What is structural violence?

[Magnus]

Paper notes printed by fractional reserve central bankers, and deemed by the State to be the only valid currency, is a deeply perverted form of money.

 

But that does not mean that there can never be an ethical form of free market money. It doesn't mean that all money is bad and must be abolished. It means that central banking, legal tender laws, fractional reserves and other Statist aspects of today's money are deeply wrong and harmful.

 

I wish the RBE crowd would take a little bit of time and care to understand what money is and how the current Statist banking scam actually works. If they did, some of them might not gravitate toward fantasy nonsense like the Benevolent Commie Computer of Infinite Abundance, and would instead focus on the real, practical causes of the pervasive monetary distortions we actually live with.

[FriendlyHacker]

Paper notes printed by fractional reserve central bankers, and deemed by the State to be the only valid currency, is a deeply perverted form of money.But that does not mean that there can never be an ethical form of free market money. It doesn't mean that all money is bad and must be abolished. It means that central banking, legal tender laws, fractional reserves and other Statist aspects of today's money are deeply wrong and harmful.I wish the RBE crowd would take a little bit of time and care to understand what money is and how the current Statist banking scam actually works. If they did, some of them might not gravitate toward fantasy nonsense like the Benevolent Commie Computer of Infinite Abundance, and would instead focus on the real, practical causes of the pervasive monetary distortions we actually live with.

 

Don't underestimate what people know, because they might know more about it and spent more time studying it than you think, calling people ignorant because they don't agree with you is a non sequitur.

[STer]

Imo, money was the greatest invention ever in mankind because it allowed the division of labour to really get started and allow technological process.   Many of the greatest tragedies in mankind's history have been due to the constant meddling with money by "authorities", thereby disrupting the division of labour process leading to inefficiency in the system which has meant scarce resources do not get to where they are supposed to. 

 

Yes but many of the other greatest tragedies in mankind have been allowed by technological "progress," as well, which has led to horrible weaponry and so on.

As far as I can tell, the lobbyists paying off the government in order to keep making money off scarcity are going to keep doing the same thing with or without a government, and if you think rich people would only manage to screw up the monetary system with a government paid army, then you are not following the latest developments in warfare technology.

 

How can lobbyists pay off the government to keep making money if there is no government to pay off?

 

Are you saying there are groups of rich people using private armies to implement their policies? If so, that would be great evidence to put forth to show not all the problems are state-caused or driven by corrupt people wielding the state. Please post examples of that if you have them.

This is a really long thread for something with such a simple answer...  Violence created by structures, also known as governments and dogmatic religions.

 

I believe that when PJ and Zeitgeisters say "structural violence" they are not talking about violence committed by entities that have a structure. I think they are talking about "violence" that emerges out of the structure of society itself. I mean even the human body has a structure so you could say a person punching another person is "structural violence" if it meant what you are putting forth. But I'm pretty sure they mean what I said in my second sentence instead.

Don't underestimate what people know, because they might know more about it and spent more time studying it than you think, calling people ignorant because they don't agree with you is a non sequitur.

 

I would like to hear your response, though, to his point. Time and again, it seems you are putting forth problems with things like money, but all the problems you list come from the state-related forms of it.

 

Of course, the money has nothing backing it up and so it is paper and all the things you said. But that's because the government decoupled the money from having any backing.

 

I feel like the folks at FDR and the Zeitgeisters actually agree on so much more than they realize. But what keeps seeming to get in the way is that the Zeitgeisters point out all the problems and the FDR people then point to how every single one of those problems involves state interference. Your response can't just be "oh trust me, it would still happen without a government." You have to give examples of how it happens without a government.

 

Personally, I'm not saying you're wrong and it couldn't happen without a government. I'm reserving judgment. But Zeitgeisters really need to give a lot of examples of how these things are corrupt even separate from government influence.

[Mike Fleming]

It was a brilliant invention, so was the morse code.

 

Who owns the government? Do you know?

 

"Permit me to issue and control the money of the nation and I care not who makes its laws".

Who said that? Was it a politician, or a banker who profited from printing fake paper? Is this person directly related to what happened during the great depression?

 

No-one owns the government.  As many people are fond of saying, there is no such thing as the government.  Only the unjust use of aggression because some people believe they have authority and others believe they have that authority.

 

As for the rest of your post I'm not sure what point you are trying to make?  Can you elaborate?.  The quote I think comes from Rothschild.  I'm not sure of it's authenticity.

Yes but many of the other greatest tragedies in mankind have been allowed by technological "progress," as well, which has led to horrible weaponry and so on.

 

Technology is a double-edged sword, I think that's well established by now.   I'm sure it wasn't long after the first caveman made the first axe that one subsequently sank one into someone else's head.  Not what it was originally designed for, but hey, we humans are nothing if not inventive.

 

The pace of technological progress is why I think government, and the idea of authority, is too dangerous an idea to be allowed to live.  It's already wrought too much destruction.  With more and more advanced computer technology the state becomes more dangerous to us and our freedoms than ever.  That's why I'm in this community.  Before I discovered libertarianism and, then anarchism I was deeply depressed about society because, working in IT, I could see where the development of technology was going and how it would empower the state and what the state was already doing to shut down freedom in the name of security.  It seemed we were doing a tailspin into a 1984 world.   And it felt like I was the only person in the world who realised it and that's why I was depressed.  I'm much more optimistic now, but I still recognise it's a long fight.

[Think Free]

@STer, it has become completely clear to me that you either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge what's going on in this argument. I believe I have rationally answered all of your points and that you have been unable to answer mine. I believe a competent third party reading this discussion would either acknowledge that I am correct, or provide new facts or arguments that you have not provided. Therefore, this will be my last post responding to you on this subject unless either a third party adds something new to our argument or you reveal a better understanding of what's going on. All my comments below are in support of the claim, "You don't understand our argument."

 

I notice that every time I say something, you disagree with something else, and I point out that you misquoted me, your next move is to talk about "relevance." I connect civilization and states, you misquote me as saying agriculture and states, I point that out. Instead of saying "Sorry, yes you said civilization and states, my mistake, we do agree on that." instead you start talking about "relevance."

 

I made the following claim, "Unless your position is that either states are necessary for the famine-preventing measures to exist, or that states are a necessary and unavoidable result of those famine prevention measures, it doesn't matter." Your rational options are to either: a) agree with me, b) provide an argument for why the above statement is false, c) prove a necessary connection between the famine-preventing measures and states." Rather than do any of the above, you have continually and repeatedly made vague claims (ie. do not establish necessity) about the relationship between various things, which I have dismissed as irrelevant because they do not meet the criteria of the above uncontested claim.

 

(Here is a partial list of your claims: "The development of the state is not just tangentially related to agriculture and storage." "It [(the state)] emerged directly from them as part of the very same movement." "The reason states emerged isn't just tangentially involving famine-reduction, but directly rooted in famine-reduction strategies." "These guards and administrators would be the analogy of what the state developed out of." "...the rise of civilization and the rise of cities/states went hand in hand..." "[Quoting Wikipedia:] The emergence of civilization is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, a slow cumulative process occurring independently over many locations between 10,000 and 3,000 BCE, culminating in the relatively rapid process of state formation..." "They [(Wikipedia)] are saying not only do they [(civilization and cities/states)] go together in time but one was the direct outgrowth of the other." "...the state arose directly from civilization..." "So what I am saying is 'hand in hand', in this case, turns out to reflect more than just correlation. City/states emerged as a direct result of civilization.")

 

I am not "disagreeing with something else," "misquoting" you, or making a "next move." I am doing the same thing over and over again, which is point out that none of your claims address my claim and therefore are not relevant.

 

 

If you think what I'm saying is not relevant, then why waste your time responding? If you agree with what I say great. If you disagree with what I say, fine. But to respond to things I didn't say, then refuse to retract when I point that out, and then just start saying my comments are irrelevant doesn't make much sense. I'm starting to wonder if we're even discussing the same point here or you think we're having a different discussion than I do for a different purpose.

 

I respond to your irrelevant claims because you seem to think they are counterarguments. I don't have to take a position on your claims because they are irrelevant, as I repeatedly explain. As far as "responding to things [you] didn't say," I already explained that if I was misinterpreting the point of your claims, then they are still irrelevant. Here's the dilemma that you're in. Either your claims are irrelevant because:

 

1. They don't establish any connection at all between "agriculture, villages, settlement, food storage, or famine avoidance" and "state," which is what our whole disagreement was about.

 

2. They establish a connection between "agriculture, villages, settlement, food storage, or famine avoidance" and "state," but it is not a necessary connection.

 

or 3. Both of the above.

 

Why you should insist that you have been making error 1 instead of (or in addition to) error 2 is beyond me, but you can excuse me for (in good faith) assuming you were only making the second error by extending your claims to be less irrelevant to our disagreement. That's why I "refuse to retract when [you] point that out, and then just start saying [your] comments are irrelevant." Because if my characterization of your statements is not correct, that just makes them less relevant than I was already saying they were.

 

 

I already clarified the "hand in hand" comment by saying "My statement was "Civilization and the rise of cities/states went hand in hand." When Wikipedia says civilization culminates in the rise of states, that is making the connection even deeper, not looser. They are saying not only do they go together in time but one was the direct outgrowth of the other."

 

And my reply, as always, was that "direct outgrowth" doesn't establish a necessary connection any more than "goes hand in hand" does.

 

 

"Unless this means a necessary result of agriculture... well, you know the rest." - Yes, the rest is you take what I say, ignore it, change the subject and argue a straw man. I said what I said. If you agree, great. If you disagree, great. If you find it irrelevant, then why are you responding at all?

 

The rest is, "this claim is irrelevant."  I guess you didn't know the rest. And pointing out the irrelevance of your claim to your position is completely legitimate. Are you conceding that your claims are irrelevant? If not, my claim that your claims are irrelevant is relevant and needs to be rebutted.

 

 

Your analogy was an attempt to clarify your interpretation of what I said. 

 

Not at all, my analogy was an attempt to clarify my explanation of why your claim wasn't relevant.

 

 

I said something. You gave an analogy that supposedly reflected the logic of what I had said. I then gave an analogy that better reflects the logic of what I had said. I didn't ignore your analogy. I pointed out that your analogy poorly reflected the logic of what I said by contrasting it with a better analogy (though I did make a mistake as clarified below).

 

You have to show that your analogy is better, not simply assert that it is, which is what you have done in every case where I brought up an analogy. Before I let it slide because in those cases I thought that, while your version of the analogy wasn't relevantly different than my analogy, it was more closely analogous to what you had said (in irrelevant ways). However, in this last case, your analogy was not only not relevantly more accurate, it was (and as I will show below, still is) actually disanalogous to the situation.

 

 

You missed the logic of my point which was that a problem in one place may be caused by factors in multiple other places. A country's problem may be caused by governments in multiple other places, not only its own, just as a problem with your car's brakes may have been caused as a result of a mixture of problems in factories all over the world.

 

The whole point of my analogy was that your claim, "a problem in one place may be caused by factors in multiple other places. A country's problem may be caused by governments in multiple other places, not only its own..." while being true, doesn't contradict my claim which was that "looking at one country in isolation does pretty much tell the whole story of famine if the government is so heavily taxing farmers that they barely produce more than they can eat. Sure, there can be other mitigating or encouraging factors, but the government crushing agriculture (and the economy more broadly) is the most important thing you need to know about the cause of the famine." Yes, sometimes there's more to the story, but in this case there isn't. Since my analogy was a response to the logic you seem to think I missed, I think it is pretty clear that it was you that missed the logic of my point, not vis-versa.

 

On your point #2: I've pointed out in the thread that I don't even know what "structural violence" is defined as so I'm not sure how I could argue for or against it. I can't say a thing about whether "structural violence" causes famine or not until that term is defined which I've never seen done in a way that is defensible yet.

 

You were arguing against my argument against "structural violence." That's why "structural violence" is important to our argument. If you don't understand "structural violence" enough to understand my argument, that would explain a lot. It would have been better if you had added the following disclaimer to your original disagreement: "I don't know what 'structural violence' means so I don't understand your argument, but I am going to disagree with it anyway."

 

 

You're right though that I misspoke about the analogy. You were saying that brakes not working = government violence. I was speaking as if brakes not working = the country failing, with famine just being one aspect of that.

 

So to fix up my comment on the analogy, it is like you saying "the car crashed because the brakes aren't working" and me saying "the car actually may have crashed because of many other factors, and, even if the brakes are now not working, which may or may not be the case, we don't know if that was the original cause yet. It's possible that as the accident began to happen, the person slammed on the brakes and blew out a brake line during the crash, not as the cause of it, but an effect." and so on.

 

In some cases, a country's own government may not be the original cause of the famine. In other cases, the country's own government is problematic, but still not the original cause of the problem, just a part of the problem. In others, the country's own government may be almost completely to blame for the famine.

 

So let's look at this new analogy of yours. We've established that "brakes not working" = "government violence." So according to your analogy, you are claiming that we do not know if violent government is even present in those countries now, let alone whether it was present before the famine. This is clearly false--just look at the countries in question now and before the famines. According to your own analogy, you are claiming that it is possible that the famine started to occur first and then oppression of the economy came afterward. This is, again, just false. Maybe you want to claim that, while clearly there was strong state violence, we don't know that it caused the famine. But how can taxing farmers so that they have no incentive to produce more food than the bare minimum they need in a country with extreme poverty not lead to famine? (We don't even need to mention that the extreme poverty is also the result of government violence.)

 

So, I say that in the case of these African famines the country's own government is almost completely to blame for the famine, and your response is, "In some cases, a country's own government may not be the original cause of the famine. In other cases, the country's own government is problematic, but still not the original cause of the problem, just a part of the problem. In others, the country's own government may be almost completely to blame for the famine." So either you're conceding my claim or you're simply disagreeing with my claim without providing a counter-example.

[JoaoPMatos]

For a better understanding of what structural violence is supposed to be one could read Slavoj Zizek book "Violence". That is exactly what that book is about, the supposed subjective violence (structural violence) vs objective violence (wars and the like).He is kind of a weirdo marxist intellectual that actually likes capitalism (thereby, weird)...but he is considered one of the foremost intellectuals of the west, so great study subject.He also has lots of stuff on youtubeCheersJoao

[STer]

No-one owns the government.  As many people are fond of saying, there is no such thing as the government.  Only the unjust use of aggression because some people believe they have authority and others believe they have that authority.

 

As for the rest of your post I'm not sure what point you are trying to make?  Can you elaborate?.  The quote I think comes from Rothschild.  I'm not sure of it's authenticity.

 

Technology is a double-edged sword, I think that's well established by now.   I'm sure it wasn't long after the first caveman made the first axe that one subsequently sank one into someone else's head.  Not what it was originally designed for, but hey, we humans are nothing if not inventive.

 

The pace of technological progress is why I think government, and the idea of authority, is too dangerous an idea to be allowed to live.  It's already wrought too much destruction.  With more and more advanced computer technology the state becomes more dangerous to us and our freedoms than ever.  That's why I'm in this community.  Before I discovered libertarianism and, then anarchism I was deeply depressed about society because, working in IT, I could see where the development of technology was going and how it would empower the state and what the state was already doing to shut down freedom in the name of security.  It seemed we were doing a tailspin into a 1984 world.   And it felt like I was the only person in the world who realised it and that's why I was depressed.  I'm much more optimistic now, but I still recognise it's a long fight.

 

My view, which I've made sort of the core idea of my writings on this subject, is that we have a volatile mixture of two things:

 

1) Technology keeps progressing, which allows more extreme helpful and harmful gadgets and tools.

 

2) Society is filled with a certain percentage of people of limited conscience/empathy (due to various conditions) and another certain percentage of people who are "hijackable" by those people.

 

Two main views seem to have emerged:

 

1) Dangerous people are around with access to increasingly dangerous technology. We need a government with enough strength to stop them because nobody else could.

 

2) Dangerous people are around with access to increasingly dangerous technology. We must never have a government so that these people cannot get enough strength by becoming part of it because then they would be unstoppable.

 

As I've phrased it many times, is government the protector against dangerous people or the concentration of dangerous people?

 

Clearly on FDR people lean toward the latter. But I think it's really not that simple. I think you can find cases on both sides. There are endless examples of abusive governments where terrible people get access to so much power and cause horrific outcomes. But there are also certainly examples where governments have saved many lives by stopping rogue non-state actors hell-bent on doing terrible destruction for a variety of motives.

 

This is a real stumper. On one hand, you definitely need to keep these dangerous people out of any entity with so much power as the government. On the other, with the level of technology available, it doesn't take many of these people to become powerful enough that only a very strong entity with a similar level of power can stop them.

 

What I think is that the focus is too much on government vs. non-government and too little on "How do we identify which people are dangerous?" The technology in that field - for example, the increasing ability to notice differences in brain scans of areas associated with empathy and conscience - is fascinating. But even that technology is scary if in the wrong hands.

 

So it's quite a complex dilemma we're in here with the issue of the combination of increasingly powerful technology and government as protector vs. danger.

For a better understanding of what structural violence is supposed to be one could read Slavoj Zizek book "Violence". That is exactly what that book is about, the supposed subjective violence (structural violence) vs objective violence (wars and the like).He is kind of a weirdo marxist intellectual that actually likes capitalism (thereby, weird)...but he is considered one of the foremost intellectuals of the west, so great study subject.He also has lots of stuff on youtubeCheersJoao

 

Zizek is a really interesting guy. Every time I listen to him speak, I learn some entertaining quote or story or idea. But if you think PJ is good at "word salad," Zizek is like the double extra large word salad. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure out what he's saying half the time. But I think it's more the word salad.

[JoaoPMatos]

"But if you think PJ is good at "word salad," Zizek is like the double extra large word salad. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure out what he's saying half the time. But I think it's more the word salad."Haha completely agree..some parts of the book i was like "what the hell was i reading about on the previous sentence? ". His writting (and ideas probably) is all over the place, drawing thoughts and references from multiple other thoughts and references, and really saladyyy, seems like the books arent edited...well probably the editors dont get it either. But really interesting indeed.Cheers

J

[STer]

 

"But if you think PJ is good at "word salad," Zizek is like the double extra large word salad. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure out what he's saying half the time. But I think it's more the word salad."Haha completely agree..some parts of the book i was like "what the hell was i reading about on the previous sentence? ". His writting (and ideas probably) is all over the place, drawing thoughts and references from multiple other thoughts and references, and really saladyyy, seems like the books arent edited...well probably the editors dont get it either. But really interesting indeed.Cheers

J

 

 

Oh man, can you imagine trying to edit a Zizek book. It would be ruled cruel and unusual punishment.

@STer, it has become completely clear to me that you either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge what's going on in this argument. I believe I have rationally answered all of your points and that you have been unable to answer mine. I believe a competent third party reading this discussion would either acknowledge that I am correct, or provide new facts or arguments that you have not provided. Therefore, this will be my last post responding to you on this subject unless either a third party adds something new to our argument or you reveal a better understanding of what's going on. All my comments below are in support of the claim, "You don't understand our argument."

 

 

I made the following claim, "Unless your position is that either states are necessary for the famine-preventing measures to exist, or that states are a necessary and unavoidable result of those famine prevention measures, it doesn't matter." Your rational options are to either: a) agree with me, b) provide an argument for why the above statement is false, c) prove a necessary connection between the famine-preventing measures and states." Rather than do any of the above, you have continually and repeatedly made vague claims (ie. do not establish necessity) about the relationship between various things, which I have dismissed as irrelevant because they do not meet the criteria of the above uncontested claim.

 

(Here is a partial list of your claims: "The development of the state is not just tangentially related to agriculture and storage." "It [(the state)] emerged directly from them as part of the very same movement." "The reason states emerged isn't just tangentially involving famine-reduction, but directly rooted in famine-reduction strategies." "These guards and administrators would be the analogy of what the state developed out of." "...the rise of civilization and the rise of cities/states went hand in hand..." "[Quoting Wikipedia:] The emergence of civilization is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, a slow cumulative process occurring independently over many locations between 10,000 and 3,000 BCE, culminating in the relatively rapid process of state formation..." "They [(Wikipedia)] are saying not only do they [(civilization and cities/states)] go together in time but one was the direct outgrowth of the other." "...the state arose directly from civilization..." "So what I am saying is 'hand in hand', in this case, turns out to reflect more than just correlation. City/states emerged as a direct result of civilization.")

 

I am not "disagreeing with something else," "misquoting" you, or making a "next move." I am doing the same thing over and over again, which is point out that none of your claims address my claim and therefore are not relevant.

 

 

 

I respond to your irrelevant claims because you seem to think they are counterarguments. I don't have to take a position on your claims because they are irrelevant, as I repeatedly explain. As far as "responding to things [you] didn't say," I already explained that if I was misinterpreting the point of your claims, then they are still irrelevant. Here's the dilemma that you're in. Either your claims are irrelevant because:

 

1. They don't establish any connection at all between "agriculture, villages, settlement, food storage, or famine avoidance" and "state," which is what our whole disagreement was about.

 

2. They establish a connection between "agriculture, villages, settlement, food storage, or famine avoidance" and "state," but it is not a necessary connection.

 

or 3. Both of the above.

 

Why you should insist that you have been making error 1 instead of (or in addition to) error 2 is beyond me, but you can excuse me for (in good faith) assuming you were only making the second error by extending your claims to be less irrelevant to our disagreement. That's why I "refuse to retract when [you] point that out, and then just start saying [your] comments are irrelevant." Because if my characterization of your statements is not correct, that just makes them less relevant than I was already saying they were.

 

 

 

And my reply, as always, was that "direct outgrowth" doesn't establish a necessary connection any more than "goes hand in hand" does.

 

 

 

The rest is, "this claim is irrelevant."  I guess you didn't know the rest. And pointing out the irrelevance of your claim to your position is completely legitimate. Are you conceding that your claims are irrelevant? If not, my claim that your claims are irrelevant is relevant and needs to be rebutted.

 

 

 

Not at all, my analogy was an attempt to clarify my explanation of why your claim wasn't relevant.

 

 

You have to show that your analogy is better, not simply assert that it is, which is what you have done in every case where I brought up an analogy. Before I let it slide because in those cases I thought that, while your version of the analogy wasn't relevantly different than my analogy, it was more closely analogous to what you had said (in irrelevant ways). However, in this last case, your analogy was not only not relevantly more accurate, it was (and as I will show below, still is) actually disanalogous to the situation.

 

 

 

The whole point of my analogy was that your claim, "a problem in one place may be caused by factors in multiple other places. A country's problem may be caused by governments in multiple other places, not only its own..." while being true, doesn't contradict my claim which was that "looking at one country in isolation does pretty much tell the whole story of famine if the government is so heavily taxing farmers that they barely produce more than they can eat. Sure, there can be other mitigating or encouraging factors, but the government crushing agriculture (and the economy more broadly) is the most important thing you need to know about the cause of the famine." Yes, sometimes there's more to the story, but in this case there isn't. Since my analogy was a response to the logic you seem to think I missed, I think it is pretty clear that it was you that missed the logic of my point, not vis-versa.

 

 

You were arguing against my argument against "structural violence." That's why "structural violence" is important to our argument. If you don't understand "structural violence" enough to understand my argument, that would explain a lot. It would have been better if you had added the following disclaimer to your original disagreement: "I don't know what 'structural violence' means so I don't understand your argument, but I am going to disagree with it anyway."

 

 

 

So let's look at this new analogy of yours. We've established that "brakes not working" = "government violence." So according to your analogy, you are claiming that we do not know if violent government is even present in those countries now, let alone whether it was present before the famine. This is clearly false--just look at the countries in question now and before the famines. According to your own analogy, you are claiming that it is possible that the famine started to occur first and then oppression of the economy came afterward. This is, again, just false. Maybe you want to claim that, while clearly there was strong state violence, we don't know that it caused the famine. But how can taxing farmers so that they have no incentive to produce more food than the bare minimum they need in a country with extreme poverty not lead to famine? (We don't even need to mention that the extreme poverty is also the result of government violence.)

 

So, I say that in the case of these African famines the country's own government is almost completely to blame for the famine, and your response is, "In some cases, a country's own government may not be the original cause of the famine. In other cases, the country's own government is problematic, but still not the original cause of the problem, just a part of the problem. In others, the country's own government may be almost completely to blame for the famine." So either you're conceding my claim or you're simply disagreeing with my claim without providing a counter-example.

 

Well since you start your post by saying you won't be responding anymore, I see no point in taking the time to carefully go through this and respond to it. Suffice it to say, I feel the same, that you don't understand the topic of the discussion. I think we're having two separate discussions that just overlap a little and are talking right past each other. If you decide you want to continue, then I'll read all this and respond. But otherwise I am not going to put in the time to go through it all.