A person now has the choice to engage in violence, or to not. Violence is the use of forces to physically harm (irritation of one's weaknesses) and thus persuade another individual to conform to, maintain, or occupy their perspective. Some have different ways of justifying violence, whether it be for an objective that they subjectivity hold to be of more value than the person they commit violence against, a conscious justification, or whether it is from shear impulse of fear or anger or even hate. It of these subconscious impulses that are the most common causes of micro-personal violence and it is of these I will first address.
Fear is an instinct that serves of value to us, as is anger, and to some extent hate. They are all devises of the individual, designed to protect the individual. Fear induces automatic responses that remove us from potential harm, physically or other wise. Anger causes responses to prevent further harm in the future, to exploit fear in someone else, or protect one's self from fear or sadness. Hatred is the most basic and feral self-defense mechanism, one that defies definition more so than other emotions. Hatred can be used to protect us from recognizing similar traits in other individuals that we don't like in ourselves, to protect ourselves from the psychic implications of harming others, to protect ourselves from things or people that make us experience feelings we are not comfortable with, or to protect ourselves from many other emotions or conscious realizations that could lead us to conclusions that we are not comfortable with. People hate others who make them feel guilty, people hate those who make them feel inferior, people hate those that they do not understand, all a means of protecting one's self from harm, emotionally, mentally, physically, or even intellectually. These are core devises we use to remain out of harms way. And they are all proponents of violence.
Fear caused impulse independent of conscious thought, as a means of circumventing our typical thought process. It is the dictator of the democratic sanctity of our minds. It seeks to avoid deliberation in an effort to be efficient. The end product is almost indefinitely poorer than that of deliberation. This could be something to be said of conversation and argumentation, something people typically shy away from for the sake of protecting their own understanding, to prevent their own anchor from becoming loose, regardless of what ground it may rest in. Anyway, fear elicits responses that are not conscious. Humans are conscious beings. That is what makes us human, our ability to think independently of our instinct or intrinsic nature. Fear is an animal response. Fear is cowardly. Whether you value bravery or not, there is something to be said in fighting yourself and winning. Their is at least some value in being courageous and opposing a foe who knows you better than anyone and hold more control over you that even you do at times. To refuse to act violently as a cause of fear is by far the easiest to justify logically and condone as wrong. It is however, the hardest to resist. The ability to control our fear, however, is our ability to be human. To give in to that, we now are inhuman, we dehumanize ourselves. In the face of the loss of our inclusion to our race, we must beat back our instincts and refuse to act in fear. Even if that fear is the fear of death itself. That is true courage. Courage is not to be fearless when committing acts of violence. Violence is perhaps the easiest forum in which to fearless, in the security of our own fear, anger, or hatred. To face foes who are so impersonal to us, versus the foes you know the best that resides in you, is not true bravery. To act in the security of these emotions who serve as a buffer against harming yourself as you cause other to suffer. Irreversible damage is done to those who commit harm on others. Others who must occupy this perspective every day must conjure feelings of hate, anger, or fear to protect them from the mental degradation committing violence on other causes us. To refuse to give in to these emotions that sanctify our acts of violence, to allow them to protect us from the responsibility of our actions, is true cowardice. This is true fear. Real courage manifests itself in the face of our final foes. Ourselves.
In the medium of anger, control of our actions would sometimes seem to manifest independent of our own will. It would seem as if someone else is driving us. people who have experienced acts of severe anger describe moments of "blacking-out" and then coming to to face actions they feel were committed independently of their our determination. This is at its core the realization of the instinctual, bestial, residual subconscious being inside of us taking control. It would seem an indomitable foe, like a boulder that roles down the steep side of a mountain, gaining momentum until we are now powerless to stop it. We must move aside or be crushed. Anger causes many other things. Their is a delineation between the anger of our conscious mind, and that of our animalistic inclinations. Conscious anger is the product of conflict with our consciously determined values and that of an outside entity and is under our complete control. It is then only logical to surmise that the use of violence is never a very logical choice in comparison to those that would in the long run prove to be much more productive. One doesn't need to whip a slave into working. One can free him, feed him, and show kindness to him. He will then be inclined to help you split that pile of wood outside as a sign of gratitude or a reciprocal act of kindness, etc., and he will do it with less dissent and more passion than that of a broken man. This is of course only one example, but it holds some universal truth. Kindness will forever elicit the same, no matter how long it takes. The real danger of anger is of the kind we would propose we have to control over. The boulder of our fury can carry us away down slopes of indeterminable depths. But suppose the boulder never got rolling. What causes us to get angry and lose control. Many consciously angry thoughts can spiral out of control and leave us wondering who was driving our actions. It all comes down to conscious control. We must tame the beast that is liable to take control of our actions. This metaphor is not-exclusively one that is based in Christian interpretations of our desire to do evil. It cannot be because my metaphor exclusively condemns violence which the bible does not do so exclusively. However, their is some merit in interpreting the need of many humans to blame their actions on an actor that is independent of themselves. The Devil of the Christian Bible can easily be a metaphor for our emotions and subconscious, one that defines both the role of anger, hate, and fear to cause negative things to happen and as another for the needs an individual has to transfer the responsibility of their actions to another being. Perhaps this is selling your soul to the Devil, allowing your controllable consciousness to be usurped by the uncontrollable impulse of your subconscious. I digress however. The point is that people have the ultimate control over how their anger will affect them. They have the ability to focus anger and to have it mean something other than a manifestation of your individual need to justify an act of violence. We must hold ourselves accountable for what we do rather than allow our anger to protect us from the guilt, or such other feelings, an act of violence against another human causes us.
Hatred is by far our most sinister foe. It can be justified consciously; it can be a virus of our subconscious. It may be argued that it is the easiest or the hardest to insight, it all depends on the context of our hate. I say it is our hate because it is our own. It is our own self's devise to protect us from harm. Do we give in to this cowardice of the self? Because it is truly cowardly to hide within the vestiges of our own hate rather than do battle with our self and come to terms with out actions or with our feelings. True bravery squares off with our own reality, with the reality that is our perspective, that perspective that defines us and changes what it sees. We change for the sake our own humanity or for the protection of another persons humanity. This is true courage, to change rather than to become static and wallow next to the furnace of our hate that keeps us war, to brave the potentially icy depths of self realization and responsibility.
True courage forsakes the safety of our objective hate, our irrational anger, and our cowardly fears. To master these instincts is true courage. Each of these are the sole proponents of violence against others because they justify our violence and protect our minds from the harm it does to our humanity. A true hero refuses to commit violence, even in the face of ourselves. Even in the face of our death.
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