2026-05-05

# Bridge between worlds of non-violent and violent people

Disclaimer
 - **Quick Note**
 - Thinking aloud, may not endorse after a lot of thought
 - Written to myself

Main
 - I wish there existed an epistemic bridge between the most nonviolent and the most violent people in the world.
 - I first realised how wide this gap is when thinking about secrets.
   - You can get access to people's secrets consensually or non-consensually.
   - To consensually get access, the default route is to become a therapist or a priest or similar, and prove over a period of many years how non-violent you are.
   - To non-consensually get access, the default route is to join a intelligence agency as a spy, and prove over a period of many years that you are willing to be violent and obedient to your superiors.
 - I think people on both extremes have useful and valuable insights about the world.
   - I am pretty sure people like Naval Ravikant (self-claimed "ethical" billionaire) have been offered harems of child sex slaves by people like Kim Jong Un, in return for completing business deals. (I don't know if Naval and Kim Jong Un have literally met, but I'm sure this type of interaction is common.) When Naval Ravikant writes about being ethical, my guess is that one reason he writes this is because he wants people like Kim Jong Un to fuck off from his life.
   - On the other hand, if you read about some therapist's lives online, you get the sense that their social circle has been filtered so hard in favour of non-violent people, they genuinely will be clueless at gaining an actual inside view of someone like Ravikant or Kim Jong Un. They will be clueless when trying to understand why the US founding fathers wanted people to have guns, or why Mandela's wife wanted to pipe bomb people, or similar. They will just throw categorisation systems at people because they have no idea what it is like to be someone like this, from the inside.
 - To build good political systems, you need to understand the truly violent self-interested people.
   - If humanity is to survive the next 10 years, or the next 100, it would be a good idea to build political systems that can handle our transition to human genetic engineering or artificial superintelligence.
   - I think non-violent people are very naive at this.
   - Heck, I am far from non-violent and I think even I can be naive at this.
   - Example 1
     - For instance, when I proposed a "zero privacy world" to some people, one person (indirectly) told me that if the world gives zero privacy to 99% of people, but some privacy to 1%, then all the black markets for weapons and drugs and similar will route through this 1%, and in worst case these people may literally come to run the world.
     - And yes, now I'm pretty convinced that if you really want to build a "zero privacy world", it has to be every person on Earth being public with no exceptions for any person or any activity, not even for having sex with your partner. If you can't do this, then zero privacy world probably won't work.
     - But my point is, I did not actually even realise this point about black markets. Someone else had to point this out me. This proves even I am capable of being naive about violent self-interested people think.
   - Example 2
     - Stalin created two intelligence agencies, and asked them to purge dissidents from each other. Stalin waited for Hitler to invade cities first, so that he could reduce the number of men required to invade them himself.
     - This sort of violence actually requires a degree of creativity. It is not enough to just read about this afterwards, and be like "huh, that makes sense". If you are building a new political system, you need to be capable of thinking of such creative violent strategies **in advance**, and defend against them. Otherwise your paper thin system will crumble until real pressure just like literal communism crumbled under literal Stalin, and once it is crumbled you don't get a redo button so easily.
 - To build good political systems, you also need to understand true non-violence atleast a little.
   - I actually think I am not that good at understanding truly non-violent people. My first reaction when someone tells me they are non-violent is that this guy is a naive idiot who is lying to himself, he has copy-pasted this from some religion but will crumble when in a real crisis.
   - But there are also some truly principled non-violent people out there, and I genuinely have a poor understanding of what it is like to be them.
   - There are some therapists who are principled and non-violent, and atleast some of them probably became this way because they saw some source of violence in the past, maybe directly suffered at its hand, and decided to be nothing like that.
   - Like, imagine a therapist just spends 10 years working with divorcees and makes a lots of notes about it. If they aren't completely stupid, I am sure they have atleast some fine-grained nuanced insights about divorce that the average person (and me) don't understand at all.
   - I actually think my notes here are shorter because I suck at getting inside view picture of non-violent people.