The desire to do violence seems to stem from one of two sources; one either employs violence in order to get something one desires, or one embraces violence as the execution of a sort of divine mandate for retribution.
Generally it is the individual who uses violence to satisfy personal desires, and it is the greater society that justifies its system of institutionalized violence as a righteous execution of Platonic retributive justice. The latter seems to be the more frightening of the two because it is not seen as an individual’s decision as to what is right or wrong, but as an indisputable cosmic ethic.
The first use is simple to discern, although few see it as plainly as it is. Individuals use violence in order to get what they desire. I want to be stylish so I will buy clothes made in sweatshops, accepting the violent oppression used to manufacture those clothes. I want money so I rob a store. I like the taste of meat and dairy products so I eat them, despite the brutal violence used to get them on my plate. I do not want a child, so I destroy the fetus inside me. All of these are examples of individuals deciding to use violence to get what they want. Note, however, that very few think it is right and necessary to destroy fetuses, murder animals, or oppress workers. Most either do not care what they are doing or not think that what they are doing is wrong.
Let us move, however, into the realm of physical interpersonal conflict: fights, wars, and the like. There exists in nearly every corner of society the belief that if someone is attacking you or attacking someone else, it is not only justified to attack that person, but it is right, it is essential, it is one’s duty to attack that person. The Platonic idea of justice in this society is one of clear and unambiguous retributive violence. If someone hits you, you hit him back and give him what he deserves- only then will rightness be restored to the situation, only then will justice have been executed. Our sense of justice is as a vampire: it requires violence to exist.
This ethic does not apply just to small-scale violence: it requires violence built in as the cornerstone of the system of social organization. It requires an armed police force to shoot those who may be a threat (pre-emptive justice). Police are revered and respected not only because they are a source of protection, but also because they are seen as the executors to divine justice: they are the good guys, restoring equilibrium to the cosmic balance by destroying the bad guys with violence.
We maintain a massive prison system, the primary purpose of which (as is demonstrated by prison conditions) is not to rehabilitate, but to punish. The court system is seen as the symbol of justice in this society: an individual is decided to be either guilty or not guilty of a particular “crime,” and if found guilty that individual is locked in a cage for years as punishment. And this daily judicial activity is the most revered act of justice, is considered the purest execution of justice: that the “guilty” be punished with the violence of incarceration, or even be put to death.
But from where does mankind draw this ideal that justice necessarily demands violence, that the execution of retributive violence is a divinely-sanctioned mandate? Why is it that if a person who commits violence is not violently punished, a great injustice is considered to have occurred? This ethic is what allows people to say that someone “deserves” to be jailed for life, that someone “deserves” to be beaten by police, that people of some country “deserve” to be bombed.
It is an idea of violent retributive justice for which a society both presupposes its own innocence and assumes for itself the role of executor. Society (or rather, mainstream society’s ethic) plays judge, jury and prosecution at the trial of one who has gone outside of that society’s rules of conduct.
Thus violence is not only accepted by the society, violence is embodied and promoted by the society. Retributive violence is not only accepted, it is deemed proper, right, moral, necessary. It is deemed vital to the existence of a just society. Thus a just society, by current standards, is founded on a bloodthirst, on the self-assumption of moral righteousness and the duty to violently punish as an earthly execution of a divine scheme of violent retributive justice.
In making the distinction between individuals’ acts of violence and society’s institutionalized violence, we are not at all to suppose that individuals’ use of violence for personal ends is any less horrific or wrong. But although peoples’ viewpoints on personal morality differ, there is a collective and almost universal acceptance of the idea that Platonic justice demands we be executors of punishment. It is the collective belief that violence can be and is right when worked within a popular of codified system of behavior.
It is the assumption of divinity on the part of mankind, for it is making violence a moral demand, it is deeming the destruction of life a necessity. It is this self-divination that has justified violence on all levels-individual, state, international- for thousands of years, and continues to demand punishment and retributive violence today.