The Nature and Future of Violence

A friend posed a thought-provoking question, on Facebook, as to the nature and sources of violence, particularly the kinds of horrors we are seeing in the world these days, and what it will take to end violence. I shared my own "take" on it, and I want to offer it here as well. 

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I think there are two intrinsic factors: one is desperate resort, the certainty—whether accurate or misled—that there is no other option; the other is perversity, the enjoyment of inflicting pain and destroying life because of the sense of power it brings.

Note that even justified violence (self-defense; defense of others) corresponds to my "intrinsic factors", at least to one of them, i.e., the first.

Also, someone might note the glaring absence of terms like anger, hatred, inhumanity, not to mention sin! But I am trying to get behind those factors to what spawns them.

We don't feel anger to feel anger; we feel anger because our desires or aims are frustrated, and when we sense there is no other option for attaining our ends we resort to violence—and that whole "process", from frustrated aim to violence, can happen in the blink of an eye. People descend into atrocious "man's inhumanity to man" because, 1) they are pursuing priorities they cherish above the value of human life and violence is the only way they see of getting there, and, 2) if that is the sort of state they're in, they most likely get a perverse thrill in exercising god-like power over others; crushing the lives of others feeds their egos in the illusion that their lives are superior, somehow authentic on a higher plane.

(My friend asked, "Which do you think is predominant in the present misguided scenario?")

Anger and hatred, obviously, are operating in both brands of massacre we're witnessing lately: the ideologically-driven kind and the "random" sociopathic kind like Sandy Hook or the movie theater.

It seems to me that frustration/desperate resort and raw perversity are operative in both—in the ISIS brand of violence, the searing frustration at not seeing their cherished religion universally submitted to, along with, most likely, deep resentment at being long viewed as "third-world", primitive, less civilized than the "Christian (imperialist) West."

But, sin being sin and lust for power being lust for power, I am thoroughly convinced that no small quotient of plain perversity/sadism and visceral thrill is involved in all the "creative" ways ISIS is devising to torture people to death. Let's face it: most of ISIS is a pack of testosterone-driven young men who are, doubtlessly, getting a sexual thrill out of all the killing, under the convenient rubric of Allah's glory. Such is the stupefying obtuseness of the sin-possessed soul.

As for the Sandy Hook/movie theater kinds of massacres—these "lonely misfit" killers who erupt all at once, cataclysmically, I think that the frustration factor is at work there, too. Frustrated to the eruption point by a vacuum of identity, meaning, of any sense of realized authenticity, and aided by a pop culture that has long inculcated the notion that "in-your-face is GOOD", these pathetic creatures opt for the ultimate in-your-face resort that will prove to the world they make a difference, that their existence leaves a mark.

Wanton, indiscriminate violence is the cheapest route to making a vivid "statement", and it's all that's left to someone otherwise utterly incapable of making a genuinely creative, beneficial, life-nurturing contribution to the world. Yet the DRIVE in us human beings to "mean" something is SO deep and basic that, absent any possibility of "meaning" something salutary, people will resort to "meaning" something horrific, because something seems better than nothing. And this, too, is the unspeakable force of sin, the primitive pride that insists on self-significance OVER belonging to God in love.

I don't think violence can ever be stopped, short of Christ's Glorious Appearing, our blessed hope. In the meantime, each of us can aim at being a (provisional) peacemaker, in whatever quadrant of His field of operations the Creator has placed us.