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Coercive violence is (not) free
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Today I was thinking about something that seems to be a fallacy which is baked into maybe the human condition, and certainly American society and others to various degrees.
Coercive violence is free.
Or at least cheap.
My thesis is that there's a dysfunction in how our cost-assumptions for things in civil society exist. If something costs money, then we view the cost as real - i.e. we imagine actual dollars or euros of whatever being spent to go do...something.
But if the cost is violence, then actually, a huge number of people view the actual monetary costs as not real - i.e. free, or if pushed, they'll say "cheaper then <non-violence>".
I feel like you can observe this casually all the time when people let their conspiracy brains run amok on the internet: there'll be some problem proposed, and someone will skip over any measure which would have a "real" cost - i.e. a direct monetary cost we could put on paper - like incentive payments, tax breaks, etc. to instead propose some draconian, violent measure. And while some of this is just mask off fascism/racism/sexism (i.e. "population is shrinking" -> "how can we force women to have babies"), I feel like that's an inadequate explanation for just how common this weird logical jump actually is.
Which is to say: it's because any measure which has a real monetary cost gets quickly put into the bizarre "but we can't afford that from taxes!" bucket, but ideas of coercive violence never have any implementation cost against them. People will argue they're cheap, but I would say they're not even arguing that at all - what they're saying in the subsequent argument is "No I just plain don't believe that this would really cost anything".
Basically, the effectiveness and reliability of violence is vastly overestimated, so commonly and so pervasively that it's a real problem in proposing and implementing government policy, and the cost in terms of actual and real logistics seems to get reliably minimized such that it's not perceived at all.
Perhaps at a human level, definitely at a Western societal level and very specifically I see this dysfunction in American thinking all over the place, coercive violence isn't costed properly and it seems to me that it's a more subtle issue then "people are just bad people" (sure, some, but I don't think it explains the commonality or the mode of failure properly).
Coercive violence is free.
Or at least cheap.
My thesis is that there's a dysfunction in how our cost-assumptions for things in civil society exist. If something costs money, then we view the cost as real - i.e. we imagine actual dollars or euros of whatever being spent to go do...something.
But if the cost is violence, then actually, a huge number of people view the actual monetary costs as not real - i.e. free, or if pushed, they'll say "cheaper then <non-violence>".
I feel like you can observe this casually all the time when people let their conspiracy brains run amok on the internet: there'll be some problem proposed, and someone will skip over any measure which would have a "real" cost - i.e. a direct monetary cost we could put on paper - like incentive payments, tax breaks, etc. to instead propose some draconian, violent measure. And while some of this is just mask off fascism/racism/sexism (i.e. "population is shrinking" -> "how can we force women to have babies"), I feel like that's an inadequate explanation for just how common this weird logical jump actually is.
Which is to say: it's because any measure which has a real monetary cost gets quickly put into the bizarre "but we can't afford that from taxes!" bucket, but ideas of coercive violence never have any implementation cost against them. People will argue they're cheap, but I would say they're not even arguing that at all - what they're saying in the subsequent argument is "No I just plain don't believe that this would really cost anything".
Basically, the effectiveness and reliability of violence is vastly overestimated, so commonly and so pervasively that it's a real problem in proposing and implementing government policy, and the cost in terms of actual and real logistics seems to get reliably minimized such that it's not perceived at all.
Perhaps at a human level, definitely at a Western societal level and very specifically I see this dysfunction in American thinking all over the place, coercive violence isn't costed properly and it seems to me that it's a more subtle issue then "people are just bad people" (sure, some, but I don't think it explains the commonality or the mode of failure properly).
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It seems like an easy answer but there historically has never been a situation where mass murdering large segments of the political and aristocratic class has really worked well.
Sulla killed every troublemaker in Rome and died thinking thr Republic would be eternal, but the first Triumvirate was barely 20 years later. Napoleon followed the French Revolution, Stalin the Bolsheviks, etc.
“Kill the rich”, would just make other people that are rich.
Of course you Also have to factor in the costs of not using coercive violence.
Let's go lightly on the people who did the beer hall putsch.
That one worked out real well.
Or let's not discipline the Kwantung army. Surely a winning strategy.
It's a tough call once you start the cycle of violence you don't get to decide where it stops.
But if you let other people choose to start the cycle then that gets real ugly too.
Let's say someone loses an argument on these forums or makes a bad prediction. They don't have to shell out $50 every time they get something wrong. Just ignore or distract and the problem at least superficially goes away a lot of the time. The changes to your reputation and the long term effects of misinformation are borderline imperceptible, so how can any human learn consequences?
Extrapolate that to violence. You physically hurt someone, you torture someone, the human body physically heals. Homeostatic forces are immense, so on the surface it looks like the victims will be ok, or society will keep moving on without blinking. The true, permanent damage is under the surface and difficult to see. It's very difficult to grasp the true consequences of violence because our senses deceive us.
And why should it be any different? Accountability isn't cool. It's not respected and on average decreases survivability. Everyday life is so complicated and everyone is such an expert of avoiding fault that the one mutant who decides to accept consequences becomes the trash bin for everyone seeking a scapegoat. There is no bright side to being able to detect and bear the cost of harms, so that trait has been naturally selected out of the population.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Criminals, minorities, immigrants, native Americans, organizers, the poor, brown people in foreign lands. Harm done to them, if not the point, doesn't matter to a big chunk of Americans.
Also, when your opponent is a group that is actively and obviously working towards literally exterminating everyone not like them using the system they are stealing by force bit by bit then there's not exactly room for "discussion" when they're literally gunning people down in the streets with impunity under the color of "law"
To condemn violence "on all sides" is to chide the oppressor and oppressed as though they are equally responsible/to blame for violence occurring.
It flattens the disparate kinds (and amount of) violence committed and creates false equivalencies.
It erases all the context that is necessary for one to consider to determine if the violence is justifiable or not.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I do know that violence tends to cause some people to steer clear of an issue and turn off their engagement, which is probably within their rights and a good call if they don't have experience dealing with the situation or a solid action plan. Because once things turn to violence, the cost of mistakes and the risk of causing further real harm becomes very high.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I think the concept you’re searching for here is “internal colonialism.” Related is the distinction between the core and periphery, but taken together, they form a useful way of applying conceptual models of colonialism except exploitation comes from within rather than outside the nation.
Coercive violence is, of course, a key feature of colonialism, neocolonialism, and internal colonialism. For obvious reasons, such violence generally costs more than it produces, but the gains are internalized by a small group of elites and the costs born by a larger number of the oppressed.
So while classical economics might suggest that internal colonialism should not arise within a capitalist, free market society because the costs outweighs the benefits, the distribution of costs and benefits makes it a constantly appealing option for the elite.
I agree with this, though I will add that there's a difference between hypothetical 'justified violence' and 'violence that improves the situation' and that ideally we'd want the two to overlap, which is neither historically common nor easy to achieve.
Classical economics most definitely does not say this. Not even classically liberal economics would say this.
Weren't you against even basic clear-cut self-defense?
As the saying goes, "History is written by the victors."
Historical revisionism is rampant when it comes to violent resistance. Rare is the textbook you'll encounter in public education that will talk about, say, the Black Panthers as anything more than violent radicals, despite that the violent acts they committed paling in comparison to the systemic violence meted out against Black people by agents of the state in the decades preceding their formation, and the textbooks being silent about the many forms of non-violent action that the Panthers engaged in to improve the conditions of their communities.
Typically, violence is not the method resorted to by oppressed persons because it is viewed as the best way to improve a situation. It is the method resorted to because other options have been exhausted.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
"The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell."
"If we really think about it, there were two Reigns of Terror; in one people were murdered in hot and passionate violence; in the other they died because people were heartless and did not care. One Reign of Terror lasted a few months; the other had lasted for a thousand years; one killed a thousand people, the other killed a hundred million people. However, we only feel horror at the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. But how bad is a quick execution, if you compare it to the slow misery of living and dying with hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery is big enough to contain all the bodies from that short Reign of Terror, but the whole country of France isn't big enough to hold the bodies from the other terror. We are taught to think of that short Terror as a truly dreadful thing that should never have happened: but none of us are taught to recognize the other terror as the real terror and to feel pity for those people."
I would say it's not seen as free given that I've been constantly bombarded about how the military industrial complex is evil. It's considered instead to be a necessary evil. The cost for necessities are given less regard because they are necessary.
Look at the pushback at separating mental health emergencies from police oversight. Despite massive evidence that a non militarized intervention has immensely better results, we can't get any major cities on board. Austin is an example of this.
The people with the guns refuse to give up any power.
Violence is a tool and an important one. Swearing off all violence or willingness (or threat of) using it is just surrender to people who are willing to use it.
Pretending all violence is bad and context doesn't matter or there is no right to self defense or defending against violent actors is silly.
Situations can be complex, as often 'not touching you' situations create an aggressor out of the victim / defender and again, context matters. But not everyone using violence is wrong or the bad guy. But any use of violence should be subject to scrutiny.
Like, being able to fix things without violence is generally a preferred solution, but sometimes it just is not an option, and i am not going to start arguing that the oppressed need to just patiently wait for their rights to be given to them.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Well sure, one of the fundamental ways our society is broken is we are poisoned on the cheap easy solutions that come off as just paying off people who are for whatever reason 'undeserving'.
Money can't fix all problems, but throwing comparably small money can solve a whole lot of them if people can move past the idea giving people 'free' stuff is bad. Whole other thread topic probably.
I guess you could argue at some point of poverty and sufficient amounts of money are essentially coercive violence. E.g. do this or forfeit your food stipend / healthcare / rent and die in the street. I'm pretty amenable to those arguments.
Sorry, what's this other terror exactly?
What is the outcome desired? Is violence a way for that outcome to be achieved? Is non violent protest a way for that outcome to be achieved? Is that outcome possible to be achieved in the current environment? What can be done to change the environment?
That type of questioning can help determine an appropriate outcome. Be wary about fully breaking that down on a public forum though. Because sometimes that answer might be violence. However many effective actions are non violent. I think more area wide strikes should be organized, just shut down the economy of a city.
My read is that it’s the oppressive rule of the French Monarchy that lead up to the Revolution and following Reign of Terror
One was violent, bloody and immediate, the other a slow burn that devoured more people over a far longer period of time.
Its effectively doing the opposite of what OP is talking about; over-valuing the cost of coercive violence. There's a special breed of idiot who believes that Ukraine should/should have just surrendered to Russia, because war bad, and obviously not doing war is always the better option. Completely ignoring the "cost" of the alternative and all of the lives which would be destroyed regardless, not to mention that appeasing a dictator literally always just leads to escalation.
This post makes me think about Russia's whole "hyper-macho" culture as a whole, actually; they seem to have exactly this problem. They believe that they can solve all of their problems with force, by invading weaker nations and pushing political opponents out of windows, and the only reason nobody else does this is that they're just too weak. And now they're in the process of finding out exactly how expensive the coercive violence solution is...
I think it says a lot about our history of violence that you have to go back to the 1960's to find a positive example.
And then somehow the Jury decided that no, an armed occupation of federal land is not a crime
50s in that case, but I chose that example because it's about as stark and undisputable an example as you could get in living memory, not because it's the most recent.
As Fencingsax mentioned there are other more recent examples that aren't as clear cut but still positive.
There is also the argument that it's good these tools (violence) are rarely used because other non or less violent solutions work. Now it's arguable that these other solutions are working great, but you didn't need the 101st to escort gay couples through large violent crowds of protesters to get their marriage licenses back in 2015, so it's probably good that extreme a tool was left on the shelf (but it's existence was a tool Obama could have used if needed).
I think it was less a new Fort Sumter and more a new Waco.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The problem is, as I see it, is that these tools are used all the time. Systemic racism is ensured by coercive violence. Look at the police thread for many examples. Every riot I can think of was a response by the people to this treatment. Counter examples are always the exception, never the rule.
Also, I don't think Obama could send in the 101st as the military is barred from police actions on US soil. Laws were changed to prevent a repeat.
Section 253 which was used to call in the 101st is still on the books.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/insurrection-act-explained
And how did this slow burn devour people, in ways that the post-monarchy regime did not?