I think the root of human violence is that in most forms, people do not see it as violence; or at least, they invariably frame their own violence as protective, proactive, necessary.
I’m watching a documentary on Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, and they have footage of Hitler. It is a recurring theme in his actual speeches that he does not want violence, but by God he is not going to let it be visited on the German people, that he is sick of the crimes the Jews commit against Germans, how they sabotage them at every turn. And how the international community cannot wait to shrink Germany into a small space and cut their balls off (in effect).
Hitler never said “we need to invade the Soviet Union and Western Europe”. What he said was that Germany needed space to live and breathe, and that on all sides everyone was trying to prevent it, and to confine them.
All mass violence begins like this. People have violence in them at all times, but they need an excuse to let it out. An excuse, to return to the modern era, like the belief that “fascists must be attacked”. This belief, of course, has less validity than Hitler’s claim that the world wanted to confine Germany, which was somewhat true (they did after all start World War 1, for somewhat similar reasons).
Be all that as it may, I am going to try for a longer term sobriety again, this time based on understandings I did not have even a week ago, which is that at root addiction is internally directed rage, and as such a remnant of a violence which happened outside of me, which I could not control, but which presumes my own life is worthless. My own life is not worthless. I cannot control the storms which happen outside of me, and which regrettably play out within me still. But I can focus on the good, and learn to calm myself. I have already had some successes.
So, I feel this violence, deeply. I do not get sex yet, but I get violence. I think I can say that.
And what soothes violence is music and dance. I was reading this piece yesterday, somewhat at random: https://www.absolutept.com/mental-physical-effects-drumming-review/
Does it not seem obvious that music has, as the saying puts it, the “power to soothe the savage soul”? Does it not seem obvious that it brings people together, even disparate, different people? Does it not seem obvious that dance does as well? That it brings about spontaneous social orders which are robust, at least for a time, and quite real?
Ponder in this regard the prohibitions in Islam respecting music, dance, representational art, and intoxication in any form.
Could one not say that this religion is constructed so as to PREVENT the formation of any spontaneous order OUTSIDE of violence? War is of course a well proven way of building comradery, and group cohesion. And I suppose gang rape is a sort of war, isn’t it?
Islam is an order intrinsically and intentionally based on the use of force. Force to prevent women’s “immodesty”. Force to ensure conversion to Islam. Force to ensure no one leaves Islam. Force to make sure people pray 5x a day. Force in the face of anyone who criticizes Islam. Everywhere, a war, even within the “House of Peace”, to keep it homogeneous.
Genuine individuation and the development of personal moral consciousness is impossible in such a situation. It is a totalitarianism which in the case of the Saudis literally extends to your bedroom and what you do with your dick.
I have always noticed on college campuses that the Muslim students are almost invariably clustered in groups of 2-3. If they are not in a group, they are looking for one. People who do not value independence and individualism need one another for continual reinforcement. It has no room for a personal, conscience based relationship with God. Rather, it is a social system organized by force to coerce everyone to interact with one another and the process of prayer in ways determined 1,500 or so years ago, in a desert far, far away.
This is the major point, though: how is peace possible with people who hate joy, who hate dance, who hate singing, who hate music, and who hate non-abstract art, which is to say, virtually all of the crowning achievements of the human spirit, the world over, and who are unique in all this?