The Laws of Violence

The first law of violence is continuity. Once you start using violence, you cannot get away from it. Violence expresses the habit of simplification of situations, political, social, or human. And a habit cannot quickly be broken. Once a man has begun to use violence he will never stop using it, for it is so much easier and more practical than any other method. It simplifies relations with the other completely by denying that the other exists. And once you have repudiated the other, you cannot adopt a new attitude – cannot, for example, start rational dialogue with him. Violence has brought so many clear and visible results; how then go back to a way of acting that certainly looks ineffectual and seems to promise only very doubtful results? So you go on using violence, even if at first you had thought that violence would be only a temporary expedient, even if you have achieved thorough change in your own or the general political situation. […]

The second law of violence is reciprocity. It is stated in Jesus’ famous word “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Let me stress two points in connection with this passage. There is the insistence on "all.” There is no distinction between a good and bad use of the sword. The sheer fact of using the sword entails this result. The law of the sword is a total law. Then, Jesus is in no sense making a moral valuation or announcing a divine intervention or a coming judgment; he simply describes the reality of what is happening. He states one of the laws of violence. Violence creates violence, begets and procreates violence. The violence of the colonialists creates the violence of the anticolonialists, which in turn exceeds that of the colonialists. Nor does victory bring any kind of freedom. Always, the victorious side splits up into clans which perpetuate violence. […] 

The man who, in whatever way, uses violence should realize that he is entering into a reciprocal kind of relation capable of being renewed indefinitely. […] The ethic of violence is a truly new ethic, permitting neither peace nor surcease. […] Violence imprisons its practitioners in a circle that cannot be broken by human means. Study of the possible results of violence shows that it will have only one certain result: the reciprocity and the reproduction of violence. Whether any other results are attained – equal rights, legitimate defense, liberation, etc. – is wholly a matter of chance, and all those results, too, are subject to the reciprocity which is one of the laws of violence.

The third law of violence is sameness. Here I shall only say that it is impossible to distinguish between justified and unjustified violence, between violence that enslaves. […] Every violence is identical with every other violence. I maintain that all kinds of violence are the same. And this is true not only of physical violence – the violence of the soldier who kills, the policeman who bludgeons, the rebel who commits arson, the revolutionary who assassinates; it is true also of economic violence – the violence of the privileged proprietor against his workers, of the “haves” against the “have-nots”; the violence done in international economic relations between our own societies and those of the Third World; the violence done through powerful corporations which exploit the resources of a country that is unable to defend itself. […]

Moreover, to say that sameness is one of the laws of violence is to say that, on the one hand, violence has no limits and, on the other, that condoning violence means condoning every kind of violence. Once you choose the way of violence, it is impossible to say, “So far and no further”; for you provoke the victim of your violence to use violence in turn, and that necessarily means using greater violence. We have seen the so-called escalation of war in Vietnam. But, mind, this “escalation” is not a result of chance or of a government’s wickedness; there never are limits to violence. When you begin to employ torture in order to get information, you cannot say: “This bit of torturing is legitimate and not too serious, but I’ll go no further.” The man who starts torturing necessarily goes to the limit; for if he decides to torture in order to get information, that information is very important; and if, having used a “reasonable” kind of torture, he does not get the information he wants, what then? He will use worse torture. The very nature of violence is such that it has no limits. We have seen that it is impossible to set up laws of warfare. Either no war happens to be going on, and then it is easy to make agreements as to the limitations that should be established; or else a war is under way, and then all agreements fall before the imperative of victory. 

Violence is hubris, fury, madness. There are no such things as major and minor violence. Violence is a single thing, and it is always the same. In this respect, too, Jesus saw the reality. He declared that there is no difference between murdering a fellow man and being angry with him or insulting him (Matthew 5:21-22). This passage is no “evangelical counsel for the converted”; it is, purely and simply, a description of the nature of violence.

Now the third aspect of this sameness that characterizes violence: once we consent to use violence ourselves, we have to consent to our adversary’s using it, too. We cannot demand to receive treatment different from that we mete out. We must understand that our own violence necessarily justifies the enemy’s, and we cannot object to his violence. […]

We must recognize, and clearly, that violence begets violence. Does anyone ask, “Who started it?” That is a false question. Since the days of Cain, there has been no beginning of violence, only a continuous process of retaliation. It is childish to suppose that today’s conditions are unprecedented, to say, “There are dangerous communists about, we must be on guard against them,” or, “This government is basely imperialistic and dictatorial, we must overthrow it.” When a man is born, violence is already there, already present in him and around him. […]

Violence begets violence — nothing else. This is the fourth law of violence. Violence is the par excellence method of falsehood. […] Whenever a violent movement has seized power, it has made violence the law of power. The only thing that has changed is the person who exercises violence. […]

Violence can never realize a noble aim, can never create liberty or justice. I repeat once more that the end does not justify the means, that, on the contrary, evil means corrupt good ends. But I repeat also: “Let the man who wants to do violence, do so; let the man who thinks there is no other way, use it; but let him know what he is doing.” That is all the Christian can ask of this man – that he be aware that violence will never establish a just society. Yes, he will get his revenge; yes, he will subdue his “enemy”; yes, he will consummate his hatred. But let him not confuse hate with justice. […]

Finally, the fifth law of violence is this: the man who uses violence always tries to justify both it and himself. Violence is so unappealing that every user of it has produced lengthy apologies to demonstrate to the people that it is just and morally warranted. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Nasser, the guerrillas, the French “paras” of the Algerian war – all tried to vindicate themselves. The plain fact is that violence is never “pure.” Always violence and hatred go together. I spoke above of the rather useless piece of advice once given Christians: that they should make war without hatred. Today it is utterly clear that violence is an expression of hatred, has its source in hatred and signifies hatred. And only a completely heartless person would be capable of simply affirming hatred, without trying to exonerate himself. […]

It is very important to be clear about this persistent longing for justification. I do not say that the practitioner of violence feels uneasy and that therefore he must be experiencing pangs of conscience; but in acting violently he is so unsure of himself that he has to have an ideological construct that will put him at ease intellectually and morally. That is why the person inclined to violence is necessarily the victim propaganda aims at; and, conversely, violence is the theme that above all others lends itself to propaganda. […]

These are the laws of violence, unchanging and inescapable. We must understand them clearly if we are to know what we are doing when we damn violence.

- From Jacques Ellul, Violence: Reflections From a Christian Perspective. New York: The Seabury Press, 1969. Chapter 3: Christian Realism in the Face of Violence.

I encountered a situation in my last game where one of my players said "..well, it's not like we haven't thought about killing babies before.  In fact, we HAVE killed babies before."  And this is true.

It made me think about the nature of violence in RPGs, and in some of my research I stumbled across the above passage, which, though rooted in religious thought, seems like a sound philosophical position to me.  The rebuttal to this position is actually contained within the text above, the idea that, "When a man is born, violence is already there, already present in him [...]"  This is what Cormac McCarthy expresses so artfully through his character of the Judge in Blood Meridian, specifically the passage that begins "Men are made for games."

Speaking of games, it is interesting to me how casually we insert violence into our games, and we do this really from the time we are quite young, before there has been a great deal of socialization.  Even without toy soldiers or guns, there are a lot of games where you might hear one child say to another, "You can't do that!  You're dead!  I killed you!"

The rejection of violence and the notion of grace are really quite new ideas in many ways.  Pre-Christian traditions nearly always had a place for violence in them, and so it is really not surprising that in most of the polytheistic societies we construct in D&D that violence is such a central element - there is nothing to oppose it in most games!  I have not personally played a non-violent RPG, and I would be interested in hearing about any such experiences anyone reading this might have had with such games.  I am also considering inserting a nonviolent mystical tradition in my game to see how my players deal with the notion of someone who is nonviolent but believes utterly that they are morally correct and is determined to carry through on some course detrimental to the PCs.

I think I still have The Book of Exalted Deeds somewhere and that may be worth revisiting.  I do think it would be interesting to run a game where there was a PC or multiple PCs dedicated to the notion of nonviolence in a world where violence is a given.  How might that play out?  It's easy to be cynical and say it ends with the first encounter with footpads the group has, where some thug merrily slits all their throats, but I'm not so sure that has to be true.

Another type of character that has always appealed to me is the "shriven killer."  This is the character who has, at the beginning of the story, recognized all the truths expressed in the passage above and is leading a life of nonviolence, but chooses to return to violence (usually at the climax of the story) with the full philosophical knowledge of what he does.  The dramatic tension and release built in this kind of story is undeniably powerful.  I think of William Munny in Unforgiven, or Nanashi from Sword of the Stranger or Kenshin in Samurai X.  I would be interested to see how this might play out in a game as well, though implementation might be difficult!