alt Hacker News> "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?
The is just survivorship bias. Violence sits at the root of ALL human societies. The vast majority throughout history have failed or are currently failing.
If you're on HN you're probably sitting in one of the lucky, relatively prosperous ones. Violence didn't create the prosperity, otherwise Sudan and Liberia should be the richest countries in the world.
Your relative prosperity came from your ancestors being smart enough to build frameworks to allow a society to mediate scarcity without the need for violence (common law, markets and trade, property rights, etc all enforced via a government monopoly on violence). In fact, any rich country is the result of systems of decentralized scarcity mediation without decentralized violence.
It's the lack of violence which built the relative prosperity you enjoy today. Not the other way around.
> The is just survivorship bias. Violence sits at the root of ALL human societies. The vast majority throughout history have failed or are currently failing.
That only strengthens the argument that violence is sometimes the answer. It doesn't matter that it's not always the right answer, the fact is sometimes it has been, and no society has ever managed to survive without choosing it at some point or another.
Indeed, there is the argument to be made that the capability to choose violence is critical even if you never actually need to choose it. This is the basis of deterrence theory which has arguably been the cornerstone of international peace for decades and the theory of the social contract which has been the source of most people's freedoms and political power. A people who will never stand up for themselves and their friends, no matter what injustice is done upon them, invites that injustice. By simply acknowledging there exists a point beyond which you would retaliate, you discourage others from risking going past that point.