The challenge of violence By Tomás Núñez, ThD

The challenge of violence
By Tomás Núñez, ThD
Frequent violence forces us to think. Why is it so recurrent? To see some light,
we must start without self-deception from this fundamental ambiguity: on the one hand,
reality is full of conflict, but in another sense, it is a fabric of order and peace. Neither of
these two aspects succeeds in eradicating the other. They are mixed and maintained in
a complex and dynamic equilibrium.
The art consists in maintaining this tension, seeking that convergence of
energies that allows the emergence of peace, the fruit of minimally fair and inclusive
institutions, and of healthy social arrangements guarded by a State that ensures the
balance of tensions, legitimately using coercion when necessary. If this search for
balance did not occur, sociability would be impossible, and human beings would
exterminate each other.
Peace results from the management of conflicts using non-conflictive means. In
peacebuilding, collective interests must prevail over individual interests, multiculturalism
must prevail over ethnocentrism, and the global perspective will guide the local one.
We have to be realistic and sincere. There is violence in the world because I carry
violence within me in the form of rage, envy, and hatred, which I must always contain.
The explanation of aggression has challenged the most acute thinkers. Sigmund
Freud starts by observing two basic drives: one that affirms and exalts life (Eros) and

another that tends towards death (Thanatos) and its psychological derivatives, such as
hatred and exclusion.
For Freud, aggression arises when the death instinct is activated by some threat
that comes from outside. Someone can threaten another and want to take his life. Then,
the threatened person anticipates and attacks and eventually eliminates the person who
threatens him.
Another contemporary thinker, René Girard, claims that aggression comes from
the permanent rivalry that exists between human beings (which he calls "mimetic
desire"). This rivalry creates permanent tensions and elaborates sinister complicities.
Society makes him a scapegoat by concentrating all evil and all threats on someone.
Everyone unites against him to get rid of him. This union establishes a momentary
peace between all the contenders. Once the peace is destroyed, we must invent a new
scapegoat (terrorists, drug dealers, etc.), and once again, everyone unites against him,
and the lost peace is remade.
Anthropologists have also helped us to understand aggression. They assure us
that we are simultaneously sapiens and demons, not because of degeneration but
because of the evolutionary constitution. We are carriers of intelligence and inner
energies oriented toward generosity, collaboration, and benevolence. And at the same
time, we are carriers of madness, of excess, of death drives. We are tragic beings
because we emerge as a coexistence of opposites.
Given this contradiction, how can we build peace? Peace will only triumph
because people and communities are willing to cultivate cooperation, solidarity, and love
as a life project. The culture of peace depends on the predominance of these positives
and on the vigilance that people and institutions maintain over the other dimension,
always present, of rivalry, selfishness, and exclusion.