10 - Violence and the Soul
Violence and the Soul
The violent rioting in recent days … and the anticipation of more such violence to come … motivates me to digress somewhat from my flow of thought.
Violence rends the soul of both victim and victimizer. The broken soul is compulsively driven to break other souls. Thus the cycle of victim becoming victimizer, producing more victims and more victimizers is perpetuated. It is the cycle of revenge. The victimized are so carried away by anger toward the violence of the victimizer that they imitate the same violence toward others. This is because the original victimizer is often out of reach of justice. Perhaps they have died, disappeared, or are safe behind walls of class, gender supremacy, or political power. The revenge of the victim is then transferred toward others who may, or may not, deserve it. Indeed, whether or not those who experience revenge as proxies deserve it or not is irrelevant. It is the act of violence itself which seems to satisfy the anger of the victim.
Yet that satisfaction is only temporary. Revenge is like an addiction. The more you exercise it, the more you crave it. Violence begets more violence, which then escalates and expands, fracturing countless souls in seemingly endless compulsiveness. Internal violence leads inexorably to social violence.
You see this today in the race riots in America. A victimized population, chronically denied justice because of its powerlessness against oppressors, eventually erupts in violence that quickly becomes indiscriminate. More innocents are victimized, who in turn lust for revenge themselves. The cycle of violence can ultimately destroy a society.
The temptation to violence is exacerbated by two concurrent factors: natural and political. We see both today. Natural disasters, like Covid-19 pandemic, reinforces the sense of victimization by circumstances beyond our control. It is “gratuitous” evil, which is to say, meaningless or purposeless pain. The second factor is lack of leadership, not in the sense that leadership can give meaning to essentially meaningless pain, but in the sense that there are no role models to endure pain or to “rise above” pain through self-control. When true leaders are present, they react to victimization with justice and gratuitous pain with empathy and grief. Today there is no justice and leaders feed the social rage of victims by celebrating victimization.
It is less easy to see this same process internally … within the heart of each individual participating in social violence and raging indiscriminately against victimization. Rioters all look alike. Yet the mob is made up of individuals, each of whom are victims in their own way and with a unique history. The individual not only rages against the one who has victimized him or her, but against the perceived meaninglessness of their personal circumstances, unchecked by the spark of reason that lies within each human being.
The root cause of violence is existence itself. The very fact of existence, symbolized by death, separates the soul from God. This is why in the mythologies of many religions there is a “devil” who is ultimately responsible for severing the perfect unity of the soul with God, so that human beings are “cast out” into a cold world. This is the “original victimizer” who starts the seemingly endless cycle of victimization.
Whether social or personal, is a cycle that seems inexorable also inevitable? The solution to social victimization is a deliberate choice for non-violent protest. Only a courageous commitment to non-violence can break the cycle of mutual victimization. You might say that this is the purpose of civilization itself. “Civilization” is not a collection of institutions, but the shared courage to choose non-violence as a way of life. The solution to individual victimization is also a courageous choice for non-violence. This choice for non-violence is not only a choice to accept the other but to accept oneself … to stop hating the other and stop hating oneself. One can only stop hating the other if one stops hating oneself; and one can only stop hating oneself by stopping the hate toward the other.
Obviously, this is easier said than done. Victimization is not the experience of being hurt by another, but the experience of being shamed by another. Victimization robs the soul of self-esteem or self-respect. The individual hates himself or herself, and the inability to accept and respect the self is what drives the compulsion to hate the other (or any “other”) that is perceived to be a threat to well-being. Since the victim is radically and profoundly “unwell”, everyone becomes a potential threat. Yet it is one thing to know it, and quite another to overcome it.
This is why the philosophies of many cultures agree that all suffering is fundamentally self-inflicted. We may experience pain, but we allow ourselves to suffer. We rage against perceived enemies because we rage against ourselves. We may be helpless to be victimized once, but we allow ourselves to be victimized repeatedly. And we allow ourselves to be drawn into the addiction to violence because we are predisposed to be violent toward ourselves.
A philosophy of non-violence is more psychologically complicated than we might have thought. In order to pursue justice in society, I must come to an acceptance of myself. Before I can endure violence without reacting violently, I must first train myself to accept my own humanity. This is the radical meaning of humility.
However, non-violence is also more spiritually complicated than we might have thought. Sometimes one can choose to break an addiction, but if the evil we seek to resist is truly an addiction that we need the intervention of a higher power. The soul cannot heal itself. It can only be healed through the touch of the divine. The religions of all cultures will have “saints” that share a common message. “The good that I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I do not want to do, is what I end up doing. Wretched one that I am, who shall save me from this despair? Only Emmanuel – God-with-Us or God-within-me.”