Violence  and the Loss of Freedom

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

Fury

Resentment-based violence arises as a reaction to guilt or to depression. When resentment is currently being felt, then normally this produces nothing worse than hostility. But when fear is also generated then the potential for violence increases dramatically. In order to overcome the fear, the resentment surges up to a simmering fury. When this happens, violence is kept restrained only by the person's social conditioning ; if the conditioning is too weak, then violence explodes and is acted out in the current situation.

When this surge of fury happened to me, my fear of violence decreased to the point where my own violence was kept in bounds by my ethical principles only, and not by social conditioning. I began to feel like a walking volcano, a volcano of violence that was ready to explode at any time and at anyone who upset me. When this mood is present in a crowd, then riots easily and spontaneously occur.

Anger

A variation on violence occurs when I live in a society which has, from my point of view, minimised ethical values to vanishing point. I experience anger rather than fury. Since there is no immediate danger so fear is absent, thus allowing anger to arise. (Fear and anger are binary, or complementary, emotions : when one is present the other is absent). The level of violence from anger is less than that from fury. [¹]

My anger becomes righteous anger at the poor quality of life that such an amoral society breeds. I feel trapped within a debased society, even though I recognise that for most members of this society their personal evolution has not yet reached the point of ethical take-off ; these members respond only to social conditioning. The emotional dynamic (that is, the emotional factors that maintain the psychological mood) of righteous anger is resentment with anger. The resentment acts as a stimulus to the production of social morality, together with the process of abreaction. [²]

Violence in Dreams

When righteous anger becomes active in my dreams, then I dream of being violent to other people who are threatening vulnerable aspects of me. I act as a saviour.  [ In my dreams, each vulnerable aspect assumes its own identity as a person. So my close friends in a dream are projections of aspects of myself as I am or would like to be.] [³]

The loss of freedom is a powerful theme in some conflict dreams.
First, I note an idea from a previous article. Violence often arises from the reaction to guilt or to depression. When this occurs, the person can feel trapped by some aspect of life [4] ; then we have diagram 2 in operation (from the article Mind Loops). I repeat it here for convenience.

Diagram 2.
Loop of Loss of Freedom

When the feeling of being trapped by life, with no chance of escape, is experienced, then tears of sorrow flow from my eyes and an abreaction of pride begins. When, during sleep, the stage of pride (mode of hate) is present then I often dream of being incarcerated in prison. [5]. Murderous feelings against my jailers arise. My body boils and sweats, especially my thighs. These dreams happened so often that I lost weight from my thighs (see also the notes on dreams in the article on destructiveness ).

A variation on the themes of repressed righteous anger and pride gives rise to dreams of a horde of people trying to fight and conquer and kill me. In the dream the people represent ‘depraved’ society, the society that is alienating me and forcing me to conform. My fear of society is expressed within this dream scenario. In the dream I often overcome my fear by switching to righteous anger ; then I retaliate by machine-gunning and killing all these people. In the dream scenario I find a way to express my violence. This kind of dream occurred many times to me in the 1990s.

The danger of such dreams is that there will be horrible consequences if the dreamer tries to live his phantasy. If he cannot restrict his fear and anger of society to phantasy then he will be driven by confusion and lack of control to enact this phantasy within society. He may end in shooting and killing people in a public massacre. These public disasters have occurred, and so I know that my way of portraying violence in dreams is not peculiar to me.

Three Primary Sources

The loss of freedom can generate the feeling of being trapped. This is a potential source of violence. In general, there are three primary sources of potential violence.

a). Infancy trauma. [6]

b). The process of reincarnation (this produces the sense of nihilism). [7]

c). The loss of freedom in an amoral person.

Other sources of violence, such as experiences of warfare and political repression, are secondary sources, and their intensities reflect the intensities of the underlying primary sources.

Aspects of amorality (and hence of freedom) are dissolved either by the inculcation of social conditioning (unwilling recognition of social restraints), or by social learning (the internalisation of acceptable social norms). The greatest effect of the loss of freedom occurs when it is interpreted as a restriction of one’s will, rather than a restriction of one’s abilities.

Freedom and Identity

The loss of freedom brings with it the issue of social conditioning, when social norms are imposed on a child or an adult against its will. What is the rationale of social conditioning (apart from trying to maintain a stable society)?

Consider an example from the history of the United Kingdom. Up to the thirteenth century Wales was an independent country. Then the English king Edward I  conquered it and incorporated it into a union with England. What was the effect on the Welsh?   Probably little effect on the agrarian community, but a big change in the nobility and land-owners. The Welsh lost their freedom to be a small country, with its correspondingly small opportunities for social achievements. Instead, through the union with England, the Welsh nobility had access to a world of more advanced culture. They could now achieve more, in terms of wealth, status and power. Hence there was a compromise: they lost depth of character but gained breadth of opportunity.

So too with personal evolution. The amoral person has his range of freedom and this reflects his sense of identity. But it is usually a narrow identity. In order to progress, he needs to broaden this identity. Therefore he has to give up some aspects of freedom in order to develop other aspects. His identity has to change in some ways : it has to change to meet new needs, new opportunities, new ideals as society changes. [8]

This requirement creates a problem: the relinquishment of freedom is rarely done with consent. The person knows what he is, but does not know what he might become. Fear is present because the sense of identity is threatened. Only by compulsion is the transition to a higher state of evolutionary growth accomplished. The fear and the compulsion are sources of conflict and so generate the potential for violence.

Violence and resentment usually accompany
the evolution of identity.

Morality and ethics are the traditional means of handling one’s potential for violence. Morality allows me to see other people as the source of my problems. Ethics enables me to understand that I am also a source of other people’s problems. [9]

Self-image

Another way of depicting the problem of changing a sense of identity is that it relates to the person’s view of himself, to the person’s self-image. Upon self-image is built the sense of identity. The primary sources of violence have the effect of corroding self-image, and then morality and ethics facilitate the building of a better one. Self-image is the basic issue.

Violence is always inversely related to self - image.

High intensities of resentment, fear and guilt denote a poor self-image. Therefore the poorer the self-image that a person has, the greater is the level of violence that he will be capable of.

The way to improve self-image lies in the cultivation of self-esteem and self-confidence, together with an awareness of one's weaknesses. This takes the person into the exploration of psychology, especially dynamic psychology (the psychology of the subconscious mind).

Punishment
These ideas mean that the use of prison as a means of retribution and harsh deprivation will usually be counter-productive to a person who is not a career criminal. If prison degrades even more the self-image of the person then he may become capable of even greater violence than before. Whereas, when prison is used as a means of rehabilitation, so that the regime is not harsh, a different possibility arises. Such a programme of treatment is likely to improve the person's self-image.

Whether a soft regime makes a person into a better social product is debatable, 
but at the very least it should reduce his tendencies to violence.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. The binary nature of emotions is described in the first article on Emotion. [1]

[²]. My in-depth analysis of the process of abreaction is given in the five articles on Abreaction. See Basic Ideas page.
The role of resentment in the formation of social morality is described in the fourth article on Abreaction : Resentment and Bitterness. [2]

[³]. Conflict dreams are briefly mentioned in the article Depression and Autism, sub-section Internalisation of Emotions.
Dreams which feature either paranoia or revenge are described in the article Destructiveness, sub-section Dreams of Conflict.
There is an article on Reverie and Dreams on my website  The Subconscious Mind. [3]

[4]. Depression can give rise to anger and violence : see the article on Depression and Autism, section Violence.
The feeling of being trapped is described in the article Sensitivity and the effects of Fear, on my website Discover Your Mind. [4]

[5]. A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = fear + vanity.

My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas page. [5]

[6]. Infancy trauma is my name for psychological trauma that occurs in the first years of childhood. This distress occurs when the stresses and negative states of mind of the parents’ own lives are transmitted to the fledgling ego of the infant.

An article on Bonding focuses on some problems of a sensitive child and explains an unintentional source of infancy trauma. This is on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion, or  The Subconscious Mind, or Discover Your Mind.
In more detail, infancy trauma is explained in two articles. The first article, Vulnerability of the Ego, focuses on the origins of violence. And the second one, Guilt & Meaning - part 2, centres on why trauma can occur unintentionally. [6]

[7]. A source of the nihilism at the core of one's being is created by the process of reincarnation. There is an article on this source, called Nihilism, on my philosophy website, A Modern Thinker.
My view of the process of reincarnation is explained in two articles, in section 4, on my website Patterns of Spirituality. This view is different from traditional views, the reason being that I incorporate my understanding of the subconscious mind into the theory. [7]

[8]. I have an article on Personal Evolution on my website A Modern Thinker. [8]

[9]. I separate the meaning of the terms "morality" and "ethics", since I need to compare the involuntary acceptance of social norms with the voluntary acceptance of them. The involuntary acceptance, I call morality, and the voluntary acceptance is called ethics. This change of use in terminology is described in the article Morality, on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. [9]

My website on the construction of personal identity is  The Subconscious Mind.

The articles in this section are :

Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

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