Addicted to violence

ARCHIVES 2009

By admin-s On Sep 9, 2009

By Wong Chin Huat (The Nut Graph)

WE have celebrated Merdeka Day and will usher in Malaysia Day, the real national day, just a week from now. But why are we celebrating the birth of our nation? Indeed, why celebrate the birth of any nation?

This is not another article lamenting that Malaysia has not treated some of its citizens fairly. It is not your "I love my country, does my country love me?" kind of thing. Many have complained about ethno-religious discrimination and exclusion in this country already. The ugly cow-head protest, which enjoyed inaction from the federal government and managed to subdue the Selangor state government, certainly did not stop many Malaysians from feeling like migrating to other countries.

So, why should we have this nation called Malaysia if we cannot love each other, you may ask. This is actually the romanticised myth behind the nation state: that it is supposed to let us love each other.

All states exist first and foremost not to promote love, but to stop violence. Love is the business of society, not government. In the words of Enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine: "Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the later negatively by restraining our vices … The first is a patron, the last a punisher."

We need a government to monopolise legitimate means of violence so that no individuals or groups can use violence to reign on others. Without this elimination of violence, no civilised life is possible. In this sense, the government must have enough coercive power to put down any private means of violence, but this coercive power must not be any greater than is necessary.

"Now the drugs don't work…"

A government is like a drug — you consume a dosage that's just enough to beat off the virus, not to get addicted. People who believe in authoritarianism and unconstrained coercive means like the Internal Security Act (ISA) or police brutality are like drug addicts. They are driven from one form of harm (private violence) to another (state violence).

Why must we minimise violence? The commonly understood reason is that it causes harm and misery to others. But the mere absence of violence does not guarantee well-being. After all, what is the point of non-violently and lovingly dying of famine? In reality, when humans are driven by famine or shortage of resources, they rarely remain kind to each other.

Thus, the often ignored but equally, if not more, important reason to oppose violence is that it prevents the use of reason. Violence is in fact the opposite of reason and in this sense is anti-evolutionary. Violence encourages us to win an argument by killing off our opponents rather than debunking their flaws or winning them over.

Hence, if society believes in violence, we will need to have stronger fists rather than bigger brains. We will develop only martial arts skills and abandon or even ban music and literature, except when they serve the purpose of war. We will develop technologies in weaponry rather than in agriculture, manufacturing or communications.

Minimising violence, on the other hand, means that we need to compete with reason in peaceful co-existence. Furthermore, our faith in reason would mean that we can be trusted with freedom.

In this utilitarian sense, the victory of reason over violence is socially and economically more productive. The end of the Cold War, which transformed battlefields into marketplaces, is the best proof.