Preventing Violence Quotes

“The political rhetoric of the ruling class claims to want to decrease the rate of violence. It advocates making the deadliest weapons, from handguns to assault rifles, freely available to as many people as possible; increasing the rate of capital punishment; imprisoning as many people as possible; and making the conditions in which they are incarcerated more and more brutalizing; depriving prison inmates of the opportunity to acquire education which could help them to renounce their criminal violence. All this is pursued in the name of being "tough on crime" and "tough on criminals"; but however "tough" these policies may be on criminals, they are, in fact, the most effective way to promote crime and violence. This deceptive rhetoric still fools millions of voters. This brilliant strategy also labels those policies that would decrease the rates of crime and violence, as being "soft on crime.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Unequal societies are not only the most violent; they are also the least productive.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“It is very important to note, however, that the only segment of the population from whom changing our social and economic conditions in the ways that prevent violence would exact a higher cost would be the extremely wealthy upper, or ruling, class — the wealthiest one per cent of the population (which in the United States today controls some 39 per cent of the total wealth of the nation, and 48 per cent of the financial wealth, as shown by Wolff in Top Heavy (1996). The other 99 per cent of the population — namely, the middle class and the lower class — would benefit, not only form decreased rates of violence (which primarily victimize the very poor), but also from a more equitable distribution of the collective wealth and income of our unprecedentedly wealthy societies.

Even on a worldwide scale, it would require a remarkably small sacrifice from the wealthiest individuals and nations to raise everyone on earth, including the populations of the poorest nations, above the subsistence level, as the United Nations Human Development Report 1998, has shown. I emphasize the wealthiest individuals as well as nations because, as the U.N. report documents, a tiny number of the wealthiest individuals actually possess wealth on a scale that is larger than the annual income of most of the nations of the earth.

For example, the three richest individuals on earth have assets that exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product of the fortyeight poorest countries! The assets of the 84 richest individuals exceed the Gross Domestic Product of the most populous nation on earth, China, with 1.2 billion inhabitants. The 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's population, or 2.5 billion people.

By comparison, it is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. This is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.

It has been shown throughout the world, both internationally and intranationally, that reducing economic inequities not only improves physical health and reduces the rate of death from natural causes far more effectively than doctors, medicines, and hospitals; it also decreases the rate of death from both criminal and political violence far more effectively than any system of police forces, prisons, or military interventions ever invented.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“One sign of a health-giving physical environment, one that is most supportive of individual life and survival, is the absence of physical pain. And one criterion by which to recognize an environment that is most conducive to the survival not only of individuals but also of groups, societies, and the whole species, is the absence of shame. The main precondition for preventing violence, then, is the establishment of the social and psychological conditions that minimize people's exposure to shame, and that maximize their access to nonviolent means of undoing whatever shame they do experience, so that they can maintain their pride and self-esteem without doing so at the expense of the pride and self-esteem of others.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“The social and economic structure of any given society can be seen as an ocean in which people are like so many fish who have to learn how to survive in that ocean or die. The ocean itself can be health-giving, fostering life for all the fish in it; or it can be a polluted ocean in which only the bigger and more powerful fish thrive, though there is always the risk that if it becomes too polluted even the big fish will perish. All social and economic systems in the world are somewhere on a continuum between those two extremes, though the current U.S. system, and the system in many developing and all undeveloping or regressing nations, approaches the most polluted extreme.

In fact, the world system as a whole, with its division into a tiny minority of staggeringly wealthy nations and a great majority of increasingly poverty-stricken ones, can be considered extremely polluted. It is futile to blame individual big fish for surviving, or for wanting to survive. So if we want to prevent violence, we will need to clean up this "ocean." We will need a system that as far as possible provides for an equal sharing of the collective wealth of the world among all individuals and all nations, while providing free education and healthcare for everyone.

When the sharing comes close to being absolutely equal, as we have seen from examples at all stages of economic and cultural development, violence almost disappears. Conversely, the more unequal the social and economic environment, the more frequent and severe is the violence. If we are to succeed, the political Orwellian Newspeak that surrounds us will have to be translated into plain English. Violence serves some very powerful interests Those interests will continue to exist, and will continue to stimulate violence, until we eliminate the conflict of interest by eliminating the hierarchies and gender asymmetries.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“The fact that depriving prisoners of the opportunity to acquire an education increases the rates of crime and violence in our society, and that there is no reason a society as wealthy as ours cannot afford to provide free higher education for everyone, are points that tend to get lost in discussions of this issue. But there are two even bigger points that also tend to get lost, so I will emphasize them here.

The first is that it is in the interests of the extremely wealthy upper class for the government to pursue policies whose effect is to raise the rates of crime and violence in our society. It is in their economic interest to increase the gap between rich and the poor to the highest level possible because they are the rich, and the greater the gap, the more they get. But the larger that gap becomes, the higher the rate of crime and violence. There is a clear conflict of interest between their economic interest in becoming wealthier, and the public's interest in preventing violence.

There is also a political dimension: namely, how to persuade the public to vote for politicians who will write the laws that keep diverting more money into the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the middle and lower classes. A high rate of crime and violence pits the middle class against the lower class. Most of the categories of violence that the laws define as criminal are committed by lower-class people, and this makes the middle classes angry at the poor and afraid of them. But it also divides the lower class against itself — most poor people do not commit violent crimes, but most of the victims of violent crime are poor.

The higher the rates of crime and violence, then, the more the middle and lower classes are distracted from noticing that they are in most danger of being robbed by the very wealthy and their political agents. As the old saying goes, the poor man robs you with a gun, the rich man with a pen.

In this analysis, I am not assuming that there are many individual members of any class who are consciously aware of the role they are playing in this conflict. Some are, and of those, some work consciously to support this system, and some work consciously to oppose it. But the beauty of the system, from the standpoint of the rich, is that the vast majority of people whose lives are affected by it, whether for good or for ill, do not have to understand the system or consciously support it in order for it to work. The socio-economic and criminal justice systems do that job for them.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“After thirty years of working with the most violent men our society produces, I am convinced that we do not need to give up on anyone. Even the most intractably violent people can learn to live with others in ways that are constructive rather than destructive. So there are many reasons why even those who feel nothing but detestation for every violent criminal in the world might still conclude, on the basis of self-interest, that these men deserve all the attention we can give them.

That leads to another meaning of the concept of respect. The German word for attention — Achtung — also means respect. And that makes sense: the way you truly respect someone is to pay attention to them, and if you are not giving them your full attention, you are disrespecting them. That is one reason, I think, that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are such deep forms of respect for human beings and human dignity. They involve, indeed they consist of, paying full attention to another human being.

It is not only Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman to whom attention must be paid; we all need attention. When we get it, we know that we are being respected. That also helps to explains the etiology of violence: assaulting people is a foolproof way to get their attention. Since everyone needs respect/attention, if they cannot get it non-violently, they will get it violently. And I have never met a group of people who had been so profoundly neglected and deprived, and who had received so little of either attention or respect, as the prison inmates.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“What programs would a prison need to utilize in order to maximize the likelihood that the people sent to it would renounce violence as a behavioral strategy? To begin with, it would need to be an anti-prison. Beginning with its architecture, it would need to convey an entirely different message. Current prisons are modeled architecturally after zoos — or rather, after the kinds of zoos that used to exist, but that have been replaced with zoological parks because the animals' keepers began to realize that the old zoos, with concrete floors and walls and steel bars were too inhumane for animals to survive in. Yet we still keep our human animals in zoos that no humane society would permit for animals.

And the architecture itself conveys that message to the prisoners: "You are an animal, for this is a zoo, and zoos are what animals are put in." And then we act surprised when the men and women we treat that way actually behave like animals, both when they are in this human zoo and after they return to the community.

So we would need to build an anti-prison that would actually look as if it had been built for human beings rather than animals, i.e. that was as home-like and pleasant and civilized and human as possible. Once we had done that, we could offer those who had been sent there the opportunity to acquire as much education and/or vocational training as they had the ability and energy and interest to obtain. We would of course need to provide treatment for whatever medical, dental, psychiatric, or substance-abuse problems they had, and would want to incorporate many of the principles of a therapeutic community into the everyday routines of this residential school, with frequent group discussions with the other residents and staff members with training in psychotherapy.

The goal would be to replace the "monster factories" that most prisons now are with therapeutic communities designed to enable people who are deeply damaged, and damaging, to recover their humanity or to gain a degree of humanity they had never been able to acquire; in short, to help them heal themselves and learn, in the process, how to heal others and even repair some of the damage they have done.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Prisons themselves could actually start preventing violence, rather than stimulating it, if we took everyone out of them, demolished the buildings, and replaced them with a new and different kind of institution — namely, a locked, secure residential college, whose purpose and functions would be educational and therapeutic, not punitive. It would make sense to organize such a facility as a therapeutic community, with a full range of treatments for substance abuse and any other medical and mental health services needed to help the individual heal the damage that deformed his character and stunted his humanity.

If it seems utopian to replace prison with schools, let me remind you that prisons already are schools and always have been — except that they are schools in crime and violence, in humiliation, degradation, brutalization and exploitation, not in peace and love and dignity. I am merely suggesting that we replace one already existing type of school with another.

Such a program would enable those who have been violent to adopt non-violent means for developing the feelings of self-esteem and self-respect, for being respected by others, and of being able to take legitimate and realistic pride in their skills and knowledge and achievements, which all human beings need if they are to be able to find alternatives to violent behavior when their self-esteem is threatened. It would also enable them to become employable and self-sufficient, and to make a productive contribution to society when they return to the community.

But before that can happen, we will have to renounce our own urge to engage in violence — that is, punishment — and decide that we want to engage in educational and therapeutic endeavors instead, so as to facilitate maturation, development, and healing.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“What then can we do about crime and punishment? To ask that question is to ask what we can do about violence — whether it takes the form of crime or punishment. The first and most important principle might be to start doing nothing, or in other words, to stop doing the things that we are already doing that only stimulate violence — such as responding to the kind of violence that we call crime with the kind that we call punishment.

I am not suggesting that it would make sense to let those who are actively raping and murdering others walk the streets. Physical restraint of those who are currently and actively physically violent, including confining or "quarantining" them in a locked facility, is at times the only way, in our ignorance, we have yet discovered to prevent further violence, temporarily. But to punish people — that is, to deliberately cause them pain — above and beyond the degree that is unavoidable in the act of restraining them only constitutes further violence (on our part), and only causes further violence (on the part of the "criminals" we punish).

And since restraint itself unavoidably involves coercion and physical force, and will inevitably be experienced by some (though not all) as a form of punishment, it would make sense to utilize it only for those who are physically violent themselves. In other words, it is time that we stopped overcrowding our prisons, distorting our economic priorities, and subjecting the non-violent to violence and teaching them to become violent themselves by placing anyone in prison for a nonviolent crime.

To use our prisons for those who have committed only crimes against property, or drug offenses, or have offended against someone's sense of morality, as with prostitution or gambling, is self-defeating if our goal is to decrease the amount of violence in our society; for the most effective way to turn a non-violent person into a violent one is to send him to prison.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“The criminal justice and penal systems have been operating on the basis of a huge mistake, namely, the belief that punishment will deter, prevent, or inhibit violence, when in fact it is the most powerful stimulus of violence that we have yet discovered.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“What is the mistake the criminal justice system is making? The major mistake, I believe, is the failure to differentiate between restraint and punishment; and to imagine that punishment will prevent, or deter, violence.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Ironically, despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the cliché that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, when most of us think of medicine we usually think of the cure, or treatment, of established diseases, even though of the three levels of fighting disease this is the least important and effective — that is, the least cost-effective, in relative terms, and the least clinically effective, in absolute terms.

Exactly the same is true of discussions of violence prevention in the mass media and the political arena, most of which focus on courts, police, prisons, and punishment as the major tools for fighting crime and violence, even though they are far less effective in reducing the rates of serious violence, in both relative and absolute terms, than primary and secondary prevention.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Ironically, the only drug that has been shown to stimulate violent behavior, through its psychopharmacological effects on brain and behavior, is one that is legal — alcohol. And the most dangerous drug of all, without any close competitors — the drug whose very use is an act of violence, since it kills both those who use it and those whom they expose to it, and kills incomparably more people than are killed in the gang wars precipitated by the illegal drugs — is another legal drug, tobacco.

So the net effect of the drug laws has been to outlaw the drugs that prevent violence, legalize the one that causes violence, legalize the other one whose use is an act of violence, precipitate violence over the sale of the illegal (but violence-preventing) drugs, subsidize an illegal drug industry which as a result is powerful enough to destabilize several fragile Third World countries, exacerbate the AIDS epidemic, and so on. Clearly, repealing these laws and providing treatment rather than punishment would be one of the most important and effective steps we could take in the secondary prevention of violence.

The RAND Corporation (Caulkins, et al., Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences, 1997), for example, found that treatment of heavy users of drugs reduced serious crimes against both persons and property ten times as much as conventional law enforcement did, and fifteen times as much as mandatory minimum sentences. And, not surprisingly, treatment was also vastly more effective in reducing cocaine consumption than either conventional law enforcement or mandatory minimum sentences.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Most of the violence associated with the use of the illegal drugs is caused by the fact that the drugs have been made illegal — as a result of which their economic value has been greatly enhanced, one could even say subsidized, by the government. There is an enormous and extraordinarily lucrative market in these drugs, which, since they are illegal, cannot be regulated in the normal, peaceful way that markets for legal commodities are regulated, that is, by the government.

As a result of this, the drug dealers engage in extremely violent wars with each other to gain control over as much of the market as they can. That is what causes the vast majority of the violence associated with illegal drugs. The drugs themselves are not causing the violence. The legal system is causing it. The "War on Drugs" is causing it — by precipitating "drug wars" between the drug dealers. That is why the most effective way to prevent the violence associated with the use of illegal drugs would be to treat them as a problem in public health and preventive medicine (which they are), and provide treatment for those who are addicted to them, and stop treating them as a criminal problem.

Most of the violence associated with the illegal drugs would end tomorrow — the Colombian drug cartel and the inner city drug gangs would go out of business — if we decriminalized those drugs today.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Consensus has emerged from major psychology departments throughout the U.S. (e.g. James Garbarino, then at Chicago, now at Cornell; Mark L. Lepper, at Stanford; Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, at Rochester; Teresa Amibile, at Brandeis) that creativity, interest, subjective satisfaction, persistence, and overall productivity all decline when a task is done for the sake of an external, extrinsic reward. The only sphere in which "material rewards do seem to be necessary" is that of the dull jobs "that make very little of use of their abilities" (Ryan Equality, 1981).

But that is precisely the type of work that is much less necessary now that technology has created robots and servomechanisms. The time may have come to ask whether the price we pay in violence and unhappiness is worth the reward of keeping some groups of people in menial jobs that we could easily do without.

Another relevant research program consists of studies investigating the degree of satisfaction or happiness that whole groups of people experience under differing conditions of income distribution. The consensus is that people located at every point on the status scale in the unequal income communities — whether at, above, or below the average — reported less personal happiness and subjective satisfaction than those in communities in which income was distributed equally (Furby, "Satisfaction with Outcome Distributions," 1981).”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“As we enter the new millennium, perhaps it is worth reflecting on the fact that this could be a turning-point in the evolution of civilization, for our technologies have evolved to the point where there is no longer a need for an underclass of slaves, serfs, and wage-slaves. This division of society into a hierarchical order of upper and lower social classes did not exist until civilization was invented.

The low level of technological development made this necessary to allow a class of specialists (mathematicians, inventors, poets, scientists, philosophers) the leisure for the creative work that is a prerequisite for the creation, maintenance, and further development of civilization. But slaves and underclasses are no longer needed in order to free up enough leisure time and energy for the elite to do work that is creative rather than alienated. Therefore we no longer need social classes and their concomitant, relative poverty and economic inequality, and their concomitant, violence. If we permit ourselves — and by ourselves I mean all of us, all human beings — to enjoy the fruits of the creative labor that has preceded us, we could create a society that would no longer need violence as the only means of rescuing self-esteem.

Implicit in this argument is the idea that money is neither a necessary incentive for creative work, nor the main incentive. The play that infants and children engage in is clearly an inborn, inherent trait of human beings. Play has been called the work that children do, the mans by which they acquire the skills and knowledge that enable them to develop and mature into adults. Play has also been described, when applied to adults, as simply another name for work that one enjoys. We could use the word to refer to unalienated labor, creative work, work that is an end in itself. I believe that the wish and the need to engage in this creative work/play is only conditioned out of human beings by the alienating conditions to which the underclass and even the middle class in our society are subjected.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“The traditional defense of class stratification and the existence of a "leisure class", ever since the rise of civilization, from both Plato and Aristotle as well as from more recent social thinkers, is that a leisure class is needed in order to have the time and energy for the specialized intellectual development and technological skills that are necessary preconditions for civilization; and "leisure class" has always meant a group with a guaranteed income — i.e. those who did not have to work for a living.

Implicit in this argument is the assumption (which I happen to think is correct, as I think the history and development of civilization proves) that when people are freed from the necessity to work — that is, when work is freely chosen rather than slavery or wage-slavery (i.e. "work or starve"), they do not just vegetate in a state of "passivity and dependency." Rather, they engage in much more creative work. Coercion creates an incentive for "passive aggressiveness," because when overpowered and helpless there is no other way to express the minimal degree of autonomy that people need in order to maintain any semblance of self-esteem, dignity, and pride.

Furthermore, when work is a means to and end — working in order to eat — then it is, in Marx's terms, "alienated" labor. Labor can only be liberated from alienation when work is an end in itself, entered into freely as the expression of spontaneous and voluntary creativity, curiosity, playfulness, initiative, and sociability — that is, the sense of solidarity with the community, the fulfillment of one's true and "essential" human nature as "social" and "political" animals, to be fulfilled and made human by their full participation in a culture.

In short, the contradiction in the old defense of class stratification is that it defends leisure for the leisure class, but not for the underclass. With reference to the underclass, leisure is said to destroy the incentive to work, leads to slothfulness and self-indulgence, and retards cognitive and moral development. When applied to the leisure class, the concept evokes an image of Plato and Aristotle, whose leisure was based on slave labor, creating the intellectual foundations of Western civilization; or patrician slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson laying the foundations of American civilization; or creative aristocrats like Count Leo Tolstoy or Bertrand Ear Russell; or, even closer to home, of our own sons and daughters (or of ourselves, when we were young adults) being freed from the stultifying tasks of earning a living until well into our adult years so that we could study in expensive universities to gain specialized knowledge and skills.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“I have heard politicians like John Major in the U.K. and his counterparts in the U.S. say that what we need to do to solve the problem of crime and violence is to teach criminals to learn the different between right and wrong. In other words, we need to teach them to recognize the difference between justice and injustice, and to pursue the former and eschew the latter. But what the politicians who mouth these sentiments do not realize is that the violent criminals are perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong.

They realize that they have been victims of injustice (most of all, from those who preach to them most loudly about it), and they commit their crimes in order to achieve some measure of justice, by taking something back from a society that has subjected them to a degree of deprivation to which it does not subject others. For example, how can we, as a society, say that we have something to teach about justice, when we permit the perpetuation of an economic system in which some people inherit millions of pounds while most people inherit nothing? How can we speak of equality of opportunity under those conditions?

Violent criminals are not violent because they are dumb, out of touch with reality, or unable to recognize hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice when they see it. They are violent precisely because they are aware of the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice that surrounds them and of which they have been the victims. That does not mean that they respond to those conditions in a rational or just way, or that we should tolerate and permit their violence — which affects their fellow victims much more often than it does their oppressors.

But it does mean that we cannot expect to stop the kind of violence that we call crime until we stop the kind of violence that I have called structural in "Structural Violence" (1999). By this I mean the deaths and disabilities that are caused by the economic structure of our society, its division into rich and poor. Structural violence is not only the main form of violence, in the sense that poverty kills far more people (almost all of them very poor) than all the behavioral violence put together, it is also the main cause of violent behavior. Eliminating structural violence means eliminating relative poverty.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Since there is a reciprocity between causation and prevention, those same statistics show the conditions that prevent violence. These are: economic and political egalitarianism, with classless societies, no slavery or social classes, and minimal hierarchicalization in the political sphere; and relative freedom from the invidious display of wealth, boasting, sensitivity to insult, and other social and cultural characteristics that tend to stimulate shame, envy, and violence.

What is extraordinary about the range of cultures we have discussed so far is that for all their variety, ranging from modern (post)-industrial economies to Anabaptist communal farming communities to the most primitive non-literate hunting-and-gathering societies, they have two things in common: in all of them, wealth and political power are shared unusually equitably, and they all have remarkably reduced rates of violence. It would appear that social and political egalitarianism (democracy) serves to diminish both shame and violence quite effectively, across a wide range of differing levels of overall economic and cultural development.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Another source of evidence that violence can be prevented comes from the experience of those religious sub-cultures that practice "primitive Christian communism," such as the Anabaptist sects — the Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites. These are classless societies with essentially no inequities of income or wealth and virtually no private property, since they pool their economic resources and share them equally. They also experience virtually no physical violence, either individual or collective.

The Hutterites, for example, since emigrating from eastern Europe to escape religious persecution around 1874, have lived in communal farms in southern Canada and the north-mid western United States for more than a century. As strict pacifists, that was their only alternative to extermination. Thus, they have no history of collective violence (warfare). They "consider themselves to live the only true form of Christianity, one which entails communal sharing of property and cooperative production and distribution of goods," as Kaplan and Plaut described them in Personality in a Communal Society (1955).

That is, they conform to the pattern of the earliest Christian communities, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (2: 44-45): "all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." As a result, the Hutterites experienced "virtually no differentiation of class, income, or standard of living... This society comes as close as to being classless as any we know." (Kaplan and Plaut).

An intensive review by medical and social scientists of their well-documented behavioral history and vital statistics during the century since their arrival in North America reported that "We did not find a single case of murder, assault or rape. Physical aggressiveness of any sort was quite rate." (Eaton and Weil, Culture and Mental Disorders, 1955.) Hostetler, writing twenty years later, reported that there still had not been a single homicide in the 100 years since the Hutterites entered North America, and only one suicide in a population of about 21,000 (Hutterite Society, 1974).”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“It is not unemployment as such that causes violence; what causes violence, rather, is the loss of self-esteem and feelings of self-worth, the blow especially to one's sense of adequacy as a man (men are, after all, expected to be the "breadwinners" and to "bring home the bacon" in all patriarchal cultures), and the shame brought on by rejection and enforced passivity and dependency, which can all be precipitated by being fired from one's job. Can be, but are not necessarily.

For the psychological meaning of unemployment is shaped both by the psychological strengths and vulnerabilities of the individual, and by the meanings that it is given by the culture in which the individual lives — as embodied and symbolized, for example, by the way in which the society responds economically and in terms of moral value judgements to those who are unemployed.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“To the extent that we place a positive value on social stratification and hierarchies, whether actively or passively, then we signal to our children that status systems are a good thing, and they are likely then to reproduce their own versions. Working to dismantle all status hierarchies, however, does not at all require that we stop making distinctions between better or worse quality work, whether in the arts, the sciences, or any other field of endeavor.

We have to recognize that the only basis on which we can live with each other without violence is one of mutual respect, a respect that is so deep and unconditional that it is not dependent on achievement or behavior, but is respect for human dignity, for the inviolability of the human soul and personality, and a determination not to subject anyone to any shame that is not an unavoidable consequence of the fact that we are all imperfect and therefore will all inevitably and appropriately suffer from the narcissistic wound of acknowledging our own imperfections.

Finally, it is important to remember Malcolm X's insight that no one can give someone else self-esteem or self-respect; people can only acquire that for themselves, through their own achievements and way of life. But we can choose whether we make available the tools people need to acquire their own self-esteem, by deciding whether to do everything possible to guarantee true equality of opportunity, including equal access to education.

Thus it is not enough to provide schools like Columbine High School only for the children of the affluent white upper-middle class. It is just as essential to provide schools of equal quality for every child everywhere, for failure to do so sends a message to all our children, both those in the ghetto and those in the Columbines of the world. This message is that creating status hierarchies that expose those at the bottom to soul-destroying, violence-provoking intensities of humiliation is acceptable human behavior.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Violence, from the point of view of those who engage in it, does not intensify shame, it diminishes it and even reverses it into its opposite, namely, self-respect, and respect from others, which is why the most violent people boast for their violence rather than apologizing for it.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“George Bernard Shaw said that if a man steals a hundred pounds he is sent to jail, but if he steals a million pounds he is sent to Parliament. I believe the same principle applies to male violence. If a man kills one person, he is sent to prison; if he kills ten, to a prison mental hospital; but if he is responsible for the death of thousands, he is crowned emperor, made the Duke of Marlborough, or elected President of the United States. The opposite of shame is honor; and the highest honor given by the United States is the Congressional Medal of Honor. Who is it given to? Men. And for what? For violence, or more precisely, for turning themselves and other men into objects of each other's violence.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Cultures that have social classes, those that have caste systems, and those that practice slavery, all show significantly more of both shame and violence than cultures whose institutions do not divide people in those hierarchical ways. The existence of inequality exposes everyone to the risk of being inferior, which in turn stimulates aggressive competition to inflict the inferior status on others (such as by enslaving, impoverishing, or degrading them). In other words, inequality stimulates shame and shame stimulates the creation of inequality; shame stimulates violence and violence stimulates shame; inequality leads to violence and violence leads to inequality. These are all mutually reinforcing "vicious circles", or positive feedback loops.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Violence occurs when people see no means of undoing or preventing their own humiliation except by humiliating others; indeed, that is the underlying purpose of inflicting violence on others.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“A shame culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is perceived to reside in other people, in their ridicule, criticism, or contempt (so that one is shamed in other people's eyes). The feeling of shame actually occurs in oneself, of course, and can occur when one is alone, but it characteristically perceived as something that occurs before an audience, an external judge in whose eyes (and by comparison with whom) one appears weak, failed, foolish, incompetent, ridiculous, rejected, inferior, contemptible — in short, shameful. Thus, shame motivates concealment of those traits in oneself of which one is ashamed, since shame is only intensified by exposure to others.

A guilt culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is oneself, one's own internalized conscience and the moral law one imposes on oneself, violation of which leaves one feeling guilty and sinful in one's own eyes. By contrast with shame, the feeling of guilt or sin is actually relieved by exposure, which is why guilt cultures institutionalize the practice of confession of sins. This is understandable, since the person who feels guilty perceives his sin (evil) as being "inside" himself, so to speak, so letting it "out" through confession can feel like draining a moral abscess, bringing a relief of painful pressure.

But why would the perceived source of moral sanctions and disapproval affect either the likelihood or the direction of violent impulses? The answer, I believe, is that what the feeling of shame motivates most directly is the wish to eliminate the feeling of shame, since it is a very painful feeling; and since shame is seen as emanating from other people, that can be done most directly by eliminating other people. It is true that one could also eliminate the feeling of shame, at lower cost to oneself and others, by means of achievements of which one could feel proud, and which would elicit approval, admiration, respect and honors from others. But that is not always possible, and when it is not, eliminating others may be seen as the only alternative.

What the feeling of guilt motivates, correspondingly, is the wish to eliminate the feeling of guilt, since it is a very painful feeling; and since the feeling of guilt emanates from the self, the only way to eliminate it may be by eliminating the self (as in suicide, or by provoking or passively submitting to martyrdom). Another way to understand why shame motivates anger and violence toward others, and why guilt directs those same feelings and behaviors toward the self, is to remember that in a shame ethic the worse evil is shame, the source of which is perceived as other people (the audience in whose "evil eyes" one is shamed). Therefore evil resides in other people, and to the degree that one feels shame, it is other people who deserve punishment.

Punishing others alleviates feelings of shame because it replaces the image of oneself as a weak, passive, helpless, and therefore shameful victim of their punishment (i.e. their shaming) with the contrasting image of oneself as powerful, active, self-reliant, and therefore admirable, and unshameable.

In a guilt ethic, by contrast, the worst evil is to be guilty or sinful, and guilt and sin (to the degree that one feels guilty and sinful) are perceived as residing within oneself. Thus, people who feel guilty see themselves as deserving punishment. And receiving punishment, whether from oneself or from others, relieves guilt by expiating it. Indeed, that is the purpose of punishment, both in the criminal law (in which punishment is the means by which the criminal "pays his debt" to society and thus discharges his guilt) and in the religious sacrament of penance (the self-punishment by which the sinner expiates his sins, that is, relieves his guilt-feelings). Thus, whereas punishment intensifies feelings of shame, it relieves feelings of guilt.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“It is difficult not to feel inferior when one is poor when others are rich, especially in a society that equates self-worth with net worth; and it is difficult not to feel rejected and worthless if one cannot get or hold a job while others continue to be employed. Of course, most people who lose jobs or income do not commit murders as a result; but there are always some men who are just barely maintaining their self-esteem at minimally tolerable levels even when they do have jobs and incomes. And when large numbers of them lose those sources of self-esteem, the number who explode into homicidal rage increases as measurably, regularly, and predictably as any epidemic does when the balance between pathogenic forces and the immune system is altered.

And those are not just statistics. I have seen many individual men who have responded in exactly that way under exactly these circumstances. For example, one African-American man was sent to the prison mental hospital I directed in order to have a psychiatric evaluation before his murder trial. A few months before that, he had had a good job. Then he was laid off at work, but he was so ashamed of this that he concealed the fact from his wife (who was a schoolteacher) and their children, going off as if to work every morning and returning at the usual time every night. Finally, after two or three months of this, his wife noticed that he was not bringing in any money. He had to admit the truth, and then his wife fatally said, "What kind of man are you? What kind of man would behave this way?"

To prove that he was a man, and to undo the feeling of emasculation, he took out his gun and shot his wife and children. (Keeping a gun is, of course, also a way that some people reassure themselves that they are really men.) What I was struck by, in addition to the tragedy of the whole story, was the intensity of the shame he felt over being unemployed, which led him to go to such lengths to conceal what had happened to him.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence

“Why do economic inequality and unemployment both stimulate violence? Ultimately, because both increase feelings of shame. For example, we speak of the poor as the lower classes, who have lower social and economic status, and the rich as the upper classes who have higher status. But the Latin for lower is inferior, and the word for the lower classes in Roman law was the humiliores.

Even in English, the poor are sometimes referred to as the humbler classes. Our language itself tells us that to be poor is to be humiliated and inferior, which makes it more difficult not to feel inferior. The word for upper or higher was superior, which is related to the word for pride, superbia (the opposite of shame), also the root of our worb superb (another antonym of inferior). And a word for the upper classes, in Roman law, was the honestiores (related to the word honor, also the opposite of shame and dishonor).

Inferiority and superiority are relative concepts, which is why it is relative poverty, not absolute poverty, that exposes people to feelings of inferiority. When everyone is on the same level, there is no shame in being poor, for in those circumstances the very concept of poverty loses its meaning.”
― James Gilligan, Preventing Violence