When violence is divided into categories such as unacceptable, acceptable, or even necessary, a gross error is made in this division. It consists of the assumption that it is possible to fight only unacceptable violence without affecting other categories. The initiation of violence is supposedly useful in certain situations, and therefore this “useful” violence should be preserved.
However, dividing violence into different categories based on the indicator of acceptability and unacceptability is simply an absurd undertaking. Violence is indivisible; there are no people capable of committing one type of violent attack while being incapable of committing another. A person is either capable or incapable of committing a violent attack in general. You will be able to easily convince yourself of the truth of this statement after a brief explanation of the very nature of violent behavior and one interesting fact.
Violence is not a purely rational act to which a person resorts whenever it is profitable and does not carry serious risks. The manifestation of violence does not depend exclusively on social checks and balances. Regardless of the incentives, most people have never committed and will never commit an act of violence, at least not in its serious forms, such as causing significant physical harm to another person or murder. Throughout human history and in all circumstances, such as wars and genocides, fewer than 2% of people have committed such actions.
As a rule, humans possess natural deterrents to aggression—a violence inhibitor that causes a feeling of repulsion when attempting to commit an act of violence. This mechanism also plays an important role in the development of empathy, which is also inherent in most people. The ability of the average person to cause real physical harm to others is limited only to self-defense in the presence of an immediate threat to life.
Now it is worth mentioning one very important and interesting fact. As domestic violence statistics in the US show, it occurs up to 4 times more often in police families than on average in all American families. And these are only the cases that police officers reported themselves in anonymous surveys; surely many of them did not even admit to their violence in that way.
By preserving even one category of violence, it is inevitable that all other categories are also preserved. For a society to have police, soldiers, and even more so some kind of special services and “executioners” who carry out orders to eliminate someone, it is absolutely necessary for there to be a certain percentage of people in society who are capable of violence in general. Otherwise, there would simply be no place to get such employees. But if such a state of affairs is maintained, then private violent crime will never disappear. And the employees themselves will be a source of private violence. By day, someone is a highly successful employee, always ready to carry out any violent detention on command, and in the evening he returns home and beats his wife and children. Judging by the statistics, this is exactly what should be expected from a person who, in general, does not feel as strong a repulsion toward committing violence as other people do.
An attempt to merely limit, rather than eradicate, violence from people capable of committing it simply will not work. One can effectively fight only against all violence and all violent offenders at once. Violence cannot be divided into categories of acceptability and unacceptability (and even more so necessity), otherwise this problem will not go away, and that small percentage of people capable of committing it at any moment and in any form will continue to remain in society.
