Sarah Hoyt explains why the cult of non-violence is bound to have negative consequences:
Violence isn’t – by itself – bad but – more importantly – you can’t eradicate it from a human society, and we’re going about the problem of keeping the savage part of man controlled upside down and sideways, when we KNOW the solution. What we’re doing deliberately ignores hundreds of years of experience and we’re going to pay for this. We’re going to pay for this in awful ways. In fact, we’re going to pay for this in a lot of violence that will be targeted mostly at the defenseless….
Take away physical weapons, and people will use the authorities as physical weapons. (And psychological ones too, which is worse.)
Now, the weasels we shall always have with us (I think that’s in the Bible, somewhere.) And the wicked flourish like the green bay tree.
But when you take from society the manly weapons of open and clean, minor and non-lethal violence, what you’re left with are the female weapons: the denunciation, the stab in the back, the laughter, the snark, the reputation-destroying rumor. And the advantage is not just to women (the wrong kind of women) but also to entirely the wrong kind of man. Some men are very good at it indeed.
And what results is what we’re seeing in certain professional organizations: bullying of the ones perceived as weak. Hounding of those who don’t think with the group. Abuse of elders. In fact, the full panoply of the crab bucket.
This is because people have been taught violence that’s not physical is okay, and because they’re human and violence, group fighting and group protecting has to go somewhere.
And the advocates of non-violence can wipe their hands to the wall. I hope to heaven I’m wrong, but I predict that in less than a decade, those will be very bloody fingerprints.
The problem with the feminized interpretation of civilization that is presently dominant is that it eliminates the social mechanisms of violence that have kept men reasonably in line for thousands of years. Because women are direct-conflict avoidant, their form of conflict non-resolution prevents matters from ever being resolved. For example, look at how McRapey is STILL snarking about me nine years after first attacking me; in a more civilized society, I’d simply have punched him in the face two or three times and the matter would have been forgotten about years ago.
Instead, there is no resolution and conflicts continue ad infinitum. The gamma males emulate the mean girls and embrace private politics to manipulate authority and establish a legal regime to leash the strong they fear. There is no tactical difference between what Scalzi, Nielsen-Hayden, and Gould did with the SFWA Board and what Obama, Holder, and thousands of activist groups are presently doing with the IRS and many other government agencies. In the absence of a one-on-one circuit breaker, everything becomes a manipulative appeal to authority.
Which gradually leads to inevitable disrespect for the legitimacy of that authority – who here has any respect for the moral authority of either SFWA or Obama’s Department of Justice – and an eventual return to the use of violence, only far more indiscriminate and opportunistic than in its previously limited form with its code that spared the weak and defenseless.
People tend to behave very badly when they believe they are safe from consequences. I suspect that the woman who is murdered by her divorce-raped ex-husband is extremely startled to discover that the Marriage 2.0 regime may have been able to award her cash and prizes, but is not actually capable of keeping her physically safe.
What we now have is legalistic barbarism wearing the sheepskin of civilization. But it is not civilization, as will become increasingly clear over the next few years. The descent into barbarism will not be easy for anyone, but the silver lining is that open barbarism is considerably more satisfying for the strong than pseudo-civilization. There is a reason, after all, that Man likes to read stories about heroes and killers and soldiers, not lawyers and bureaucrats and lobbyists.