Kinetics and Violence

First question: Did you mean “5GW is more kinetic than Peace” in the last progression?

I’ve looked at the issue of kinetics before, in a post called “Warfare Continua.”

3. The Non-Kinetic - Kinetic action continuum: K. I am more likely to say that every action is kinetic. Even speech and writing operate kinetically, by producing sounds and letters (or pixels). However, this variable represents a value on a continuum; we can also postulate a distinction between actions that have a corresponding and immediate concrete reaction and those that do not. E.g., if you drop bombs on a bridge, that bridge will immediately react by blowing up, but if you publish an essay, the written letters you are creating may not produce an immediate reaction.

Given my more recent thoughts on static, and also considering the Cobling/Kirking discussion — including a comment I made on TDAXP, to the effect that customers no longer traveling to J.L.Kirk to be interviewed and pay cash upfront, etc., would be a kinetic effect of the blogstorm — I would now say that we should view the question of kinetics in conflict as one of distance between cause(s) and effect(s). This, btw, reintroduces the concept you addressed fairly recently, indirection in 5GW; plus, look at it from a mildly Thomas Barnett 5GW perspective, in which abstractions such as “rule sets” when declared and supported by legal systems and national policies (writing, verbal) ultimately have a very kinetic effect.

Also, the use of the word “violence” may sometimes lead us to forget that kinetic activities like building concrete infrastructure — highways, bridges, town halls and universities, etc. — are potential high-K activities although they are not, strictly speaking, violence directed toward individuals.

* Extermination is more kinetic than violence

* Violence is more kinetic than threats of violence

* Threats of violence are kinetic kinetic than social sanctions

* Social sanctions are more kinetic than threats of social sanctions

* Threats of social sanctions are more kinetic than manipulation

* Manipulation is more kinetic than stasis

Following up on the previous comment, more questions:

• Do threats of violence always lead to violence, or a high-K (direct) result?
• Ditto, threats of social sanctions: do they always lead to social sanctions?
• Can’t “manipulation” be concrete, high-K, rather than always indirect, or low-K?
• Can any of these — threats, social sanctions, manipulation — be direct or indirect, with respect to K, or both simultaneously?

Vis-a-vis that last question, I’m considering a racial insult uttered on-air but directed toward no one particular vs. a racial insult hurled at the person standing in front of you.

Curtis,

“First question: Did you mean “5GW is more kinetic than Peace” in the last progression?”

Yes, but the typo is true as well.

“I would now say that we should view the question of kinetics in conflict as one of distance between cause(s) and effect(s).”

Then it is not the term I am looking for. Killing my neighbor and doing not cutting a $5 check to this-or-that-relief agency may both lead to a person not living any more. Yet to say that both are equally kinetically intense fails to find a distinction between the violent and the non-violent.

“Also, the use of the word “violence” may sometimes lead us to forget that kinetic activities like building concrete infrastructure — highways, bridges, town halls and universities, etc. — are potential high-K activities although they are not, strictly speaking, violence directed toward individuals.”

So what other term should be used?

“Do threats of violence always lead to violence, or a high-K (direct) result?”

I’m looking at K as a measure of action, not a measure of effect-size. Perhaps we need to clarify our terms.

“Ditto, threats of social sanctions: do they always lead to social sanctions?”

Again, I’m not interested in a measure of ends but a measure of means.

“Can’t “manipulation” be concrete, high-K, rather than always indirect, or low-K?”

Perhaps… what I am getting at is holding a gun to someone’s head is more intense action than threatening to hold a gun to someone’s head, which is more intense action than leading a person to commit the same end of his own accord.

“I would now say that we should view the question of kinetics in conflict as one of distance between cause(s) and effect(s).”

Then it is not the term I am looking for. Killing my neighbor and [doing] not cutting a $5 check to this-or-that-relief agency may both lead to a person not living any more. Yet to say that both are equally kinetically intense fails to find a distinction between the violent and the non-violent.

This is not exactly the meaning I intended, since killing the neighbor is very direct — high K, nearness of cause and effect — but not cutting a check and thereby causing the death of someone who would have benefited from that $5 is more indirect — Low K, distance between the check-writing/non-check-writing and ultimate outcome. However, the term violence descends from the Latin for force; although it is typically used to describe events like the first example (killing), viewing violence only in those terms means choosing to willfully ignore the complexity of force relations in our system. I.e., the term is often a cop-out when used narrowly; high-K actions will be addressed, whereas low-K actions will be ignored or overlooked, if a moral judgment is made on the basis of level of violence of each act — and in the absence of evaluating the outcomes.

If on the other hand we choose to use a V continuum, we might make a similar distinction as with the K continuum: High-V involves directly corresponding, immediate concrete reactions and Low-V involves indirect means for causing damage. One thing I didn’t add to the K continuum nor now to the V continuum: the dispersal of causes, and the fact that many Low-K activities in various locations can have a cumulative effect downstream, a definite focal point, or may not. Such a consideration becomes important when we consider 4GW dispersion or 5GW dispersion of forces through the lens of K. Through V, we might question whether sometimes any variable v = 10 X 1/10v — this approaches a consideration of frameworks many liberals use, e.g. Obama in recent statements about the Virginia Tech shooting. At some point, however, static blurs the chains of cause & effect, and making such claims becomes a dream quest or fairy tale.

When considering V and K, we should also consider the role that technology plays. For instance, programming coordinates into a missile’s guiding system is low-K in comparison to what that missile does when it hits the bridge; is the guidance programmer any less responsible for that effect than the self-destroying terrorist who uses a truck-bomb to destroy the bridge? (Consider also those who have chosen the bridge for destruction, those who have determined the coordinates to the bridge, those who have hit the button launching the missile, etc., as being low-K players causing the destruction of that bridge.) This reminds me of something written by the poet Auden in his essay “Hic et Ille”:

From the height of 10,000 feet, the earth appears to the human eye as it appears to the eye of the camera; that is to say, all history is reduced to nature. This has the salutary effect of making historical evils, like national divisions and political hatreds, seem absurd. I look down from an airplane upon a stretch of land which is obviously continuous….

Unfortunately, I cannot have this revelation without simultaneously having the illusion that there are no historical values either. From the same height I cannot distinguish between an outcrop of rock and a Gothic cathedral, or between a happy family playing in a backyard and a flock of sheep, so that I am unable to feel any difference between dropping a bomb upon one or the other.

And later in the essay, perhaps more related to the subject of this post:

One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

Incidentally, Dan, rather than viewing your two progressions from the framework of “steadily decreasing kinetic conflict, on the whole,” shouldn’t we view it as redirected and diffused kinetic activity? I.e., rather than kinetic activity focused narrowly in one actor or wielder — or leader — the movement is to a dispersal or diffusion of kinetic activity?

I’m not suggesting a constant K for the system-as-whole, however. In fact, given the increase in population size, I’d suspect that human kinetic activity when considered as a whole may be on the increase, if only slightly. (Maybe not, given how machinery has taken over a lot of the work — and given the growing epidemic of obesity.) This, incidentally, ties in with an old consideration of the peculiar “creationism” I once proposed: that creating is now often more abstract than concrete; or, rather than build real items like clothing and homes, most people build legislation, poems, lawsuits, blog posts, family trees, and many other abstract “items.”