akzeptieren, dass Gewalt eine natürliche Verhaltensweise für das menschliche Tier ist. Es gibt keine Beweise die die Hypothese unterstützen der Mensch sei von Natur aus friedlich. Es gibt jedoch eine beträchtliche Anzahl an Beweisen welche die Ansicht unterstützen das Gewalt schon immer ein Teil des menschlichen Lebens war. Jeden Tag findet irgendwo ein Archäologe einen weiteren alten Schädel der Schäden durch Waffenwirkung oder stumpfes Trauma aufweist und auch die ersten Gesetzestexte waren schockierend und grausam. Wenn wir uns heutzutage weniger bedroht fühlen, wenn wir uns fühlen als ob wir in einer gewaltfreien Gesellschaft leben dann tun wir das nur weil wir so viel Macht über unser tägliches Leben an den Staat abgegeben haben. Manche nennen das vernünftig aber wir können es genauso gut Faulheit nennen. Eine gefährliche Faulheit könnte man meinen, wenn man sich anhört wie wenig Vertrauen die meisten Menschen doch in unsere Politiker haben.
Gewalt kommt nicht von Filmen oder Videospielen oder Musik. Gewalt kommt von Menschen. Es wird langsam Zeit, dass die Menschen den Dunstschleier der sechziger Jahre durchbrechen und anfangen das Thema Gewalt wieder ehrlich zu betrachten. Menschen sind gewalttätig und das ist OK. Man kann Gewalt nicht durch Gesetze beseitigen oder darum herumreden. Auf der Grundlage der vorhandenen Beweise gibt es keinen Grund zu glauben, dass ein „Weltfrieden“ je erreicht werden kann oder das Gewalt jemals „beendet“ werden wird.
Es ist höchste Zeit, dass wir damit aufhören zu zweifeln und wieder lernen die Streitaxt zu lieben. Denn die Geschichte lehrt uns, dass wenn wir es nicht tun, es jemand anderes tun wird.
