Nonviolence Isn’t Necessarily the Answer
By: Millard J Melnyk
Tags: Nonviolence, Social Change, Resistance, Violence, Revolution

Scilla Elworthy asks an important question at TEDxExeter, April 2012

In her TED talk “Fighting With Non-violence,” Scilla Elworthy asks, “How do we deal with a bully without becoming a thug?” This refers to a central quandary in the problem of violence. It highlights, I feel, an important problem with the problem: we are not sure about ourselves.

To rephrase Elworthy, “How do we deal with a bully without looking like a thug?” I think this is the more frank and widely applicable version of Elworthy’s question. If we know for a fact that we are not thugs, then we should have no question whether the use of bully-like behavior will make thugs of us, and the question whether we’ll be regarded as thugs by others should be secondary, if relevant at all. If violence is effective and doesn’t escalate conflict, why not use it? If knocking the bully down stops the bully from trying it again, what’s the problem with knocking him down?

Of course, prevailing nonviolent dogma claims that violence always serves to escalate conflict. That’s a belief, not a tested hypothesis. There is plenty of evidence showing that violent resistance can escalate conflict, but precious little to show that it always does. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that, past a tipping point, violence does not escalate conflict, but instead ends conflict and eliminates subsequent violence. This is, in fact, the same principle that abusers, dominators, and tyrants rely on to acquire and sustain control over their victims. What’s more, it’s the same principle that state-controlled “justice” systems rely on to combat “criminal” elements of society. So, in those contexts at least, violence works.

Defeating resistance by means of violence often works spectacularly.

We just don’t like what violence would imply to others when it comes to our involvement.

The tipping point between escalating cycles of violence and complete collapse of resistance is the point of intimidation at which victims of violence finally succumb. This point varies from person to person, peoples to peoples. Until that point is reached, victims of violence resist. After that point is reached and beyond it, victims of violence feel overcome and become convinced that resistance is futile. It’s ludicrous to witness this over thousands of years of human history and billions of people in the persons of the oppressed and criminalized, but deny that it is also valid and applicable when it comes to oppressors.

We know that oppressors can, through violence, be brought down. We know that formerly brazen, monstrous men can be brought low, totally deflated, made to collapse, losing all intention, motivation, and will to resist, even moving them to self-destruct. So violence does not always escalate conflict, at least in the short term. Hardly. If that were true, we in the USA would be insane to rely for our “security” on the largest military force in the world, expressly founded on the premise that overwhelming violence does indeed end opposing violence. Many of us do in fact think that this reliance is patently insane, but even we don’t deny that overwhelming violence would drastically reduce conflict, not escalate it, at least in the short term.

In the long run, the oppressed or the vanquished oppressor might regain will and again start towards retaliatory violence, or others sympathetic to them might take up their cause, reigniting the vicious cycle. But notice that the same belief that causes victims to capitulate and complicitly enable their own plights also makes oppressors cave in and accept their fates — the belief that resistance is futile — and the belief in the futility of resistance must be rescinded or suspended before resistance can be resumed. If oppressed or vanquished oppressors and their supporters can be kept believing that resistance is futile, resistance will not resume, and the vicious cycle of violence will remain broken.

On the other hand, nonviolent resistance likewise succeeds only if it manages to achieve a tipping point at which the opposition realizes that their cause is futile, that opposing the resisters will fail. So, the crux of successful resistance is not its method — violent or nonviolent — but inducing the belief in those being resisted that they will succumb, that counter-resistance is futile. How that tipping point is achieved is important, but instilling the belief — not the method for instilling it — is the critical factor in successful resistance.

An interesting asymmetry serves to recommend violence against oppressors. While oppressed people instinctively feel violated by oppression, oppressors have already bought into paradigms that legitimize both violence and oppression before they engage in them. At some level, violence — the lingua franca of oppression — seems legitimate to them. This, oddly enough, applies whether they perpetrate it or suffer it. Oppressors don’t get outraged by violence itself. Their objection isn’t that it was used, but that it was used against them. Violence itself still makes perfect sense to them. In contrast, these days, most of those who oppose oppression object to violence in principle. So, ironically, their objection to violence against oppressors tends to be stronger and harsher than that of oppressors in their own defense.

So, if violent resistance is sometimes effective, and especially if those overcome by it can be kept believing that subsequent resistance is futile, what’s wrong with using it?

Discussing that question is rich and interesting, but I don’t intend to pursue it here. I raise the question for another reason: to point out that, in a very real and relevant way, many people do not want that question seriously considered. They object to the question itself, being predisposed to invalidate it. I’m interested in why that is so and where the prejudicial bias comes from. I suspect that it has partly to do with the question I opened with, the problem with how we approach the problem of violence: we are not sure about ourselves.

If violence is sometimes effective, then we must contemplate its use or prejudicially dismiss it and forego its benefit irresponsibly. But people who were raised to care and be considerate of others find contemplating actual violence to be uncomfortable, even repugnant. However, it’s not so far removed that we can’t find it in ourselves. If we think of an innocent, especially someone we know and care for, and particularly if that person is someone we feel protective about, like a child, it’s easy to find ourselves comfortable with violence. Imagine a child or relatively frail person, like a beloved elder, being attacked by a thug. Would you — assuming that you’d succeed — resort to violence to protect the innocent? If your answer is no, then you might want to explain how preserving a commitment to an abstract concept like nonviolence outweighs the very concrete safety and welfare of a living human being.

Few of us would let “what others might think” deter us from using violence to rescue someone we care about. I suspect that our more profound discomfort with violent action stems from another variant of Elworthy’s question: if we behave like bullies, how can we be sure that we are not thugs? Of course, as long as we think solely in behavioral terms — i.e., that our behavior defines us, that “doing it” amounts to “being it” — there actually is no question. From the perspective of our society, there in fact is little question. In the eyes of the law or public opinion, for example, behaving like a bully makes you a bully, and you can be tried, convicted, and punished like one, even if you aren’t.

The behavioral approach to defining ourselves isn’t just problematic, it’s backwards. Behavior is expression, motivated by psychological processes that always precede the behavior, conditioned by a slew of preexisting attitudinal factors that I refer to as intention. Behavior is determined by intention and motivation, not the other way around. Behavioral conditioning can affect intention and motivation, as behavioral therapies show, but this only confirms my point. The objective of behavioral conditioning is to alter, if possible, the preconditions and factors that determine subsequent behavior for which altered intentions and motivations are indeed responsible. It might be a cycle, but it’s a progressive cycle, a spiral, if you will. The causal direction still holds.

So, in effect, doing violence doesn’t make us violent. Neither does nonviolent behavior necessarily make us nonviolent. We might be extremely violent, but simultaneously capable of amazing self-control, so that we don’t let ourselves express our violent impulses raging within. In fact, we tend to see successful management of that kind of internal conflict as a virtue — the greater the violence we suppress, the greater the virtue. But this merely condones the psychological processes that instigate violence, allowing them to continue, simply because we’re able to prevent their expression. This is to make saints of those who psychologically are thugs, simply because they can control their thugishness.

So, ironically, the devotion to nonviolence so in vogue these days might actually be — and, I believe, in part actually is — a symptom of our anxiety that we in fact are prone to violence. Concern that using violent methods makes us thugs, even if we in fact are not thugs, betrays a profound self-doubt. Consequently, we tend to avoid violent methods, even if they would be more effective than nonviolent ones, without regard to outcome or actual benefit but because of egoistic concerns. What’s worse, we’ve become so averse to the question of violence that we refuse to raise it when simple intellectual and ethical authenticity demand that we should.