from Olivia Funders
Never in my life would I have expected reading 14 lines from the Iliad to turn into a full-scale war (figuratively speaking) about whether violence is justified—and I certainly wouldn’t have expected it during an interview for a summer program.
To be honest, I wasn’t really involved in that fight; in fact, I was the one trying to settle the debate with a few carefully worded arguments about why we shouldn’t argue, which (of course) no one wanted to hear. There were two sides: one argued that violence was justified and the other that violence was justified only in some cases.
Although I ended up siding with the case-by-case argument, from that day on, there was a little voice in the back of my mind that wondered if I fully agreed with him. Of course, I knew it was impossible to completely rule out violence or say it was justified in all cases, but I thought there must be another side to the argument that I was missing.
A few days before this “debate” I was listening to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell called “Revisionist History”. In this particular episode, Gladwell talks about the RAND Corporation during the Vietnam War and explains how all three individuals who were privy to the information released in the interviews with members of the Viet Cong came to three separate conclusions about the state of the war—one (Conrad Kellen) believed we would lose the war, one (Leon Gouré) believed we would win, and one (Mai Elliot) wasn’t quite sure.
Later in the podcast, Gladwell mentioned how all three individuals who had access to the interviews—Gure, Kellen, and Elliott—had their own internal biases that influenced their view of the information. Gladwell explains:
“An interview with a Viet Cong officer, a fantastic piece of intelligence — an insight into the mind of the enemy. Yet not everyone agreed on what that meant. Because everyone looked at him with different eyes. This is why intelligence failures happen. It’s not because someone is screwing up or being stupid or lazy; this is because people who understand intelligence are human beings with their own history and biases.
This result is not limited to RAND Corporation research in Saigon; it goes back to looking at violence on a case-by-case basis. In general, making valid and informed decisions about whether to use violence is difficult when you don’t have all the information or are limited by your personal experiences and biases. Intel can often be ambiguous; when a situation appears dire based on how information is interpreted, people may resort to violence—no matter how wrong that choice may appear to our own eyes.
So is violence justified? Well, I guess I still agree with the case-by-case argument — but maybe we should start considering the personal baggage everyone brings to the table.
Olivia Funders is a student at Weehawken High School and director of ideas and solutions at the Institute for Youth in Politics. yipinstitute.org.
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