If life were a game, what would the nature of that game be like?  In basketball, there’s a court with defined boundaries.  There are rules determining how to score points, what constitutes a foul, when you can take a time out, what things the coach can’t yell at a ref, and ultimately how to win.  Some actions will predictably lead to a win, and some won’t.  Life is not so different in that respect.  I believe that if we look at life like a game, it is a game of flourishing or thriving.  Just as the way to win in basketball is to score more points than the other team, the way to “win” in life is to experience progressively greater thriving.  Author Sam Harris, in his book “The Moral Landscape,” adeptly pointed out that maximizing the well-being (thriving) of all conscious creatures is the primary goal of all our actions.  In the most basic sense, there is no other standard by which to measure success or failure or what’s “good” or “bad.”

In this grand game of thriving that we’re all playing, there is one move that is always a losing move:  Violence.  For human beings, using violence is like taking the basketball, running down the court, and throwing it in your own goal.  No matter what is accomplished by using violence, we always make the world a worse place than it could have otherwise been.  We always create less thriving for less people than what was possible.  It’s a guaranteed losing strategy.  As Robert Breedlove and Michael Saylor exposited in the “What is Money” show, we are beings who channel energy along the lines of our intellect.  We are creative beings who engineer solutions to answer the problems of survival and increase our thriving.  However, violence is a choice that creates nothing.  It can only destroy creations of human effort, and/or redistribute them from one person to another.  This is why I define violence as the choice to go against our creative human nature.

Imagine if half (or even 20% of) the people in our society chose violent methods of getting what they want – breaking into houses, stealing from neighbors, physically attacking people they don’t like – we would be doomed to live in squalor with no hope of progress.  There wouldn’t even be anything worth stealing; people don’t create what they know will be quickly destroyed or stolen.  This of course, is why we have governments.  The aforementioned condition of rampant violence is a non-starter.  It’s probably also a non-starter for people to take retaliatory justice into their own hands.  You may end up getting lynch mobs for relatively minor crimes.  It seems best to have an institution which can maintain order by handling the punishment of violence.  Ayn Rand provided us the most brilliant definition of government ever given: “a government is the means by which a society places the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control.”  A government is an agency of coercion/force/violence. All government action is violence, and the government carries the biggest stick in society.  No individual or group can match the total physical force at its disposal. It’s got to be that way to dissuade potential criminals and punish them.

The vast majority of people can understand that it’s a good thing when a person who initiates violence against others has to pay for his actions.  However, we have a pulled off an incredible magic trick of the mind in America (and in all “major” societies known over Earth).  We have come to believe that we can use violence to achieve the good, to achieve progress, thriving. First, we created this institution with a massive stick to stop those who would initiate violence, so that our society could create and thrive.  Then we decided to start using that massive stick (the ultimate tool of violence) as a tool of progress and thriving.  This could be viewed as the greatest losing move of all time in the game of human thriving.  

In America, the government has become involved in essentially every field of human endeavor – education, healthcare, business and trade, social customs – you name it.  We allow ourselves to have more than half of our life energy forcefully expropriated from us (taxation, inflation, lost creativity), that the government then uses to impose more violence upon us in every way conceivable, all because we really believe that violence will somehow make things better.  We do this because we do not trust each other, and we do not trust ourselves to create optimal thriving.  We are afraid to take 100% responsibility, and to extend the same opportunity to all others.  It feels safer to have some of our choices taken away by force – we couldn’t help the outcome – we didn’t choose.

Of course, educational programs can be created from money forcefully taxed away.  So can healthcare programs.  Regulations can be imposed to force businesses to treat their customers certain ways.  Things get done that way.  But that way will always be worse than the non-violent way.  When there’s a massive stick held over everyone in a society, people start to care more about avoiding the stick or helping to aim it at certain others than creating thriving and progress.  And some people get attracted to having a big stick to swing at others – they won’t pass up the opportunity that government violence promises. Giving up our responsibility is a mistake, and one we pay dearly for.  It is a mistake because we are inalienably responsible for all our choices anyway, and taking on that responsibility is the most beautiful adventure that leads to the maximum thriving for all.  As we begin to understand that all government action is violence, and that violence negates goodwill and destroys creativity, we will learn that the adventure of personal responsibility coincides with the path of optimal human thriving. As this happens, so much violence, mistrust, and corruption will fade away like a fog, and leave us standing in a freedom better than we’ve imagined.