The Opposite of Violence
This is a story from about ten years ago. Someone sent me a message on social media that they really wanted to meet and talk to me. I remember it being a short note that conveyed some sense of urgency.
That day, I was having a cup of coffee at a café in Okamoto, Kobe. Right after I tweeted that I’d been coming here since my teens, the reply came.
From the profile, the person appeared to be a high schooler. I had some things to do, so I turned down her request. I said we should meet another time.
A few months later I was back in Kobe, and we decided to meet at that café. After saying hello, she falteringly began to say what was on her mind. She wanted to be a writer, but what were the steps she needed to follow to get there? What did it mean to learn? When she finished, over two hours had passed.
The sun sets early in late autumn. I was starting to think maybe I should go home when she stared me straight in the face and brought up another topic.
“What do you think we need to do for the world to be peaceful?”
The look in her eyes was the one of a sixteen-year-old who won’t accept a cop-out. This was my reply:
“I think peace and conflict exist side by side.”
Eliminating conflict won’t bring about peace. People talk about creating an “inclusive society.” But the reason that coexistence on the broader scale of the world, as nature—including humans—works is the vertical axis of domination and order. You can call “order” “competition.” You can call it “the weak are meat the strong shall eat” or “survival of the fittest.” Conflict plunges right down the center of this world.
Too many people simplify that reality into “the strong ones win.” The result is that the strong ones win, but the lion isn’t always occupying the strongest position. Lions get eaten too. Humans get eaten by the earth.
Institutions and thought tone down the raw domination and order. With institutions and thought, the rate of exposure to violence decreases, but it’s not as if violence is abolished. That’s what I said to her.
When I get killed, it will be me getting killed, not you. Why does it have to be me? There’s no answer to that question. Daily life is full of incidents where the significance of someone’s birth is all too easily erased and the living body is ground into meat.
If unexpected fate means getting eaten by something, no human can escape the conflict of eating or being eaten any more than anyone else. Living means continuing to expose oneself to the maelstrom of violence. Living can only ever be violent. Violence is constant, and there is no telling when a destructive incident will occur.
So then will peace come around if violence is eliminated? Certainly laws prohibit violence. But violence bypasses the prohibition to invade, overflowing from inside us.
Perhaps in conceiving violence as the problem on the way to peace, you think of nonviolence or peace as the opposite of violence.
I think the opposite of violence is courage (bu). Courage contains violence. It has the potential to become violence. But the two are in competition.
Stability can only exist in the midst of that competition. Peace is a condition of life amid endless conflict.
Maybe existing as oneself is exclusionary. Because “I” am the only one who can stand where “I” am standing. “I” am always in competition with others.
But that’s precisely why “I” am an other to myself. “I” must be in fierce competition with the “I” who only thinks of “me,” who has a tendency to devolve into violence. Surely that’s what courage really means.
I think it’s fine to envision peace to your heart’s content. But courage is built up through experience; it is neither the language of thought nor doctrine. Perhaps it’s just enough to guarantee the competition that keeps us from becoming violence incarnate.
Translated by Emily Balistrieri
Social media preview image by Ahmed Fareed via Unsplash