Brief Reflection on Violence

On the fluidity, insidiousness, and ubiquity of harm

Angie Evelina, MS

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” — Albert Einstein

Violence is arguably one of the most feared and least understood phenomena of the human condition. It's likely in part because it's misunderstood, and at the same time largely untouchable, that it continues to prove so intractable. As long as we don't look closely and honestly at violence—at its fluidity, insidiousness, and ubiquity, at how we define it, the conditions that precede it, the ways we respond to it, and above all, how aspects of it might live and breathe in each of us and the communities we're a part of—we will continue to feed fear and hate, perpetuate hypocrisy, and stifle the humanity of others, and in turn, our own.

Violence and harm are more complex and multifaceted than conventional narratives concede. When we hear words like violent or dangerous or degenerate, we typically imagine a criminal or convicted felon, an addict or individual living on the streets, a neighborhood rife with guns and gangs, a mass shooter, a suicide bomber. We instinctively think of illegal, physical, messy violence. We think of anger, aggression, and destitution. We think of who the harm lands on and whether or not the victim feels familiar. We often assume that the person or place is bad or broken and irreparable. We dismiss the bigger picture and the harm that came before. We also ignore the harm that comes after. We condemn, isolate, and fail to ask why, or if what we assume is in fact true. We rarely wonder if there's something we don't know or understand.

Evolving perceptions of harm means looking beyond conspicuous violence to understand the mechanisms and effects of subtle, insidious, or unrecognized harms. This kind of violence can be tangible or intangible, active or passive, overt or covert—from state- and socially-sanctioned violence, to neglect, exploitation, and pathologization, to various forms of deception, discarding, and drip violence. These harms are important to explore, not because they're better or worse than recognized violence, but because they constitute harm that's normalized, rationalized, obscured, or denied. Sometimes this type of violence is positioned as “good” or “necessary” or “acceptable.” Sometimes it's indirect, invisible, or a violence of absence. Sometimes it's clean instead of messy, polite instead of rude, released slowly over time instead of rapid and instantaneous. Much of the time, it isn't called or considered violence. But it's real and impactful, and failing to account for and better understand the dynamics and outcomes of unrecognized harm hinders our ability to understand and prevent the harms we can see.

Digging into harm and the flow of cause and effect is not an effort to flip the script and reverse the horrors we condemn and the horrors we justify. Demonization and dehumanization—simply rearranging the “monsters”—invariably feeds violence and indifference. At the same time, residing in perpetual neutrality or getting lost in complexity leads to inertia. Advancing our understanding and approach to violence—and mental health—means acknowledging but moving beyond anger and avoidance. It means moving beyond victimhood, villainy, good people, bad people, blame, excuses, certitude, and contempt. Valid or not in any given situation, and notwithstanding that there are real and important truths as well as a percentage of individuals and institutions that are critically dangerous, labels and absolutes tend to lead to circular, reductive debates and deeper adherence to an irresolvable us/them worldview. Victimhood and victimization denote profound experiences and actions—not whole identities—and as real, traumatic, enduring, and complex as the effects may be, when we internalize, project, or attach to these as identities, a lot is lost.

I want to be clear about something. At any given moment, there are people enduring pain, suffering, and loss at the hands of others and the structures we've established. It's this that impels us to have the courage to dig deeper—to look more fully at the scope, connections, and compounding effects of harm in all its diversity—and within that expanded frame, the violence we recognize, the violence we care about, the violence we are willing to reckon with and account for. When so many are suffering, when the cycles of harm turn over again and again, and when the disconnection becomes so vast that people in the same homes, families, schools, communities, and countries cannot agree on what's real or if others matter, it feels worth considering new perspectives and routes into connection, healing, and growth. It feels worth being as humble and as curious as possible about the picture in full, including our own role and the role of those we love.

I don't know what a broader perspective of harm will reveal or teach us, and I don't have the perfect answer to accountability, but I've seen, experienced, and learned enough to know that something is off. That something is off in how we treat each other and what we justify and how we define good and bad. I also know that every day we're losing people we need in a thousand different ways. As much as this is an exploration of harm, it's ultimately about humanity, and understanding what's lost to all of us when we strip people of it. It's about health, and rethinking what healthy might really look and act like. A lot is shifting in the world right now—with some things deteriorating and others accelerating, remarkable progress in some areas and staggering regression in others, and a wide range of tenuous institutions and ideas engendering a unique opportunity to evolve them. The ground isn't firm, and much of where things go and what grows and what shakes out hinges on our capacity to root ourselves in honesty, humility, curiosity, and compassion when it's hard. The assumption of darkness or dysfunction in others, the fixation on danger, evil, and peril where it may or may not exist, and the impulse to separate, destroy, or discard what we deem threatening, may actually pose a bigger risk than many of the things we typically fear. It not only keeps us from understanding and knowing others, but keeps us from better understanding and knowing ourselves. Not only does it rarely extinguish darkness, but it tends to stifle light. If we want our leaders, institutions, and technologies to emerge and operate from a place of integrity—navigating the complexities of good and bad, and right and wrong, in a healthy and humane way; if we want our children and youth to be able to trust their intuition and perception, care about others, and discern what's real—we need to get really honest about how we navigate these things ourselves. It's not that so much darkness is looming, but that in our fear, we miss and destroy tremendous light.

There are many heartbreaking things going on in the world right now, but I continue to feel hopeful. My sense is that much of what's shifting and surfacing and emerging is not thrusting us into some abyss or irrecoverable crisis, but bringing us to the doorstep of ourselves and one another.