Polite Conversation

Three philosophy undergrads, Francis, Rosa, and Alvin, sit in couches and chairs drinking champagne in Alvin's parent's living room. It's Christmas break and Alvin has invited his friends, the ones who aren't going home for the holidays, to dinner, followed by a little “Symposium”. Alvin's precocious little sister, Julia, sits unnoticed at the computer by the window, playing Starcraft II with her headphones on. Francis proposes the topic: “Violence”. Alvin starts off.

ALVIN: First off, what is 'violence'? It's a messy word full of instances, attitudes, action films with special effects, unpleasant music, rough-looking animals and men that look like rough-looking animals. In its noun form, it's useless and prejudicial. When we're dealing with moral philosophy we've got to judge actions, not demeanors. Violence in the moral sense is nothing more than the act of violating.

FRANCIS: Definition by conjugation. Brilliant.

ALVIN: No, I'm going somewhere with this. The transitive verb suggests a new question: what is violated? We're talking about rules and rights, now. Violence is the breach of a right. You know, life, liberty, property—”

FRANCIS: —Dignity, a living wage, education...”

ALVIN: [speaking rapidly] Now wait a second. See, thank you, see that's an important distinction I want to make. Right to property. Right to a wage. What's the difference? When I say I have a right to keep my stuff that means I have a right to you not stealing it. But if I have a right to a wage then you've got to give one to me. The first is about forbidding action. The second is about obligatory action. Compulsory, even. That's negative liberty and positive liberty. See, 'cause negative liberty negates someone else's license, while positive liberty posits an obligation for someone else.

What do you call that? Slavery. It's really a kind of slavery. It means that violence, the violation of a right, can be committed not only through action but through inaction. It means your failure to provide for the people around you- every second- is violence. It means every penny in your bank account is stolen. Now I don't mean let's not have any compassion, let's everybody fight to keep what we got and never acknowledge a pang of charity or anything. But isn't it a perversion of the word violence to say that you, me, sitting in this room, are doing violence to the poor every bit as much as the drug lords and DEA that are shooting 'em up or incarcerating them right now? Is it fair to call those the same thing? How do you punish our failure to serve? More incarceration and forced labor on behalf of the 'violated'? Now that's slavery. [drinks from glass]

FRANCIS: So you're saying that violence is a physical breach of personal agency? What about psychological aggression? Is intimidation a violation in these terms?

ALVIN: Well of course. [licks rim of glass and sets it down, leans forward] Once violence is systematized it rarely consists in physical acts anymore. It's the threat of overwhelming force that allows people to compel others to enter into bad contracts. That, or fraudulence. In fact, here you go: [with practiced declamation] put another way, this rights system is a prohibition against coercion and fraud. All human action is restricted to the non-aggressive deployment of one's own property and person, and the peaceful persuasion of others to cooperate to mutual advantage. Now there's something I can say standing on one leg. [relieved, he interlocks his fingers around his knee and leans back, stretching his shoulders]

FRANCIS: But what about the abrupt cancellation of extant contracts? Are you saying it's never cruel to lay off a thousand employees without benefits on Christmas?

ALVIN: Well if forewarning and benefits are stipulated in the contract then that's a breach--

FRANCIS: What if it's not?

ALVIN: Then maybe they should read the terms of their employment a little more closely, and eventually the businesses who do that will struggle to find decent workers.

FRANCIS: [gradual crescendo] Suppose that's not an option? Suppose-- and bear with me here-- that we live in a world where jobs are scarce because business is not expanding at the same rate as the population. Imagine for just a second that national advertising has actually shifted the culture so that people don't trust small businesses with names that they don't already recognize, and big suppliers are able to drive down costs because they have the wherewithal to outsource labor and dodge taxation and take advantage of harsh immigration laws that strip half of their “brown” employees of legal rights or even recognition, and the costs and risks of starting a business or throwing your lot in with local business rise exponentially as the Law of Economies of Scale dominates healthcare and advertising and litigation and production and borrowing and shipping and even legislation so that if you don't give in and swear fealty to one of half-a-dozen conglomerates in your region that will hire unskilled labor, you're an enemy to them and they are working every day to break you using only their “peaceful persuasion” of government officials and “non-aggressive deployment” of like ninety-percent of the means of production that exist on earth. [takes two big gulps of champagne]

Pause. Alvin closes his eyes, fingers on the bridge of his nose in affected frustration, and enunciates slowly.

ALVIN: It's easy to rail against epiphenomenal injustices. But contrary to legal opinion, corporations are not people. Only people act, and morality can only prescribe and proscribe actions for people. And it's hard to look at these unfortunate circumstances and put together a causal chain connecting deliberate, violent actions with these broad effects. Is firing fair in principle? Yes, I still think so. Can it be unfair in specific circumstances if the employer is responsible for putting the employee in a desperate spot in the first place? Conceivably, yes. But the breach of rights is far from clear, and you can't really make a judgment without articulating it fairly and formally in terms of established and agreed upon ethical principles. I'll judge privately, I'll get angry and disgusted at mean, slimy, petty people, but I can't throw around a word like violence without a damn good reason. As wrong as some things seem, I don't really know what it'd look like if it were different. I'm pretty confident that some things never work out for the general good in the long run. I think it's safe and wise to categorically prohibit the really antisocial stuff. The rest, it's not that morality doesn't go any farther, but, well, prescriptive morality can't go any farther. Morality is who gets the ax, right? Decency, that's something else.

FRANCIS: [impassioned] Decency is where it starts! The way you reckon it I'm probably never going to make a moral decision in my life. Maybe two or five. Judges, politicians, you could make a case for strict formal limitations on their moral deliberations because they're vested with a whole lot of power by a whole lot of people. But that doesn't reduce us to a passive role of obeying laws and occasionally voting to change the people who change them. [sip] We've got the hard job as humane humans; they're there to catch the things that slip by us, which unfortunately is a lot of bad, bad shit.

[adopts parable voice] I went to a Montessori school when I was a kid and in my Upper Elementary class we had a list of rules like any other 'society.' But they're big on positive articulations of norms rather than negative restrictions- quite the opposite of Alvin's philosophy, in fact- because they wanted that list to describe what a healthy environment actually looks like. And I'll never forget what the number one commandment was: Everyone must be physically and psychologically safe. Mind you, we were nine years old when we came in. Big words. But they taught us what they meant and made it very clear that verbal abuse and emotional callousness were not okay- because we all had a right to feel safe.

I'm going to pick up your point about positive liberty and slavery and challenge it. [last sip; pours another glass as he continues] You're really concerned that moral judgment be restricted to actions and the negation of positive invasions. Now I'm going to say something on one foot and you're going to stop and think about it for a second, and hopefully admit that there's a hell of a lot more going on here on earth than you've dreamt of in your philosophy: Every action and utterance in society is psychologically invasive. That doesn't mean 'violent' per se; but it means that everything you do is heard or seen, and interpreted by others. And as often as not, the little things you say thoughtlessly can hurt people, put them down, marginalize them, or- worse yet!- implicitly tell them by way of example that something's okay when it's not, or that certain prejudiced assumptions are valid, or that certain questions aren't worth bothering about: like when you trivialize rape as a metaphor for anything mildly unpleasant in regular idiom- “Man, the Cowboys got raped last night!” “They were out of chocolate croissants! Butthurt!”- or when you always introduce an intelligent, successful, admirable woman as “beautiful” or “lovely”, or when you see a strapping, broad-shouldered lad walking across campus and you mutter to your friend, “football scholarship.” [snorts, continues]

There's two kinds of things going on here, what Pomo scholars and feminists call “microaggressions”, and what I call “coughing”. Because when people hear you typecast them or belittle them, it's like a papercut, it's tiny but it stings and it's not the first or the last little cut of the the day, and over the years they bleed from these fine incisions until they're pale and weak and pretty firmly convinced there's something wrong with them. But the other kind, the coughing, that's how the disease spreads. Because you don't know you're sick with prejudice! You respect women, your best friend is black, you had a gay teacher in school and he was a really swell guy, but these loaded idioms just slip out of your mouth like viruses and you don't have the sense to cover your mouth with your sleeve because you don't believe in invisible things. And other people pick up what you've got even if they don't 'pick up on it', and they unconsciously adjust to the norms established by their friends and acquaintances, i.e. you.

And just like the little cuts add up on the debit end, the little coughs add up to a lot of bigoted credit too. That's how 'family rights' activists and 'border control' fanatics push invasive legislation in moderate and liberal states. It's how seemingly liberal parents snap when their kids come out of the closet and they just can't process it and they fly into a rage that has nothing to do with their political convictions. I'm going to make maybe four or five “morally significant” decisions in my life, and I'll screw even those up if I'm infected with millions of bad influences accrued over a lifetime of being surrounded by people who think their day-to-day interactions are excusable.

You want to talk about slavery? Slavery is being victimized and humiliated all the time qua minority, while simultaneously being conditioned qua dominant majority to unconsciously abuse other minorities and to be an unwitting chauvinist mouthpiece. And that's the only other option if you reject the other willing “slavery” of being mindful of what you say and trying to lead a consistently moral, compassionate life in all the details. We subject ourselves alone to moral “slavery” so that we don't live in a world where everybody is silently enslaving each other.

ROSA: Speaking of which, can I weigh in?

ALVIN: [relieved] Of course!

FRANCIS: [embarrassed] Yeah, I'm done rambling. Please, go ahead.

ROSA: [probing, but with certitude] It's been bothering me, while you've both been talking about the definition and vicissitudes of violence, that there's this mutual assumption that we can do something about it just by recognizing it. Like we either recognize good and evil choices and commit to the good ones, or else we recognize good and evil habits and cultivate the good ones. But for, like, ever people have been preaching about compassion and justice and shit and yet the kind of systematic abuse that Francis is talking about is still, well, systematic. And ubiquitous too.

I've done a little of my own thinking about the whole question of evil, not what it is but why it is, and I've got two theories and I think they're complementary. The first came to me when I was reading Veblen.

FRANCIS: Vablin?

ROSA: Yeah, Thorstein Veblen, turn-of-the-century economist. He's the guy who coined “leisure class” and “conspicuous consumption”. But what's really key in his philosophy-- 'cause that's what it is, not a “Dismal Science” so much as an extremely dismal social and psychological theory-- is the Theory of Invidious Comparison. Invidious, like... like envy. Envy-producing. Basically, after acknowledging that we have some marginal interest in our material well-being that drives us to put bare subsistence above all else- usually- but after that's taken care of the solitary enjoyment of goods-in-themselves drops off substantially: hedonism is way overrated in economic analysis, and so is security. No, what we really want is to be esteemed by other people. We gotta consume conspicuously, in absurd quantities and extravagant ways, to show that we can afford to. Like those Pacific Northwestern tribes that give each other piles of fancy rugs and set them on fire. It's not just a Western thing All human beings measure themselves relative to the people around them in terms of social and economic status. Everything else, money, luxury, education, beauty, power, is commodities to trade for status and tools to maintain it.

The issue, obviously, is that not everyone can be at the top, and for every person above the social median there's gonna be somebody stewing below it. Egalitarian schemes don't work in a zero-sum game because people will find a way to compare and compete anyway. Innovations in production and distribution increase the abundance of goods, but raising the lot of rich and poor alike does nothing to affect the underlying tension between the enviable and the envious. First world societies, third world societies, communist societies, capitalist societies, industrial societies, primitive societies, Christian societies, Hindu societies, atheist societies, free societies, totalitarian societies-- it doesn't matter, it doesn't fucking matter, wherever you are and whenever you are it always boils down to who's ahead and who's hot on their heels.

The violence you guys are talking about, physical brutality or casual cruelty, it all sounds like envy and pride to me. Envy, pride, and fear. “Fair” and efficient laws can transmute physical violence into non-physical violence, but they can't outlaw the causes. A well-ordered society can maybe put an end to starvation but it can't extinguish relative poverty. And Francis, your “society of servitude” isn't going to get any farther. It sounds ridiculous but I've seen it happen, piety-contests and passive-aggressive charity. We've got a phrase for that, “holier-than-thou”, and its secular applications are just as apt. People on both sides of the political battleground pat themselves on the back for their superlative tolerance or conviction, and they put down their political enemies like dogs while they smugly compare themselves to their political rivals, i.e. their best friends and allies. [pours last drops from bottle] Dammit, are we out?

ALVIN: Some ale in the fridge.

FRANCIS: What kind?

ALVIN: Fat Tire.

ROSA: That'll do.

ALVIN: [rising, grunting, then perkily,] Comin' right up.

FRANCIS: So how do you reckon that envy is the be-all and end-all? Children still read Winnie the Pooh. There's, like, hope.

ROSA: And then they buy the merchandise and wear it to school.

FRANCIS: Alright, you've got irony on your side. Still, anybody who makes universal claims about human nature is suspect in my book. Everybody's got a theory about human nature: it's called an “autobiography”.

ROSA: Not if you know what you're doing. You think I believe this? It's more a challenge than a claim. Glaucon asked Socrates to defend justice against the toughest arguments, and not take the easy road. Thrasymachus is a dumbass, and he buys shitty beer but he raises one or two good points. I'm raising the rest of them.

FRANCIS: [as Alvin re-enters with the six-pack] Fair enough. You mentioned two theories. [to Alvin] Thanks. You got a bottle opener? [he produces it] Double thanks. [to Rosa] Shoot.

ROSA: Alright, now all that self-gratifying factionalism leads me to the other side of the coin. Couple years ago I was reading Konrad Lorenz' On Aggression. Lorenz is an ethologist, that's an animal behaviorist, and he had this fascinating theory about the evolution of socialization. It's gonna take a while to explain but I'm paraphrasing a book so you can go read the damn thing or you can bear with me here. [drains half a bottle] Fish.

FRANCIS: Fish, huh?

ROSA: Yes, fish. Not exactly full of personality. Pretty docile though, the little ones. They swim around in schools for protection. Not like they got together one day and drafted a social contract or anything, but the ones that swim close together are less likely to get eaten because it confuses predators, you know, Sartre's existential crisis of choice at dinnertime, and because in large, dense numbers they look like a great big amorphous Leviathan [chuckles at her admittedly deft pun] and they scare the predators away. So they evolved to hang out in schools. Mind you, these are peaceful, harmless little things and they would've lift a fin to the defense of their neighbor. They just exist in each other's proximity and that is the extent of their “society”.

[continues, like a blogger reviewing a book chapter-by-chapter] Rats are much more social. Which is to say horribly vicious to rats from other “clans”. They recognize each other by scent and they are fiercely loyal to their compatriots, but they will tear apart even one of their buddies if the poor sucker got lost in enemy territory and escaped with the offending scent still clinging to his fur. Lorenz observed a higher level of organization and cooperation among the rats than among the fish, coupled with an increased aggressive drive directed outside the clan.

But he's most famous for his studies on geese. First he establishes by way of amusing anecdotes that geese often develop patterns of behavior which originate as responses to their environment but eventually become “rituals” repeated seemingly for their own sake, divorced from their original context. What's fascinating is that he traces rituals of courtship, affection and loyalty between geese and their ganders to original displays of aggression directed at rival geese. What's more, he suggests that there is a direct relationship between the famous pugnacity of ganders while in the company of their mates, and the equally-notable affection displayed between the mates. With these three examples and a few others he builds an argument that aggression, as an instinctual set of behaviors, co-evolved with instinctual displays of ever-increasing loyalty and affection to ever-smaller groups of cohorts.

At the end of the book he extends his argument to humans too but with the caveat that we, as omnivores, and equipped as we are with inferior natural weapons relative to (say) dogs, have imperfectly evolved affection-safeguards to check our aggression. Because, y'know, for most of our evolutionary history we were not nearly so lethal as we are now. Our technological capacity for violence has greatly outstripped the slow evolution of instincts which sublimate aggression into affection. I would argue further that as social, emotional creatures our capacity to hurt and be hurt has expanded in more ways than that, as Francis pointed out.

But what I take away from this phylogenetic history of aggression, and maybe I'm wrong and certainly I'm not as scientifically rigorous as Lorenz, but what I take away is an explanation for the constant reinforcement of social cohesion by way of exclusion that I see every day. Forgive me for anthropomorphizing but those fish with a tepid sense of filial loyalty don't seem to have a clear conception of “fishness” contra “non-fishness”, or at least they don't act out the difference as zealously as the rats do, who understand the consequences of “clan” and “not-clan”, or the ganders who seem to seek out “not-mates” to beat up to remind themselves of how much they love their mates.

Do you see where I'm going with this? [she gets to her point] How do we know we belong to a nation, a race, a club, a gender, a class, a subculture, a hobby-group, or a clique? By thanking our lucky stars we don't belong to any of the others. And we do that by putting down, belittling, demeaning, beating up, and waging war on the members of other groups. Every act of inter-group aggression makes the boundary between belonging and not-belonging clearer, and it increases our sense of belonging. Conversely, every act of intra-group affection tacitly excludes non-members and reinforces the divide. Elvis Costello's got a great phrase for it: “Emotional Fascism”. That's exactly what it is. We create our group identity by undermining the identity of others, though not always with gas chambers, thankfully.

[conclusion and synthesis] So we establish our individuality and self-worth by invidious comparison. But this alienates us and isolates us, so we make up for it with group elitism enacted through emotional fascism. “Coughing” may be unconscious but it's hardly accidental. Your so-called “disease” of bigotry, Francis, is an evolutionary mechanism we've developed so we can overcome our inherent egotism and organize into powerful groups. It's a way to bond over invidious comparisons by externalizing them. Yeah, it sucks. It makes me feel sick to talk about it. But that's the dismal truth. Violence and bigotry aren't just systemic, they're hard-wired.

ALVIN: That's a tidy theory but what do you do with it?

ROSA: Oh, I don't know, think about it and refute it cogently?

ALVIN: [just dripping with it] I could play that game but I don't really feel compelled to. There's nowhere to go with it. It pretty much obviates any attempt at purposeful, moral action. People are going to act according to ethical criteria and they're going to think their criteria are True and Correct. So imagining that morality is hopeless is like imagining you're in Plato's Cave, imagining you're a solipsist, imagining any other thing that's just going to spawn a doublethink disconnect between your actions and your philosophical masturbation because there's just no rational translation between theory and practice. Any of these things could be “objectively true”, whatever that means, and nobody will be able to really conceive them, they'll still act the same way they always do and utter combinations of words that might resemble the reality of their situation like burnt toast resembles the Virgin Mary but it won't mean anything, people can't think like that. I mean, come on. Maybe you'll sleep better if somebody pulls a clever word trick out of a hat and calls it an “ontological rebuttal” but you could instead choose not to need philosophical psalms to quiet your mind.

ROSA: Is that all these are to you? Philosophical phantoms and philosophical psalms? Are you really not bothered by unresolvable contradictions?

ALVIN: Well I'm not bothered by things that don't exist, no. And “unresolvable contradictions” are just semantic errors in disguise. I am bothered by practical questions so I think about them lucidly, with precise language so I don't fall into a semantic trap, until I figure out a functional solution. That's what real philosophers do. Scientists, I mean, and mathematicians and judges and economists. Sorry to bore you, but logic is a lot less exciting than existential angst I guess.

ROSA: Wow. Gosh. And here I thought I was actually thinking and exercising my tiny brain. Thanks for fixing my childish philosophical errors, Al.

ALVIN: Anytime, Rosie.

ROSA: Speaking of wise children and naked emperors, Julia, have you been hearing any of this?

JULIA: [takes off her headphones and pauses her game]Unfortunately, yes.

ROSA: Care to weigh in?

JULIA:[turns] Trade you an incisive commentary for a beer.

FRANCIS: Uh-uh. You're like fifteen.

JULIA: Sixteen. And I could be huffing nitrous in a garage somewhere tonight but of all the people I know you guys are, regrettably, the most edifying company I can half-ignore.

ROSA: Jeez Alvin. How's it feel knowing you got the deficient genes in the family?

ALVIN: Ignore her. We found her in a little shuttle-pod in the backyard. You see the antennae under her hair?

JULIA: He's sensitive about his adoption. Humor him.

Rosa laughs and shares a glance with Francis, who stifles a chuckle of his own as he opens another bottle and offers it up. Julia, still blasé and deadpan as ever, takes it and sips, grimacing.

JULIA: Could use a lime at least. Not that I expect even a perfunctory nod towards civilization from college kids.

ALVIN: You don't get to say “kids,” Jules. You ride a yellow bus and wear braces.

JULIA: Chill, bro. You don't get a merit badge for picking on a widdle gurl.

ROSA: [refocusing the banter] You mentioned you had some thoughts on our debate?

JULIA: Yeah, I've had a few thoughts. But first let me see if I can recapitulate the argument. First off my brother rehearses his curious mashup of deontological Natural Rights theory and Rule Utilitarianism, with a smattering of semantic Pragmatism. Easy start. On a good day he usually expands on common law as an inductive institution for discovering useful norms by trial-and-error, so he can root his Holy Trinity of Libertarian Rights in a standard of human happiness. Tonight he forgot that, so his economic allusions regarding employment and creative destruction were kind of out of the blue. But trust me, he's not as dumb as he looks. Or sounds.

That said, he opened the door for Francis to lay down a passionate leftist critique of corporatism within Alvin's own libertarian framework. In my opinion, market anarchism and left-libertarianism are where the supply-side methodology of classical liberalism breaks down. For centuries the rational actor was atomic and irreducible but psychologists split that atom a long time ago and the neo-classicals can ignore that all they want but corporate advertisers and party strategists sure don't.

Francis, I like your “Cough” theory. Nice extrapolation on microaggression synthesized with intersectionality. It's a great diagnosis, but that's all it is. Sure, you can try to be a more compassionate person and that's a noble thing, but you're fighting an uphill battle when you try to magnify your microdots and deconstruct the implications of everything you do. It's martyrdom by paranoia and it's gotta be exhausting.

Rosa took it in an interesting direction by looking for the systemic causes of violence, but you were a little hyperbolic for my taste. Empirically, it's easy to establish the existence of something but unless you can back it up with measurable and repeatable experiments you're basically abandoning universality. Not that I think universal claims are useful to the social sciences anyway. Invidious comparison happens, and it happens in a big way and any attempt at maximizing human happiness on a large scale is going to have to address envy. That's not the same as saying that invidious comparison is universal, fundamental, or insurmountable and I don't think you proved any of those things. Likewise, emotional fascism- love that phrase by the way, you're getting that from the working title for Armed Forces, right?- yeah, emotional fascism is ubiquitous in the sense that you see it all the time but it's unnecessarily ambitious to say it's the rule. Alvin raised a good point here, in the most asinine way possible: a lot of important conversations get postponed because excitable philosophers accidentally use hyperbolic language that stumps everyone until somebody finally comes along, reads the argument closely, and points out the logical leaps. Philosophy has been “ended” more times than a soap opera. We'd move a lot faster if we tempered our arguments and aired our misgivings. [she stops and thinks]

ALVIN: Thanks for the play-by-play “crystallization of the round,” but I was expecting a personal opinion, not a scorecard.

JULIA: Would you give me a moment? It takes me a little longer to formulate arguments because I don't pull them out of my ass or plagiarize them from my professors.

ROSA: Oh, snap! Let me get you some ointment for that--

ALVIN: Don't even...

JULIA: Fine, you want a bone to chew on? Here's what jumps into my head. It's a little psalm, or a koan or a mantra or a- well, it's a bone to chew on anyway. I met an old hippie once, she looked out of her eyes like she was dozens of people, like her body was a coral and she was full of lives, and she told me that it's impossible to feel fear and gratitude at the same time. At first it sounded like some sappy wishful hippy shit but it stuck in my head and I've turned it over a lot. Whenever I'm afraid I think about that and I realize that that if it's true, then what is there other than fear and gratitude? I used to think everything was fear: anger and misery and ambition and cruelty, it all boils down to uncertainty and dread and finally fear. But she reminded me that gratitude is qualitatively different from all that, irreducible in its own right. And every other good thing I could think of, love and happiness and freedom and safety, when they're at they're very best they make me grateful, they overwhelm me and the thank-yous just spill out of me. It's impossible to feel fear and gratitude at the same time. It's impossible to feel anything other than gratitude or fear. And if you think of it one way, fear is the potential for gratitude. I mean, gratitude can't become gratitude. There's a particular wonderful feeling of finding gratitude, like feeling a car accelerate. And only fear can do that. So shouldn't we be grateful for fear? Not because it's fear, but because even the most terrible thing carries the seeds of gratitude.

I still grapple with fear, of course. I wonder if even that old bag of spirits grapples with fear. Probably. She's not dead yet. But knowing that fear and gratitude have this complementary relationship, like seeds and trees, like eggs and chickens, it gives me something. It's like emotional resurrection. So even when my mind is abused and paranoid and dismal my soul can reflect on it without fear because my soul can see beyond my brain-state and so it constantly revels in the resurrection.

I think that's the way to end violence: not by fighting it but by nurturing it into its maturity, into its natural culmination as benevolence, as gratitude. It's just an attitude, really, not a specific strategy. It's no excuse not to work hard to figure out how to transmute violence into love. It's a call to the vocation of moral alchemy. I'm a moral alchemist, and I take that very seriously. How's that for an answer?

FIN