Photo
by Gabriel
Perelman on Unsplash
(an almost-island with trees is in the centre of a peaceful lake, with a narrow point of land and more trees reaching out to it, all surrounded by steep, jagged, bare, snow capped mountains under a foreboding sky)
As a first point: anyone who hasn't been on the receiving end of hate has NO right to be dismissive of or push the amathia that dealing with hate is easy or simple - it is complex for a number of reasons, including that it involves important lessons.
I recently posted “Post No. 3,032 - What does it feel like to give up being regressive/a bigot?” https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2025/02/post-no-3032-what-does-it-feel-like-to.html , and, along a similar vein, I thought I would try a post along similar lines, but around growing beyond being violent.
This is a far wider topic, so I will not be able to be as clearcut, but ... here goes.
A first issue is the need to get over the desire to control other people (not the universe, or life, or any of the overly broad thematic arguments usually trotted out here). This is about people fearing things could go wrong for them or people they love, and so they try to FORCE events to go the way they want - for the sake of themselves and/or those they think they love.
It is a violent extreme of helicopter parenting, and it denies the people they claim to be loving the change to mature and be adults.
This has to be balanced against the need to stop people doing harm, but in the physical sense, that is the role of police. When individuals try to do that, they miss the bigger picture, and are very likely to DIRECTLY and IMMEDIATELY harm innocent bystanders.
But, in the longer term or broader picture, violence ALWAYS rebounds.
As Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. wrote:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral. Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence, add deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
There are statistics showing the benefit of nonviolence in achieving political change (see here), and I’m confident there are likely statistics showing the personal and societal benefits of more peaceful societies. In addition to those, a society that has a more peaceful psychological soup will be able to direct energy towards problem solving, rather than safety, defensiveness, and suspicion, and thus will be more productive in the real sense.
As US President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
And that leads in to another social aspect: the absolute and utter evil known as social status.
Rich people fearing a loss of social status are now known to be responsible for starting civil wars, but there is a great deal of psychological violence also done by those who fear changes will lessen their sense of superiority (i.e., their sense of social status), as shown by whites against black people, men against women starting to work, and ciswomen addicted to patriarchal stereotypes of femininity against transwomen.
To deal with that evil, it is vitally necessary to - in the Australian vernacular - “get over oneself”, or stop being arrogant and superior. Instead, take the healthier and more constructive - for self, those about one, and all parts of society - of being one’s true authentic self (which possibly started with a cultural appropriation from Buddhism, but, unlike the cultural misappropriation of mindfulness by the business world, is an inherently healthier matter).The next problem is that of social conditioning - especially the passing on of patriarchal tropes of toxic masculinity, toxic femininity, toxic individualism, toxic loyalty, etc.
(I consider the terrible shooting yesterday in my home state comes out of this sort of patriarchal influence, and is a combination of toxic masculinity and toxic individuality.)
What can help with starting to get over that is to start taking a broader perspective or less self-centred focus - as happens, for instance, when people become parents, but a good dose of objective looking, clear thinking, and realisation - especially if that allows one to see the chain of harm - can also acheive the same breakthrough in state of being.
Incidentally, this is where some pro-peace/anti-violence activists can make a spiritual bypasser type mistake.
If they became such activists as a result of their personal perception of/response to an incident(s) of violence, they may think it was the fact that were observing the violence from outside, and thus were able to see the chain of harm being propagated (through groups of individuals, or families, or communities), that was significant.
However, it should also be noted that others also were such observers and didn’t react the same way to violence.
The difference is that those others didn’t have the preparation that enabled one to be in a state where one would actually notice what was happening and have the proper realisations.
Be prepared to notice and acknowledge the less obvious parts of this journey.
The next issue to be aware of being the sort of pacifist who has gone to the opposite extreme against violence - and thereby shows that they are still under the grip of violence, and they are acting in reaction to violence, rather than the totally independent track of acting for peace and healthiness and constructiveness.
The main problem that can come out of this is the failure to take action to defend (appropriately) against wrongdoing or evil - as the world attempted to do against the evils of fascism in World War (part) Two, as Ukraine is doing against Russia now, and as police in my home state are doing by trying to find and arrest or stop the gunman who committed two heinous murders yesterday, as I referred to above. A pacifist who is controlled by the evil they are reacting against, rather than love of peace they are acting for, may mistakenly try to campaign against any violence, even that which is in defence against evil. A healthier response was shown by a peace group in NSW a few years ago who gratefully accepted the aid of police who protected them against a violent intruder, but continued their campaign, knowing it was a long term and large project.
Another point I will add here is that: some people like dramas as they have the skills and capacity to cope with that sort of verbal/emotional violence; others like physical violence as don’t have word skills, but have strength; others like bureaucracy/cults as they have skills at manipulation/psychological intimidation. If any of those people try to force their preferred arena of violence on others, they are being violent - and exercising exactly the same dislike of difference/expectation of sameness and similar unhealthinesses that underlies almost all such forms of hate - and bigotry is hate, not fear, which takes us back to my original paragraph about people who do NOT have the right to be dismissive or condescending/trivialising about violence.
The journey to move on past violence is both personal and societal; we have a collective responsibility for the world we create, which includes the standard that we walk past is what we accept, the absolute necessity of giving up cynicism/defeatism/etc, and the obligation to study and the ways of peace as carefully, thoroughly, and intelligently as any rebel, soldier, or psychopathic sadist in power.
Peace is an ever evolving path of hard work - but it is worth it, and is far more rewarding and beneficial.
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).
#PsychicABetterWorld and may all that I do be of value and actively BPM used for and by the nonphysical BPM because #KindnessIsThePoint
Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here, and Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear
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