The Power of Nonconflict

The high cost of violence has sparked an interest in the power of nonviolence and in nonviolent techniques of conducting conflict. Of the three types of violence and nonviolence — the cult, the extermination, and the breakdown of threat systems — the third is most important. Nonviolence involves threat in more subtle and less costly ways than does violence. Conflict is relatively unimportant in biological evolution, except in the very indirect sense of unconscious competition; it is more important in social dynamics and operates as a facilitator or a limiter. Most human activity and most developmental processes are nonconflictual, and where conflict exists it is frequently dealt with by ritualization. The control of violence may be achieved more easily by expanding the nonconflictual aspect of human behavior than by trying to substitute nonviolent for violent conflict. The main problem is dialectical thinking in terms of only two alternatives or two parties, which almost always is a gross oversimplification. A “trialectic” of violence, nonviolence, and nonconflict is a much more realistic approach to the problems of the dynamics of society.