A statement on nonviolence

This arose from an offline conversation with someone advocating - or for the purpose of debate pretending to adocate, I can't tell - for violence in civil rights movements, "Occupy Wall Street" included.  Anyway here's my response to him, which predictably comes down on the side of nonviolence but for reasons that surprised me when I ended up writing this response, edited to correct grammar and typos:

" I think the heart of my reaction boils down to believing that almost anyone has the capacity to respond with empathy when presented with a more complete description of the world's dynamics.  Even the most rabid conservatives who call for wholesale slaughter of brown people in the Middle East will respond with empathy and concern when someone they know is in trouble - even if responding with help and support violates every principle they spent years espousing or even enforcing. I call this one's "empathy radius" and use it to distinguish those who end up being  (a modern United states) conservative from those who become progressive: what is your capacity to identify with others?

I agree that credible threats of force contribute to behavioral change in others, which I take it underlies your invoking the Black Panthers and the "Arab Spring" in Egypt.  But let me ask you this: what changes in those others and what are the consequences of those changes? It's pretty well-established that strong emotions and credible threats are very effective in shutting down large portions of human brains while they resort to limbic-based reasoning. Therefore, by invoking violence credibly, you are diminishing the humanity of your "opponent." You also accept the terms of their end of the debate by acknowledging their "otherness." That may, as you indicate, result in short-term successes but does absolutely nothing to address the root cause - the willingness to see and treat others as outside of one's empathy radius. When people say that the enemy has won because you started acting like them, they may mean that you have debased youself. That's not what I hear.  I hear that "they" have won because you have done nothing to substantively advance and change how conversations about power are constructed. You are now playing their game on their terms by having accepted their propositions so fundamentally that the acceptance defines everything fundamental about your response. They're not winning by eliciting a violent response from you; they're making you into them."