Literally Violence

America is in the midst of an epidemic of violence.

Look around any corner and you might see it. It’s lurking in our cities, it’s afflicting our neighborhoods, and it’s inside our homes. It’s in our colleges and our families. It’s everywhere. And the police can’t stop it.

They can’t stop it because I’m not talking about criminal violence. I’m talking about the violence of gentrification, of measuring BMI, of literature reviews. Talk to the right political activists and thinkers and you’ll learn that all these things are literally violence.

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Along side the COVID-sparked increase in actual violence, there’s also an epidemic of calling things violence. If you exist online and talk about politics, you’ve seen it. Capitalism is violence. Silence is violence. Speech can be violence, especially jokes. Evictions, borders, not wearing masks and the gender binary are all violence.

Fossil fuels are violence. Naturally. But did you know nuclear power is also violence? Hydroelectric dams and infrastructure are violence too. Poverty is violence. Talking about obesity is violence, and dieting is a violent act. If a sports team’s coach yells at players, that’s obviously violence.

At some point, you start to envision the average ‘X is violence’ argument as this scene from Reno 911:

You’ll never see conceptual boundaries shattered as hard and as fast as when we explore all the things violence can be. Campus speakers and common phrases can be violence. Microaggressions are absolutely violence. Housing deregulation? That one’s actually genocide.¹ Acts as mundane as making your child put on a coat or not taking out the trash are described as literal violence. The entire concept of science is a structure of violence, whatever that means.

As far as I can tell there’s no outer limit. Some activists will write with a straight face that non-violent action has always been violent.

Some of the things mentioned could potentially be considered violence by normal people, depending on how you define it. Some of them can’t be considered violence unless you streeeeeech your definition to the breaking point. And some are outright absurdities.

At this point, there are probably a number of conservative readers snickering to themselves about Those Dumb Lefties. Look how cringe they are! I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that while some leftists think gender itself is violence, rightists claim that leftist gender ideology is violence. The left may say that heterosexuality is violence, but conservatives insist that homosexuality is violence against God. One camp says abortion restrictions restrictions are violence, while the other says abortions are violence (and a third group of freaks say all adoptions are violence). You can find conservatives moaning about how IVF and diversity are violence. Libertarians? You better believe that taxes are violence. And while liberals say gun ownership is violence, libertarians say that gun control is violence.

This happens more often on the left, but none of you are free from sin.² Everything, everywhere is violence.

Why is this happening?

The Worst Argument in the World

Years ago Scott Alexander wrote a short essay titled The Worst Argument in the World. The worst argument in the world, he says, is the Non-Central Fallacy:

"X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."

In more illustrative terms, the worst argument in the world is that Martin Luther King was a criminal, and therefore bad. The archetypal criminal is a sex offender or a murderer. They hurt innocent people, they destroy public trust, and have a harmful impact on society. We have strong negative connotations towards the word criminal. And yet it’s the case that MLK knowingly broke the law many times. He was objectively and irrefutably a criminal.³ Gotcha, MLK fans! Your hero isn’t so great now!

The problem with this argument is that it tries to assign our typical gut reaction to the word ‘criminal’ on to MLK, who did not hurt innocent people or have a harmful impact on society. Murderers are bad and MLK was good, even if they share a category.

This is also what’s going on when you hear the libertarian complaint that ‘Taxes are theft’, usually coming from the most punchable face you can imagine in the smuggest possible tone. You don’t support theft, do you? Well, taxes are when my money is taken without my consent, by threat of force. That’s theft! Checkmate, libs.

This ignores that the typical case of theft is a guy mugging you in an alleyway and is very unlike the collection of taxes. A typical theft is unjust, unplanned for, in violation of the social contract, and has no beneficial purpose - whereas taxes are planned, predictable, agreed upon by the community and have a socially beneficial purpose.

The purpose of the worst argument in the world is to skate past all those complicating factors and reduce your argument down to a single emotional plea. This thing is bad, you see, because it’s violence. We all hate violence, you’re not in favor of violence, are you? These are thought-terminating clichés, words that indicate the reader can stop thinking and accept the pre-determined conclusion that Thing is Bad. It spares you from having to make an actual argument - nobody would be for literal violence, right? So fashion is violence, and that’s the end of the discussion.

The Degradation of the Discourse

When violence is invoked this way - usually by activists or those making political arguments - there’s little effort made to explain exactly how the thing in question is violence. Proof isn’t even attempted, the word is just gestured at and then we move on. That whiteness is violence is asserted, not explained. When there is an explanation, it usually tortures the word’s natural definition into oblivion.

Believe it or not, the point here isn’t to shame any individual example listed above. What the above paragraphs should hammer home is the full breadth of how meaningless terms like ‘violence’ become when they’re overused and abused like this. Just like ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘capitalism’ or ‘wokeness’, violence has become a sort of boogeyman phrase, a self-justifying invocation where further explanation is unnecessary.

Ugh, Capitalism

I’m here to stand athwart the onslaught of Literally Violence, and stubbornly insist that further explanation actually is necessary. You don’t get to invoke the bad word and call it a day, you need to make real arguments for your political positions. That’s a difficult and time-consuming thing to do, but you must do that if you want to be taken seriously.

There’s a counter-argument that goes something like this: “These people aren’t using the word the same way you do! They just define violence differently. Words can have several definitions, and can change over time. Don’t be such a stick in the mud!”

At the risk of being the stick in the mud, no. This is not the neutral evolution of a word, akin to how ‘nice’ changed meaning from foolish to pleasant. Calling things violence is a deliberate political tactic. This sort of wanton redefinition leads you down absurd pathways, like world-famous philosophers saying that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

This sort of rhetoric is also bad for activists themselves. On a basic level, it’s a lazy form of rhetoric that rots your brain. It denies any sort of complexity in any issue. There’s no need to understand the complicated details of housing policy when you can casually assert that tall buildings are violence. Why would you consider trade offs, why would you carefully analyze the situation? One side is by definition wrong and evil, and must be condemned.

This turns politics into a tribal game of who can denounce the most things and who can denounce them the hardest - rather than a debate of whose ideas help people and which actions can make the ideas happen. Arguments, like muscles, atrophy over time. If you continually resort to cheap shots of ‘this thing is violence’, if you never actually explain why your positions and beliefs are correct, you’ll lose the ability to do so.

It’s also bad for the activists’ well-being. I’m not the first to note that younger Americans are going through it. If a generation grows up hearing that everything is violence, everything is abusive and genocidal and threatening, it should be no surprise when that generation has higher rates of depression and anxiety.

Bad things exist. There’s actual violence out there in the world, and people want to feel safe. But in addition to making people feel safe, we also need to teach people to be strong and resilient. And the relentless focus on ‘violence’ is part of a larger coddling of the American mind, a phenomenon that makes no difference towards solving real issues but traumatizes those involved.

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If everything is violence, the word loses its impact and its seriousness. If you insist that mispronouncing a name is literally violence, then most people won’t decide that mispronouncing a name is a hurtful thing they must carefully avoid. They’ll decide that violence, as you insist on using the word, is not that bad.

What happens when you mispronounce a name?

Acts of real violence like murder, assault, or sexual abuse are serious and horrifying. The word violence should properly express that horror, and it’s dangerous to allow it to lose its power.

Words change over time. That’s a normal and healthy process. But the purpose of words is to convey meaning, and the current misuse of violence does not accurately convey any meaning. It muddies rather than clarifies. We do a disservice to ourselves and our discourse when we insist that everything is violence.

1. You really don’t want to know how long this paragraph could be if I included all the things that are abuse, or genocide, etc.

2. In addition to the examples above, the right typically prefers a different set of scare words like woke, socialist, etc. You don’t get to smugly think you’re above it all if your media machine calls everything under the sun ‘cultural Marxism’.

3. One response to this argument is to weakly insist that actually, MLK wasn’t a criminal because his actions were just and virtuous and the state itself was criminal and yada yada yada, trying desperately to redefine the word. This is thoroughly unconvincing. A much better argument is to shrug and say “I’m not going to argue definitions, but if MLK was a criminal he was a good one and more people should be like him”.