Human violence: understanding it; ending it

Similarly, an individual might engage in a powerless act of interference in the life of another as an unconscious manifestation of their suppressed anger. For example, if someone is angry because they feel they are being forced to clean up after someone else, but this anger is fearfully suppressed and cannot be acted upon by raising and dealing with the conflict openly, then the person might half clean up something but then leave all of the cleaning equipment in the way of the other person in an attempt to powerlessly 'force' that person to, in effect, clean up after them.

More interestingly perhaps, an individual might engage in a powerless act of interference in their own life as an unconscious manifestation of their suppressed anger. How might they do this? And why? A person might get in their own way by, for example, being untidy, disorganised or by persisting in using dysfunctional equipment (rather than having it repaired). And they do this as a projection of one or both of their parents 'getting in my way' when they were a child. This 'getting in my way' usually occurs when the child is 'held to account' for making mistakes (that is, being inappropriately and unfairly treated as dysfunctional) but is not allowed to get angry about this unjust response to its 'mistakes'. So, scared out of being angry, the child (now an adult) wants to 'insist' on doing what they want (dysfunctional or otherwise) because this represents them trying to learn to do things for themselves (and 'getting away with' making mistakes in doing so) when they were a child. Unfortunately, they are now trapped in this behaviour pattern because they cannot have the feelings, which are deeply suppressed, that would allow them to restore more functional behaviour.

Another damaging outcome of the violence described above is that violence becomes deeply but invisibly entrenched throughout society and this is indeed evident in all of its structures and institutions, including the economy (which ensures ongoing accumulation of wealth by the relative few through exploitation of the vulnerable many, as well as nature); the education system; the medical and pharmaceutical industries; the media industry; the police, legal and prison systems; and the military defense system. (For brief critiques of these structures, see 'The Flame Tree Project To Save Life on Earth') Clearly, if violence is to be ended, then all of these structures must be dismantled and replaced with small-scale local structures that do not have violence built into them.

In summary, the person who uses violence is not angry; they are terrified. To the inexperienced or fearful eye, of course, this is not apparent. Ending human violence will require us to stop terrorizing our children, giving violent individuals support and safe spaces in which to feel their suppressed fear consciously, and changing institutions, such as the legal system, so that we no longer use fear to try to 'modify' behavior.