The False Aliveness of Violence

The very word violence describes acts of brutality and of imposing force upon something. At heart, violence is about assertion and domination: the attempt to bend others, or the environment itself, to one’s will. Psychologically, this entails an othering, treating people, communities, or nature as objects to be controlled rather than as fellow participants in life.

At the sharp end this means direct violence: homicides, wars, assaults, terrorism, domestic abuse. Globally, intentional killings number about half a million a year, with armed conflict adding tens of thousands more. In sum, deaths from direct violence account for well under 2% of the roughly 62 million global deaths each year.

But direct violence is only the visible tip. Beneath it lies structural violence: deaths caused indirectly by the conditions created by conflict, inequality, and systemic neglect. In the Democratic Republic of Congo’s wars, it was estimated that nine out of ten deaths were indirect, from hunger, disease, and collapse of healthcare. If we extend this reasoning worldwide, structural violence, through poverty, malnutrition, preventable disease, inadequate housing and education, claims millions of lives annually, dwarfing the numbers killed by bullets and bombs.

A central mechanism of structural violence in the modern world is money itself. The way money is created and distributed embeds inequality at the heart of the system. Wealth flows upwards through interest, speculation, and concentrated ownership, while scarcity is manufactured for the many. Those born without access to capital, credit, or inheritance are structurally constrained, condemned to shortened lives and reduced opportunities not by natural law but by financial design. In this sense, money functions less as a neutral tool of exchange than as a technology of control, rationing survival and reinforcing the violent hierarchies of class and power.

Supporting both is cultural violence: the ideologies and narratives that legitimise harm, from racism and sexism to religious or nationalist dogmas that render oppression normal. Hate speech is a clear expression of this: it dehumanises individuals and groups, licences prejudice, and prepares the ground for discrimination and attack. In doing so, it acts as a bridge between the cultural and the structural, ensuring that inequalities are not only maintained but justified in the language of everyday life. 

The violence within human culture naturally effects the environment. Each year there are around 130 million births and 62 million deaths, adding roughly 70 million more people annually to the human population. This exponential growth is itself a form of violence against the natural environment: forests stripped for farmland, oceans emptied of fish, rivers dammed and poisoned, species driven to extinction. The human story of growth and mastery has become an ecological story of depletion and collapse.

Erich Fromm, in his classic The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, helps us to understand why violence runs so deeply. He distinguishes between benign aggression, which is defensive and life-serving, and malignant aggression, which is gratuitous, destructive and peculiarly human. Unlike animals, which rarely kill beyond necessity, human beings can display cruelty and destructiveness for its own sake. Fromm links this to social and cultural conditions: systems of domination, authoritarianism, and inequality that breed resentment and legitimise harm. He stresses that the denial of freedom and the experience of impotence or helplessness can fuel destructive behaviour, as can wounded pride or narcissism. Crucially, Fromm explores the psychology of destructiveness, showing how boredom, fear, loneliness, and the absence of meaning can make violence attractive as an assertion of power and stimulation and false aliveness. He contrasts this necrophilic orientation, a fascination with death, decay, and control, with its opposite, biophilia, a love of life, growth, and creativity.

Morality is often cast as the moderating force that reins in violence, a set of codes and conventions designed to prevent our worst impulses from spilling over. Yet morality is, at best, a cultural scaffolding, a compromise between competing interests. It can even bring its own kind of violence: the shaming, guilting, and excluding of those who fall outside its codes. In this way, morality easily becomes another tool of control, policing behaviour through fear of rejection or punishment. 

The dream of utopia, too, is not exempt from this pattern. Human history is littered with visions of the perfect society, yet again and again the attempt to realise them becomes a story of suppression. The utopian ideal demands order, conformity, and purity; it cannot tolerate the messiness of human difference. What begins as the hope of universal harmony too often ends in the violence of exclusion, coercion, or forced equality. In this sense, utopia reveals itself as another expression of the necrophilic impulse, the drive to control, to systematise, to impose a rigid image of perfection upon living reality. A truly biophilic vision would not be a blueprint of perfection but an openness to life’s unpredictability, a flourishing that arises not from suppression but from the vitality of being itself.

The roots of this divide lie deeper still, in the very way the self is imagined. I would suggest that necrophilia’s obsession with control arises from the sense of a separate self: a self that stands apart from others and from nature, and therefore must defend itself, assert itself, and exploit its surroundings for gain. This seeking self is never satisfied, always anxious, always measuring life by what it can acquire or dominate. Biophilia, by contrast, is born from the dissolution of that separateness. When the rigid boundaries of the ego soften, what emerges is not a self locked in competition with its world but a selfless process continuous with it. In this orientation, growth and creativity arise naturally, and there is no need to seek mastery, for one is no longer divided from what one seeks to control. Natural aliveness replaces the false aliveness of separation. 

Therefore, how we see the world is inseparable from how we feel ourselves to be. This must be the central conclusion. The tales we tell about conflict, scarcity, or competition mirror our inner sense of separation and insecurity. Conversely, stories of belonging, cooperation, and renewal arise when we feel ourselves not as isolated egos but as part of a living whole. Culture is not merely an external frame but the outward expression of an inward state. Violence and peace both begin in how we narrate ourselves into the world.

In the end, to live biophilically is to be free of the very thought that binds us to separation: the thought that says “I am” as a fixed, isolated identity and reveal the true alivness of self-evidence beingness, discarding the false aliveness of seeking and controlling and force.

With love,

Freyja

Freyja Theaker

Writer, Educator, Founder Naturally Being

🌐 www.naturallybeing.one

📧 freyja@naturallybeing.one

This article first appeared on Freyja's Substack,

Naturally Being: freyjatheaker.substack.com