Considering that violence rises from scarcity

SOCIAL STUDIES - May 5th 2008

I listened to a lecture by Hector Avalos from Iowa State University the other day.

As an aside, the Internet is an incredible tool for knowledge; sort of like they promised television could be. If you can wade your way through the inconsistent and the irrelevant, you can find university courses and famous speeches offered for free. This lecture was part of a symposium on violence and I found myself fascinated by the one sentence claim of professor Avalos, from which he spun his entire presentation.

"All violence derives from privation."

Or, to put it in simpler language, which he himself does, violence happens because we feel we are lacking something -- we react violently to scarcity.

Is it that simple? Avalos thinks it really is and he goes on to give example after example of ways in which this plays out. As children we get in fights when we think that there is not enough love to go around; and so if a parent or a teacher, or even another friend pays more attention to someone else -- we get angry. When we think that there is only so much money a company pays to employees and someone else gets more than their fair share -- we get angry. When America seems to be running out of oil and, say, some Middle Eastern oil rich country wants to control access -- we get angry.

He even found more subtle things to prove his thesis; for example, religious violence. What if we think of salvation as being a limited resource, only certain people get into heaven, and therefore we get angry with those who claim that it is them, and not us who are going? Or what about the fact that deep down we know there are only so many sunny days in a year and when someone tries to take one away from us with work -- we get angry.

You see the pattern here eh? I am not completely convinced that life is so black and white and simple, but I do think he might be on to something. Whether it is time, gas, health, or money; just about everything in this world seems to be a "limited resource." Certainly most of the stressful situations in my life come about because I feel deprived of something; whether it be one of the above, or even deprived of creativity or energy.

There is always a reason too, isn't there? It is always someone else's fault that I am deprived -- it never has anything to do with the choices I have made. Or at least I keep telling myself that. It is easier to believe that I am powerless in the face of the big bad world and everyone in it; because if that is not true then the real culprit behind anger and violence is, in fact, me.

I once took an anger management course in which we were told that anger is not a real emotion, which seems crazy to anyone who has ever lost their cool because of a scratch on the new car, but when you stop and think about this there might be truth here. Anger is in fact a reaction to a real emotion.

So, what I am really feeling is shock that the car has a scratch, and disappointment because it is already ruined, maybe even some post purchase anxiety because this just proves how quickly a car depreciates in value.

Events and people make you disappointed, they make you sad, they make you worried -- but how you react to these emotions is in fact a choice -- and if you choose to get angry you are probably going to become less capable of actually handling the situation and making a difference. There are numerous other things we might choose if we remain calm.

One of the choices we can make is to re-evaluate the real world enough that we are more competent in our decision making. That is to say, forewarned is forearmed, or, to go full circle to Professor Avalos, realize that often it is our perception that there is not enough which is worrying us, and in truth there might be nothing to worry about.

One thing I know for sure is that the Beatles were right, "All You Need is Love", and love is not a scarce resource -- it just seems like it is. The reason I say that we need love is that for the most part, our ability to deal with other scarcity is mediated by the amount of love we feel. If you had no money to spend on a date but ended up talking all night on a park bench with the love of your life, would you feel satisfied? If your kids did without the new Xbox but knew that they were loved unconditionally, don't you think they would turn out all right? If you felt enough love in your life that you did not need other people to pay more attention to you than they were capable of, then you would not be jealous.

I know it will never buy enough oil, or pay for the best cancer treatment, or feed the hungry of the world right away. Enough love however, might get us to share these resources that we hoard out of fear -- it might make it so that we could stop worrying so much and start sharing. It might, just might, counter the violence that seemingly erupts every day.

It may sound simplistic, but John Lennon was always on the right track.