United States | News & Politics

The trouble is that, philosophically speaking, there are no useful guidelines for when violence is or is not justified.

When dealing with individuals, we all know when we're justified in using violence against them (in self-defense against violence already initiated or reasonably imminent). When dealing with governments (or maybe more generalized to "any large group"), this standard just doesn't cut it. For one, if they've already initiated violence against you... you're going to lose. For another, the goal of a tyrannical government is to control you against your will, so them murdering you generally subverts their own intentions. Instead, they merely threaten violence, and often do so in a way that psychologically interrupts your ability to see that as justifying counter-violence.

People jumping the gun and trying to get riled up is a reaction to that (making sure that the psychology never interrupts the justification of counter-violence). Of course, that just means that they also attempt insurrection even when there isn't anything resembling justification.

Until people are willing to talk about the subject, we can't even explore just when it is and when it isn't justified, and we'll be left with a "you'll know it when you see it" approach that means no one can be certain that they should fight back until they're being shoveled into the ovens.

Probably, we're all scared (whether or not it's the case) that if we were to come up with a logical philosophy, we'd discover that we should have done something decades ago.