#### Meaningful Action
### wow this is barely comprehensible
## Jan 23, 2025
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[Mirror neurons](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Mirror_neuron). Their entire role is to evoke the emotional response that we perceive in another being. They are considered a foundation for empathetic understanding. Your brain is, in essence, simulating the other person’s experience.

Yet once our bodies shift into flight or flight response, meaningful learning becomes almost impossible. In that heightened state, we can certainly feel emotions like anger, relief, or righteousness, but our minds are geared towards immediate survival. Not deeper reflection or growth. Harmful responses, often rationalized as fair or just, only reinforce this dynamic. When someone does something harmful, we might think that harming them in return will bring resolution, but in reality, it just perpetuates the cycle of pain.

Harm is never going to help. It’s hard to understand and embody in a culture as addicted to harm as ours is under the guise of punishment and fairness. By perpetrating the harm, or even by witnessing it, not a single human being’s emotional response is going to be “Wow! I better bravely and vulnerably heal all my most painful internalized multi-generational traumas so that I never have any harmful thoughts or actions that might slip out in a way that would result in my community harming me.” If I’m on the offense, then I’m not the cornered one. I’m safe. I would also conceal my wounds as much as possible by performing adherents to community norms to avoid harm in a way that makes our wounds feel disconnected and distant, but actually doesn’t heal them and makes it harder for us to access them.

Thanks to our mirror neurons, witnessing or enacting harm impacts us on a visceral level. We instinctively experience a measure of that harm ourselves. Many people today, especially men, distance ourselves from that by adopting this tough “Well they got this coming for them” attitude. But these men are terrified. They have no idea what repair would actually look like. They have no idea what successful conflict mediation looks like, what forgiveness looks like, what community looks like. They’ve never seen anything other than deeply wounded people who are addicted to punishing others as thinly veiled attempts to validate the harm that they’ve experienced. Reactive harm is never constructive, even if they are ideologically correct. All it leads to is them repressing their true ideologies in public, and would guarantee to bury those incorrect thought patterns and make them express them in more insidious ways against others who are more vulnerable. This is the cycle of harm. When we, as a culture, use punishment to suppress behavior, we don’t solve underlying believes or even make that behavior go away. We just make it harder for anyone to see or access or change.

This doesn’t mean we should tolerate damaging behavior. We should address it in ways that actually help the community heal. The fact that people can’t even imagine what intervention without punishment is evidence of how deeply normalized how punishment is in our community. No part of this is saying we should tolerate minimize downplay or excuse problematic behavior. I’m saying we need to break our internalized cycles of violence to the point where we can actually address the believes that lead to the behavior, instead of just making ourselves feel safe and superior by defaulting to punishment, making the perpetrator identify as a victim now.

Nowadays on the internet, we are crafting a shared narrative and understanding of the world. When we see things that are mistaken, we feel a strong pressure to correct them. The way you treat other, imperfect people, is the way you treat yourself, an imperfect person. You're telling yourself that the world is dangerous and that you better not get caught you’ll be crucified too. When you go after other people, you’re going after yourself, and reinforcing the idea that you have to be perfect or else you’ll never be safe or loved. You’re locking yourself into your own wounds, and cutting off opportunities for growth and healing. Punishment is not educating. You do not deserve to suffer, life is not suffering.

That’s all easier said than done. Considering current events, we are clearly moving towards a fascist society.

Karl Marx states,

> “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

Collective self-defense. If the ruling class uses violence to suppress us, we have a right, maybe a duty, to defend ourselves.

I personally struggle with the distinction between self-defense and retaliatory violence. I’m still in the process of healing and growing myself. I’m still learning to stop fighting in the TikTok comments, and have an open diaglog with someone face to face. I understand that if someone in my community is facing oppression, stepping in is a form of solidarity.

What’s clear is that something needs to be done. If a kid grows up in an abusive household, the kid will grow up hating the parent that abused them, and the parent that sat back and let it happen just as much. We must reject passive complicity. Standing idly by when people are harmed can enable further violence. We must move beyond performative activism in online echo chambers. Engage with people in real life. Listen to your neighbors, attend local events. Find tangile ways to make life better in your immediate community. Personal involvment humanizes both you and those who might be drawn to harmful beliefs.
