Violence And Murder

Ideas, true or false, underpin every aspect of the smallest community and the most elaborate civilization alike.  Every individual member of the human race is a slave to philosophical stances; the issue then becomes which ideas are true and whether people live out those ideas consistently.  Stances on which harmful acts one person can inflict on another are, of course, not exempt from this to the slightest extent.  Without recognizing the different degrees of harm humans can impose and the weightier moral consideration the more brutal kinds merit, a society will always be susceptible to destroying itself and perpetuating the abuse of its members in the name of selfishness or alleged justice.  Murder has the most significant amount of personal and moral revulsion surrounding it for many people, all because of misplaced attempts to understand the most savage human actions.

When the word murder is automatically associated with the word violence by people who regularly fail to distinguish words from concepts, the consequence is a societal exaggeration of how violent murder is.  Murder is at its most violent when it is combined with acts that are far more violating, cruel, and violent than simple killing.  Inversely, there are many methods of murder that do not even involve any violent acts at all.  Killing someone in an execution or personal act of murder does not have to overlap with true violence.  What does not logically follow from this is that killing is therefore amoral or not a serious offense, but it does follow that a society that prioritizes ending murder at the expense of allowing or ignoring greater cruelties is based on a false, pathetic belief.

Anyone who thinks that murder is inherently painful has never thought clearly about possible methods of killing like quick-acting poisons that do not inflict torturous sensations, pulling the plug on a life-preserving medical device, or some other hypothetical or conventional method of killing that does not have to put the victim in any sort of true torment.  They have probably never thought seriously about the different forms of abuse they could face and whether they would hope that their community would seek to eradicate greater forms of cruelty than lesser kinds that have merely been mistaken as the ultimate social sin.  Secular society and many Christians hold to completely backwards ideas about the actual severity of murder as they overlook more harmful behaviors.

Those who believe that distinguishing murder and true violence is a pointless intellectual inquiry have not rationally evaluated the impact of flawed ideas on societies or thought about what would be a less cruel fate than lengthy abuse.  American culture is dominated by the idea that killing someone is the most egregious, disrespectful thing that could be done to them.  If the people who regard killing as the most degrading or cruel kind of human behavior were ever in a situation where they might be abused to the point of wishing they were dead, they might suddenly realize that it was always true that killing is not the most abusive offense on its own.  Indeed, killing is not even automatically linked with any sort of overt violence!  Anyone who devotes just moments of rationalistic thought to the issue can directly grasp this.