There is a moment before violence. It is invisible to everyone except the person holding it. I have stood in that threshold. Not as a soldier, not as a protester, but as a man who discovered, without warning, that the life he thought he was living had been hollowed out from behind. The betrayal was specific—a wife, a friend of a friend, a blunt truth delivered without mercy. But the violence that followed was not directed at either of them. It filled the room. It became the air. I remember my hands shaking, my vision narrowing to a tunnel, and something ancient rising in my chest that wanted not justice but annihilation.
I did not hit anyone. I did not break anything. But I crossed a line I did not know I had. And in the aftermath—when the adrenaline drained and the silence returned—I was left with a question that has never fully left me: Where did that come from? Not the circumstance. The impulse. What root, still alive in me, had been waiting for permission to surface?
The Lie of Otherness
The comfortable story is that violence belongs to them. The criminal, the tyrant, the mob, the terrorist. We watch footage of riots and wars and we file them under a category called inhuman, as if the perpetrators arrived fully formed from some other species. This is a lie, and it is a dangerous one. It protects us from the harder truth: violence is not an aberration. It is a human capacity, latent in nearly everyone, activated by specific conditions that are more common than we admit.
Seneca called anger a brief madness. He understood something we have largely forgotten—that the distance between the civilized self and the violent self is not character. It is context. Strip away enough stability, enough dignity, enough sense of agency, and the same person who holds doors for strangers will scream in someone’s face. Push further, and worse becomes possible. This is not an excuse. It is an anatomy. And if we refuse to study the anatomy because we find it repulsive, we will never prevent the wound from opening.
What the Root Wants
Violence is rarely about the target. It is almost always about the self. When a man strikes his wife, when a mob burns a building, when a nation invades its neighbor, the immediate grievance is rarely the true engine. The true engine is a collapse of internal order. The sense—sometimes accurate, sometimes imagined—that one’s own life is no longer in one’s own hands. Violence becomes the last available proof of existence. I can still affect the world. I can still make you feel what I feel. I still matter.
This is why punishment alone rarely stops violence. It addresses the act without draining the swamp. The root wants something: recognition, agency, relief from humiliation. Until we understand what it wants, we will keep cutting off branches while the tree grows thicker.
The Civic Scale
This is not merely a personal psychology. It scales. The same dynamics that drive a man to punch a wall in his living room drive crowds into the streets with broken glass. I have marched in protests. I have seen peaceful civic action and I have seen it curdle. The No Kings demonstrations this past year were, by and large, exactly what democracy should look like—ordinary people refusing to be subjects. But in Salt Lake City, a confrontation turned lethal. A man with a gun. A peacekeeper returning fire. A bystander dead. The violence was not the point of the protest. But it was present, waiting, like a spark in dry grass.
We want to separate the righteous protest from the violent outlier, and morally we should. But structurally, we cannot afford to. Because the same conditions that produced the courage to march also produced the rage that fired the weapon. A population that feels unheard, that believes its institutions are rigged, that sees no nonviolent path to change—such a population is a forest of dry timber. Someone will strike the match. The match is not the cause. The cause is the drought.
The Seeds in Ordinary Soil
This is the part that makes the essay dangerous. I am not talking about them. I am talking about us. About the casual dehumanization we practice daily. The way we reduce political opponents to caricatures. The way we delight in another’s downfall. The way we let contempt replace curiosity. Every time we strip someone of their full humanity in our minds—whether on social media, in family arguments, or in our own private narratives—we are tending the same root that eventually produces violence.
Dehumanization is not a switch that tyrants flip. It is a habit that ordinary people practice, one comment at a time, until the person on the other side of the screen becomes an object. And objects can be destroyed without guilt. This is how violence becomes thinkable. Not overnight. Incrementally. The same way liberty erodes. The same way a marriage erodes. The same way a soul erodes.
What We Must Do
There is no policy that will root out violence. Laws matter, but they treat the symptom. We need something older and harder than legislation. We need the discipline to examine our own rage before it hardens into contempt. To refuse the cheap dopamine of moral superiority. To remember that the person we disagree with is not a category but a consciousness—flawed, frightened, and freighted with their own unprocessed pain.
I am not calling for civility theater. Some things deserve fierce opposition. But there is a difference between fighting for justice and fighting to feel alive. Between anger that illuminates and anger that consumes. The Stoics taught us to rule our passions instead of being ruled by them. That is not weakness. That is the only form of strength that does not eventually destroy what it claims to protect.
Here is the call to action, and it is personal. Inventory your resentment. Not the public grievances you post about. The private ones. The grudges you carry against family members, neighbors, strangers who cut you off in traffic, politicians you’ve never met. Ask yourself what those resentments are feeding. Ask yourself what you lose by holding them. Then do the harder thing: let one go. Not because the other person deserves it. Because you are not willing to be farmed for violence.
Speak to someone you disagree with not to win, but to understand. Refuse the headline that reduces a human being to a caricature. When you feel the heat rising—the tunnel vision, the ancient thing in the chest—pause. Name it. This is powerlessness looking for a target. Then choose a different target. Write. Walk. Call a friend. Do anything except transmit the pain forward.
Violence ends where responsibility begins. Not the responsibility to fix the world. The responsibility to stop making it worse, one internal choice at a time.