The Delusion of Non-Violence

Photo from a burn scar in the Yellowstone River’s Pine Creek drainage, taken June 2021. The 2012 fire was human-caused, but lodgepole forests found in cold air drainages like this one need a stand replacement fire roughly once every century to thrive.

---

Violent forces have played an indispensable role in forming and transforming life in our universe since the big bang, and products like smartphones and computers that many of us rely on come from global supply chains built on labor practices akin to modern-day slavery. Under these real-world conditions, can there be such a thing as non-violence? TFC’s Jackie Brennan thinks not. But for that exact reason, she argues, it’s incumbent on all of us to understand a crucial delineation between violence and abuse.

In the few years I’ve been working at The Friendship Center, my understanding of violence has evolved considerably. Maybe that sounds like an obvious statement based on our mission, but the minutiae of my work is pretty different from what our advocate staff does, and it’s rare that I directly interact with clients. At the same time, there’s a standard level of knowledge our entire staff has around client services, and our advocates help hundreds of survivors of domestic and sexual violence every year. That breadth of perspective and experience permeates our entire agency, and of course it’s had an influence on me. Under that logic, I suppose it isn’t surprising that my thinking on the nature of interpersonal violence is constantly evolving.

What has taken me by surprise, though, is the realization that I personally identify less with the ethics of non-violence than I ever did before I started working here. Now, hear me out. I’m not saying that I’m suddenly a proponent of senseless brutality. I’m also not about to launch into some jaded assessment of a criminal justice system that fails to hold abusers accountable followed by a clarion call to start taking justice into our own hands.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve come to feel that “violence” is too often used as shorthand for only cruel interpersonal violence where harm and subjugation are the primary intentions, and I would actually consider that the misappropriation of violence. Violence, in my mind, is a much broader concept than what it often gets reduced to, and I think we all suffer when we can no longer distinguish violence as a natural force in our reality from abuse.

I recognize semantics present a challenge here. In the victim services and criminal justice world, the word violence often has legal implications. And in more conversational use, it’s overloaded with connotations of abuse, entitlement, and violation of personal autonomy perpetrated by human beings. This is why I want to explain myself carefully. But to do that, I’m going to have to take you on a little journey–first to the cold air drainages I grew up around in Yellowstone’s northern range, then to one of the more life-affirming books I’ve read in recent memory.

Disturbance Is Healthy

Back in June, as I was driving for the first time over the section of the Continental Divide that splits Montana’s Big Hole Valley and Idaho’s Salmon River drainage, I was struck by how quickly the setting transitioned from lush meadows bursting with purple camas blooms to what, for me, is a very familiar scene–a winding road through a creek drainage lined with dense lodgepole stands. Sure enough, as I made my way across the state line and started traveling south on Highway 93, the outdoor temperature according to my dashboard thermometer quickly dropped several degrees. Cold air drainages like this, no matter where they are, always feel like home to me because they were the backdrop of all my formative years.

In terms of biomass, lodgepole pine is one of the most abundant species of any kind in the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.[1] It’s probably the first tree species I learned to distinguish from others, and in school programs with Park Service interpretive staff, it’s drilled into Yellowstone gateway kids that this is a fire-dependent tree. While they’re well-adapted to the cold temperatures characteristic of high elevation, extreme heat is the form of disturbance that triggers the release of seeds from their cones. I assume that this message was so clear and consistent in my childhood because I’m part of the crop of 90s babies born in the wake of the massive 1988 fires that became a PR nightmare for park managers. The conditions that created such a tinderbox are worth discussing, because it shows how depriving a landscape of disturbance backfired, big time.

For nearly a century starting in the late 1800s, federal land managers in the US aggressively suppressed all large fires. This policy sprang from human hubris rooted in at least two delusions–one being that any fire can be put out with enough manmade equipment and boots on the ground, the other being that fire was a threat that the landscape needed human protection from.

We know now that the long exclusion of fire was actually quite disastrous for the health of our coniferous forests, and in many cases, it made the large, high-intensity fires that federal agencies were so obsessed with preventing way worse. A shift toward letting naturally-caused fires on public lands burn started in the early 1970s, when scientific research had finally caught up with what Indigenous people had known and practiced for millennia prior to the arrival of white Europeans in North America–namely, fire had a beneficial role in forest ecology. In fact, it’s essential in most ecosystems across the globe.

Besides creating unhealthy forests, the long absence of fire from our western US landscapes spawned a massive public awareness problem. For a century, basically five human generations, most Americans came to view wildfire as a scourge on the land, an intolerable threat to human civilization, and even a danger to their concept of nature–not as something with life-sustaining ecological value for all interdependent lifeforms, but as something to be consumed and enjoyed by humans like an amusement park. This was still the climate when federal agencies rolled out a “let it burn” policy in 1972 to start reintroducing natural fire to national parks and wilderness areas. Through its first 15 years on the books, a few hundred fires were allowed to burn less than 34,000 acres in Yellowstone. In a park that encompasses 2.2 million acres, you can imagine this put little to no dent in the massive unnatural fuel load that hadn’t seen the type of stand replacement fire lodgepole forests need to thrive since before the 1880s.

If you were alive at the time, you likely know what happened next. In less than three months in 1988, which saw an exceptionally dry summer, 51 total fires affected almost 800,000 acres of the park. The blowback was significant, and for a general public who didn’t understand how the decades of neglect by suppression prior to 1972 set the table for such a large, high-intensity burn under dry conditions, the let-burn policy became an easy scapegoat. I have to believe school groups of my generation got such a loud-and-clear message about the importance of fire in Greater Yellowstone ecology as a reaction to the ignorance that almost jeopardized any kind of natural fire policy in its fledgling years.

It would be a long time before I’d understand the more universal truth this message fits into, but it was early exposure to the natural process whereby healthy, moderate disturbance is what builds resilience in a larger system, and in many cases, brings new life to it. The severity of the 1988 Yellowstone fires also underscores this important lesson from the living world: The total exclusion of disturbance can actually result in highly dangerous and destructive outcomes for the whole system. Total insulation can be a form of neglect for any lifeform, even a form of harm. It’s the same reason the analogy used to describe how human nervous systems learn, adapt, regulate, and build resilience is the back-and-forth between rupture and repair–a pattern that starts and continues from the moment us placental mammals leave the womb. But, of course, there’s a balance in these processes. If resilience is the result of healthy disruption, wanton destruction is the result of extreme, prolonged stress or deprivation, which is why we need to have a high level of respect and knowledge when it comes to forces with the capacity to disrupt and transform. In other words, we need to be extremely competent with violence.

It feels very uncontroversial to me to say that violence–even destructive violence–has an important, indispensable role in the forces that define life on this little rock we find ourselves on in the fathomless home galaxy we call the Milky Way. I feel very clear in that assessment. Evidence of it is everywhere. The universe started with a big bang. The dynamic northern temperate-zone ecosystem I got to grow up in has its origins in a massive event of volcanic cataclysm, the likes of which only occurs on Earth, oh, every 50,000-150,000 years.

View of Lake Village on the northern shore of Yellowstone Lake, June 2013. The northern two-thirds of the lake occupies the southeastern section of the caldera formed from the most recent super-eruption of the Yellowstone hotspot, about 640,000 years ago.

The peaks we enjoy looking at and hiking up were formed variously by volcanic activity or the collision of tectonic plates or both. When the highest ice dam that formed Glacial Lake Missoula failed at the end of the last Ice Age, geologists believe the towering mass of water and ice that thundered toward the Pacific Ocean shook the ground with flood speeds approaching 65 miles per hour. The surge of glacial meltwater stripped away hundreds of feet of soil, cutting the deep, breathtaking canyons of today’s Columbia River Gorge.

I find ermine overwhelmingly cute and charming, but I also respect that they’re highly successful hunters capable of killing prey many times their size. Prairie smoke is one of my favorite wildflowers, but I know those dandelion-like wisps that make them look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book when they go to seed have to be broken off and distributed to regenerate. The aurora lights that a lot of us living south of the 49th parallel have been getting rare glimpses of over the past year or so are a byproduct of an eruption of super-hot gas and magnetic field lines from the Sun’s outer atmosphere.[2]

(1) Prairie smoke, Mount Ascension, June 2024. (2) Rare aurora viewing for Lower 48 residents. Photo taken in Helena. May 2024. (3) Routine aurora viewing for interior Alaska residents in March 2021. Photo from White Mountains National Recreation Area provided by author’s sister.

Maybe more than the average person, I need these natural expressions of violence. I need to move through the world with a sense of wonder because the hyper-colonized, hyper-industrialized, hyper-synthetic society I have to participate in is full of senseless violence with no ecological benefit or, more and more often, violence that’s intentionally smokescreened by supply chains so people don’t have to face their complicity in exploitation while still enjoying the material comforts it affords them. I myself am deeply guilty of participating in this type of outsourced violence. At almost all times of day, I have at least two devices on or near my person made with cobalt that Congolese children may very well have died mining, all to create the rechargeable batteries found in products that many of us rely on like smartphones and computers. Most of the miners who toil in Medieval conditions to collect these rare earth metals (often without any kind of protective equipment even though they're toxic to handle) will never own or see a smartphone in their lives. Maybe you see where I’m going with this, but I think part of my emerging struggle with non-violence as a concept is twofold.

First of all, even those of us most selective about the ways we choose to participate in “modernity” for lack of a better word can’t avoid hypocrisy if we claim to be non-violent. Our dependence on systems that exploit other beings and our home planet’s resources is just so entrenched. And many of our so-called “clean” or “renewable” energy sources are still predicated on industrial-scale extraction of minerals and abusive labor practices in the southern hemisphere that faraway manufacturers profit handsomely off of. Electric vehicles are a prime example of this. Would we live on a cooler, cleaner planet right now if automobile manufacturers had moved away from mass-producing internal combustion engines long ago? Without a fucking doubt. But an average EV battery also uses 290 times the volume of cobalt found in a smartphone, virtually every gram of which is sourced from modern-day slave labor. Until supply chains radically change, us rank-and-file consumers at the end of the line are all accessories to harm, and I implicate myself in that statement.

Second of all, I’m kind of pissed that we’ve created an overculture where interpersonal violence has overtaken most people’s general concept of violence. I think it allows for the oversimplistic dismissal of all violence as wrong, doing a disservice to the beneficial violent forces that shape our lives, and paving the way for societies full of people that feel comfortable with outsourced violence, or even morally superior to common criminals while their own consumer choices may have an equal or higher body count. Our physical distance from the harm doesn’t make it more benign.

Tourniquet

While it feels uncontroversial to me to say that violence is a part of the living world, I suspect some will struggle with this spicy statement: I believe there is no such thing as non-violence. The conditions of our existence preclude it. The natural processes we’re a part of as humans preclude it. I can understand non-violence as more of an ideal to try to live up to, knowing failure is guaranteed. But anybody who stubbornly proclaims they are non-violent is living with a dangerous delusion. I feel strongly that we have to understand our own connection to violence to be able to discern the unnatural, outsourced, or basically purposeless or outright evil forms of it that cause harm, from the natural forms that promote growth and sustain life.

To be clear, this is a bit of dissent from The Friendship Center’s position on violence. And guess what? I think that’s healthy. I think it’s good to be able to keep sight of my own personal values as they evolve, and to be able to articulate how they can deviate from my employer’s without being entirely conflicting. I think our agency’s stated vision of “communities free from violence” is a reflection of the runaway train that has overtaken modern society, especially in a country like the US that’s built on the dispossession of land and genocide of Indigenous life on one continent and 250 years of chattel slave labor violently extracted from another continent an ocean away.[3] Make no mistake: The entitlement to ownership at the root of colonialism has abused everything in its wake. The carnage, apocalyptic in its dimensions, is still unfolding. To relate back to the US’s different historic policies for wildfire response, I understand why agencies like The Friendship Center have to take a full-suppression approach. I might operate under more of a let-burn policy in my own life, but I also don’t think TFC’s approach is necessarily wrong.

The best analogy I can come up with to explain my logic here is a tourniquet. As a whole, mainstream society is hemorrhaging. It’s so out of control, so unconscious in its application of violence, so normalizing of outsourced violence, and so far disconnected from the role that purposeful, moderately applied, natural disturbance has in our overall wellbeing and balance in the systems all carbon-based life depends on, that the patient is bleeding out. We can’t have any forward-facing conversations about the advanced tools that must only be used with deep knowledge and precision to build strength, resilience, relationships grounded in reciprocity (across species), and a higher quality of life until we’ve addressed the acute crisis and stabilized the patient. There’s added urgency in this case, too, because the patient is the species with the greatest responsibility to take care of the whole system, and, conversely, the greatest ability to harm the whole system. We can’t address the root causes of the gnarly wound until we get the life-threatening symptoms under control.

This means agencies like The Friendship Center, at least for now, have to go on the defensive. The cultural incompetence with violence is so pervasive and we’re dealing with what I liken to an unnatural fuel load, so the risk of wanton senseless destruction is too high. Violence, in my mind, is a powerful and essential force of nature that’s being widely abused by humans as the age of global empires and industrialization has dislocated us further and further from our lineage as hunter-gatherers and people who see other beings as relatives to be treated with respect.[4] For most of our 300,000 years of history as homo sapiens, acting in the interest of our community and using the land’s abundant resources sustainably was the norm, not the exception. Restoring those practices and principles is going to take a lot of work. At that, work that most of us aren’t yet prepared for.

I would argue that our historically successful co-regulation with each other, our fellow beings, and our environment–even through hugely disruptive changes and the hostile conditions of the last Ice Age on through the Late Pleistocene–is the definition of human nature, at least one big piece of it. Another is the fallibility–our capacity, all of us, to be bona fide dumbasses and to occasionally indulge our asinine streak in self-interested ways that bring harm to our community. That said, one all-important quality we possess as a species that historically helped keep more serious outbreaks of dumbassery in check is that we get off on learning. My word choice here is deliberate: The chemical rush to our brains and the arousal we get from creating new neural pathways can be tantamount to that of an orgasm in intensity and pleasure, particularly when humor is involved (think about how involuntary it feels when you laugh so hard that you cry). Constant knowledge transmission and experiential learning, once imperative for our survival, is a huge and unfortunately neglected part of human nature. Nowadays, most of us are only using a tiny fraction of the trillions of potential neural connections humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

One of the problems we’re facing is that much of modern human behavior, including the use of violence for self-interest and control, is species-atypical. It’s antithetical to how we’re built to function. So, I can understand why a theory of change in our field would start with a moratorium–an aggressive reining in of all forms of violence. But if TFC’s vision of a community free from violence is ever realized, then what? Where we go from there is interesting to contemplate.

What would the treatment process look like following generations of overdose on careless violence? Would we be prepared to reclaim a healthy relationship with it after we’ve undergone detox, one grounded in a deep respect for the way it shapes all life on this planet? One where our use of it is precise, purposeful, and highly influenced by its beneficial role on this little blue dot we occupy? I don’t blame you if this question strains your imagination. I concede that, the way things are going, it seems likely that the conditions needed to support human life on this planet will expire before we ever get there. And I guarantee we will lose other species, other relatives, along the way. Nonetheless, pushing the limits of our imagination is a radical exercise. The capacity to envisage beyond our current reality has always been a necessary precursor to changing the societal and material conditions that perpetuate suffering. And, at least, for this question, not much envisaging is needed because the blueprint already exists. I promised this journey that started in the lodgepole forests of my youth would eventually take us to a particularly life-affirming book I got my mitts on. This is where that comes into play.

“What would it mean to reverse this domesticated state?”

The book I read earlier this year that completely blew my wig back and was particularly validating in the way it addressed the concept of violence is Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk. The practical impossibility of non-violence within current real-world conditions was already on my mind before I ever picked up this book, and its relevance to this idea could’ve easily eluded me if I had read it at a different time.

Overall, Sand Talk is about applying Indigenous knowledge to modern sustainability dilemmas. In the Aboriginal Australian context Yunkaporta speaks from, that means recognizing the patterns or laws that govern the whole living world, and putting that wisdom into practice in our actions, our relationships with other beings, our personal development, and within our communities. However, the place of violence in an Aboriginal worldview is an undeniable throughline in the book.

Suffice to say, my Sand Talk reading experience was a neural pathway tunneling bonanza, clarifying much of what I was slowly coming to believe about violence, and providing me with ample pleasurable chemical rushes to the brain along the way. It’s an immensely satisfying and insightful book, and I hope my stamp of approval inspires some intrepid folks out there to give it the full cover-to-cover read it deserves. But for the purposes of this essay, and for my overarching question about whether there can or even should be such a thing as non-violence, I think it’s most practical to call out some of the most compelling insights about violence Yunkaporta touches on. Rather than overload the body text of this already-sprawling essay with transcribed quotes, I’ve included dropdowns with scans of corresponding passages from the book that I found particularly illuminating. Without further ado, here are some insights about the place of violence in sustainable systems.

1. Placing yourself above land or other people is cause for swift punishment, which can take the form of violence. But punishment is seen as a learning process to prepare perpetrators for being equal and full participants in community once they’ve been willing and equal participants in their punishment.

Read the full passage

2. In the rules of engagement in a traditional sparring game Yunkaporta describes, the winner receives all the same blows they inflict on the loser at the end of a fight. This kind of combat is intended to make combatants see their enemy’s point of view so that by the end, there are no opponents, just two parties with mutual respect and understanding. As Yunkaporta puts it, this model ensures that enemies become an “unrenewable resource” because it forces players to build respect for conflicting points of view.

Read the full passage

3. In sustainable systems, violence is distributed equally among all agents to minimize the damage it can do. It is not concentrated into the hands of one privileged group to subjugate the others, and most crucially, it’s in the interest of the community not to use it to subjugate women because it would mean stunting the development of half the population, and specifically the half capable of birthing the next generation. Equally important: Women are subject to the same punishments as men because they aren't considered weak, fragile creatures, but equal and accountable to everyone else in communities.

Read the full passages (3)

4. There’s an important delineation between the “horrific violence of the occupying civilization” and a severely disrupted community’s dysfunctional responses to it. Yunkaporta is speaking here about the abusive practices that took root in Aboriginal societies after their populations were decimated, and their governance structures were severely upended by over two centuries of European disease before devastating settler-colonial policies even went into effect. However, he could just as easily be talking about a survivor’s responses to the trauma and stress of living under siege and the persistent threat of abuse and/or stalking.

Read the full passage

5. Sustainable systems also avoid the practice of “outsourcing violence to other places so we can enjoy the fruits of it without having to see it.” Distancing ourselves from violence contributes to our incompetence with it, and the delusion that it’s something we can live without.

Read the full passage

6. There is no word for the concept of safety in the Aboriginal worldview Yunkaporta writes about. There are, however, many words for protection, as well as protocols obligating people to look out for themselves and for others. This outlook emphasizes the agency everyone has in navigating risk and defending themselves, while also reinforcing the interdependence of a community built on extensive kinship networks where everyone has each other’s backs.

Read the full passage

7. Sustainable systems also keep violence in the public eye, in part because controlled violence is sometimes a form of entertainment, but mostly so it can be adjudicated. There’s an understanding that there is no transparency with violence behind closed doors because there’s no one to bear witness or help if somebody steps outside of the rules of engagement. If violence is used, it is highly ritualized and witnessed by all. Since this is a longer continuous passage from the book, I will note that the Kelly that Yunkaporta references in this section is Kelly Menzel, a Ngadjuri university professor and researcher.

Read the full passage

What I take away from these insights is that a more advanced grasp of violence is that, at its highest and best, it can actually prevent abuse. And this is approaching where I want to land this contemplative journey. Personally, while you won’t hear me claiming to be non-violent these days, my perspective on abuse is uncomplicated. If violence is a fact of nature, abuse is the unenlightened misuse of it. I have no problems advocating for communities free from abuse because it’s not exactly a delusional aspiration–the fact that there are Indigenous people alive today is proof of societies that endured for millennia with governance structures and cultural teachings that were designed to make abuse unsustainable.

How we get to the full eradication of abuse, or if we even can before the sixth mass extinction does us all in, is up for discussion because I don’t think there’s one correct approach. And something I hope I’ve gotten across in this long meditation is that there might even be multiple phases to this process that use different responses, different policies. For now, a full-suppression policy may be what’s needed. But my hope is that we can reverse some of the more debilitating effects of our own domestication as a species–our alienation from the land, our atrophied curiosity, our stunted imagination, our stifled creative capacity, and the compounding neglect of our trillions of potential neural pathways. Maybe then we can recover a healthy relationship with violence and roll out more of a let-burn policy and reintroduce healthy disturbance to all the places of our lives where it can have a substantial benefit, even making us more empathetic and rendering enemies an unrenewable resource.

This leads me to the last bit of inspiration I want to talk about from Sand Talk. Of all things, it involves the pace with which domesticated pigs can evolve back into mighty razorbacks when released from captivity:

What would it mean to reverse this domesticated state? It would take centuries to transition from human domestication and recover our exceptional physical and mental powers as a custodial species. It takes a few generations for pigs to get over it when they escape into the bush. At first they remain fat, pink, stupid beasts they were selectively bred to become over centuries of captivity. But soon they grow black bristles and long tusks, each generation becoming faster, stronger, smarter until the formidable razorback emerges. I often wonder what men and women would transform into outside of captivity.

I hope my thinking about all of this continues to evolve, if only as evidence that I’ve never lost my taste for the reward of chemical pleasure that comes from true learning. But here’s where I’m at for now: Maybe the wholesale rejection of violence–even if it is grounded in delusion–is a necessary first step. Eventually, though, I think we’re going to have to shift our focus to reversing our own domestication. I don’t want our species to keep mutating to the point where our brains are so much smaller, and our capabilities are so much more infantile than our more formidable hunter-gatherer ancestors that we have to adopt delusions about something as factual and integral to our existence as violence.

Is there any such thing as non-violence? My answer is no. And I think I’ve made my position crystal clear that I don’t want to live in a universe absent of its truly awe-inspiring effects. After all, I get off on learning, and tripping out on natural phenomena has proven a reliable way to do that. Now, do I want to live in a universe where all beings are seen as full participants and contributors in a sustainable system, not resources or property to be controlled, domesticated, and profited off of? Hell yes. I want to live in a universe where agency and mutual respect–the opposite of domestication–is the rule of law so there is no need to abuse violence.

---

Notes

[1] Thermophilic microbes take the cake in terms of total organisms though, vastly outnumbering everything.

[2] These are technically called coronal mass ejections, but I, in my infinite maturity, call them coronal mass erections.

[3] It’s never a bad time to remind ourselves that while the formal institution of chattel slavery in the United States was abolished 160 years ago, we still have about a century to go before it’s been outlawed longer than it was officially legal in this country.

[4] If you find that perspective challenging, trip out on this fact: Human DNA is at least 80% identical to that of most other vertebrates. You and your dog? Four-fifths similar, genetically speaking. Those adorable ermines I so endlessly admire? Our genetic overlap is probably closer to 90%. To adapt the title of Doug Chadwick’s 2021 book on this phenomenon of astonishing genetic similarity among species, I’m at least nine-tenths an ermine. How sick is that?