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This is one of my favorite essays, it also has a great aside about how the appetite for power is more dangerous than the capacity for violence, which has always

This is one of my favorite essays, it also has a great aside about how the appetite for power is more dangerous than the capacity for violence, which has always stuck with me as a particularly astute observation. The essay is also particularly good because it recognizes that Shakespeare pre-identified faults in Tolstoy's philosophy, in King Lear. I've also long thought that a lot of the subtlety of language touched on in this essay would have likely escaped Tolstoy in translation.

hitekker 9y ago
Very astute indeed, this is my first time hearing about it. Copy pasted below: > The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise. My two cents is that the vast majority of people likely have the similar capacities for violence, their expression only changes in different contexts and for different reasons. Orwelles articulates that in the political context, the most likely reason for violence is to attain power, so those who care less for power have less reason and therefore less-seeming capacity for violence. I quite like how he establishes that the reason for violence comes before the capacity of violence when considering if someone will be violent/express violence. That man had a window into the political soul.

hitekker 9y ago

Very astute indeed, this is my first time hearing about it. Copy pasted below: > The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise. My two cents is that the vast majority of people likely have the similar capacities for violence, their expression only changes in different contexts and for different reasons. Orwelles articulates that in the political context, the most likely reason for violence is to attain power, so those who care less for power have less reason and therefore less-seeming capacity for violence. I quite like how he establishes that the reason for violence comes before the capacity of violence when considering if someone will be violent/express violence. That man had a window into the political soul.