pacifism is cowardly when inaction enables bad actors.
But pacifism isn’t inaction. It is action with the intent to do no harm.
not everyone values peace
The value of peace is social, not individual. You value peace when you know you have everything you want from the status quo. You embrace violence as a means of shifting conditions in your favor.
But violence comes at a grander social price. Simply embracing it because someone else has only compounds the costs.
the paradox of tolerance is not a paradox
The question of a socially acceptable degree of tolerance is a difficult one to answer philosophically and even more difficult to implement as social policy.
It is not strictly a paradox, but it is an unsolved problem.
don’t let the illusion of a peaceful society lull you into a vulnerable trance
The cost of violent action is what dissuades a violent response. People aren’t in a trance, they are taking a calculated risk.
never play fair with your enemy
Violating a social compact erodes trust. You reap a short term gain while everyone pays a long term price.
“Playing fair” is about establishing a social compact that everyone recognizes as beneficial. Violating broadly beneficial norms means accruing more enemies with whom you feel compelled to play unfairly.
the utopia that most considered a pipe dream became a feasible reality
The utopian era ended with WW1 and the industrialization of modern warfare. The 21st century has seen wave after wave of new investments in warfare, while domestic improvements and social welfare advances have ground nearly to a halt.
If there is a utopian future, it can only come with the abolition of international militarism. Otherwise, we continue to descend into generation after generation of escalating conflict and unchecked immolation of life and property.
The utopian era ended with WW1 STFU with your poindexter BS. you know what the fuck i mean when i say utopia.
Buddy, you don’t know what you mean. These words have a historical context. They don’t just mean what you having bouncing around between your ears. Utopianism describes a series of real social movements that involved actual people organizing to build intentional communities. Its not just vibes.
Narcissism is left wing though. That’s why Fox News is always trying to brainwash you into thinking narcissism is destroying America. You didn’t fall for conservative propaganda, did you?
That’s not the classical sense, that’s the modern pop culture sense. The classical sense is an asexual. But luckily for you, drag was also using the modern pop culture sense when drag said narcissism is left wing.
Fascist movements are primarily made up of submissives. People who want to be dominated. White men who want a big strong man to tell them what to do. Sure, a fascist movement will sometimes have a dom at the top, but half the time it doesn’t even need that. Source: the Crusades. That was nothing but armies of bottoms committing a genocide to please Mummy God.
One in a million fascists is a narcissist. And one in a million narcissists is the leader of a fascist movement. But the other 999,999? They’re all on the left, because they only care about themselves, and the left is the side that actually helps people.
You should want to have friends who only care about themselves, because they’ll want to maintain the friendship and have a good life with you. The friends you gotta watch out for are the selfless assholes. Those are the kinds of people who commit a genocide because Sky Daddy says so.
Fucking lol. MAGA is chock full of Boomers ready to vent their bloodlust on their children and grandchildren. “Generation ME,” but yeah, surely not narcissists.
The narcissistic boomers are volunteering for the Harris campaign and participating in local government, so that they can maintain the welfare programs and the libraries and the ACA and the other things they need in their retirement. The boomers who don’t care about their own wellbeing are voting for Trump because they don’t care if he repeals the ACA or destroys their pensions. Narcissists are left wing.
Ghandi?
Nope.
It is not that I do not get angry. I don’t give vent to my anger. I cultivate the quality of patience as angerlessness, and generally speaking, I succeed. But I only control my anger when it comes. How I find it possible to control it would be a useless question, for it is a habit that everyone must cultivate and must succeed in forming by constant practice.
― Mahatma Gandhi
I tell people that I’m a pacifist in the same way that Bonhoeffer was.
Not many, but my hope is that anyone interested enough does a little research.
Bonhoeffer’s pacifism is a complicated matter. He believed in nonviolence, but also participated in a plot to kill Hitler.
To summarize him a little…. Sometimes we need to abandon our principles to care for others. My goodness is less important than the wellbeing of those who are oppressed.
I’ve expressed a similar sentiment as “it’s easy to be enlightened up on a mountain.” As in, big whoop to all the wise hermits who fled society to find peace: that’s not being above the problems of the world (except literally), it’s hiding from them and pretending that ignorance can be bliss again. The real work is maintaining peace and wisdom in the face of monstrous injustice.
I struggle to consider myself a pacifist as the paradox of tolerance is a difficult thing to have to come to terms with and I’m fundamentally a flawed human being, but I so fundamentally hate the presumed human cost of “just doing business”. I am filled with a searing, incandescent rage at all times, fueled entirely by the hypocrisy of liberal ideology and the cruelty of conservatives. I’m burning up and trying to avoid melting down just getting through the day, surrounded by people who seemingly willingly refuse to understand nuance on hot issues or that complicated problems oftentimes require complicated solutions. I’m tired, boss.
The thing is, you can be full of rage and still be against violence. Expressing rage doesn’t have to be violent. People express rage in all sorts of non-violent ways, like writing or painting or sculpting.
What are you even talking about? Are you under the impression that the only way to take action is through losing your mind and raging?
Controlling your rage allows you to act rationally.
My biggest weakness and most toxic trait is wanting to see bad people face consequences. That person weaving through traffic at high speeds without a turn signal, with no concern for the safety of everybody else on the road? Please drive off the road, crash, do something that drives home how selfish you are acting, and I hope it’s expensive.
Politician campaigning on hate and saying that religion punishes ‘wicked’ people? I hope a loved one suffers some horrible disease and dies in pain.
Vote for an anti-abortion law? Watch your wife or daughter die of something entirely preventable. Refuse to provide exceptions for rape? Do unto others and all that, you know?
Nazi/christofascist/white supremacist? Worm food. Slowly.
I fix things, that’s my whole driving purpose in life, and basically the only thing I’m particularly good at. I have never been very creative, I suck at writing , I’m not a great artist or sculptor or musician. It causes me so much pain and frustration to not be able to fix something, and so much rage to see people deliberately breaking things, doubly so when they delight in the suffering it causes.
I call this the Paladin Perspective. I want to be a pacifist but I can’t in good conscience call myself that. Because I know that in order to maintain peace there must be not only the open palm of acceptance, but also the closed fist of justice. And I am perfectly willing to administer that fist to someone who has earned it. In order for peaceful folk to remain at peace, there must always be someone standing guard against evil who would seek to exploit them. This has been true throughout all of human history and I don’t exactly expect us to pivot now. So the world needs Paladins. It needs someone willing to wield violence, or at least the threat of it, in the name of Good. The police force is supposed to fill this role but they’ve fallen from grace. Religious leaders have filled this role before in the past, but they too have fallen from grace. Lacking either of those or a suitable surrogate, some people take matters into their own hands. Sometimes this leads to a glorious revolution in which power is seized from evil and the evil is ousted. More often this leads to a cell, in some fashion or another.
So it bothers me, because on one hand, I dream of a world without suffering. A world completely without suffering, where no sort of guardian would be required. But I feel in my heart that that is impossible. So instead, where that dream should be, is instead a wish to punish wrongdoers. At the heart of things when I sit down and inspect who I really am, I want to hurt bad people. I want to punch nazis. I want to defend my people from Proud Boys with my right to bear arms. I want to beat the ass off every sitting US politician except for Bernie Sanders and I want to host a cookout for everyone with a net worth higher than $5M. These things invoke a sort of sick schadenfreude that I didn’t really know was in me, and it’s hard to square that with my desire for a free and safe world where no one has to suffer. I’ve been watching myself getting radicalized in real time over the last 8 years, and if I were someone less attentive to my internal state, I might not have ever noticed and taken steps to reign it in. Sometimes I feel it would be more morally correct not to reign it in. But I do no good to anyone in prison so I stay out of trouble.
It’s just a weird dichotomy, wishing fervently for a world without senseless violence but knowing damn well we’re going to require some sensible violence if we want to make it there. I would hope that all those who choose violence in service of good would share my same desire that it not become necessary. I know that’s not true, but a man can dream. But what it comes down to at the end of the day is, folks who say “violence is never the answer” are incorrect. It absolutely is a solution, one that solves most problems in fact, it’s just the last solution on the list. I will make every effort possible to talk and debate and deal and wheedle and compromise within reason, but when it becomes clear that violence is the path forward, I’m not afraid of that path. Woe be upon he who stands in the way of progress.
Does this make me a bad person? Does this make me no better than those I claim to oppose? In my opinion, which I respect, I’d say no. But truth is I don’t really know. If raising the sword in service of those who cannot makes me a bad person, then I think I’ll just have to learn to live with that. Because I can’t not do it. I will not stand aside and watch torture fall upon the backs of the innocent without meeting like with like. And if that makes me evil then I will stand tall for my own punishment when it comes due.
I feel your last paragraph. I could maybe write but I don’t have time to develop that decently. Research is my purpose but fixing things is how I get by. It makes me feel a bit like a fraud as I figure out how to fix things but don’t have talent in it like I have seen in some.
Slightly off topic, but I find it interesting that in two of your examples it isn’t directly the oppressor paying for their crimes directly, but someone (presumably?) uninvolved. Is there a reason for that? I’m all for karma, but it feels like this is still targeting innocents…
Pacifism doesn’t mean you don’t get angry. It basically just means that you don’t think violence should be the first option.
Like, I’m a pacifist, but I wouldn’t think twice about using lethal force to defend my life or others if no other peaceful option existed. But I’ll always try non-violent approaches first.
Not to gatekeep pacifism, but I would really struggle to justify taking another human life, even when seeing red. It would probably take long enough to get over that hurdle for what I was trying to prevent to occur. I am a physically large man and could do a lot of damage, so when I’ve been hit in the past I’ve found other methods of de-escalating the situation. Not applicable in every situation. But it would be something I’d have to put a lot of thought into.
a pacifist as the paradox of tolerance is a difficult thing to have to come to terms with and I’m fundamentally a flawed human being
Don’t think of it as a paradox - tolerance is a social contract, once you break the terms you’re no longer protected by that contract because accepting that would nullify the contract for all of us.