By Olivia Fanders
Never in my life would I have expected reading 14 lines from “The Iliad” to turn into a full-blown war (figuratively speaking) over whether violence is justified — and I certainly wouldn’t have expected it during an interview for a summer program.
In all fairness, I wasn’t really involved in this altercation; in fact, I was the one trying to settle the debate with some carefully worded statements on why we shouldn’t be arguing, which (of course) no one wanted to listen to. There were two sides: one argued that violence is justified, and the other that violence is justified only in some cases.
Although I eventually sided with the “case-by-case basis” side of the argument, since that day, there’s been a little voice in the back of my mind wondering whether I completely agreed with it. Of course, I knew that it is impossible to fully rule out violence or say that it is justified in all cases, but I thought there must be another side to the argument I was missing.
A couple of days before this “debate,” I listened to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell called “Revisionist History.” In this particular episode, Gladwell spoke about the RAND Corporation during the Vietnam War and explained how all three individuals who were privy to the information released in the interviews with Viet Cong members came to three separate conclusions about the state of the war — one (Konrad Kellen) believed that 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 – Gouré, Kellen, and Elliot – had their own internal biases that impacted their view of the intel. Gladwell explains:
“One interview with a Viet-Cong officer, one fantastic bit of intelligence — an insight into the enemy’s mind. Yet, everyone was in disagreement on what it meant. Because everyone was looking at it through a different set of eyes. That’s why intelligence failures happen. It’s not because someone screws up or is stupid or lazy; it’s because the people who make sense of intelligence are human beings with their own histories and biases.”
This outcome isn’t just limited to the RAND Corporation’s research in Saigon; it goes back to the “case-by-case” basis outlook of violence. Generally, making valid and justified decisions on 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 the situation seems dire based on how information is interpreted, individuals may resort to violence — no matter how misguided this choice may seem through our own eyes.
So, is violence justified? Well, I guess I still agree with the “case-by-case basis” argument — but maybe we need to start taking into consideration the personal baggage everyone brings to the table.
Olivia Fanders is a Weehawken High School junior and the Director of Ideas & Solutions at the Institute for Youth in Policy, yipinstitute.org.
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