Violence

"Violence" is a short book on the need to continually mitigate violence and to channel violent tendencies into less socially destructive forms. A non-anthropocentric definition of society is adopted, to include the interactions between all sentient creatures. Upon this definitional amendment of 'society' violence becomes better theorized. The question of sentience, and in particular - the capacity to suffer, is developed through critically evaluating scientific literature thereon. It is only through harming living sentient creatures that violence operates: harm is a condition of violence. The book explores hierarchy and primate aggression, as well as giving an analysis of dominant modern institutions built around markets or central planning in terms of their respective violent capacities, realities and real world outcomes. Five different categories of violence are given, wherein ritualized and virtualized violence are shown to be less aberrant and harmful. The book concludes with a call for better macro-political economic systems to replace the violent begetting hierarchies of central planning and markets - aspects of which could remain but mainly outmoded through decentralized planning and small-scale more locally based markets. This is a novel book with a matured and intricate conception and understanding of violence in today's world. Enjoy!