The pre-eminent problem confronting humankind is human violence. It is our own violence, in its various guises, including the ongoing possibility of nuclear war and the ongoing devastation of the natural environment, that threaten to consign us to the fossil record within decades, if not sooner. And yet we devote virtually no effort to trying to understand human violence and to developing strategies to end it. Why?<\/p>\n
The short and highly unpalatable answer is this: because most of us want to use violence when it suits us and to \u2018get away with it\u2019 when we do. This is why most of us find ways to inflict our violence in socially legitimized ways or we do it in relative secrecy. Apart from inflicting violence on our own children and the natural environment, society has created whole sectors of activity in which \u2018legitimized violence\u2019 can be inflicted.<\/p>\n
The most obvious example of socially endorsed violence is that allowed during military service but another sector that absorbs many perpetrators of violence is the police, legal and prison system. Many police, judges, magistrates, prosecutors and prison officers use their socially legitimized role to inflict their violence (whether directly in the form of assaults or institutional in the form of imprisonment and capital punishment) on those individuals snared in the legal system. There is no evidence that violence (even when labeled \u2018punishment\u2019) and the fear that it causes can restore functionality.<\/i> However, modern societies have devoted vast quantities of resources to the military, police, legal and prison systems rather than financing research efforts to understand why human beings are violent and then developing comprehensive strategies to eliminate this violence based on an understanding of its cause.<\/p>\n
This failure to understand violence means that a vast and ever-increasing quantity of resources must be devoted to maintaining both military forces that are sent to kill all over the world and an endlessly expanding system of highly dysfunctional \u2018law enforcement\u2019 in which individuals are no longer considered important once they are defined as \u2018criminal\u2019.<\/p>\n
Why do governments devote resources to the military, police, legal and prison systems? In brief, this occurs because members of governments want to perpetuate violence in the delusional belief that it gives them \u2018control\u2019 and one socially endorsed way of participating in this violence is to perpetuate an institutional framework that defines \u2018enemies\u2019 and \u2018criminals\u2019 as legitimized victims. This happens because people who feel powerless to control what is important (particularly the violence they suffered at the hands of their own parents) seek control of other people and things (including trivia) to avoid the feeling of powerlessness.<\/p>\n
The social investment in violence at all levels is staggering: if it was not, as noted above, there would be substantial research funds devoted to understanding the origins of violence so that it could be reduced and eventually eliminated. But there is no budget allocation anywhere to fund research to understand this most pervasive and phenomenally destructive problem, although humans spend approximately $2billion each day<\/i> on military violence and a staggering, but unknown to me, amount on the world\u2019s police, legal and prison systems. Who benefits?<\/i> It includes individuals working in government and the military forces, those corporations that make the weapons and build the military and prison infrastructure, and those individuals (including police, lawyers and judges) who gain employment within legal institutions.<\/p>\n
However, the victims of military violence, \u2018criminals\u2019 and particularly \u2018the public\u2019 (that is, the vast majority of the world\u2019s population) do not benefit because violence is perpetuated rather than progressively cut back. How do governments, legal institutions, corporations and the individuals who work within them actually benefit? At the superficial level it is about things like status and money: taxes, profits, income from jobs. But the deeper, psychological reason is that it helps these individuals to suppress awareness of the terror, self-hatred and powerlessness that has destroyed their Self-hood and that drives their use of violence in the delusional belief that they will regain \u2018control\u2019.<\/i><\/p>\n
So what can we do? Despite the lack of social effort to understand human violence, there is a comprehensive explanation available. According to this research, all violence is an outcome of the visible, \u2018invisible\u2019 and \u2018utterly invisible\u2019 violence inflicted by adults on children. See \u2018Why Violence?\u2019 http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/whyviolence<\/a> Once the child has been damaged, it will inflict violence on itself, the people around it, as well as non-human species and the natural environment; it will also play a part in maintaining structures of violence and exploitation, such as the education and legal systems.<\/p>\n If you wish to join the worldwide movement to end all violence, you can sign online ‘The People\u2019s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ http:\/\/thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Human beings will end violence or<\/b> ___________________________<\/p>\n Robert Burrowes, Ph.D., has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of <\/i>\u2018Why Violence?\u2018 http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/whyviolence<\/a>. Website: http:\/\/robertjburrowes.wordpress.com<\/a>. Email address: flametree@riseup.net<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of us want to use violence when it suits us and to \u2018get away with it\u2019 when we do. This is why most of us find ways to inflict our violence in socially legitimized ways or we do it in relative secrecy. Apart from inflicting violence on our own children and the natural environment, society has created whole sectors of activity in which \u2018legitimized violence\u2019 can be inflicted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nViolence will end human beings.<\/b><\/p>\n