This is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation.
His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)
Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.
You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.
Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
I feel like you are just trying to justify violence to some degree.
I think the specific condition here is "change that someone else is willing to prevent using violence". I guess that is not present too often during everyday life.
Everyday you're not trying to achieve political change.
And a lot of those interactions are backed by implied violence: people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
> His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
I have read very many people claim this and exactly zero reasons provided by them why I should believe it is true.
It seems to me like basic common nature that if you see proponents of a cause behaving in a manner you find objectionable, that will naturally bias you against the cause. And I have, repeatedly, across a period of many years, observed myself to become less sympathetic to multiple causes specifically because I can see that their proponents use violence in spreading their message.
I've tried very many times to explain the above to actual proponents of causes behaving in manners I found objectionable (but only on the Internet, for fear of physical safety) and the responses have all been either incoherent or just verbally abusive.
> making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This would only make sense if social change required action specifically from people in power, who in turn must necessarily act against their best interest to effect it.
If that were true, there would be no real motivation to try nonviolence at all, except perhaps to try to conserve the resources used to do violence.
> You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective
First, no, that makes no sense. If that were true, formal debate would never occur and nobody would ever actually try to convince anyone of anything in good faith. The premise is flawed from the beginning; you cannot apply game theory here because you cannot even establish that clearly defined "players" exist. Nor is there a well-defined "payoff matrix", at all. The point of nonviolent protest is to make the protested party reconsider what is actually at stake.
Second, in practice, violence is never actually reserved as a credible threat in these actions; it happens concurrently with attempts at nonviolence and agitators give no credible reason why it should stop if their demands are met. In fact, it very often comes across that the apparent demands are only a starting point and that ceding to them will only embolden the violent.
yeah the crazy part about that is one uncomfortable point many through history (and in threads today) have made is that nonviolence implicitly assumes a moral audience. And that injustice, once clearly exposed will provoke people's conscience.
History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then.
MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along.
Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."
In a survey of ~600 movements since 1900, it was found that those that tended to use violence more succeeded about 25% in achieving their goals, while those that used less violence succeeded over 40%:
You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public.
(The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)
> You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence.
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
> Admittedly having not read the 400-page study […]
It is not a 400-page study: it is a 400-page book that goes over the research available at the time and summarizes it. The book leans slightly academic, but it's a fairly easy read.
A movement's success is (partly?) determined by its size and how much of the general population gets on board with the original (presumably) small group that started it.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
> If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
The book covers such scenarios: where you are non-violent but the Powers That Be are violent towards your movement.
I will attempt to find a link when I'm not on my phone, but the methodology and results here have been solidly criticised (mainly around survivorship bias, as a sibling notes, as well as about the measures of success).
This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.
> [Chenoweth and Stephan] have gone out of their way to correct people who treat it like a cheat code, and to caution against overreading any success of non-violent oppostion.
The rebuttal is against those arguing that 3.5% is a "magic number", that treat(ed) it like an 'absolute', when we're actually dealing with probabilities and likelihoods and odds.
The formulators of the "3.5% rule" do not treat it as an absolute, and neither do I: my GP post talks about "odds" and likelihoods.
And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
It is actually 'interesting' in that it is one of the few examples where a non-violent movement ended up with an authoritative regime after "success": it's (almost?) unique in that regard per the author. Most non-violent movements end up in a democratic system.
> And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
"original" is doing some heavy lifting here - the Iranian revolution was not non violent. By the state or by the revolutionaries.
It's also impossible to talk about the regime without also bringing up the formative events in the early years of the Iranian state, namely the Iran-Iraq war.
They were different goals. 25% of those using a club to achieve their goals were successful but 50% of those using a broom to achieve their goals were successful. The takeaway is that those who seek clean floors are more likely to achieve success than those who seek freedom from oppression.
Many people, especially in the US today, dont understand that non-violence doesn't mean passivity or even a willingness to compromise. It just means you do anything you can without actually punching and killing people.
And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.
Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.
Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.
Sometimes, I suspect that Gandhi was helped by the global developments of that time, specifically the British context at the end of the war. Gandhi could have been lucky, in part, to find the British in a mood to relinquish their holdings. Bose, on the other hand, decided to fight by all means, though being no match against the British. Maybe, both strategies would have been equally weak, if there was no world war.
Agape could be discussed as a philosophy between disagreeing figures like King and Carmichael. Today, fewer people have encountered the idea so they can’t choose it as a philosophy.
Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,"
-JFK, 1962
Many criticise the October 7 attacks for their violence. And they were clearly violent. But history didn't begin on October 7, 2023.
A few years earlier we had the Great March of Return [1], which were the nonviolent protests that preceded October 7. Gazans basically stood at the border and protested. The result? The IOF used them for target practice [2] where hundreds died and thousands were maimed, intentionally. Israeli snipers basically kept score with the number of peaceful protesters permanently disabled, documented in "42 knees in one day" [3]. You can look at first-person video from snipers [4].
Malcolm X and others had a different stance on the place for violence. I'm of the view that the oppressor sets the level of violence and many as a whole don't look at the level of state violence.
This is becoming increasingly relevant at home with the violence committed by ICE officers, notably murdering a 37 year old American women in Minneapolis recently.
We have a masked, unidentified force of poorly trained officers who are murdering Americans. Given they don't identify themselves, this is going to escalate. At some point somebody is going to use the castle doctrine or "stand your ground" laws to shoot these officers. That's just a probabilistic inevitability in a country with more guns than people.
We also had peaceful protests on college campuses in 2024 and 2025 that the state responded with with violent and excessive force.
My point is not to defend any violence. Rather, don't ignore state violence. And just because someone points out that the pot will eventually boil over, that's simply analysis not a justification.
> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.
But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable.
You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display.
This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
>reates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties
Only if you have good advertising for your cause.
Violence is typically good advertising, most news is simply salivating to cover it.
Which means in any non-violent group seeking a goal, it is optimal to have a small violent 'unassociated' group cause just enough problems to get noticed in the global media.
Is anyone aware of a more thorough argument for why this must be the case? Is it a commonly held view? It sounds realistic, but not necessarily and immutable law, I’d like to know what thought has been given to this.
It’s an incentive problem. If even one party defects in a society of pacifists, the pacifists have no real method of recourse besides refusing to interact with the defector, and how many people are going to do that if the defector starts killing people to enforce compliance?
Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.
It's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.
Yeah, the thorough argument is that people in power don't want people to rise up and challenge their authority.
It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.
I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).
John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).
You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.
A commonly cited example is during the Battle of Seattle the cops wanted to beat the shit out of a nonviolent sit in and the black bloc protected them through a combination of strength and diversion. The non violent people are there for the optics and the violent people are there assuring that any move made on the nonviolent protesters will be rewarded swiftly.
The important part is that the violence mostly doesn't start until someone tries to hurt those who are there peacefully. Good was there peacefully so retaliation is becoming a possibility.
Sorry, are you suggesting that violence doesn't also require coordination of a group? I think the record of lone gunmen solving institutional problems remains kind of scarce.
Whether you want to be a guerilla group, terrorists, or take a peaceful approach the first step is always going to involvefinding confederates.
I have an undergraduate degree in Peace Studies, and have spent extensive time in and around conflict or post-conflict zones.
Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal.
That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded.
The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution.
Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I think you are confusing the BPP with some other organization. All of King’s substantive achievements were accomplished before the formation of the Black Panther’s and he died before they came to national prominence.
Heh, did I mention that peace degree was a loooooong time ago. Totally appreciate the correction.
I remember reading an argument along those lines at the time that resonated. Perhaps not the Black Panthers? Or am I just totally wrong here and there wasn't a shred of political violence in the background?
>Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".
When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".
Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
There is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..."
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
I feel like the role of non violence is over emphasized. It plays a part in these social and political movements. But the MLK era civil rights movement and even the Indian independence movement MLK drew inspiration from, involved a lot of violent resistance sustained for years. People paid with their lives to create unrest and draw attention to their oppression and and gather supporters. We shouldn’t ignore their contribution or forget that it’s part of the overall path to getting justice, alongside non violent resistance.
Beware that while you may choose nonviolence to protest this regime, your local police department will water you like a row of daisies with giant cans of mace and CS while TikTok users get bored and swipe to the next video.
Couldn't find the author, situation in US is apparently so bad that you can't even mention nonviolence without fear of threats.
Stanford University played a major role in wrecking societies worldwide through "nonviolent" white-collar crime.
Majority of their students became US tech workers and VCs, many making a career out of extracting value from societies worldwide with zero ethical concerns. How many Stanford alumni worked at Facebook when their fake news triggered the Rohingya genocide? Stanford is also home to the FTX scam family.
Now everybody is throwing their hands up into the air and asking "how could that happen?"
I wouldn't use this as a metric. With social media almost any opinion whatever will surface some weirdo advocating violence even before you factor in trolls.
Not saying things are ideal in the US by any stretch of the imagination, but the mere presence of people making threats online is not itself deeply indicative of a population ready to get into it.
Facebook's utter failure to moderate itself (as documented many places but especially Careless People) is bigger than just a few weirdos advocating violence. The much more important piece is the fake news that says over and over again "group X did Y", "group X did Y", "group X, they're out there doing Y again". It's the echo chamber that magnifies and amplifies and reinforces untrue and half-true narratives, chasing engagement and fury and ad impressions with zero sense of civic responsibility.
It may be that no individual report is damaging enough to be censor-worthy, but the total effect is massively radicalizing, so that a huge group of people are primed to eventually interpret even true news stories in the maximally negative light and may even see their own eventual jump to violence as being justifiable self-defense given what they believe has preceded it.
Or it's a distraction from the message. If your argument is strong, I can try to change the conversation to you by finding some artifact and magnifying it through some creative interpretations - imply negative associations to X, suggest your references aren't allowed because of Y, or try get the group to attack ad hominem until it chokes out everything else.
We've collectively gotten pretty good at this in the last decade.
> Stanford University played a major role in wrecking societies worldwide through "nonviolent" white-collar crime.
This seems like an unfair burden to place on Stanford or any other institution of higher learning. We can attribute as much blame to Stanford for Messrs Brin and Page as we can to Wharton for President Trump's actions.
And what about positive actions? Forward secrecy would not be possible without Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both Diffie and Hellman hail from Stanford. Not to mention Ralph Merkle (of Merkle trees), Alan Kay, Paul Klipsch (of the speaker) and Barbara Liskov among others. Should the school get the credit for their achievements?
This is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation.
His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)
Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.
You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
I’m not sure that logically tracks.
You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.
Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
MLK didn’t have support because people were afraid of the alternative. They supported him because they agreed with him message.
I feel like you are just trying to justify violence to some degree.
I think the specific condition here is "change that someone else is willing to prevent using violence". I guess that is not present too often during everyday life.
Everyday you're not trying to achieve political change.
And a lot of those interactions are backed by implied violence: people paying for things at stores is not because everyone has actually agreed on the price.
> His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
I have read very many people claim this and exactly zero reasons provided by them why I should believe it is true.
It seems to me like basic common nature that if you see proponents of a cause behaving in a manner you find objectionable, that will naturally bias you against the cause. And I have, repeatedly, across a period of many years, observed myself to become less sympathetic to multiple causes specifically because I can see that their proponents use violence in spreading their message.
I've tried very many times to explain the above to actual proponents of causes behaving in manners I found objectionable (but only on the Internet, for fear of physical safety) and the responses have all been either incoherent or just verbally abusive.
> making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This would only make sense if social change required action specifically from people in power, who in turn must necessarily act against their best interest to effect it.
If that were true, there would be no real motivation to try nonviolence at all, except perhaps to try to conserve the resources used to do violence.
> You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective
First, no, that makes no sense. If that were true, formal debate would never occur and nobody would ever actually try to convince anyone of anything in good faith. The premise is flawed from the beginning; you cannot apply game theory here because you cannot even establish that clearly defined "players" exist. Nor is there a well-defined "payoff matrix", at all. The point of nonviolent protest is to make the protested party reconsider what is actually at stake.
Second, in practice, violence is never actually reserved as a credible threat in these actions; it happens concurrently with attempts at nonviolence and agitators give no credible reason why it should stop if their demands are met. In fact, it very often comes across that the apparent demands are only a starting point and that ceding to them will only embolden the violent.
He also had a 75% disapproval rating at the time of his killing.
The violence against him, in contrast with the nonviolence stand, made it stand out.
yeah the crazy part about that is one uncomfortable point many through history (and in threads today) have made is that nonviolence implicitly assumes a moral audience. And that injustice, once clearly exposed will provoke people's conscience.
History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then.
MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along.
Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnJL2jfA5A&feature=youtu.be
If you give people one option it is a demand, and they may rightfully reject it.
Now, give people two options with one of them seeming much better it becomes a choice.
Violence is 100% an answer, it's just very rarely the best answer that can be provided.
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."
-- Thomas Jefferson
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
Exactly, the potency comes from the fact that violence is the standard reaction
Essentially "good-cop-bad-cop" on a political level?
In a survey of ~600 movements since 1900, it was found that those that tended to use violence more succeeded about 25% in achieving their goals, while those that used less violence succeeded over 40%:
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public.
(The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)
> You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence.
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
> Admittedly having not read the 400-page study […]
It is not a 400-page study: it is a 400-page book that goes over the research available at the time and summarizes it. The book leans slightly academic, but it's a fairly easy read.
A movement's success is (partly?) determined by its size and how much of the general population gets on board with the original (presumably) small group that started it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
[Edited GP post to add some of this comment.]
Yea, causation here depends on a whole lot.
If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
> If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
The book covers such scenarios: where you are non-violent but the Powers That Be are violent towards your movement.
I will attempt to find a link when I'm not on my phone, but the methodology and results here have been solidly criticised (mainly around survivorship bias, as a sibling notes, as well as about the measures of success).
This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.
This video is a good rebuttal of the 3.5% rule:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQUmDwB69cQ
From the video:
> [Chenoweth and Stephan] have gone out of their way to correct people who treat it like a cheat code, and to caution against overreading any success of non-violent oppostion.
The rebuttal is against those arguing that 3.5% is a "magic number", that treat(ed) it like an 'absolute', when we're actually dealing with probabilities and likelihoods and odds.
The formulators of the "3.5% rule" do not treat it as an absolute, and neither do I: my GP post talks about "odds" and likelihoods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iranian_prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025–2026_Iranian_protests
And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
It is actually 'interesting' in that it is one of the few examples where a non-violent movement ended up with an authoritative regime after "success": it's (almost?) unique in that regard per the author. Most non-violent movements end up in a democratic system.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Invalid counter-argument: the survey in question looks all sort of movements, both those that succeeded and failed.
> And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.
"original" is doing some heavy lifting here - the Iranian revolution was not non violent. By the state or by the revolutionaries.
It's also impossible to talk about the regime without also bringing up the formative events in the early years of the Iranian state, namely the Iran-Iraq war.
They were different goals. 25% of those using a club to achieve their goals were successful but 50% of those using a broom to achieve their goals were successful. The takeaway is that those who seek clean floors are more likely to achieve success than those who seek freedom from oppression.
Many people, especially in the US today, dont understand that non-violence doesn't mean passivity or even a willingness to compromise. It just means you do anything you can without actually punching and killing people.
And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.
Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.
Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.
Sometimes, I suspect that Gandhi was helped by the global developments of that time, specifically the British context at the end of the war. Gandhi could have been lucky, in part, to find the British in a mood to relinquish their holdings. Bose, on the other hand, decided to fight by all means, though being no match against the British. Maybe, both strategies would have been equally weak, if there was no world war.
Agape could be discussed as a philosophy between disagreeing figures like King and Carmichael. Today, fewer people have encountered the idea so they can’t choose it as a philosophy.
Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.
A few years earlier we had the Great March of Return [1], which were the nonviolent protests that preceded October 7. Gazans basically stood at the border and protested. The result? The IOF used them for target practice [2] where hundreds died and thousands were maimed, intentionally. Israeli snipers basically kept score with the number of peaceful protesters permanently disabled, documented in "42 knees in one day" [3]. You can look at first-person video from snipers [4].
Malcolm X and others had a different stance on the place for violence. I'm of the view that the oppressor sets the level of violence and many as a whole don't look at the level of state violence.
This is becoming increasingly relevant at home with the violence committed by ICE officers, notably murdering a 37 year old American women in Minneapolis recently.
We have a masked, unidentified force of poorly trained officers who are murdering Americans. Given they don't identify themselves, this is going to escalate. At some point somebody is going to use the castle doctrine or "stand your ground" laws to shoot these officers. That's just a probabilistic inevitability in a country with more guns than people.
We also had peaceful protests on college campuses in 2024 and 2025 that the state responded with with violent and excessive force.
My point is not to defend any violence. Rather, don't ignore state violence. And just because someone points out that the pot will eventually boil over, that's simply analysis not a justification.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...
[2]: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/two-years-on-people-inju...
[3]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-03-06/ty-article-ma...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/10/video-appears-...
Related:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46683205
"Nonviolence" only works when a group is doing that, AND there is also a contingent of violent folks with the same aims.
Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.
This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.
But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable. You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display. This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
>reates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties
Only if you have good advertising for your cause.
Violence is typically good advertising, most news is simply salivating to cover it.
Which means in any non-violent group seeking a goal, it is optimal to have a small violent 'unassociated' group cause just enough problems to get noticed in the global media.
Somewhat relevant Cautionary Tales episode, wherein a slight variation on your same point is made from history and survey data: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-deadly-da...
Is anyone aware of a more thorough argument for why this must be the case? Is it a commonly held view? It sounds realistic, but not necessarily and immutable law, I’d like to know what thought has been given to this.
It’s an incentive problem. If even one party defects in a society of pacifists, the pacifists have no real method of recourse besides refusing to interact with the defector, and how many people are going to do that if the defector starts killing people to enforce compliance?
Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.
Under scrutiny I'm sure your comment falls apart, but it is accurate from orbit.
I happen to hold this philosophy under different words.
It's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.
Yeah, the thorough argument is that people in power don't want people to rise up and challenge their authority.
It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.
I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).
John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).
You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.
A commonly cited example is during the Battle of Seattle the cops wanted to beat the shit out of a nonviolent sit in and the black bloc protected them through a combination of strength and diversion. The non violent people are there for the optics and the violent people are there assuring that any move made on the nonviolent protesters will be rewarded swiftly.
The important part is that the violence mostly doesn't start until someone tries to hurt those who are there peacefully. Good was there peacefully so retaliation is becoming a possibility.
“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk
> We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
[citation needed]
There are multiple studies and books that go over how the less a movement uses violence the more likely it is to be successful:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
The above book has a chapter about how if a movement is non-violent, but a contingent/faction wants to use it, various ways to handle it.
Sorry, are you suggesting that violence doesn't also require coordination of a group? I think the record of lone gunmen solving institutional problems remains kind of scarce.
Whether you want to be a guerilla group, terrorists, or take a peaceful approach the first step is always going to involvefinding confederates.
I have an undergraduate degree in Peace Studies, and have spent extensive time in and around conflict or post-conflict zones.
Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal.
That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded.
The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution.
Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I think you are confusing the BPP with some other organization. All of King’s substantive achievements were accomplished before the formation of the Black Panther’s and he died before they came to national prominence.
Heh, did I mention that peace degree was a loooooong time ago. Totally appreciate the correction.
I remember reading an argument along those lines at the time that resonated. Perhaps not the Black Panthers? Or am I just totally wrong here and there wasn't a shred of political violence in the background?
>Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.
I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".
When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".
Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
There is a quote by Gandhi where he is talking about the Holocaust and he says: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs..."
This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.
This is a fundamental problem.
It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.
The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.
I feel like the role of non violence is over emphasized. It plays a part in these social and political movements. But the MLK era civil rights movement and even the Indian independence movement MLK drew inspiration from, involved a lot of violent resistance sustained for years. People paid with their lives to create unrest and draw attention to their oppression and and gather supporters. We shouldn’t ignore their contribution or forget that it’s part of the overall path to getting justice, alongside non violent resistance.
Beware that while you may choose nonviolence to protest this regime, your local police department will water you like a row of daisies with giant cans of mace and CS while TikTok users get bored and swipe to the next video.
Couldn't find the author, situation in US is apparently so bad that you can't even mention nonviolence without fear of threats.
Stanford University played a major role in wrecking societies worldwide through "nonviolent" white-collar crime.
Majority of their students became US tech workers and VCs, many making a career out of extracting value from societies worldwide with zero ethical concerns. How many Stanford alumni worked at Facebook when their fake news triggered the Rohingya genocide? Stanford is also home to the FTX scam family.
Now everybody is throwing their hands up into the air and asking "how could that happen?"
I wouldn't use this as a metric. With social media almost any opinion whatever will surface some weirdo advocating violence even before you factor in trolls.
Not saying things are ideal in the US by any stretch of the imagination, but the mere presence of people making threats online is not itself deeply indicative of a population ready to get into it.
Facebook's utter failure to moderate itself (as documented many places but especially Careless People) is bigger than just a few weirdos advocating violence. The much more important piece is the fake news that says over and over again "group X did Y", "group X did Y", "group X, they're out there doing Y again". It's the echo chamber that magnifies and amplifies and reinforces untrue and half-true narratives, chasing engagement and fury and ad impressions with zero sense of civic responsibility.
It may be that no individual report is damaging enough to be censor-worthy, but the total effect is massively radicalizing, so that a huge group of people are primed to eventually interpret even true news stories in the maximally negative light and may even see their own eventual jump to violence as being justifiable self-defense given what they believe has preceded it.
Or it's a distraction from the message. If your argument is strong, I can try to change the conversation to you by finding some artifact and magnifying it through some creative interpretations - imply negative associations to X, suggest your references aren't allowed because of Y, or try get the group to attack ad hominem until it chokes out everything else.
We've collectively gotten pretty good at this in the last decade.
> Stanford University played a major role in wrecking societies worldwide through "nonviolent" white-collar crime.
This seems like an unfair burden to place on Stanford or any other institution of higher learning. We can attribute as much blame to Stanford for Messrs Brin and Page as we can to Wharton for President Trump's actions.
And what about positive actions? Forward secrecy would not be possible without Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both Diffie and Hellman hail from Stanford. Not to mention Ralph Merkle (of Merkle trees), Alan Kay, Paul Klipsch (of the speaker) and Barbara Liskov among others. Should the school get the credit for their achievements?
Have you experienced this in real life or just on social media?