Peace Before the Storm--Confronting the Mythology of Violence

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The renowned 19^th century Lakota Medicine Man, Black Elk, once described his vision of a great universal peace among men, stating:

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

Similarly, in the beginning of the Gospel accounts, a host of angels celebrates, “Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards men” with a handful of shepherds working the night shift as the Christ child is born nearby in Bethlehem, laying the foundation for the original Gospel message of peace and love. As this Christ child grew to be a man, he boldly declared that living peacefully on Earth was the obligation of each and every inhabitant on Earth. For peace to happen, we each must be willing to love one another, even our enemies, and to forgive, to let go, when others fail, or offend us.

Now this didn’t go over well with the religious and political establishment of his day, who rather proclaimed that a Jew must be willing to fight their oppressors, to kill their enemies, in particular, the Romans, to restore the prestige and political might of the nation. This political agenda eventually led to several violent wars against their Roman overlords over the next century, tragically resulting in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE and then eventually to the Jew’s being permanently kicked out of Palestine in 136 CE. So it should be no surprise that when these same religious and political leaders couldn’t get this uppity peace-loving Jewish hippy to shut up about forgiveness, they nailed him to a cross as a traitor to their revolutionary cause.

Years later the political elite of the new Christian religion also pushed aside the peaceful Christ child, concluding that the Jewish elite were actually right about killing their enemies. The only problem in their mind was that the Jewish leaders didn’t have the superior Christian god on their side. As such, the Christian religious and political establishment has waged innumerable crusades, holy wars, purges, assassinations, and inquisitions throughout the last two millennia. Today this religious violence continues as American Christian Nationalists wage war against secular democracy, the Russian Orthodox Nationalists wage war against their former colony, Ukraine, and then the ideological descendants of the first century Jewish nationalists continue to wage war against their Palestinian neighbors in the name their nationalistic god, while various Islamic nationalists wage war against everyone that is not their particular religious sect. This pretty much brings us up to date with today’s headlines, which conspicuously doesn’t mention any sort of “peace on earth” or “goodwill towards men.”

The celebrated play, Romeo and Juliet, is often portrayed as the tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers. However, the story is principally about a violent feud between two prominent families in Verona. It has very little to do with love or romance. Romeo and Juliet are barely pubescent teens of around 14 years merely playing at being lovers. Upon meeting at a masquerade ball one night they impulsively promise to get married the next day, rashly pledging their enduring commitment to one another. Rather than a sheer poetic device, compressing time in a literary bottle, this passionate impulsivity is the point of the play. In the second act, Friar Laurence reflects upon the dangerous course of these immature passions, warning:

These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness And in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

In the previous scene, he waxes on about the paradoxical nature of life, observing how a plant that is used to heal may also be used to kill, stating:

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime by action dignified.

In the very first scene, the violent course of the story unfolds as members of the two families meet on the streets of Verona, attempting to provoke a violent confrontation in feigned self-defense. The play descends into chaos as the hatred between the two feuding families envelops the two naïve children over the course of a few days, tragically ending in both of their deaths.

Fundamentally, there is a moral subtext to violence that circumstantially justifies its use, if not in the societal milieu, then at least in the mind of the perpetrator. Thus, if I tell a tale of a bloody encounter between a band of masked interlopers who subdue a hapless soul knocking him unconscious, wherein the leader subsequently pulls out a knife plunging it into the now unconscious subject’s abdomen, what moral principle would one apply to this violent encounter? On one hand, if I say the masked interlopers are bandits, most would agree that this is a clear tale of vice having an unambiguous perpetrator and victim. On the other hand, if I say that the interlopers are a deputized posse coming off a dusty trail to catch a suspect, the interpretation is less clear as it brings more questions about the deputized leader’s apparent breach of his authority, stabbing the subdued suspect in the abdomen.

And yet, if I say that these masked individuals are a surgical team of doctors and nurses operating on a person with a cancerous tumor in his abdomen, such violence would generally be interpreted as a virtuous act between a heroic medical team and the victim of a horrific disease. The line between virtue and vice is not always clear in the act itself but rather is a product of the narrative involving the interpretation of the intent of the actor and the consequence to the target in context to some violation of personal boundary or societal norm—establishing whether an act is deemed justifiable, homicidal, accidental, self-defense, or a heroic act of service.

Violence is its own narrative. While in war there have always been mercenaries whose motivation is their professional pay, historically most wars are fought on the backs of the poor whose primary motivation is to support their families and survive another day. The underclass must be given a reason to fight and to die for king and country. Sometimes it may be justifiable self-defense, an imminent need to repel some enemy invader that is a direct threat to the conscript’s family. At other times, however, the ruling class must manufacture some prejudicial narrative of fear and heroism, typically invoking a contrived patriotic duty to protect the homeland from some real or imagined foe. Inevitably on the battlefield the enemy is portrayed as an unredeemable villain that must be utterly destroyed thus justifying the large scale killing of one’s mythological enemies.

Archetypally, it is within this Victim-Villain-Victor power dynamic that all wars and violent actions arise—a heroic fight against a monstrous foe intent on destroying the lives of oneself or one’s tribal group. However, these conflictual roles are fluid and malleable, often merging in unorthodox ways. The moral line between monster and hero is thin, typically defined by what side of a battlefield or kitchen table you stand on.

Politically, it is often the aim of propaganda to convince the underclass that they are victims of some monstrous force and that it is up to them to rise up, risking their lives to heroically destroy the monster—earning themselves tribal recognition if they survive or a better place in the afterlife, if they don’t. And sometimes this propaganda fails in the middle of the fray. Such was the case in what has become known as the Christmas Truce of 1914 occurring less than five months into the Great War. In the early days of the war, fraternization across the front line, which were only separated by a few dozen yards of dirt, was not uncommon. Thus by Christmas 1914 all across the Western Front the entrenched soldiers on both sides declared an unofficial truce as they celebrated a common cultural tradition, sang carols together, played European football, shared family photos, gave each other gifts, and for a time refused to kill each other. Even when threatened by superiors, they would only shoot over the heads of their so-called enemies. The fragile propagandistic framework for violence had come unraveled and eventually the entire frontline had to be swapped out with new soldiers who did not see the humanity of the opposing side, leading to one of the most brutal wars in human history.

Dueling narratives—one emphasizing our common humanity and the other founded in fear and hatred of those labeled by the cultural gatekeepers as “your enemy”. However, no one is intrinsically your enemy. It is a belief system built on a narrative of insecurity driven by a primal threat of victimization embodied as a struggle against an eternal monster ever ready to devour its prey. While phobic personalities can be found across the political spectrum in society, there is a heightened sensitivity in conservative psychology which sees a threat in the slightest provocation impelled by a deeper characteristic sense of fear, scarcity, vulnerability, and greed. As such, these naïve phobic personalities are easy prey to maleficent political and religious leaders willing to exploit this fear-based world view in order to create factions and alliances in their favor. Inevitably their imaginary adversaries are presented as valueless monsters who these timorous surrogates must destroy to assuage their primal fears, bringing order to a chaotic universe.

This subversive dynamic is played out in the smaller theater of towns, bars, and living rooms on a daily basis. America, while by no means unique, has proven to have one of the most consistently gullible demographics when it comes to indiscriminately accepting conspiracy fantasies and the acrimonious rhetoric of politicians, religious leaders, social influencers, and industrial propagandists under the credulous pretense of freedom, security, or some hidden truth. From the Confederate soldier and their modern admirers attempting to preserve their racist worldview to the modern vigilante gun fanatic aiming to defend his paranoid fantasy of power against his mythical zombified neighbors and tyrannical government agents, and then, to the diminutive actions of the traditional patriarchal male obsessed with controlling the intricate details of women’s life in society and at home, violence has become endemic to American life.

Many Americans are convinced that they must be ready and willing to use violence as an essential tool to solve conflicts or to get their way, demonstrating a pervasive lack of maturity, critical thinking, and prosocial morality. This violent tendency is often projected onto some demonized outsider, often imagined as a black or brown gangbanger involved in organized criminal activity, providing an excuse to build an arsenal of weaponry at home. However, the actual incidence of gang violence pales in comparison to the actual statistics for domestic violence, rapes, brawls, assaults, racially motivated attacks, domestic homicides, and suicides born of this same violent imagination against those nearest. Most of this violence is committed inside our homes or communities by and towards people we know, work and go to church with, or regularly pass in the street.

One in three girls and one in five boys will have experienced sexual assaults by the time they reach adulthood. Movies and video games desensitize our responsiveness to cruelty and the moral prohibitions against harming others. Many police departments are trained to operate on a war footing against the public, to kill incautiously at the slightest jittery provocation, under the militaristic creed of kill or be killed. Public servants are regularly threatened by politically motivated partisans fueled by fear-mongering politicians that target and dehumanize their political foes for political gain. One in five families have been in some way affected directly by gun violence. Nearly a quarter of individuals will be assaulted by a domestic partner in their lifetime. Rather than some dark faceless boogeyman hiding in the shadows, the violence is coming from inside the house--we have met the enemy, and he is us.

So how does one become a violent perpetrator in the public or household theaters--to take up the mantle of harming others? Beneath the dark exterior of violent action lies our personal sense of morality, the sacred boundaries that define who we are. South African anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela, referring to the narratives we use to justify violence, warned:

When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.

To understand violence, we need to understand the stories that define our moral boundaries. Some of these stories come from our lived experience and other narratives are inculcated through education, propaganda, and cultural norms. These narrative principles build the moral edifice of what we feel is right or wrong. Some of the planks of this edifice don’t really fit neatly together. We are a menagerie of ethical contradictions—some of these planks are built of iron, well thought out and universal, and some of straw, born of pain and primitive defenses.

Fundamentally, humans are motivated by and then act on what they feel is right or good. Even the most despicable immoral behavior by societal standards seems right to the actor based on some personal rationale—if for no other reason than it feels good or produces a sense of relief from some internal or external pressure. Any theater or movie actor that has ever realistically portrayed a villain will tell you that they had to find the underlying motivation of why the villain’s behavior made sense to them. In many modes of psychotherapy the intent of the process is to uncover the stories that make a certain behavior make sense to the client. But then also to develop an empathy for how that behavior might affect others.

Many describe violent behavior as being motivated by anger. But anger is not a thing, in and of itself. Emotions are reactions, they exist only as a response to a stimulus or event. Anger is an emotional agent in service to one’s boundaries. It is an energy that arises in response to some sense of threat to one’s boundaries being violated. Constructively, it gives us the power to fight back, to restore the integrity of a broken boundary. However, there is typically no momentary rational evaluation whether that boundary is healthy or unhealthy, or whether a real violation has even occurred. It is usually an unconscious response to a perceived event.

Thus violence is always justified. Perhaps not in the context of the greater good but it always has its own reason for the perpetrator. In order for us to have choices, to begin to act more constructively and empathetically in our relationships with others, we must become conscious of our own reasons.

If perchance, as a hypothetical matter of discourse, I am sitting in a bar and a stranger approaches who looks menacingly at me. Defensively, I turn and punch him in the face. In order to understand my action, one would need to examine the story behind my boundary that made me feel like I needed to protect myself. By deconstructing this perceived violation one might find some past narrative of vulnerability that was evoked by this ominous stranger that was interpreted as threatening my well-being in some way. This triggered narrative put me on heightened alert to protect myself. I now perceive myself to be the victim of his villainous intentions. I might feel anger or fear based on this approaching threat. I see myself as heroically standing up to punish the interloper, to protect myself, throwing a right hook to his jaw in order to judiciously restore the integrity of my perceived boundaries.

Principally, justice is often described as the personal motivation for violence—a duty to punish some transgression. But this is just a surface narrative. In the previous example, was I in any real danger? Was the stranger actually intending to harm me? Why did I feel attacked by this stranger’s seemingly offensive stare? Why did I feel that my response should be to physically strike out and harm the stranger? Within the rules of society, was my action even justified? The answers to these questions formulate an unconscious moral code based on prior life experiences which establishes my personal boundaries. In the moment, however, all I was aware of was that I felt threatened and angry. Thus, I instinctually reacted to try to ameliorate the threat.

In the relational mythology of the Torah-Gospel that leads up to the proclamation of “peace on earth, goodwill towards men,” mature moral development is portrayed as being “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and truth.” Later, Rabbi Jeshua of the Gospel accounts summarizes this as loving one another.

However, in the moralistic Christian interpretation of the Gospel based on the neo-apostle Paul’s teachings, the moral dynamic of love is given various qualifications based on “forgiveness,” that is, conditionally choosing to withhold punishment from someone that has already been condemned as guilty, symbolized by Jesus dying on the cross for your sins. The Christian god’s moralistic response to “sin” is that one is judged guilty first, condemned to be punished second, and then conditionally forgiven third (if all the right conditions are met). Without going further in to detail here, as I have covered this more broadly in several other writings, neither sin nor forgiveness are actual translations of the concepts in the underlying text. What is in the Gospel accounts is a issue of personal or relational discipline, “failing to meet a goal” often in context indicating a failure to love someone, and then an essential psychological principle of “letting go.” This correlates to the moral dynamic underlying “graciousness” as possessing a spirit of openness and generosity towards others.

Thus, in the original relational mythology, the principle of graciously letting go describes a mature state of being in which one’s boundaries are open and permeable. The actions of others are not interpreted as a violation of my own boundaries—there is no critical spirit of condemnation or judgment. A mature individual is confident and complete in their own narrative personhood. They are detached from the moral narratives of others and do not personalize or projectively moralize another’s behavior. If someone happens to look at me funny, rather than interpreting that as a moral affront, I may rather wonder what is going on with that stranger who has this disturbed appearance. I may even reach out to that stranger to offer kindness and compassion in an attempt to improve their unsettled condition. Even if they return my offering with overt hostility, I am not disturbed in my own narrative of well-being. My state of mind is detached from their behavior. I am not compelled to engage their narrative of hostility.

As the common aphorism states, it takes two to tango. In my real-life experience, many years ago, I was out with some female coworkers at a bar enjoying conversation and drinks after work. Eventually, some strange fellow came up from behind, tapped me on the shoulder, oddly asking if these were “my women.” Uninspired by his questioning, I simply said yes and turned back to my friends. But he was looking for a fight, and demanded we step outside. The conversation was obviously quite ridiculous, and I just looked unimpressed at his feeble attempt at picking a fight, not mockingly or even with any sense of superiority or condescension, just completely disengaged by its absurdity. Whereas he expected me to get up and say, “oh yeah, let’s go,” I merely returned a quizzical look. I did not engage his barroom bravado.

And not because of any great wisdom on my part. I suppose that somewhere deep down I may have been influenced by my earlier martial arts training that the best way to not get hit is to step aside without engaging, to stay out of the way of a punch, or otherwise, to not get into a fight. But in the moment, I was genuinely in a different place, a different world all together. Thus, when I failed to engage his narrative of belligerency, he was left dangling, knocking the wind out of his sails. Emotionally deflated, he then just turned around and walked away. Violence is its own narrative, and we always have a choice whether to become a part of it—whether to become a part of someone else’s story, or to stay true to our own.

This developmental narrative of being secure in one’s own personhood is illustrated in the fundamental difference between the opposing views of the protagonist Yahweh in the Torah-Gospel mythology. In the immature moralistic tradition based on the neo-Apostle Paul’s prophesies and the writings of later Christian theologians, the protagonist of this synthesized mythology is the angry god who is fundamentally enmeshed in the behavior of humankind. Any imperfect behavior by humankind is a personal affront to the Christian god who characteristically has a narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, borderline personality which craves being worshipped, can’t handle disorder or failure, and will conditionally “love” humanity until they disappoint him, causing him to horribly torture them for eternity. The only way to reconcile with this holy god obsessed with the imperfection of others is to offer a transactional human sacrifice, the shedding of the purest blood to pacify his anger.

Violence is the transformational dynamic of salvation in Christianity symbolized by the cross. Paul’s deviant theology mixes Jewish moralism and Hellenistic idolism with elements of the original Gospel mythology to spawn another variation of the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype—a form of transactional idolism at the tangled core of the human condition and the catalyst for most religious behavior. The Villain-Victor is the two-faced deity in the moralistic tradition in which rewards and punishments are merited based on whether one satisfies the desires and appetites of the gods or otherwise incurs the wrath of their disappointment.

On the other hand, in the unadulterated relational Torah Gospel mythology as written, the protagonist is rather the Good Father introduced in the Genesis Creation myth who eventually describes his own character to Moses as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and truth. The original familial paradigm is a variation of the Lover-Beloved archetype of a Loving Parent’s relationship to his children. As a mature parental archetype, Yahweh is not enmeshed in the success or failure of his children as they develop in their own maturity. All failures are let go with the only exception being to slander or misrepresent his mature loving character as the Good Parent upon which a healthy familial relationship is founded. In the relational Gospel, the way of peace, love, and truth of the Anointed Son represents the father’s maturity which is contrasted in the mythology with the way of violence represented in the contemporary Jewish tradition of the Messianic Warrior-King who was expected to come and destroy Israel’s enemies restoring the political might of the mythic Davidic Kingdom.

Regardless of the historical mythological framework one accepts as their spiritual practice or primary influence, the underlying dynamics of these archetypal constructs are present in each one of us. Due to our tendency to have a deep-seated sense of vulnerability in a perceived world of scarcity, the imbalanced power dynamic of the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype will often dominate our psychological disposition. Thus, our violent tendencies ultimately arise out of weakness, not strength, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed:

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

On the other hand, the power dynamic of the Lover-Beloved archetype comes from a deeper, inner strength leading to a spirit of inclusivity and service towards others. It only develops with maturity as we embrace our authentic nature, both strengths and weaknesses, in relationship with one another.

As such, the advent of peace on earth only manifests if we engage in our own moral development learning to open ourselves up to others, to value community through mutual cooperation. Rather than becoming self-sufficient and self-serving, we humbly choose to rely on others to support us in our weaknesses as we in turn support others in their moment of need.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Indian civil rights peace activist Mahatma Gandhi, embracing the truth of the Lover-Beloved archetype as the inner path of moral development, taught that the way to confront injustice was through authentic nonviolence, explaining:

The way of peace is the way of truth. Indeed, lying is the mother of violence. A truthful man cannot long remain violent. He will perceive in the course of his search that he has no need to be violent and he will further discover that so long as there is the slightest trace of violence in him, he will fail to find the truth he is seeking.

Later in the century, the American civil rights activist, Martin Luther King, Jr, would expand on Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, stating:

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

An ancient Gospel proverb advises, “You will know a tree by its fruit.” As such, our essential sense of authority fundamentally evolves out of our experience of either the archetypal Villain-Victor or the Good Parent in guiding our moral development. If the god or central principle we choose to accept as the authority in our life is moralistic, cruel, and self-serving, valuing some lives over others, then we will become moralistic, cruel, and self-serving, valuing some lives over others. On the other hand, if the central authority of our life narrative is founded in love based on our shared identity as a universal family motivated by compassion, graciousness, tolerance, kindness, and truth, then we will internalize this powerful moral narrative yielding the fruit of compassion, graciousness, tolerance, kindness, and truth.

Peace on earth begins with goodwill towards all humanity. As we mature to become more secure within our own identity and boundaries, we are free to let go of any need to control the behavior of others, to let go of revenge, aggression, and retaliation. Love grows out of the fertile ground of compassion, graciousness, tolerance, kindness, and truth—planting the seeds in our daily lives that build a community at peace with one another.