To get started, everybody really needs to know some things about myself.
I am an idealist to the core. First and foremost in this regard, I am a pacifist. I have naturally been a pacifist my entire life. I was constantly picked on through most of my public schooling, often facing genuinely malicious behavior from classmates and even teachers. Somehow, even before I had consciously decided I was a pacifist (around age 15) I had almost no urge to cause physical harm to anyone. I pushed somebody down once when I was around 8 years old. To this day, I still count that as the only time I've intentionally caused another person physical harm... not like I actually hurt him :P
This pacifist nature of mine is going to be absolutely central to the story I am writing for my capstone. I am not going to blindly promote my ideals through this story, either. I want to run my ideas through a gauntlet of obstacles and tests and see if they come out the other side intact. I've constantly sought to test my ideas at every opportunity ever since I started to seriously think about life around age 15. I engage in debates constantly, often getting myself in trouble with people who don't like their ideas contested as I do.
I will post a synopsis of my story concept and more aspects of myself later. For now, I think this is a good way to lead into things.
Let me expand on this by explaining my reasoning behind pacifism.
First off, I think that human experience itself is the most precious work of art in the world. I think any shortening or spoiling of human experience is the most terrible thing imagineable. That is not to say that I see death itself as terrible, but the intentional infliction of death or suffering.
I also do not believe in good and evil people. I honestly believe that people are people. The world thrusts countless different circumstances on everybody which make us different. Some people end up damaged by these circumstances, or obtain perspectives of other people which lead to violence. Thus, I often say that there are no evil people, only misled people.
I also believe that most of the violence in the world today is justified as being a means to end violence. Most people believe that the best course of action available towards creating a peaceful world is simply to remove violent people from it, even if by violent means. I'm starting to refer to this in my head as the soldier mentality. It is the cold, hard duty of reality that the soldier sees as being terrible and ironic, but inevitable truth.
Lately, I like to put these principles into numbers. The more I attempt to simplify these ideas, the more I realize that they really can be reduced to simple logic and almost even math.
I like to represent these ideas with simple 1's and 0's. Let's say that a violent person (that is any person who performs or is willing to perform a violent act) is represented by a 1. Any person who is consciously and devotedly non-violent is a 0. I know that there is alot more grey area in the real world, but for the purposes of abstract demonstration, it really gets the point across.
The soldier expects the world to operate as the following.
1 - 1 = 0
That is, violence removed via violence equals non-violence.
But in reality, it's violence + violence which does NOT = non-violence. It is a cause-and-effect system which only escalates.
if you want a more real-world relevant explanation, remember that there are billions of people in the world, and any person who commits a violent act can be seen as a 1 by any other person regardless of intent. So one person violently destroys another person because they're percieved as violent, but then that person is percieved as violent by any number of others. Soldier's duty kicks in and the cycle runs endlessly. In my experience, soldier's mentality is very prevalent in the world, and there is an endless supply of 1's to keep up the fight.
The only substantial step towards a peaceful world is the spread of 0's.
A peaceful world is a world without violence. The absence of violence in the world is only attained through the conscious decision of the individual to be non-violent. However, this is not an easy decision to make, if one takes their own ethical framework seriously. I still wrestle with it. There is a large element of fear to overcome, because the majority percieves the only alternative to violence as being victimization.
So I've had this image in my head for several years now. I often sum up my worldview in relation to violence with this image.
Imagine every person in the world is pointing a gun at somebody else's head, while somebody else points a gun at their own head. Everybody wishes they could put their gun down, but they're just too sure that if they let their guard down, they'll be shot.
I'll leave you now with one of my favorite images in the world. A real-life triumph of the human spirit and a prime example of non-violence protecting itself and enacting change in a violent world.
No comments:
Post a Comment