Monday, July 21, 2008

playing out violence

When humans ‘lock horns’ they don’t usually kill one another either, but they do a nice line in violent discussion! They bring out their sharp word weapons and engage their brutal feelings without realising what power they are exerting. By watching humans having a verbal stoush, you’d think they loved it! Once engaged in this way, their wish to be constructive soon gets lost in a sort of blood lust. When push comes to shove, humans become nasty. They don’t know how to be dynamically non-violent without becoming intimidating. Violence is so ingrained in us, that we go too quickly into that one particular high emotion. It saps our energy and frightens us into ever more violent and destructive behaviour.
If I’m a cruel person, violence comes easily to me. But it’s likely that most of us don’t want to be intentionally cruel. We’ll more likely regret becoming aggressive and yet once ‘done’ we can’t undo the damage. We don’t even try. Instead we let it fester - the air becomes charged with something uglier than we ever intended. It never occurs to us to use the emergency brake of "non-violence". Instead, we go further and further sliding deeper down into an energy drain only to find that we are making no progress at all. Panic!

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