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I think I get where you're going, but the civilians won't and can't. And it's a bit meandering. There's a core of truth here, but the presentation obscures rather than illuminates, at least for those whose minds don't run on this software.
Not that I could do better, I've been working on the philosophy of violence and the limits of rules for some time, and I can't make it sound anything but crazy to normies. This is what films like The Matrix and Fight Club (or American Beauty) are all about, and why they were such hits. They spoke to the underlying and terrifying reality that it really just is all sex and violence at the bottom, with ten thousand years of social, economic and political structures sitting wobbly on the narrow balance point of mass public opinion.
Civilization isn't even skin deep. It can vanish in an instant, and does, for millions of people every day.
There are those who know this, and those who desperately need to keep convincing themselves that it isn't true, because that would mean it was their responsibility to take care of themselves, rather than their parents/teachers/professors/police/government. This is what Dostoyevsky is talking about with "everything is permitted". "God" is the symbol of social control superseding human agency. But there is no god, and we can do anything. Only by careful consideration and long experimentation can we constrain this basic reality into a productive human civilization.
Normies have a fundamentally broken view. They think that when violence occurs it's completely unacceptable unless the state is doing it, but that some of the worst people can be excused for it because they cannot do any better. It's the same view, writ large, behind the idea that if someone rudely pre-empts you, the only polite thing to do is graciously allow them to. As I said it's fundamentally broken, and it would fall apart utterly if we didn't have an insanely powerful state freezing everything in place, bad ideas and all.
Calling it the normie view pretty much implies that it is the view of the majority, but from what I can tell only a small fraction of the population of the US has such a view.
The vast majority of Americans have never been in a fight, ergo have no recourse to violence, ergo rely on the state to do their violence for them. Everyone's had a reason to fight, sometime or another.
But for most people it almost never makes sense to do so. If you lose you go to the hospital, if you win you go to jail. If you go to jail and you're one of the "rough men" you might not suffer much as a result. If you're not you may not just lose your freedom but your job, your future, your friends, even your spouse, because now you're a barbaric criminal.
Solzhenitsyn quote you probably already know, but will come in handy if you don't:
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For a simple assault charge plead down to disturbing the peace or some shit? The fact that you think so shows my point more clearly than I could have. I've been in many fights, in jail a dozen times, caught charges twice, and my record is underage drinking and "recieving stolen goods" for having an old sign for a months-old hockey game in my dorm room. And that's only because it was campus police, rather than real cops.
You don't generally get done for fighting. The other guy has to press charges, they have to find him, you'd have to tell them etc. Your paranoia of being a "barbaric criminal" and your whole life collapsing for scrapping is simply perfect. That, that is the mentality I'm talking about.
We're likely not similarly situated. My sister got busted for minor in possession of alcohol, lost a college internship (teaching) as a result, and was unable to get another until she managed to get the record sealed. And that's as pissant a charge as you can get beyond traffic tickets. Of my co-workers in my past few jobs, judging from the reactions if I tell the story I'm probably the only one who has been arrested for anything serious as an adult (I was not convicted, or I'd likely be long dead by my own hand). I know of people who weren't hired because it turned out they had a criminal record, though for what I don't know.
The other guy doesn't have to press charges. If you get in a barfight, you can get busted for drunk-and-disorderly if not assault, for instance. Or if the cops break up the fight they can and sometimes do charge all concerned.
One can always find a reason why a course of action is too risky.
True, but that does not mean the reason is never correct.
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Exactly. Unless it's an immediate mortal peril, it's generally best to be physical conflict avoidant in modern society due to the consequences of civilization being potentially levied on you.
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Just because a man decides to rely on state violence instead of doing violence himself does not mean that the man thinks that violence is unacceptable unless the state is doing it. More often, it means that the man thinks that it makes more sense from a benefit/risk perspective to rely on the state than to do it himself. It's not about personal violence being acceptable or unacceptable to him.
No, it doesn't. But it is a revealed preference that others do violence in one's stead.
It's the difference between eating meat and hunting. Between cheering for your team and being on the team. Between supporting a war and fighting it.
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Normies have surrendered to logic, but it is precisely the illogical, violent and insane passions of humanity that militate against any long-term oppression. You have to be willing to suffer wildly disproportionate consequences for the sake of internal principle to ever fight a structural issue. Hence religion.
Of course, this basic urge also produces many societal problems. Like beer, violence is the cause of and solution to many of our problems. This is a fundamental tension of humanity, that our most heroic impulses are also our most evil and destructive.
I think this is wishful thinking.
I suspect that the truth is that the median plumber electrician or individual working an hourly min-wage service job understands all of this implicitly and that it's the rationalists and the grad students who haven't made the connection yet.
Those at the lower end of the economic scale can see into the void below, it's why they're working. They're also the secondary victim pool of the underclass, so a much larger percentage of them have experience with violence. But even then, it's a minority in the US. Some localities (like mine) are high enough crime and conflict that probably the majority of males making less than 50k a year have experience with violence, but it is one of the most violent places in the country, and has been for thirty years.
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Long-term oppression is the story of history.
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