when I said "may I have this dance" what I meant was "let me be your sacrifice"

[thewishfire]

I've been thinking a lot about violence, lately. Physical violence, and other types of violence too

Comments

[justicewearsred]

Hmm. I think violence is a thing to which people have a lot of complex responses, yes. At the heart of it, as you said, it feels good-- both to physically exert yourself, and to triumph, to conquer, to have done away with something that was harmful to the world. When you see ideologies reflected in people that you wish to take down, these two drives can overlap in an unfortunate way. But they are not, in and of themselves, bad things, and so we can be easily deluded by our instincts into thinking violence is a good, even, dare I say it, righteous and just solution. Because it feels good, on physical levels.

It's just important to realise that you can't take down a concept by destroying a person.

[strivinghigher]

You can't fight a concept, in general, except by fighting expressions of that concept. I think some people feel that they're making a difference in the fight against bad concepts, or in the struggle for the expression of their own worldviews, by battling the people expressing them. But they're not fighting the person's behaviour or expression-- they're fighting the person. Perhaps that's where it becomes tricky?