Transcripts / Violence

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So why is it that humans just can’t stop killing each other? Well I don’t know, what do I look like to you, some kind of philosopher? So look, Thrasymachus, this is a question for God and the prophets, not for preening transsexuals who can’t get out of bed without a Bloody Mary. 

However, if I were to make a modest contribution to the subject, I would humbly offer up the hypothesis that humans are horrible to each other because, well, violence is fun. And when I say that, I of course mean that it’s fun to be violent. It’s not fun when other people are violent to you. I mean, unless that’s what you’re into. 

That is what I’m into

Did I say you could speak?

No mistress–

Then shut up 

🥛 Mm. It's good. Chocolate-y. Stanley Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange" is very uncomfortable to watch, and not just because it depicts horrible acts of violence. Most of the movies I like depict horrible acts of violence. I mean if you’re gonna watch a non-violent movie you may as well read a fucking book. 

What’s disquieting about "A Clockwork Orange" is that it encourages us to viddy the old ultra-violence largely from the perspective of the sadistic protagonist, a jaunty rapist who likes to sing and dance as he tortures and humiliates his victims. What’s creepy about Alex is the film encourages us to identify with him, and he kind of draws us in. I mean he listens to Beethoven, and I personally am attracted to every man who has ever liked German composers. Also he tries the wine. 🍷

So we watch Alex kick, and spin, and smash things, and beat the shit out of homeless people, and bash old ladies in the face with giant sculptures of dicks, and all of this to triumphant classical music and show tunes. It’s clear that for Alex this is all a lot of fun. So the question I wanna ask is, how unusual are people like this in real life? How normal is it to enjoy violence?

I mean extremely violent behavior is uncommon, but part of that might be that most of us live in political circumstances where behaving like a violent maniac is… highly frowned upon. And there’s also that tedious old thing called having some semblance of a moral conscience. And I think that’s part of the reason why so many people don’t really enjoy watching "A Clockwork Orange". It’s not that they don’t enjoy violence, it’s just that in order for them to enjoy violence they need some kind of reassurance that the violence is okay, and that enjoying it is morally and socially allowed. 🍹

I guess it’s kind of like sex. I’m not gonna want to have sex in a fluorescent-lit bathroom stall–at least, not since I started taking this shit– I need candlelight to get me in the mood you know, a little goddamn ambience. And you could say that the moral conscience is the fluorescent-lit bathroom stall of the human mind. You can’t properly enjoy violence with all that internal nagging in the background. But in that case, what is the romantic candlelight of the sadistic psyche? What do we need to get to a place where we can enjoy violence?

Well think about the TV show "Law & Order: SVU", which has just as much sex and violence as "A Clockwork Orange", but which is much more popular. SVU is a show where hero cops with no regard for due process brutally interrogate suspected sex offenders, and smash them in the face with wooden drawers. 

You like that don’t you?

I love it so much.

You all do. I think a lot of the appeal of SVU is that it gives upstanding American citizens a way to sate their curiosity about heinous sex crimes, while promising the moral purification of justified police violence. 

Ohhh, so that promise is the candlelit ambience of the moral psyche. When we believe that violence is morally justified, when we think the guy being thrown around the interrogation room fucking deserved it, we become capable of enjoying it aesthetically. 

Exactly. And I think this kind of moral lampshading partly explains the popularity of rape-revenge plot lines you see in movies like "Kill Bill", "The Crow", and Curious George Kills the Rapist. For viewers with too many moral hangups to get off on totally senseless violence, a rape-revenge plot line is a cheap way to establish the emotional precedent required for a gratifying bloody payoff. 

But I wonder if there may not be as much of a psychological difference between the good person’s enjoyment of "justified" violence, and the evil sadist’s enjoyment of "random" violence as we might like to think. 

Yes, the good person has a moral conscience as a kind of inhibitive influence. But once you get past that there’s a kind of amoral kinetic rapture in swinging, thrashing, stabbing, shooting, blasting, and burning; an aesthetics of violence and destruction. 

Now I, for one, hardly ever enjoy real-world violence because I empathize with the victim and my conscience vetoes any enjoyment of it. I mean, unless I get real frustrated–

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Shut up! Please just shut up! I can’t think with all this noise. I can’t think straight. You're so filthy. It’s time to drink your milk. 

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But you know, when I’m playing video games and there are no moral or practical consequences to any of my actions, I behave like an absolute goddamn psychopath. I guess that a simulation of a thing being fun doesn’t mean the thing itself is fun. I mean "The Sims" is a simulation of life and that’s fun, but life itself... is terrible. 😔

To be clear, that was a joke, not a cry for help. I’m actually fine. I have tons of friends. I’m fine. I'm really– I'm, I'm fine. I’m happy, okay?!?!

Here’s what I want to know, unless violence is fun on some basic level, why are simulations of it so fun that the gameplay of most video games is based entirely around it? Some critics have suggested that this is simply toxic masculinity at work, and that it’s a patriarchal moral defect that our media is so violent. And yeah, it’s true that men are mostly responsible for this, granted. But honestly I feel a little bit infantilized by the moral critique since I like violent media, and I feel like I can tell the difference between real and fictional violence. Although sometimes the distinction between real and simulated violence can get blurrier ₮Ⱨ₳₦ ł Ʉ₴Ʉ₳ⱠⱠɎ Ⱡł₭Ɇ ₮Ø ₮Ⱨł₦₭.

♪ Hush little baby don’t you cry, momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird ♪

Joshua Oppenheimer’s disturbing documentary "The Act of Killing", chronicles the contemporary lives of the Indonesian gangsters who massacred millions of alleged communists from 1965 to 66. One of the killers, Anwar Congo, explains on a local television program that his torture and murder methods were inspired by sadistic American movies.

"Each genre had its own method. Like in mafia movies… they strange the guy in the car, and dump the body. So we did that too."  

The documentary takes a surreal turn as the original perpetrators set to work producing cinematic reenactments of their youthful war crimes, stylizing the events after Westerns, Mafia films, and other Hollywood genres. It’s a particularly uncomfortable case of life imitating art. And on that topic, Stanley Kubrick had "A Clockwork Orange" withdrawn from British distribution in 1973, after the film was alleged to have influenced a handful of real-life assaults. 

Now I’m not saying that violent movies make people violent, and we know that most consumers of violent media never commit acts of violence themselves. I mean I watch violent movies all the time and I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.

So now "woke" @ContraPoints thinks child abuse is funny. I personally drowned several of my babies and it was very traumatic for me. ⌨️

Why did I become an SJW again?– 

Hey! What I wanna know is what’s the difference between fans of violent movies who are peaceful and those who are sadistic killers? Well, who better to ask than an Indonesian gangster with a thousand dead communists under his belt?

Interviewee: "Killing is the worst crime you can do. So the key is to find a way not to feel guilty"

… 

Interviewer: "But the Geneva Conventions define what you did as 'war crimes'."

Interviewee: "I don't necessarily agree with those international laws. The Geneva Conventions may be today's morality, but tomorrow we'll have the Jakarta Conventions and dump the Geneva Conventions."

So in other words as long as you can justify it to yourself with some kind of flimsy excuse, you can kill without remorse. And I imagine it also helps when the US-backed government of your country endorses the killing, and you never have to face any consequences for it. What’s interesting to me is that the sadistic enjoyment of violence is psychologically identical, whether or not your justification rationally holds up or makes any sense. 

In other words the psychology of a righteous sadist may not differ from that of an evil sadist, except that the former has better reasons backing him up, or lives in a better political situation. But hold on, is there even such a thing as a righteous sadist? I think it’s okay to enjoy violent movies, but is it ever not bad to enjoy real violence? What would be helpful here is an example, some act of violence that my audience thinks is righteous and that a lot of them probably even enjoy. Unfortunately, my audience is morally superior, and none of them would ever enjoy such a thing–

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@ContraPoints has completely libbed out and can’t stop wringing her hands over a poor little Nazi getting hit in the face. Awwwww. ⌨️

Alright, alright. Let’s grant that punching a Nazi is morally acceptable. Let's say it’s morally required even. Well, why don’t we try to bring everyone on board. Suppose there’s a Nazi TERF and he’s about to punch a baby, and punching the TERF Nazi is the only way to stop him punching the baby. Socrates, is it just to punch the baby-puncher?

ContraPoints’ sponsors would like to apologize to the baby community for this video’s ongoing trivialization of infanticide. They’d also like you to know that some of Natalie’s best friends are babies, and they all think babies should just learn to take a joke.

Why are we still even still talking about this over-discussed Nazi punching bullshit? I guess part of it is that it’s the only actual recent example of far-left violence in America that anyone seems to be able to dig up. 

Tabby: Not for long bourgeois dogs! Catgirls of the world unite! 

Natalie: Tabby, could you bring it down just 27 notches or so?

Tabby: *hissing* 😾

Natalie: Why don’t you take a second to relax. Just chill out a little bit. Here, have some spiked milk. 🥛 ♪ "Rasputin" by Boney M ♪

That is having a very interesting effect on her. I guess my continued uneasiness with leftist “punching” discourse– whether it’s Nazis or TERFs or whatever– is twofold. First there’s just the optics problem. We want to convince people that, for instance, trans women are not creepy men who want to assault cis women. And I can't help but wonder, is the slogan “kill all TERFs” really the most effective way to convey that message? …And I realize the costume I’m wearing is not the best for making this point either. But you know, I just didn’t plan well. 

The other worry has to do with when violence stops being strategic and starts being fun, as in our collective enjoyment of the Richard Spenser punch. Because then it’s not just that we’re saying sometimes preemptive violence is necessary to prevent worse crimes, it’s that we're actively fucking enjoying it. And any time real violence becomes fun, that’s a little alarming because even if your actions are genuinely justified, you don’t want to get in the habit of enjoying real violence, because the violence will continue to be fun whether or not your justifications are any good. 

Though I agree there’s something sort of inherently liberal about this anti-sadism hang-up. For most of history it was just accepted that war involves a certain amount of rape and pillage, and that executions were entertaining public spectacles. As a boring French postmodernist called Michel Foucault pointed out, in the 18th and 19th centuries there was a so-called humanitarian revolution that was suddenly ashamed of overt sadism with respect to criminal justice and treatment of the mentally ill, replacing brutal executions with intricate techniques of discipline. 

And a boring French communist called Alain Badiou– argued that this contemporary ethics based on pity and tolerance is actually just fucking neoliberal bullshit that encourages first-world people to stage third-world "humanitarian interventions" that look a lot like invasions for some reason, as well as opposing genuine liberation movements on the grounds that such movements amount to violent ideology– the bourgeois liberals claim. 

So I guess in a sense my weird hang-up about violence benefits the people in power, since you have to break a few eggs to make a communist utopia, and sometimes to make political progress you have to tar and feather some folks, and cut their heads off just a little bit, or punch them in the fucking face. 

Now I realize that all the non-leftists watching this are absolutely horrified right now, and they’re thinking: “What’s to stop your violent revolution from becoming just as bloodthirsty and unjust as those Indonesian gangsters killing communists?” To which I respond, well that’s an easy one. It’s because my side are the good people and your side are the bad people, I’m so sorry. Seriously though, that is a pretty good question. Why don't I change the subject to avoid how much of a problem it is for the argument I’m making?

Isn’t all politics kind of violent? What about capitalism? Politics is the practice of organizing groups of human beings, and it’s the relations of power that maintain or disrupt that organization. So there’s always violence or the threat of violence in there somewhere. In our own society, police will use violence against us if we disobey the law or are Black. And even when white people do obey the law there’s always the implicit threat of police violence, including the potential arrest and incarceration of pretty much every citizen who doesn’t have enough money to–⚡️

Let’s talk about Western values. According to the great tradition of European political thought, sovereign power is justified by the social contract. In other words, we all consent to be governed because it’s in our own interest. Except it’s really hypothetical consent more than anything, because no one actually asks you and you can’t say no. Wait a minute… 

Shhh! I guess if you live in a liberal, capitalist society, it’s pretty easy to see how fascism and revolutionary movements are inherently violent, and how those political situations generate conditions where violent sadism can flourish. What’s harder to see is how the same tendency spills out at the seams of our own supposedly humane society. We think of the police as peacekeepers, not killers, yet it’s not unheard of that oh… Oh no. Oh god. 

Likewise we think of our wars as liberation projects or humanitarian interventions, but when you put real human beings in combat situations the nature of war has a way of just oh… Oh god. No. Fuck.

We tend to pass particularly harsh moral judgment on sadism, but sadistic violence isn’t even necessarily the worst thing that can happen to people.There’s also the quieter structural injustices that lead to millions of people starving, or workers throwing themselves out of windows at the iPhone factory, or the lowkey normalization of sexual assault in supposedly civilized countries, none of which requires so much as a single cackling maniac.

So in order to think about this intelligently, we need to weigh the risk that revolutionary violence will spin out of control and lead to sadistic mayhem, against the risk that our complacency with the injustices of the status quo will make us quiet enablers of more subtle but equally unjust forms of violence. And I don’t feel confident enough to say which one I think is the bigger risk. But I do know I don’t trust the politics of anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the problems with both options. 

So… in conclusion… is violence good?… Or is it bad?… I guess we’ll never know.

You know, with any true philosophical question there always comes a point where you realize that all the rationalizations you tell yourself for all the things you believe and do just don’t really make any sense. And that’s when it’s time to stop thinking about it, you know? Just go do the fucking laundry. Drink some wine. I don’t know, do whatever. Look, what do you want from me?