Road to Non-Violence - intro

This is a partial introduction to Volume 5 in a series of Volumes, the title of which will be Road to Non-Violence. The volume utilizes discourses of psychoanalysis, critical theory, phenomenology and design.

We cannot properly address the subjective question of transcendence and transformation unless we also discuss society’s role.?This involves the structural elements within society and culture that condition the possibilities of subjectivity.?In the West, this involves the question of democracy, which is based on objective formulations of universalization, and not on the needs of specific and unique individuals.?This is governmentalization, which does violence to individuals as it serves the state, society, and culture.?This is the structural violence that harms and destroys, sometimes in ways that are difficult to discern. It is my sound belief that our current structure supports competition, capitalism, narcissism, and egocentric behavior patterns that replenish our commitment to the possessive-self doctrine I defined in a preceding Volume. Thus, any transformation must involve an ethical revolution. The problem for us is whether a violent self-structure has the capability to do so. For it seems that if a self-structure is ethical it already knows how to be non-violent; and if it is not ethical it lacks the resources to do so.?

How, then, can we make this transition??How much is for society to do??How much is for an individual to do? This is especially problematic when the society itself is primarily violent.?It is violent because it suppresses individuality – individual needs – in favor of functional governmental categories. This universal order, at its foundation, is a violent usurpation of the individual. Thus, a need for the ethical dimension emerges from this lack. But this illuminates a problem. In a competitive, capitalist economy, we are encouraged to a win-lose dynamic, to use whatever power and resources we have in order to gain scarce goods.?Thus, we see how this structure does not support the ethical.?It may support the law, but this does not mean that it supports the ethical. Further, it supports an application of the law that works in favor of the stronger and the more powerful and that works against the weaker and less powerful.?This is part of the deep structure that created and maintains violence.?

This structural violence creates a topological potential for egocentrism, that narcissistic, possessive-self framework that I articulate in a preceding Volume. Thus, there is an outcry to correct the injustice that occurs because of this framework. Yet, it is a kind of forcing through punishment and other behavioral re-conditioning to condition such egocentric social dynamics. As such, it is not transformative. It pushes and corrects self-structure, but it does not transform it. Thus, the logic of justice in an egocentric social system merely limits harmful destructive behavior. This means that our society and the individuals within it are always at risk for entropy, destruction, and violence. Within this system, we can see how egocentrism structurally encourages and creates possibilities for violent subjectivity, which sediments and crystallizes as structural violence. It is difficult to see how egoism and egocentrism, within a capitalist, competitive economy, can think and live democracy and ethics. This is an important understanding because the central problem of this book is how we change our self-structure, and how we transform the social-cultural structure to allow this to happen.?Therefore, we have a freedom to exercise our responsibility to the Other that goes beyond the law.

I accept that this is the position from which we must address the questions in this text.?That we have created an egocentric self-structure – that we approach moral and legal questions from and within this self-structure. My question, which I have approached in a preceding Volume of this inquiry, is whether humans are necessarily fated to an egocentric self-structure, or whether this structure is plastic and can be transformed. The derivative question is whether we have a sufficient degree of freedom to change this structure, both individually and/or culturally.?This second question is the subject of this Volume. It is my basic hypothesis that we can change our self-structure.?What is more difficult for me to imagine and conceive is how we can accomplish this.?Thus, this current Volume is a prolegomena – an exploration – of this project.?

As I have constructed the problem in a preceding Volume, our current self-structure – our human anthropology – our topology of the self – is based on structures like capitalism, competition, scarcity, arbitrary ontological valuations, moral freedom and autonomy, and psychological tropes like narcissism and egocentrism. One might argue that all living things strive to persist in their being, but this does not logically imply an egoism that presences as narcissism or egocentrism. What this does mean is that we can explore the contours and dimensions of this freedom to understand its range of choices. As such, there is an infinite number of ways to interpret Being, and concomitantly, to interpret the being of a human.?This is a fundamental assumption to the development of my account and argument.?