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Violence can be a simple, rational reaching for a goal, in its legal form of war or its illegal form of crime. It can often be irrational, as in a seemingly senseless killing or quarrel. But the distinction between irrational and rational violence is not easily drawn. Even the insane murderer kills to satisfy a need entirely real to him. Violence is often caused by "displaced aggression," when anger is forced to aim at a substitute target. Every psychologist knows that a man might beat his child because he cannot beat his boss. And a man may even murder because he feels rejected or "alienated." But what leads one man in such a situation to kill and another merely to get drunk is a question psychologists have never really answered. There is no doubt that violence has a cathartic effect, and the pressures that cause it must find an outlet of one kind or another. (Japan's Matsushita Electric Co. has set up a dummy of the foreman that workers can beat up on a given day once a week, thereby presumably releasing their aggressions.)
But the aims of violence are usually mixed. Several violent codes combine a functional purpose with an emotional mystique. This was true of the aristocratic dueling code, which served to maintain a social hierarchy that became enshrouded in trappings of honor and death. It is true of the city gang, which functions as a rough and ready community but also includes a mystique in which violence is equated with courage and crime with merit. It is, finally, true of revolutionary ideology, which combines the brutal but often practical belief that only violence can pull down the existing order through a crude poetry about the purifying properties of blood and fire. "I believe in the cutting off of heads," proclaimed Marat during the French Revolution, and his contemporary, the Marquis de Sade, preached, in the duller pages of his books, the virtue of murder as policy. Explains Brandeis University Sociologist Lewis Coser: "The act of violence commits a man symbolically to the revolutionary movement and breaks his ties with his previous life. He is, so to speak, reborn." The late Frantz Fanon, a polemicist for anticolonial revolution, wrote: "Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex."
Cutting Edge