Violent crimes are typically divided into 4 main categories: homicide, assault (physically attacking another person with the intent to cause harm), robbery (forcibly taking something from another person), and rape.


Violence can also be categorized according to its motivation. Reactive, or emotional, violence typically involves the expression of anger — a hostile desire to hurt someone — that arises in response to a perceived provocation. Proactive, or instrumental, violence is more calculated and is often performed in anticipation of some reward.


What is anger? Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence.


Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.


Morgenthau may have been the philosopher of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by his own Realist disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military power, which was a very different thing. “The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relation between two minds, which is the essence of political power, they physical relation between two bodies, one of which is strong enough to dominate the other’s movements.” Such domination, however, was a crude and temporary tool, unrelated to genuine political power, because “no dominion can last that is founded upon nothing but military force.” Generals usually made lousy diplomats. “The armed forces are instruments of war; foreign policy is an instrument of peace.”

Conquerors who thought only in material and military terms, like the Germans and Japanese of WW2, were bound to pass from the scene, no matter how much damage they might do, whereas those with a more nuanced and restrained notion of power, like the Romans and British, were able to construct successful, long-standing institutions. Hearts and minds constituted the very essence of what Morgenthau meant by political power. “All foreign policy is a struggle for the minds of men.”


They, as well as policemen, derive such importance as they have from the simple fact that violence is the final support of power and the final resort of those who would contest it. Only when revolution or crime threaten to disturb domestic order does the police captain, and only when diplomacy and war threaten international order, do the generals and admirals, come to be recognized for what at all times they are: indispensable elements of the order of power that prevails within and between the national states of the world.

A nation becomes a great power only on one condition: that its military establishment and resources are such that it could really threaten decisive warfare. In the rank order of states a nation must fight a great war successfully in order to be truly great. The effective force of what an ambassador says is rather direct reflection of how mighty the general, how large and effective the fighting force standing back of him, is supposed to be. Military power determines the political standing of nations, and to the extent that nationalism is honored, to that extent generals and admirals share decisively in the system of national honor.


Back in the Middle Ages, the public sphere was full of political violence. Indeed, the ability to use violence was the entry ticket to the political game, and whoever lacked this ability had no political voice.


All political power emerges from the barrel of a gun.

What politics really is, at its most basic, core level, is an attempt to settle disputes by alternate means, so violence can be avoided.

But what many people do not understand is that “means of avoiding” is another way of saying “proxy for.”

Politics is proxy for violence. And therefore, the ultimate basis of political power is capacity to commit violence.

No ability to commit violence? No political power.

No willingness to commit violence? No political power.


Violence and cruelty has 4 general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and cliched stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism — convictions of personal and moral superiority — that drive most acts of evil.


As is the way with most forms of giving birth, the advent of the modern state not only took what it seemed to be an excruciatingly long time but was also a bloody mess. Virtually all issues were resolved with violence or the threat of it. Any hint of weakness was a invitation to further mayhem.


Nobles would not hesitate to punish lack of respect with violence.


The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.


This reaches to the core meaning of the state: as the organizer of legitimate violence, the state periodically calls upon its citizens to risk their lives on its behalf.


Inside each group, all adult males dominate all females. The struggle for power is what makes them tick. Much of it is waged by political methods, meaning manipulation and the formation of alliances. Display of power, visible, auditory, or both, also play a very important role. However, chimps are very aggressive animals. Competition can easily explode into violence — which may or may not be followed by reconciliation. Fights to the death, including the squeezing out of testicles, have been recorded. Among both species of apes dominance would be meaningless if it had not been accompanied by its opposite, subordination, and the behavior that is appropriate to it. For every animal that is more than equal there must be at least one that is less so. Some chimpanzees literally grovel in the dust in front of others. Such behavior can be understood as a kind of ritualized confirmation of the dominance relationship.


Life itself, zoologists claim, is one long struggle to reach the highest position as soon as possible, stay there for as long as possible, and take advantage of the nutritional and sexual privileges that accompany it. The struggle is waged with every means, often including violence.


Our social tolerance comes from our having a relatively low tendency for reactive aggression, whereas the violence that makes humans deadly is proactive aggression.


In practice, real sovereignty is the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity, which of course is concentrated in the powerful. Sovereign power is fundamentally premised on the capacity and the will to decide on life and death, the capacity to visit excessive violence on those declared enemies or on undesirables. The really fundamental sine qua non of law in any society — primitive or civilized — is the legitimate use of physical coercion by a socially authorized agent.


He cannot be a man without knowing how to be aggressive, but it must be controlled aggression that is at his conscious disposal. If he is just overcome by his rage and violence, then it is no good; his masculinity is not yet formed. Psychologically, he has been defeated inwardly by his Red Knight. His ego lies prostrate, and the Red Knight in him has won, emerging as terribly bully, a violent temper, or even in vandalism or criminal ways. So every boy on his way to manhood has to learn how to master this violent side of himself and integrate that terrible masculine power for aggression into his conscious personality.


The military expertise, the management of violence, includes the science of war and combat as well as organizational and administrative skills.


“Violent entrepreneurs” used violence to supervise contracts, settle disputes, and recover debts (since protection from the authorities was insufficient or non-existent), to negotiate with state organizations and help obtain permissions, registration, licenses, and tax exemptions as well as to incur damages and sabotage activities of competitor companies. Their efficiency was such that some of these entrepreneurs were hired by legal companies.


All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. Why, then, is not military dictatorship the normal and usual form of government? For the greater part of human history, men have, in fact, lived under the sword, and in any serious disturbance of human affairs, real or imagined, societies do tend to revert to military rule.


He assumes that, in any society, there is a sort of quota of men who when appropriately provoked will resort to violence. But if you give such a man a job in a certain kind of social hierarchy, you will get a professional soldier and often civilians can control him.


Jillianwala Bagh, the site of the Amritsar Massacre, was a stark reminder that the British Empire everywhere was ultimately maintained by violence.


Boys’ aggression revolves around the threat of violence: “I will physically hurt you” … but girls’ aggression has always been relational: “I will destroy your reputation or your relationships.” Female aggression tends to be indirect. Rather than assault an antagonist’s physical body, face-to-face, they’ll attack their avatar. They’ll attempt to secure their enemy’s ostracization, severing their connections to games, and use mockery, gossip and insult to strip them of status.


The more ambiguous the relation is with respect to who should be expected to outrank whom, the more likely violence is.


An African proverb says, “the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” If the game rejects you, you can return in domination as a vengeful God, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility. The fundamental cause of most human violence is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.


Most of the time, we don’t fight with violence. Instead we engage in battles of belief. For humans, ideology is territory. Our species has an astonishing capacity for fighting wars over the content of other people’s minds.


I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell’s observation that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”


For much of human history, people have been governed under the principle of “might makes right.” The king has a monopoly on violence and he could do whatever he wanted. And everyone else? They weren’t citizens, but subjects — and they were dependent upon the king. Even with a generous king, the passive assumption for subjects across history remained prohibition, not permission. If the king didn’t expressly permit something, it was assumed to be forbidden. That was the rule whether you wanted to start your own business or worship as you pleased.


Violence is any act of aggression and/or abuse that causes or intends to cause injury to persons, animals, or property. It may include random violence, and coordinated violence.


Victory won by violence is tantamount to defeat, for it is momentary.


Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are able to show the immediate effectiveness of violence. But it will be as transitory as that of Genghis’s slaughters. But the effects of Buddha’s nonviolence persist and are likely to grow with age.


If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Cliches begin arguments, they don’t settle them.


Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.


It is not a question of the necessity of violence, but how to organize it to fit our unique situation, to tie it with flawless exactitude to our political activity, and to organize it immediately.


Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence is done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.


People often say that violence accomplishes nothing, that it’s ineffective. Violence is dreadfully effective. That’s why those in power use it.


The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.