When To Choose Violence

Or, when does violence choose you?

I’ve been trying to decide how to feel about the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO. My first impulse was, on the one hand, to be extremely careful about condoning violence while, on the other hand, to appreciate the act as a demonstration that we are—we remain—in a class war and that more people need to take that seriously. Too many people are constrained by a sense of decorum in their resistance to oppression, a sense of decorum established by and for the oppressor. I hope this incident will make people realize that it should be we, not our rulers, who determine where the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of resistance lies, and that it should be much more inclusive than it presently is.

But does it include assassination? Does it include war? To what extent should any kind of political violence be practiced, advocated, or condoned? I’ll say this much for certain: political violence like this assassination is going to be inevitable so long as there are not effective, peaceful alternatives readily available. It is maybe possible for a person to totally refrain from violence even in the face of harm to oneself or to innocent people, but if it is, it must be the result of nearly superhuman discipline, and thus correspondingly rare. This is to say that to expect such infinite restraint from the majority of people in the face of escalating, unpunished abuse is naive to the point of delusion. How about this, from the White House Press Secretary: “violence to combat any sort of corporate greed is unacceptable.” Really? Any sort at all? What about when that corporate greed becomes its own kind of violence?

What happens if we consider the murder of a healthcare profiteer through the lens of self defense? How should we respond to a group of people who intend to steal the means of our survival and leave us for dead, especially if we have no hope of legal protection from them? Should we let such a group commit mass murder, especially of the most vulnerable, for the sake of the ideal of pacifism? Or worse, of civility and decorum? Or are we obliged to stop them, even at the cost of violence we never wished to commit? Is this not the struggle we find ourselves in against those who profit from death, whether it be in the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, or the military industrial complex?

But we need to remember that the real enemy isn’t corporeal, and so there is no number of dead CEOs that, by themselves, will be enough to achieve liberation. Rather, the enemy is the logic of separateness and infinite accumulation that we carry within us like a parasite and which sustains itself through our actions. It is this logic that has manifested itself as the death machine we call capitalism, and while the United Healthcare CEO was certainly a privileged cog in that machine, he was trapped in it just like we all are. In the end, we are all responsible to some extent for the machine’s continued functioning.

The dual nature of this problem—that it is everywhere but nowhere—mirrors that of the ethics of attention I talked about last time. For us to act properly, I said, we must first grasp our similarly dual nature as individuals, but also as manifestations of the universe, of the All. However much we disagree with the practices and direction of our society, we are in some sense responsible for them, because we as individuals are products of this society, and this society has no other existence from that of the individuals within it.

Therefore, changing our society and changing ourselves are one and the same thing. This is true in two senses. When we change our individual selves, society changes as a result, and that society feeds back on and influences us as individuals. But also, because of this feedback loop, it turns out that our self is never just our individual body, but the loop itself, back and forth between society and individual. What happens “out there,” to “other people,” will always find its way back inside us, which shows us that outside and inside are always two sides of a whole.

It is therefore a mistake to believe that when we commit violence against another person we are not also committing it against our own self, our own universal body. This is not to say that such self-inflicted violence is never justified, any more than it is to say that it is never justified for our immune system to destroy our own cancerous cells. But to lose sight of the fact that we are always acting from and against a single universal body is to risk the equivalent of an autoimmune reaction that destroys the systems which keep us alive.

Since the shooting, I’ve asked myself, as probably many people have, whether this might be the most effective way, in the present moment, of advancing our liberation struggle, whether this is the kind of act this moment requires of us whether we like it or not. But in considering the nature of what I’ve called the ethics of attention, I’ve come to believe that it is far less important to consider the effectiveness of particular actions than it is to always bear in mind the kind of dual beings we are. To the extent that we do so, and pay attention to the total situation in which we find ourselves, our actions will be appropriate. To the extent that the assassin acted for the good of all, rather than out of a need for individual revenge or empowerment (as so many men with guns do), I am prepared to condone his act, and to hope it will provoke the kind of change that our society requires without resort to further violence. Likewise, to the extent that he was willing to take another life solely to appease his own selfish anger, I condemn his act, and caution against the allure of self-righteous violence. Both motivations were present in his case—the selfish and the selfless—as they are in all cases to varying degrees.

So, should we be plotting the assassination of CEOs? If that’s really the best we can do for the world, given our circumstances, abilities, and limitations, then the answer, by definition, is yes. If we can agree that violence can ever be called for—e.g. in self defense or to protect the innocent—then we must accept that, in such a scenario, we should be prepared to carry it out.

But.

Violence is not the only or even the primary means to liberation, and I suspect that nearly everyone, nearly always, could find a better means of service to the universal body. That’s almost certainly true even for the assassin, but something kept him from finding it, and violence was the best he could do. So it is imperative for all of us to first do the work of understanding our dual nature as individual manifestations of the universal body, and to learn how to let our actions flow from that understanding. To do otherwise, to act as separate individuals against the Other, to cast ourselves as avenging angels waging war against demonic capitalists, is to fall prey to the very logic that is our real enemy, and thus to strengthen it.