taxizen wrote:Should I pre-emptively murder cops, politicians and taxmen? I am beginning to think that your quickness to turn everything into a bloodbath indicates not that you intellectually see violence as a moral good or a necessity but rather you have an emotional need to commit acts of violence and the intellectualism is only exercised in search of an excuse.
Well, on the flipside, I believe that pacifists are not able to think about violence because of something different that happens to them when they are in early development stages of childhood. This is just a speculation that is not backed by anything concrete
(yet), but sometimes you can watch children in different families and how they react to problems, and you can almost forecast the sort of person that they'll grow up to be.
Speaking for myself, I think I was always aware that
negotiation was based implicitly on the idea that one or both of the parties could just resort to an attempt at force
if negotiations break down. Any time I 'cut my losses'
(as opposed to making life difficult for someone) after a failed negotiation, it's
only because I believe that I would not sufficiently benefit in the long term from the use of force, or that I would lose if I tried to use force, or that it would cause people to be angry enough with me to stop co-operating. And I'd make those calculations all the time, without necessarily putting words to it, but it would be a quick calculation.
But some children you just knew were always going to end up getting pushed around by someone, because some children just never knew when to stop negotiating, they'd even negotiate with bullies. It made no sense. Their behaviour was illogical, and they'd end up being protected by me.
So if we want to talk about 'an emotional need', maybe I have an 'emotional need' to
plan to win. I believe that if I want something badly enough, I should be able to get it, somehow. There is always a theory which could allow what I want to happen, to happen. It just becomes a matter of finding out what it is.
So to address your question directly:
taxizen wrote:Should I pre-emptively murder cops, politicians and taxmen?
Only if you believe that the social conditions exist in which you can get away with it and
not be 'held to account' for it. If those conditions don't exist, then you need to find a way to get them to exist.
I'm sure that Ho Chi Minh and his associates used to wonder the same thing, whether they'd ever be in the correct conditions where they could pre-emptively attack South Vietnam and carry out summary killings of 2 million former oppressors, unify the state, and implement a new economic system, without ever being 'held to account' by anyone for having initiated the conflict. Well, they planned for many years and the chance appeared in front of them, and they went and did it, and got it done.
People often forget this, the Vietnam war was not a 'defensive war' by North Vietnam. It was an 'offensive war' deliberately 'initiated' by North Vietnam
(if you measure it by the usual UN conventions), meaning that technically North Vietnam broke international law. But they had to.
Long story short, violence or the threat of violence is behind everything, even 'negotiations'. Negotiation in and of itself,
presupposes that something unpleasant could be happening
instead.
Look for example at the water protest threat that happened in Leicester. Severn Trent water said that it wanted to add fluoride to the water supply. Residents in Leicester responded by threatening to stop paying water bills
en masse if Severn Trent went through with it
(in essence, the threat was mass theft of water, that's what refusal to pay bills means, refusal to pay for a product you have switched on and running into your sink, is a violent act). Severn Trent backed down and did not fluoridate the water supply. Obviously that teaches me that the threat of force works and is behind all negotiations.
Now, you could say that Severn Trent could just ask the state to arrest everyone who refuses to pay. But if the entire county refuses to pay the water bill, they can't put
everyone in jail, and so the population would in fact have defeated them utterly. And they knew it.