We Don’t Hate Violence, Only the Wrong Kind of Violence

Or, when you cannot change facts, you should change the context

👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.

It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.

I’m back from my holiday. It was super fun! One of the goals of my trip was to live with locals and connect with them — something I’ve never been very good at. All the Airbnbs we booked were private rooms in somebody’s place, precisely for this reason. I’m happy to say that this experiment has been a success.

Fun Fact: I got to stay at one of my reader and early supporter’s place in Barcelona. Noel and his girlfriend were kind enough to host us. For free. Super grateful!

On to this week’s essay! It’s about 1,000 words.

Note: If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart below my name (above)? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍

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Q: Can we influence human judgement without changing the facts?

In the excellent 1996 movie Primal Fear, starring Richard Gere and Edward Norton, when a beloved archbishop is brutally murdered in his private quarters, Edward Norton’s Aaron Stampler is caught fleeing the scene covered in blood.

Martin Vail (played by Richard Gere) believes Aaron is innocent and decides to defend him. But later he finds a tape incriminating Aaron. As he confronts him, Aaron breaks down crying and suddenly transforms into a new persona, Roy, a violent sociopath. The neuropsychologist is convinced that Aaron has dissociative identity disorder caused by years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his father and the archbishop.

Aaron is a murderer — that’s a fact. But in the “right” context — he was abused for years and he has a mental disorder — suddenly we become lenient. Suddenly, we are ready to forgive him because now we “understand” his plight.

Today, let’s talk about context. More precisely, how we can tweak people’s minds without changing the facts. Let’s try to understand how, with the right context, a judgement can sway from being very harsh to being extremely merciful.

Let’s take violence for example.

I enjoy violent movies, but I’m not a fan of violence otherwise. War movies are my favourite genre, but I’m generally opposed to war. I’m usually against capital punishment, but I want Hitler (and his likes) to die an extremely painful death. As a kid, I liked shooting other kids with my air pistol (it didn’t hurt, only pinched), but at the same time I preferred diplomacy and “dialogue” over physical violence to deal with disputes at the cricket field.

In other words, I have a confused array of feelings and thoughts about violence, aggression, and competition. Just like most humans.

To put it plainly, our species has “problems” with violence. We have created mushroom clouds that have decimated cities, our subway ventilation systems have carried poison gas, our letters have carried anthrax, our passenger planes have become weapons, bombs haven gone off in markets, schoolchildren with guns have massacred other children, and there are neighbourhoods in many parts of the world where everyone from janitors to firefighters fear for their safety.

Then there are the other less visible versions of violence. A childhood of growing up abused, or the effects on a minority people when the majority shouts domination and menace.

We are always shadowed by the threat of other humans harming us.

But it’s not that simple. If violence were like AIDS or Alzheimer’s — or in other words, if violence was unambiguously bad news — it would be an easy problem to approach intellectually. Similar to schizophrenia, cancer, malnutrition, flesh-eating bacteria, global warming, etc.

The problem is that violence doesn’t go on that list. We often have no problems with violence at all.

We don’t hate violence. We hate (and fear) the wrong kind of violence. In other words, we shun violence that is in the wrong context.

Violence in the right context is different. We pay good money to watch it in a stadium, we teach our kids to fight back, we feel proud when, in creaky middle age, we manage to beat the shit out of a pickpocket at a train station.

Not only that, our conversations are filled with military metaphors. We “rally the troops” after our ideas “get shot down”.

Our sports teams’ names celebrate violence — Knight Riders, Super Giants, Titans, Tuskers, Warriors. We even think this way about something as cerebral as chess — “Kasparov kept pressing for a murderous attack. Toward the end, Kasparov had to oppose threats of violence with more of the same.”

We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and many women prefer to mate with champions of human combat.

Even the most famous children’s book series, Harry Potter, is full of violence.

When it’s the “right” type of aggression, we adore it.

It is the “ambiguity” of violence — that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love — that is so challenging.

To mitigate ambiguity, we take solace in context.

For example, we distinguish between hot-blooded and cold-blooded violence. We “understand” the former more. Consider the grieving father who avenges his child’s murder — we empathise for him.

Conversely, affectless violence is horrifying and incomprehensible because they are often without context. This is the sociopathic contract killer, the Hannibal Lecter who kills without his heart rate nudging up a beat, who has neither any emotion nor any passion, and their work has no story or meaning. We have no soft corner for such people.

Violence maybe an easy target, but we expect our most prosocial acts to be warmhearted as well. “Cold-blooded goodness” seems oxymoronic and can be unsettling.

A philanthropist with a warm smile who hugs every person they meet appears more “normal” than their counterpart who appears cold and smileless, despite all the good they do. Something feels strangely off about a good person who doesn’t smile.

Suppose you see a piece of art that you think is very poorly drawn. If I tell you it was drawn by a three-year-old, you start seeing it differently. If I tell you that it was drawn by a three-year-old chimpanzee, you start seeing it in another way. If I tell you that I’ve drawn it, but with my left hand (I’m a righty), you see it differently.

A fact doesn’t dwell alone. It lives with context. Facts derive meaning from context.

How we behave, how we make judgements is fuzzy — there’s a lot of emotion that is context dependent. You may not change facts (especially when they are obvious), but you can tweak the context to change the meaning and influence human judgement.

You were late at office — fact. But it’s only because you were taking a stranger to the hospital — context. You didn’t do well in exams — fact. But you were suffering from tuberculosis — context.

Context creates narrative. It’s hard to resist a good narrative.

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Timeless Insight

Getting 100K subscribers, or 1M customers, or 100Mn in sales is not creation. It’s a side effect. It’s a validation that people want what you are creating, but if that’s the only thought on your mind, especially in the beginning, it would kill you.

You don’t need validation. What you need is the minimum amount of validation in order to keep on doing what you love to do, without losing heart.

Minimum validation is the smallest number of subscribers, customers, or sales you need to keep yourself motivated and continue doing what you are doing.

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What I’m Reading

Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.

— Susan Cain, Bittersweet

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Tiny Thought

A class war is prevented not by abolishing classes, but by giving the ruling class a superiority which cannot be challenged.

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Before You Go…

Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, jokes. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋