Why We Should Never Be Surprised By Violence

Or living a life in accordance with nature

The Stoics believed we should review our actions - both the good and the bad - in order to harden and improve and grow.

This is my review from a night several weeks ago.

The Stoic thread within it was worth pulling on, and hopefully worth sharing here.

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We were walking at night with Carson (our dog) when a sleek little delivery van was speeding in our direction and hugging our side of the road. I stopped, stood my ground, held my light by my side, and glared at the car boring down on me. The driver decided it was time to look up from his phone and swerved the van away in a panic.

He then did the unexpected: he came to a screeching halt beside us. “Hey man, we got a problem?” Thick Jersey accent. He leaned toward me like he was ready to get out of the car depending on my answer. I looked at him and asked, “Why are you speeding in this neighborhood?” He responded with, “I wasn’t speeding.” I simply looked into his eyes. He drew his head back into his car like some miserable turtle, said, “Fuck you,” and drove away.

This insignificant event occupied my mind far longer than it should have and I didn’t know why.

It’s worth wondering why someone can be so disenchanted that he is willing to throw away his life over an imagined slight; or, worse, over something he did wrong and refused to acknowledge. It may be that his life is nothing more than a television set, beer, and his favorite porn sites, and is therefore quite willing to burn it all down and take others down with him; or he might just be having a bad day.

But his motives are irrelevant to me – what matters is my response.

This wasn’t a declared war zone. I wasn’t deployed down the street from my house. I wasn’t carrying an M4 and a P226 and several frag grenades. This turtle craving a fist fight was moved by such needless and petty premises, that I was actually stunned by the unexpectedness of it all.

That, I think, was my issue: for that single moment in time, as I was enjoying the moon and winding down the day with a quiet walk, I was unprepared; I was caught off guard; I didn’t expect that to happen.

Therein lies my sin.

It turns out that a cognitive posture for second-to-second violence is a perishable skill, a truth that makes us all the more vulnerable.

What then? Why would we ever allow ourselves to be taken by surprise by an act of violence? This mode of living requires a mind of uncommon discipline and awareness; it requires a hunter-gatherer mind, or the mind of a Stoic, or the mind of a combatant, since all three share this common thread.  

How would it hit me if, ten years from now, I looked back at that night on the street, and that miserable turtle had done something to those I love? How would I feel knowing that it wasn’t due to his actions which are outside of my control, but to some lack of preparation, which was inside my control? That all I needed to do was exert a microscopic amount of effort and thought in the hours leading up to that moment, and they would have been safe?

We stock food because we know we’ll be hungry, we fill our gas tanks so we don’t break down on the highway, and we charge our phones so they don’t die. But these are low stakes. How often do we think ahead regarding matters of life and death? Of the shooter, stabber, mugger, or rapist? I fail to see anyone without a phone, but a phone is a poor match against a knife or pistol or tomahawk.

And if I forget my phone when I leave home and I reach for it five minutes later, I'm stunned. I wonder how I’ll get by, and I’ll think of all the texts and calls and slack messages and emails I absolutely need to engage with. But the phone and its messages are worthless compared to what happens if I leave home without my mind oriented to reality, consciously going over the three questions:

1)    What is the condition of my mind?

2)    What would I do if the worst thing that can happen, happens right now?

3)    How can I best support those I care for?

But let’s flip it around and say I did not, in fact, commit a sin. Why would I exert the effort for such low probability events? What follows?

Do we even need to go down that road? Would the victims of murder, starvation, cannibalism, rape, and torture under the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century support this proposition? The Turtle is the goose-stepping Nazi and he is the Communist comrade, but nature simply dropped him in the 21^st Century and swapped the foreign language for a Jersey accent.

And what about the chain of human history stretching back to our separation from our Chimpanzee brethren? These pre-state men died violent deaths at an estimated rate of 25%¹ – literally one out of every four men you would ever meet were killed by other men. The Turtle is the pre-state combatant with his little wooden spear waiting behind the ferns, but nature simply dropped him in the 21^st Century and swapped the ferns for a Ford Transit.

These people exist – they will burn it all down with a smile. Am I actually living in accordance with nature if I choose to evade this reality? Am I actually progressing as a brother, and friend, and partner, and son? Do we need to dig this hole any deeper and add more color to a fact of human experience?

But what says the Turtle? “You can wrap the body-armor of philosophy around you until the end of time, but I will come at you whether you’re surprised or not.” Of course you will, but to what end? If you think your little bullets can steal my gratitude for the Milky Way splashed across the night sky and thereby make yourself more grateful, you are mistaken. If you think your little bullets can steal from Carson the things that make him worth loving and thereby make yourself worth loving, you are mistaken.

Some things are under our control and some are not. I side with Epictetus: if you’re trying to steal our power of choice, or our power of action, or our power of critical thinking — the three things that no tyrant can take from us, the three things that are all that truly belong to us — you can “come at” a tree for all the good it will do you.

The Stoics would teach us how to die so that we will never have to bend the knee to a tyrant, among other reasons. But this does not mean passive acceptance as some have accused the Stoics of advocating.

Take into mind an image of an infantryman. Should this war fighter spend more time practicing how to die in a firefight, or how to fight in a firefight? Many ancient philosophers like the Stoic exemplar, Socrates, believed that a philosopher was inherently a Warrior Philosopher, not a modern Academic Philosopher.

The ancient philosophers counseled us to learn to cultivate a savage pleasure in everything that happens, whenever and wherever and for whatever reason it happens: death, hardship, and violence.

What then? Yes, we should prepare ourselves to merge once more with the universe with open arms, but not like those who want to die, but like those who want to live. It would be madness to choose death when all that stands between us and life is a noble fight. This test is a gift; it is a thing worth training for.

And when we do prepare for violence, what follows? We learn the true meaning of peace and calm. We prepare for worst case scenarios which makes us ready for when — not if — humanity shrugs off its suits and manners and laws and returns to the state of nature. Above all, we become more useful and expendable to those we love.

We should never be surprised that there are those who want to burn this all down.

We cannot control them.

But we can control ourselves.

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1. War in Human Civilization. By Azar Gat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.