Violence
is of three types; the violence of thoughts, violence of deeds and verbal
violence. Out of the three, in my opinion, the verbal violence is most
dangerous. The animals, in general, are not violent. They act violently for
their survival only. As against it, the human being, in general, is a violent
entity. In fact, it is difficult to find a person who is not violent.
The violence is a natural consequence of an act of a living
being that may harm, hurt, damage or destroy another living being. The violence
may be committed unintentionally; for example, an insect on the ground may or
may not get crushed if one is walking. We, while dealing with human violence,
generally go by the dictionary meaning of violence, which highlights ‘physical
violence’, leaving the other two, the violence of thought and the verbal
violence.
All of us know it very well that our verbal communication may
hurt others without our having to have intended it. No doubt, many of us, to
express or deal with our displeasure, use such words that hurt/harm the one
who, according to us, have caused it. Most of us do not retaliate or react to
the misdeeds of others by causing some physical harm. The existing norms of our
societies and our laws, in general, do not permit physical violence to resolve
a clash of interests. We can claim that we are rather safe against physical
violence of other human beings; although, we cannot claim to be sufficiently
safe, notwithstanding our protective laws and the law and order mechanisms that
are in place.
Interestingly, the modern human societies have no control
over the violence of thoughts, unless a violent thought is converted into
apparently violent action or expressed in some extreme form that may lead to
physical violence. In this ‘business world’ there are law full ways of duping
customers, competitors or governments. Similarly, freedom of expression may
allow considerable violence to be perpetrated against human beings. Wherever or
whenever ‘rights’ supersede ‘duties’ nonviolence becomes causality.
We rarely deal with others in the world as our equals. We
either try to dominate or to follow others depending on the circumstances and
occasions. We are more concern about ourselves than we are about others. We are
very rarely taught and trained to establish ‘one-ness’ (अद्वैत, Advait) with other human beings. All these things are reflected in our speech
howsoever hard we try to hide our feelings while communicating with others.
When we dominate others, they get hurt; when others dominate us we get hurt. We
all know that negative feelings stick with us to a greater extent than positive
feelings. There is no need to elaborate what has been said above with lengthy
narrations and examples. It is common knowledge that males dominate females;
parents, teachers and elders dominate children; superiors dominate subordinate;
the wealthy dominate poor; the performers dominate non-performers; those having
higher status in the society dominate those having an inferior status; highly
educated dominate those who are less educated; and so on and so forth. It means, as human beings, we make others
suffer from our verbal violence, and also, are subjected to suffer from verbal
violence of others. We can say the ‘permanent sufferers’, viz. children,
females, poor, subordinates and non-performers, etc. usually suffer from verbal violence of others, thereby developing
personalities, which, by no means, can
be called normal. This can also be expected that when getting an opportunity to
make others suffer from their verbal violence to avenge the injustice caused to
them earlier, such people with subdued personalities become instruments for perpetrating
more verbal violence. Is it necessary to conclude that verbal violence causes
more harm to an individual’s behavior and personality that violence of thoughts
and deeds?
It is not difficult to eradicate verbal violence to a great
extent if we all become very careful with our speech. But, is it possible if we
cannot get rid of our mentality of making distinctions? The ideals can never be
achieved, but making efforts to achieve them is a human quality of great value.
PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA
[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A
Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]
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