Why doesn’t violence work any better than it does? How come it so rarely succeeds at getting what it’s after? How come I can’t make the friggin’ world give me what I want?!
Say I want to change something, to fix some problem, At first I’ll try one of the soft strategies: I can get up and ‘move the furniture’ myself to get what I want. Or I can persuade someone else to do it for me. I can ask nicely or try being nice to others in the hope they’ll be nice to me.
But if that doesn’t work, I can move onto the hard strategy that is bound to work when other strategies fail. I can get violent. I can force things to change. I can make people do what I want. I can threaten them and harm them if necessary. I can even kill anyone who stands in my way. THAT should do it!
But it rarely does. How come? It seems like it would, right? Compared to the soft strategies, violence is so much more active and energetic and determined that it should accomplish things faster and more completely than nonviolence. And everyone who resorts to it is convinced it will work.
But it doesn’t. Time and time again it fails. And when it fails, what do we do? We ratchet up the violence, convinced we weren’t violent enough before. That should teach them! Only it doesn’t. So often it just makes things worse.
No other strategy could survive such a long history of such catastrophic failures. But violence survives because it is so seductive. The physical world tempts us to be physically violent, and we fall for it every time.
But physical violence doesn’t work because ultimately the world is not physical, no matter how convincing the illusion.
#scienceandreligion See Jacob's Mirror: A Reconciliation of Science and Religion at YouTube or Amazon.
