VI. Violence

WE ARE OFTEN ASKED as "Americans" why we restrict sexuality so much (we do not so much anymore) but allow 'violence'. In this particular framing, sex and violence are viewed as a pair parallel objects, or as items in a list on a ratings system. Why favor gruesome violence over sex, which everybody loves? Are these people sadistic?

AS DISCUSSED BEFORE 'sex' is obviously a charged subject. There is good reason why Muslims of the radical variety are truly afraid of it; they understand, even if not intellectually, its power to manipulate men. But sex is simply a species of violence; but what then is violence?

THE VIOLENT TAKE THE KINGDOM BY FORCE, the famous saying goes that causes "Pacifists" to immediately begin working their metaphor-engines overtime. Sex is a difficult word for us, because what originates as a description of our dimorphism turns into anything somehow relating to the ramifications of that dimorphism regarding its role in reproduction. Violence seems an even harder word; as to us it suggests Moses striking instead of tapping the rock; violence is to us by definition an excess of motion and vigor, regardless of what our dictionaries say.

BUT NATURE SO CALLED IS VIOLENT, and if we are to take sex advice from Bonobos we may as well take violence advice from Eagles. While not known for being correct or particularly sane, Nietzsche is very honest on this point: if one is to look merely at nature for one's morals as the Romantics did, why not pick and choose what YOU want, not what a watered-down form of post-Christianity chooses by 'self evidence'? You can choose to be dominant and powerful, and most of all, violent. Or are Bonobos right while Eagles are wrong? What about the species that commit what would be for men, rape?

IT IS NOT MY INTEREST to seem as though I am trying hard to 'rescue' violence as a concept, while making sure that I do not excuse violent crimes. The activity exists and others may look to its ramifications. Has our morality gotten out of hand? We must look to the thing itself to see if this is so.

ONE POINT that seems to gall Christians is the idea that somehow the God of the Old Testament was harsh and judgmental (the 'father') while that of the New Testament was nice and merciful. This distinction is heresy. The God of the Old Testament is the Son, who is revealed in the flesh in the New. We appeal to authority on this issue, since the text by itself could be interpreted multiple ways. Here is an exercise: read a prophet, say Joel, and write down your thoughts. Come back in two years and do the same thing. The self-evident meaning will be different.

THE COMBINATION of violence and mercy is not a mistake; where we read 'spare the rod, spoil the child', do we think that violence is not part of discipline (the rod)? The rod bruises and breaks, but does not kill. The rod still is violence. All weapons that exist are violent tools turned to war. A society that automatically considers any violence 'excess' is a society full of dissipation, as ours is. Barbarism was recognized first not by a people who were 'civilized' in the sense of the Eloi - non-violent, but by people who had learned to channel and sublimate their violence looking on those who could not.

LET US PROPOSE THAT VIOLENCE is natural to men. It is also notable that sexuality generally begins as the male being provoked to pursue the female and couple with her. These base, core activities all involve violence. This of course is the reason why we are opposed by the Left; they recognize the violence in our instinct and wish to remove it. But they have already, in a hyper-pious way, defined not merely wrathful and excessive violence as sin, but any violence at all.

TO GET AROUND THE PROBLEM of humans being naturally violent, they create a concept called 'consensual actions' in which it is thought you can remove the passive person by making them actively choose whatever it is, you have somehow made the violence -- not violence. In reality, human wills are not nearly as free as consensualists idealize, and consent can be coerced, especially in normally passive parties.

THIS RELATES TO THEORIES of oppression, which seem to be related to feminism, wherein the sublimated violence of the male towards the female becomes the definition of sin, the sin which keeps the woman from the promised land of freedom. This freedom then would be the ability to have nothing inflicted upon one that one did not choose. This is not the male definition of freedom.

BUT BEING VIOLENTLY PURSUED is inherent to the woman, and her concern with her personal attractiveness is related to her basic understanding of value, which arises from biology itself. It is that what is most value is what is most worth taking by force and risking violence to possess. Eve's sin is tied up in this, of course.

HYPERGAMY is the slightly perverted alteration of this, wherein instead of passively accepting the value God or 'nature' has assigned her, the woman actively seeks to inflate her value not merely by making herself more beautiful, but by trying to get the men with the most power to violently pursue to pursue her. A king could take a whole nation but he took this woman? That is validation of value.

VIOLENCE IS ALSO necessary to right wrongs; and we accept that these wrongs are necessarily caused by the errors of men. But since the natural world is itself both innocent and violent, as are our own children, violence is necessary to confront it until it can be mastered. Christ's walking on water must be understood in part this way; that he could command the water to act as land and it did. Man would have no need for the violence of paddling and sailing if he too was master of the waters in this fashion.

GOD OF COURSE applies violence to man to restrain and instruct him; "I bring not peace, but the sword," the Master says. If we quote from Christ in the right context, we will find that he was no pacifist, but rather avoided both sex and violence because he, being master, had little need for either. Those who think he might have had children are earthly-minded. God needs no human children to prolong himself; he is the source of Prolongation. He came to have violence, which he himself instituted, inflicted upon himself, to complete that work he started in Adam. Christ was no unfortunate victim of state violence. The cross was itself a weapon.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION is almost the definition of creation itself; to witness the creation of any object on the level at which the work actually happens is to see a lot of violence. Human births are violent. The question always is not whether something is violent or not, but whether the ends that violence is put to are realizable or worthy, in addition to the side-effects of the violence. Intent is important, but meaning well without understanding the ramifications of action does not abrogate consequence even if it makes forgiveness easier.

WE HAVE A FEAR that if we see violence, like human sexuality, for what it is, we will realize that some people we think are evil, were correct. We are plagued by moral weakness, for our morality is based on a form of inaction called niceness. To be perfect is to be inert like helium; It would also require us to make judgments, which is to risk judgment itself, if wrongly made. The tragedy of error is to be avoided by being classed outside of possible actions.

RESTRAINT ITSELF IS VIOLENCE, though a sublimated form of it. The necessary restraint to make people behave nice, that is coming to the USA, will undo it, since that restraint itself cannot be nice, being violent. The way around this is to 'dehumanize' the subjects of the violence, as is sometimes done in war, and is what terms like 'racist', 'homophobe', 'sexist' et al, represent. If reactionaries had an iota of the cultural clout that we are believed to have, sexism would have already been used the way racism originally was, "volkisch" - meaning folkish, according to one's own kind. In short, a man might be overheard being complimented on his sexism, being very careful to avoid feminine activities while being restrained and refined in his masculine activities. This dehumanization is justified as quid-quo-pro - homosexuals feel dehumanized by the disgust most people feel towards homosexual acts, and so on. Some of dehumanization is just the natural ramifications of persons who fall outside of someone's Dunbar's number, now needing to be abstracted to be remembered.

WE CAN SEE THAT all must develop a kind of holy violence, as all must have a holy dread. The wrong that exists in the world from human error, and the struggle against nature in our limitation require it. This does not mean all men are to be violent; for instance, women are less suited to violence in general. Priests should not be violent. We would be in error if we thought, "if priests aren't violent, then violence must be unholy." Because a clergyman does not disrobe in public, does that make being naked unholy? In the process of trying to understand the world scientifically, we have applied inorganic thinking (thinking that works with inorganic parts of the cosmos) to organic things, whereas the ancients tended to apply the organic thinking to the inorganic things. The singularization or simplification process which scientific hypothesization often involves can do unnecessary violence to tradition, like drugs often do unnecessary violence to other parts of the human body when used as treatment.

OBVIOUSLY, KNOWING THE END of man helps to understand the purpose of violence, and understanding his nature helps us place limits on its side-effects to both men and their world, but to also know how to properly use the threat of it as a defense. Violence is glorious, obviously, but also dangerous; a world devoid of violence for us, as we are, would be a world capable of only one kind of violence: self-annihilation.