Dear Friends,
It seems to me, if your ideas mush be enforced with violence, those who leave your sect must be killed and you spread your ideology through conquest, you must have self esteem issues. Confident people, institutions and groups know in their hearts that their ideas are true and virtuous, therefore they allow people to come and go, spread their ideas through discussion and hold onto followers by the power of love and logic, not violence and threats. Groups, institutions and people who have self esteem issues however, are very different. Factions with self esteem issues know in their hearts their ideology is wrong and understand in their heads that no rational person would follow them without being coerced. Moreover, those factions, institutions, groups and sects that have self esteem issues can be reliably singled out by their treatment of dissidents, unbelievers and those who wish to leave the fold. The reason this simple concept is so important for humanity to learn, and never forget, is that violence is the means in which an evil, backwards, pernicious and stunting ideas pervade mankind.
This concept need not be manifested in outright violence, other forms of coercion work as well. Political correctness is another form of violence that demands unanimity of thought, knuckling under of unbelievers and advances the ideology of progressivism through fear and intimidation. Progressives know, because history is unambiguous about this, that their ideology is wrong. They know if their ideas were fully implemented, world wide government, world communism and world tyranny, the lot of mankind would suffer greatly. The results of their ideas is irrelevant to them, the goal is all that is important, and so the means can be anything that works.
Violence in all it’s forms… soft, personal, impersonal, vague, bloody or against one’s reputation, are ways to force someone else to do something they would otherwise not do. Since someone must be forced to do something believe something or think something, they would otherwise not do, that is further proof that the action, belief or thought is not in the self interest of the individual, but of the egoist forcing the point. We do things, believe things and think things that are in some way in our self interest. Human beings are universal about this. Even the most psychotically challenged among us act in their own perceived self interest.
Self interest however come in several flavors. Self interest can be rightly understood, it can be egoistic and it can selfless. Self interest rightly understood is to follow one’s self interest in an enlightened manner, sadly, self interest rightly understood is becoming more and more rare today. Selfless self interest is what saints practice. Jesus practiced self interest selflessly. An egoist follows his or her self interest selfishly. Egoists are the ones who will use violence against others to force those others to act, believe and think, that which is against their own self interest, regardless of it’s flavor. The egoist will demand from others that which the egoist would never subject himself to. Therefore all ideologies, movements, institutions and religions that use violence to force submission, come from egoism, are perpetuated with egoistic drives and eventually are quashed in bloody upheaval.
All ideologies that spread through fear, maintain their adherents with intimidation and subject others to threats, are wrong ideologies. What the egoists that run such ideologies fail to understand is that the tighter they hold their adherents the more the adherents seek to escape. Violence only goes so far. In the greater scheme of things, it is human heartedness, (logic and love), that always eventually wins out. Yes the egoist can lower humanity for a while, sometimes centuries and even possibly millennia, but eventually, human heartedness will win out. Because people are attracted to beauty and repulsed by evil. Violence can hold a person in evil for awhile but the evil that underlies the violence, the reason that violence must be applied, the revulsion people will eventually feel at the evil they are forced to embrace will become so strong even the threat of death itself will hold no power. That is when false, evil and pernicious ideologies that use violence to hold their adherents, pull in new followers and force unanimity of thought, collapse in bloody upheaval.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
