[hn_throwaway_99]

The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.

An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people who enable those deaths are usually safely ensconced thousands of miles away, often living in cushy suburbs.

To emphasize as strongly as I possibly can, I am not advocating for more violence. Quite the contrary, I'm advocating for less. I just don't understand why we have all these adages to convince people that "violence is always wrong", while I'm sure some at least some of the people who say that are actively engaged in building machines designed to kill people.

Related, the Substack link you posted is titled "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

[Aurornis]

> The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.

My experience has been the polar opposite: The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others. This ranges from petty things like spreading gossip, to committing theft from people they don't like ("they had it coming!") to actual physical violence.

In every case, zoom out a little bit and it becomes obvious how their little self-created bubble distorted their reality until they believed that doing something wrong was actually the right and justified move.

I think you're reaching too far to try to disprove the statement in a general context. Few people are going to say "violence is always the wrong answer" in response to someone defending themselves against another person trying to murder them, for example. I think these edge cases get too much emphasis in the context of the article, though. They're used as a wedge to open up the possibility that violence can be justified some times, which turns into a wordplay game to stretch the situation to justify violence.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I think you have wildly misunderstood my point, given that your statement of "The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others" is not the polar opposite of what of I was saying - if anything, it aligns with what I was saying very well.

To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is never the answer" seem to almost always be applied in very specific contexts, completely ignoring other contexts where many people (I'd say "society at large") are completely OK with the ends justifying the means and political violence.

To use your own sentence, I've seen many people in positions of power "coming to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others", e.g. why bombing children in their beds is OK.

[Aurornis]

> To rephrase, my point is that phrases like "the ends don't justify the means" and "political violence is never the answer" seem to almost always be applied in very specific contexts

That's not what you said. You were talking about society as a whole, not narrow contexts. I'll re-quote your original comment that I was responding to:

> statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.

I was responding to your "at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any given time" claim.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Yes, society as a whole applies statements like "the ends justify the means" in wildly inconsistent ways, deeming it unacceptable in certain contexts and being completely fine with it in other contexts. I literally said in my original comment "To emphasize as strongly as I possibly can, I am not advocating for more violence. Quite the contrary, I'm advocating for less."

Beyond that, I can't help you with your reading comprehension.

[metabagel]

The point of the comment you are replying to is that it's often logically inconsistent for people to say that violence is never the answer, given the amount of violence committed by our military, law enforcement, immigration enforcement, etc. - much of which is deemed acceptable.

[bigbadfeline]

It's no inconsistent if the people who oppose violence also oppose the legal forms you enumerated.

The comment you're trying to explain is conflating different groups of people and that makes it virtually meaningless.

[pembrook]

> "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

The is just survivorship bias. Violence sits at the root of ALL human societies. The vast majority throughout history have failed or are currently failing.

If you're on HN you're probably sitting in one of the lucky, relatively prosperous ones. Violence didn't create the prosperity, otherwise Sudan and Liberia should be the richest countries in the world.

Your relative prosperity came from your ancestors being smart enough to build frameworks to allow a society to mediate scarcity without the need for violence (common law, markets and trade, property rights, etc all enforced via a government monopoly on violence). In fact, any rich country is the result of systems of decentralized scarcity mediation without decentralized violence.

It's the lack of violence which built the relative prosperity you enjoy today. Not the other way around.

[jjk166]

> The is just survivorship bias. Violence sits at the root of ALL human societies. The vast majority throughout history have failed or are currently failing.

That only strengthens the argument that violence is sometimes the answer. It doesn't matter that it's not always the right answer, the fact is sometimes it has been, and no society has ever managed to survive without choosing it at some point or another.

Indeed, there is the argument to be made that the capability to choose violence is critical even if you never actually need to choose it. This is the basis of deterrence theory which has arguably been the cornerstone of international peace for decades and the theory of the social contract which has been the source of most people's freedoms and political power. A people who will never stand up for themselves and their friends, no matter what injustice is done upon them, invites that injustice. By simply acknowledging there exists a point beyond which you would retaliate, you discourage others from risking going past that point.

[pembrook]

Sure, you can't monopolize violence under the state (and enforce laws) without the state demonstrating its willingness to use said violence (ie. forcibly put people who violate in prison or use actual violence against them if they resist).

But OP was referring to political violence...which...how do I put this delicately...let's just say political polarization has led certain very-online members of the US populist-left, some of who hang out here for example, to try to expand the Overton Window into bolshevism. See also: Luigi fans.

My point is that the most likely outcome of violent political overthrow is not utopia. The most likely outcome is a failed state and another violent overthrow. Political violence doesn't create anything, it only destroys. And creating is the hard part.

It's like saying; "at the birth of all successful people was a person who shit their pants. So why not try shitting your pants as an adult?"

Yes, one always precedes the other. But it has no correlation to whether the person becomes successful or not.

[jjk166]

I am also talking about political violence. Specifically I'm arguing against monopolizing violence under any entity, as it leads to injustice.

[thunderfork]

>OP was referring to political violence

The dichotomy of "political" and "apolitical" violence is a false one, and one of the worst thought-terminating clichees of the 21st century. It's telling that "political violence" always seems to refer to violence that isn't the result of the processes of democratic politics.

Nobody's calling out cops shooting protestors with "less lethal" rounds or ICE officers riddling cars with bullets "political violence", for some reason.

[pembrook]

I don't disagree with the idea that violence is fundamentally morally questionable. But humans haven't evolved to the point where we can function collaboratively without the threat of it from somewhere. We're animals.

The problem with believing all violence is illegitimate (even that which has been democratically granted to the state to enforce laws), is that society breaks down and loses its legitimacy if you remove this enforcement aspect.

The alternative to a monopoly on violence centralized in a democratic government is not zero violence. The alternative is decentralized violence (anarchy). I think everyone on both sides would find this far less desirable.

[sylos]

My guy, the vast majority of political violence is committed by the right. It's not zero from the left, but it is much less.

[pembrook]

I see you've addressed none of my points and instead were triggered by my suggestion your team may have some bad people on it.

Yes, in recent times in the US right wing violence has been more prevalent. But HN is not a right wing place, it's a left filter bubble like reddit and leftist violence is a growing phenomenon in US politics. Arguing against the right wing here would be like clapping along with a giant crowd, providing zero interesting discussion. The bolshevik revival in the world's wealthiest country is far more interesting to discuss.

Also historically, we have to remember that the left's utopian socialist vision (communism) is responsible for the absolute highest body counts, including 30 million starved to death and thousands of incidents of cannibalism in just Mao's great leap forward alone.

[pksebben]

I'm not going to go to bat for Mao(1), but I think you're underplaying the body count that capitalist countries have had - this is kind of easy to do because a lot of the damage that we do is obfuscated behind proxies. Besides the obvious and direct war crimes like Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and now I guess Iran again, there's the second order stuff like Israel's Bad Neighbor Syndrome (which we have enabled financially for basically the duration), Pinochet who we put in charge, heck - pick any country south of the border and we've done some damage there at least once. Then there's the spiderweb of damage that flows out to the global south continuously through NAFTA and similar foreign policy. I suppose the principal difference is that we externalize a lot of our violence (and somehow are shocked when it comes back to bite us that we trained Osama Bin Laden).

Nobody's asking for Maoist China, I think mostly we're clamoring for something closer to Norway. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to settle for UK-style socialized services but even those folks get lambasted for being "too far left" too so whaddyagonnado.

1 - I think he and 'bolshevism' are a bit of a strawman here anyway, as I've not heard a ton of pro-Mao people but a TON of people who identify as leftists - they are not the same thing

[solaarphunk]

This is just a version of individualism vs the state. Much of western society has become increasingly confused about what violence is acceptable, let alone who should be allowed to commit violence, or have a monopoly on violence.

If we can't agree on that baseline, then its quite obvious that we'll continue to have an escalation in the types of violence that we've seen in the past few years, against the political and corporate classes in the US, with very little end in sight.

[antonvs]

> If we can't agree on that baseline

Part of the point about violence is it has little to do with societal agreement, to start with. It's what happens when that agreement breaks down. And in the end, it can change the agreement.

[zahlman]

That seems to me like a somewhat odd way to put it. From where I stand, the large majority of objection to "state monopoly on violence" comes from those who otherwise express a strongly collectivist worldview.

[solaarphunk]

Like I said, very confused.

[bloppe]

There's no room for subtlety in public discourse, but ya absolutist moral philosophies almost never stand up to scrutiny. If only things could be so simple.

I've concluded that there is no universal moral framework. You have to be comfortable with the fact that your perspective is just one of many, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for, it just also means you might be subjected to others' moral frameworks if yours conflicts with theirs. Pretty unsatisfying, but I don't think an alternative conclusion exists that is sound.

[lopsotronic]

Sayings like those are aspirational rather than being realist or simulationist, and they're supposed to be aspirational.

They're stories, just like all morality. It seems when cultures get to a certain point in dissolution you have a growing population that have difficulty drawing lines between stories and reality, what stories are *for* in the first place.

Having aspirational moral systems is critical for a hyperdeveloped mostly-democratic society. It creates a gap between the Best Of Us and the Worst Of Us, and thus suggests a vector. When that aspirational system fails - whether to cynicism or brutality or both matters little - you have a societal collapse incoming or under way.

One depressing example was the progression of the United States' moral judgement on torture during the 21st century. During the worst of the Cold War years I have very few illusions that torture was occurring - extremely imaginative variants in fact. Everyone knew what happens in bush wars - we had quite a few veterans who remembered very clearly. But if in 1963 someone self-identified as a torturer, or recommended we just do it in the open, the same persion would be roundly (and justly) castigated[0].

After 9/11, the idea surfaced that yes, we're going to torture, and yes, it's ok to do it. We accept the "realism".

To see the impact of this, well, I could point to a police officer in 1992 and then to a police officer in 2022. I could also point to an Action/Adventure TV program of the 1980s - say, MacGuyver - and then point to an Action/Adventure TV Program of the 2000s - like, say, 24. Imperial Boomerang is a real thing, turns out, and now we all get to be Fallujah.

In reality, though? The answer to Scalia's "Shouldn't Jack Bauer torture a guy to save Los Angeles?" was always rhetorical[1], but if you took the bait, the correct answer was always, "No", because it destroys the aspirational vector that defines our society. Or, more practically, if for no better reason than the fact a SC justice is legally reasoning from a television show.

[0] The mixed reaction to incidents like Mai Lai show how deep this division went. Not all of America thought it was a terrible thing, but we decided we were made of better stuff. Or we wanted to be, which as it turned out, also important.

[1] The "ticking time bomb" hypothetical which is almost always presented as a stack of epistemic certainty but which is actually unfalsifiable.

[eudamoniac]

You are right, and it's like someone else said, a morality story. Of course violence is sometimes the answer, the ends do justify the means if the ends are important enough, etc. They are indoctrinated and brainwashed, in the purest sense of the word, into not even considering these ideas.

I hold it to be self evident that political violence is the only potential action that the people of North Korea could take to save themselves. Peaceful protest and voting, obviously, does not work. A massive mob rising up and stabbing dear leader with a dinner knife, at the cost of probably hundreds or thousands of themselves, might work.

To deny the above paragraph is incoherent. All governments are somewhere on the scale of justifiably being overthrown with violence. It is a valid option, and how tyrannical the government has to be before the option is justifiable is a matter of opinion. All unpretended shock and horror at the sentiment is either by the sheltered or by the afraid.

People know this subconsciously. How many stories of righteous revolution have we seen and cheered for? Shrek, Hunger Games, The Matrix, Braveheart, Dune, Star Wars; everyone knows these protagonists killing government officials are in the right. They will never make the connection, but they know it, and the intellectually honest will acknowledge it. Are we ruled by such different beasts than those characters are?

[sublinear]

> How do people square those 2 ideas?

If you're seriously trying to understand the nuance of the act itself, you should consider reading what is standard issue for law enforcement and military.

"On Killing" by Dave Grossman is a classic.

If you only want to understand and stay in the realm of politics, I don't think you'll ever find a good answer either way. There's hypocrisy in every argument for or against violence. None of that is on the minds of people "in the shit" at that time. All that stuff comes later. As you're well aware, PTSD is no joke.

What I would take away from this is to recognize all the other ways in which we are compelled to act against our own self interest under what are sold as higher moral purposes.

From that perspective, it's not that hard to see how people can treat violence as just another tool. Whether it works is a question of how much those people value life above all else. If you're surprised that's not always the case in every culture, you may want to study that first. Beliefs may devalue life for persistence against a long history of conflict. This is where you may start to find some glimmers of an answer why we in the west sometimes think violence works to get those people to "snap out of it", but it really is ultimately about control of those people or that land at the end of the day.

[zahlman]

> I just don't understand why we have all these adages to convince people that "violence is always wrong", while I'm sure some at least some of the people who say that are actively engaged in building machines designed to kill people.

First: because trusted people having such weaponry is, in expected value, believed to lead to less total violence. Second: because not all such violence is part of what you presumably have in mind when you speak of "ongoing conflict". (Of which there are many; when you speak of "an ongoing conflict" you come across as having a particular agenda, although of course I don't know which.)

> But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

There is no contradiction and thus nothing to square. People are not responsible for the actions of their ancestors, nor of members of their identity groups, and especially not of the ancestors of members of their identity groups. And there is no contradiction between "the ends don't justify the means" and the ends being just.

[bigbadfeline]

> First: because trusted people having such weaponry is, in expected value, believed to lead to less total violence.

Unfortunately "trusted people" don't grow on trees... but those who do grow to the highest positions of power, with the most destructive weaponry under their control, ask for trust with stuff like: "No foreign wars", "I'll end that conflict on day one"... "after bringing prices back down".

With that said, changing the conversation from violence to trust in the ideas and people who control it, is a worthwhile endeavor.

>> The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

That's quite backwards, violence is an irrational response to today's problems. Demonizing the discussion of those problems as "violence" can't be trusted - if the discussion stops, a rational solution will never be found.

[pksebben]

>> trust in the ideas and people who control it,

This right here is the crux of the issue. I don't even trust my own computer without fairly deep introspective tools, and what we're given for 'leadership' is 'this totally outdated and opaque system of voting for corporate shill A or corporate shill B is totally trustworthy! You obviously cannot think that you could get by without some asshat running your whole society so be thankful'.

Direct democracy, liquid democracy - whatever you pick that removes the middle man will be a marked improvement from day 1. We do not need these people deciding what's best for us. I'm not sure we ever did.

[JKCalhoun]

"But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?"

That's easy enough. Your presumption is that the U.S. (and other countries) would not exist were it not for political violence. We don't know if that is the case as we have only the violent timeline.

[estimator7292]

It's almost like the real world just doesn't deal in absolutes. For any absolute blanket rule you'd like to apply to the entire universe, there's a practically infinite number of exceptions and edge cases.

The real world is subjective and messy. Life is an endless series of edge cases and unique situations. The real world also has no requirement to be logically consistent or in any way rational. Every rule has exceptions, no set of rules and codes can cover every situation.

The nature of life is that your personal moral code will break down at some point. Your personal sense of right and wrong is not a universal truth, and you will be faced with situations that challenge your morals.

A wise person understands this fact, and a mature person can handle the messy reality of morals. An immature person thinks their personal moral code is universal truth and must never be questioned.

My morals tend toward Buddhist views, but I've been around long enough to learn the compromises that reality requires. Violence must always be avoided at all costs, but sometimes it is necessary. Occasionally violence is good. There are no hard rules, reality just plain and simple does not work like that.

[nradov]

During WWII, the entire Allied leadership was willing to kill millions of Axis children if that's what it took to win the war and force the enemy to surrender unconditionally. There was at least some genocidal intent. Population centers were intentionally bombed to wipe out civilian factory workers. We can argue about whether that was right or wrong but the reality is that it's probably inevitable once armed conflicts involving nation states escalate to an existential level.

“Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”

-- Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey Jr., 1941

[Synaesthesia]

It was wrong, and yes would likely be seen as genocidal in the current day, rightly so. You can't just randomly kill innocent civilians, no matter what. It didn't even meaningfully accelerate the end of the war.

[nradov]

Was it wrong though? How many US troops should we sacrifice to save one enemy civilian? In other words, if you were President Roosevelt or Truman then how do you morally justify not doing everything possible to shorten the war by even one day? How do you tell a US family that their son had to die so that the US government could avoid randomly killing innocent civilians?

It's cheap and easy to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one forced to make hard choices based on limited information, and then deal with the consequences.

[slopinthebag]

Even more simply put, if political violence is never the answer and the institution of government is the biggest single source of political violence, what does that say about the legitimacy of the institution of government?

These trite quips act as a way to ensure only the elite ruling class has a justification for the violence they inflict.