Violence as a Form of Collaboration

In the 12th year of training at the Monastic Academy, Forall was giving a lecture series called Buddhism for AI. He said that violence has been extremely helpful for getting people to love each other and care for another’s perspectives. This is particularly hard for spiritual types to see.

In the age of hunter-gatherers, tribes were able to collaborate based on deep connection with each other. With a matter of fact tone, he said that these people lived more harmonious and meaningful lives, and as individuals they were more happy, healthy, and intelligent than modern people. I thought about how the future viewers of this video lecture would respond. He continued, but once civilizations grew big enough, and you can’t know and care for people directly, it became extremely difficult to produce trust at scale. The basis of civilization is trust because trust is the basis of collaboration.

Forall was making the point that historically speaking, violence and the fear of it has been an extremely effective means for maintaining order and enabling large groups to collaborate. He demonstrated this with examples from the Bronze Age Collapse, the Assyrian empire, Carthage and Rome, India, China, and the Mongolian Empire. He read horrifying descriptions of the rulers of the time cutting off the heads of defectors, stacking them on a tower, and placing them at the heart of the town square. Forall often reminds us that history isn’t his expertise, and then goes on to elucidate vivid stories of critical moments in time with incredible alacrity.

Again and again he made the point, if people don’t collaborate within the same ideological frame, nothing is off the table and violence is to be expected.

In a Q&A after the class with the 15 interested, confused, and taken aback trainees, Forall stated that first we need to be horrified by this violence, and then come to see that our modern collaboration methods using “non-violence” are even worse.

The techno-utopian religion of Silicon Valley says that it’s not a problem if we convert all of nature into computers and kill billions of beings because nature suffers and we want to end that. Even if we’re not cutting off people’s heads, isn’t this form of violence worse than anything previous?