It’s a question that bears considering in an age when many claim that speech is violence, and any people living in a way of which one person disapproves are said to be committing violence against the one.

Here’s the truth: Violence is any process which increases the entropy in a system.  It is the application of undirected energy to a system such that the system’s ordered components are broken down into disorder.  It is destruction (literally the opposite of construction).  To punch or kick, to smash with a hammer, to apply a laser or explosive we recognize as violent because these are all processes which apply energy to the target in a way that breaks the ordered elements of the target.

The word “violence” implies to us, though, not just the increase of entropy in the target but also the visceral, emotional impact of that process on our psyches, a quality which repulses and fascinates us.  The destruction of a building through a controlled demolition involves more energy, but feels less violent, than the cutting of a person’s face with a knife in a fight, even though in physical terms they are both examples of the same process, and the former creates more entropy.  The impact of a comet into the surface of Jupiter we know to be staggeringly energetic and destructive, but we feel no violence in it because it is utterly removed from us and impersonal.  The closer a destructive process is to being personal for us, to being destructive of human life with which we can empathize, the more it qualifies as violent in our minds.  This is natural.  To live is to preserve the local order of our biological systems.  We recognize instinctively the opposite process as a pathway to death, and the animal in us is at once fearful of that process and inclined to study it. The animal is inclined to study violence and learn about it in hopes of avoiding it or, as often, so as to become the one to dish it out, because the animal in us knows that to be the one doing violence is the best way to avoid being the one to whom violence is done.  The animal in us has a fascination with and an appetite for violence, and always will, for the purpose of surviving in a violent world.

I would like to reject violence.  I can accomplish more in the way of creation if my life is free of destruction.  However, the moment I decide to avoid violence, you, being the human animal that you are, will recognize in that decision a lever of power you can use against me.  You have but to declare any given thing I do to be an act of violence against you or someone else and thereby you can make me stop doing that thing.  Half the population desires control, and so half the population will do this immediately upon recognizing in the other half an aversion to violence.

Moreover, because you have categorized my action or speech (which you seek to abort) as violence, you will be able to declare that any actual violence, any actual destructive effect, which you level against me is a response to my violence.  I started it, and you’re just defending yourself, even if my act was to say a true thing and yours is to bludgeon my skull with a lead pipe.  The human ape is a vicious animal, but it naturally shies from brazenly unjustified violence, because that would be socially disruptive, so the human ape always defines its victim’s existence as an act of violence against itself so that it can justify its attack as self-defense.  Every genocide in history has been called an act of self defense by the majority against the minority. Thus, once again, the only way to a peaceful life is to embrace violence.  If I never say that I will avoid violence, then you can never use that to try to compel my behavior.  You can never try to use that against me by defining my normal behavior as violence as a way to get me to stop my normal behavior.  The chain, the pathway, to your genocidal tendencies never has a chance to begin.  Thus I never have to fight for my life.  If I welcome violence from the outset, you have no leverage against me, and thus are less likely to attack me in “self-defense,” and thus I am much less likely to have to use violence in true self-defense, and our society will thus be less violent.