Keeping Our Violence in Check

1355:

Edited by CJ Tointon

In today's violent world, we desperately try to get what we want.  We bend the rules, with every intention of fixing things up later.  But once we get what we want, we usually forget to do that second bit and thus aren’t true to our word. Eventually we get used to breaking the rules and end up in a mess.  A mess which might show up in our relationships at home or in the way we act outside the home.  If we want to make this a better world, we must first value our home life.  Never neglect it.  It's where we gain the confidence to go outside and it's where we return to.  We should be able to live there creatively and happily, even if the outside world is a violent and harsh one.

Whether by negligence or violence, we often break fundamental rules.  Rules which we’d normally want to abide by.  But human negligence resulting in violent remedies, is not the same as violence in Nature.  Events like storms, epidemics and earthquakes which destroy on a massive scale, are examples of natural unavoidable violence.  What we do, as humans, is for our own partisan benefit and therefore avoidable.  Our violence is all the more damaging because it is so coldly administered.  Ours isn’t necessary for survival, only for satisfying our greed for possessions, money and power.  In this respect, humans are driven by personal insecurity and ambition.  Our destructions are never awe-inspiring, just tawdry and shame-making.

By implementing the principles of non-violence, we stop needing to win (because this usually involves someone else's loss).  If there's one thing that damages our nobility as human beings, it's materiality.  We need to step beyond the material to discover where else we can find satisfaction.  The simplest and most effective start to this process is to stop our violence leaking into everything else that's good about ourselves.  We can downgrade the importance of materiality and the sensual pleasures which often involve exploiting some element of the material world.  Perhaps the most routine of these sensual pleasures is the direct damage done to other sentient beings (animals) when we exploit and violate them for food.  By changing away from these foods, by disassociating ourselves from any such violations, we can eliminate most of our habitual violence.  At least, we will be doing something positive to keep our own violence in check. The dropping of violence involves a long 'to do' list.  But when we change ourselves for the better, others will see our example and act accordingly - eventually.  It’s the nature of the human to adapt to new circumstances.  Change is infectious.

When we see the violence in ourselves, we start to see it in our children and our partners also.  In fact, we start to see it everywhere, especially in the attitudes of our fellow humans.  It’s not immediately obvious, until you link up what certain harsh and uncaring attitudes lead to and what behaviours they excuse.   Nobody is immune to violence.  But the Vegan principle can act as a springboard to leading a non-violent life.  Being Vegan helps us 'check' ourselves and it lets us see how violence can affect our closest relationships at home. 

Home is our 'safe' environment.  But it's also where violence shows its ugliest face.  Who amongst us hasn’t been shown up by a family member, forcing us to look more closely at ourselves?  But home is also where the atmosphere is transparent enough to let us test and trial our most idealistic ideas on other living persons.  If we can be a cool operator at home, we should be able to take it into the outside world.  At home, we get praise, mockery, criticism, intimacy, ridicule, love, etc.  It’s in this mixing bowl that ego gets a good stirring and where we can eventually de-power it.  Then we can really make some progress!  

If the principle of non-violence is going to grow, it does so in the fertile ground where we can be intimate with people who know us.  And we grow best where there’s enough affection to fertilise our strengths and enough latitude to excuse our weaknesses.  Here's where we can work through our differences, perhaps more slowly than we’d like, but perhaps more thoroughly.  At home, we can watch out for each other, not lose interest or leave each other behind.  And if things don't work out, if we grow in different directions and our wish for developing non-violence is not what anyone else at home wants, then maybe we shouldn't be there.  Changes can eventually be brought about in a more civilised and less destructive way.


The building of mutual care is good for developing feelings of safety.  More than anything else, it can build confidence enough to go into the outside world of strangers and say:  "Hey, this is what I reckon!" and find satisfaction in our attempts to discuss our opinions with them.