Making Sense of Encounters With Violence - Transcripts

Let's make sense of encounters with violence. Violence is an area of interest for Sam from several perspectives, and in this compilation, we're going to explore two main tracks. The first track will be personal contact with violence. This will look at the areas of self-defense, surviving a hostage situation, personal participation in war, and Sam's involvement with the practice of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. We will then transition to the second track, the more philosophical and political considerations of violence in general. This will take a look at Sam's critique of pacifism, along with the controversial topics of profiling, torture, and gun ownership. This section will lean heavily on Sam's strongly consequentialist moral framework. We recommend listening to our compilation on the foundations of morality to fully dissect just how Sam reaches his politically relevant advocacy. Some of this compilation will be difficult to hear, and much of it presents harrowing scenarios and situations. But thinkers like Sam often intentionally wander to these dark edges of possibility and behavior, not just out of a penchant for the macabre or for the public shock value, but to hopefully make genuine and important philosophical and psychological discoveries that have many implications for all aspects of life. Moral philosophers are fond of imagining wild, hellish scenarios that sometimes seem to spring from the mind of a troubled writer of horror films. Their imaginings fill the pages of textbooks with long, obscure titles, as well as philosophy seminars inside university walls the world over.

While detailing these thought experiments, they claim to be exploring the boundaries of moral frameworks and unearthing the decisive exceptions to previously upheld philosophies. Often, the scenarios are dismissed as too unrealistic and impossible to be relevant. I mean, you'll never really be in the dispatcher's room when an out-of-control trolley barrels towards various people tied to the tracks, right? Well, many of Sam's guess on making sense come from intellectual circles like philosophy and psychology, and they regularly explore these kinds of fanciful thought experiments. But this group doesn't constitute Sam's complete list of guess. Some of the most important and challenging episodes of making sense come from Sam's engagement with people like Chris Voss, the man in our first clip. Voss sports a thick, tough guy, Midwestern accent that sounds like it comes straight from central casting, like it belongs to a hard-boiled FBI hostage negotiator. And in fact, that's exactly what Chris Voss is. He's actually lived through some of these philosophers' wildest thought experiments. Throughout his 28-year career, Voss has negotiated a variety of hostage situations, from bank heists to international kidnappings and everything in between. He's also been tapped by the corporate world to apply his insights and teach the skill of deal-making. He co-wrote a book called Never Split the Difference, negotiating like your life depended on it, which brought those same lessons into the home, to the familiar, small stakes, commonplace negotiations that happen every day in families and relationships.

His conversation with Sam spanned the entire range of considerations when it comes to hostage situations, including the moral considerations of paying ransom. We'll revisit that philosophical aspect of moral philosophy and violence in the latter half of this compilation. But for now, we'll look to this episode for a more intimate engagement with violence. In particular, we're going to get advice on what you might want to do if you ever happen to be violently kidnapped. This is Sam with Chris Voss from episode 132,

You know, it was a Mark Wahlberg movie a number of years back where he was running a facility where they were using chimpanzees for science experiments and space flight. And they had all the chimpanzees numbered and he came in and he gave them names. And the guy stopped them and he said, as soon as you give them names, it's gonna be harder to walk them out to the experiments. You're gonna get attached to them. You gotta treat them better. human nature. So I'm gonna I'm gonna exploit what I know to be the case in human nature and I'm gonna sit back and I'm gonna I'm gonna develop a relationship with my captors and then I'm gonna

And every time he went to the bathroom by himself. He'd stay away for a few minutes longer. He conditioned them to expect him to be away for a while. Then when he built the time period up, he walked away when he went to the bathroom. Now, when they caught up with him, their anger response was they took his clothes away for a while. That was the extent of their punishment. Other hostages who've tried to escape by the means of violence have gotten themselves killed. So, walk away or run away and they'll blame you for that. They expect you to do that as long as you don't do it with violence.

They understand how long they're going to stay in jail. So, domestic US kidnapping, very dangerous affair. And you are the biggest threat to their freedom as a witness and they do not want that witness to live. In the third world, the developing world, they could care less. They're more interested in getting paid. They're not worried about getting caught. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so much kidnapping in Colombia, Ecuador, Central America, South America, Mexico, Iraq. So, you got to know where you are.

They're trying to get the family's attention. Now, domestic US kidnapping, because they figured they're going to get caught, and if they get caught, the primary witness is the victim – difference game entirely. the victim is now a threat, kidnapping internationally. Who's got a robust penal system, jail system in comparison to the United States in the third world?

And there's a necessity to break moral norms to try to bring about the better outcomes. This recipe comes together when an animal is being cornered by a predator or when humans read a news report about an approaching hurricane. Fear usually isn't high on people's lists of favorite emotions to experience. But our next guest wrote a book entitled The Gift of Fear, which attempts to give fear some love. Fear, he argues, is a message from within ourselves to another part of ourselves, and it serves a tremendously important and underrated role. Evolution favors animals with a good deal of fear. All of us animals currently living are trailing a long line of the evolved behavior of fearful animals who utilized this fear to avoid death. The dead ends on the family tree are much more likely to be the animals who are most numb to the threat of something truly dangerous rather than the ones who reacted to the first rustling in the leaves as if it were a poisonous snake. But of course, there's a balance to strike. An animal who was too jumpy and ran away in fear every time the leaves rustled may have missed out on a lot of good feeding opportunities and may not have had the privilege of passing on its genes. So this evolved fear meter has been calibrating its accuracy within us for quite some time, but it's not a perfect instrument. Evolution, as always, is merely a blind process, seeking the path of least resistance suitable enough to keep the genes going.

Evolution also moves at a much slower pace than the technological and societal evolution of our modern civilization. The overwhelming majority of the fear meter's evolution took place in an environment when we were around similar looking and sounding kin and took place in the absence of technological threats like guns, bombs, and radiation. Our fear meter may therefore be calibrated to be hypersensitive to encounters with new and unfamiliar devices to make this point. Imagine plucking a human out of history from 300,000 years ago. You and this earlier human decide to go for a walk in the woods. Imagine coming across a discarded blender by the side of the path. You would recognize the object right away, and though you may have some questions as to how it ended up there, you'd be pretty confident that it posed no danger. You could see the rusted plug laying harmlessly in the dirt, but your caveman friend might be startled and mystified by it. The sharp blades on their own may scare him, and if you weren't there to encourage him to inspect it, he might take extraordinary caution towards the thing. Next, imagine that a human 300,000 years from now plucks you out from history and takes you on a walk in his world. Imagine coming across a strange device in the grass with a shape and material that made little sense to you. Your internal fear meter may be beeping and sending all kinds of fear chemicals your way to urge you to be very careful with the strange thing, even while your futuristic hiking partner assured you that the thing was harmless in this context.

Fear of the unknown may not be entirely universal or felt as strongly by everyone, but it seems to be the default for humans. The blueprint of evolution reads, better safe than sorry, but it's not just new and unfamiliar kinds of objects that can trip our fear response. Our fear meters can also be hypersensitive to new and unfamiliar kinds of people. This wrinkle is what often drives all forms of bigotry and racism. When we feel that fear of other people, it seems to spring from a mysterious source. We may experience it as just a bad feeling or something that doesn't feel quite right. So what are we to make of this? That's Gavin De Becker's area of interest. De Becker is an expert in the prediction and management of violence. He's worked in security details for celebrities and investigated stalkers. He's developed threat assessment systems for governors and US Supreme Court justices. And he's frequently been brought in as an expert witness in high profile cases.

He's also managed security for Sam's public events. Here, he and Sam will focus on fear and the mysterious concept of intuition. You'll hear De Becker give a robust defense of this inner sense and the nearly subconscious form of intelligence it represents as it has been molded through countless trial runs of evolution. This is Gavin De Becker from episode 90,

And I say, no, you should get rid of the nanny because no kid is gonna thank you in 20 years. Gee, mom, thank you for having that video of me being hit by a spoon on the head by that crazy nanny you guys hired. And so the concept of listening to intuition is what I wanna focus on for a moment. Because America particularly or Western societies, we look to government and we look to experts and technologies and corporations to solve our problem for us. And I am very glad to tell everybody here that the police are not going to protect you because they're not gonna be there during the moment that you face an intruder or you face a violent situation. And government's not gonna protect you. It can't. It tries to pretend it can, but it can't. And the only thing that's going to protect you is your own intuition, which is your own ability to recognize that something is up while it's right in front of you or while it's in your environment. And I think, as you said, Sam, it's super hard for people to accept the importance of it because intuition is usually looked on with some contempt. It's described as emotional or unreasonable or inexplicable and husbands make fun of wives for feminine intuition and they don't take it seriously. But what I can tell you about intuition, I learned from the origins of the word itself.

The root of the word, inter, means to guard and to protect. Super interesting that that's what it means. We think we're using intuition to make a thousand other decisions, but what it's built for, what it's in this system for, is to guard us and to protect us. And what it does is, and I'm really gonna quote you for a second here because you said a moment ago that evolution has really honed this. True, we didn't get the biggest claws, we didn't get the sharpest teeth or the biggest muscles. What we got is the biggest brains. And the idea that we use the expression gut feeling, well, the gut actually has more brain cells than a dog. So the gut is literally where a lot of that thought is going on. That's why you get that bad feeling in your stomach about this employee, this friend, this thing somebody said to you, this danger. And that's a very meaningful thing. Gut feeling is the perfect word for it. And it's visceral, it's in the tissue.

And so, give you a fast example. You're in an airport and you get that feeling, I shouldn't get on this plane. And millions of people have had this feeling. This plane's gonna crash, something, they get anxiety about it, and I shouldn't get on this plane. So what I ask people to do is look introspectively for a moment at where that feeling's coming from. And if it is coming from a news story, you saw two weeks ago on television of an ugly plane crash in Peru, that is not based on your environment or your circumstance, it's based on your memory or your anxiety, and that's not actual fear. If, however, the feeling is based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport and make his way slowly down the jet walk, now you've got something that's in your environment. And the question to ask always, this is how, you tell the difference between true fear, like I'm afraid of getting on this plane, and unwarranted fear, worry, anxiety, et cetera. This is how. True fear will always be based on something in your presence, and will always be based on something you perceive. The signal comes from your perception, from your senses. Unwarranted fear will always be based upon memory.

And so it's something you remember, something you recall, something you're worrying about, or something you're thinking about. But something based on your actual environment is a gift, hence the title of that book. There's not an animal in nature that would say, oh, I don't want that gift. Don't tell me when I should be worried about my safety. It's so much trouble. There's no antelope that suddenly is filled with fear and says to itself, it's probably nothing. But human beings every day are engaged in the constant prosecution of their own feelings. And the most vivid example I'm aware of is a woman alone in a building late at night. She's working late in the office and she goes to the elevator. The elevator door opens and there's a guy inside who causes her fear. She's afraid of him. And so what does she do?

Most women get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone who causes her fear. Something no animal in nature would do. And why does she do it? Because she says I don't wanna be the kind of person who makes a decision because of the guy's race or because his clothes look shabby. I don't wanna be like that. Or I don't wanna offend him or I don't wanna make him angry. she talks herself out of what I call prosecutes her own jury's conclusion. And she talks herself out of it and gets into the elevator. And as I say, these are things that no animal in nature would ever even remotely contemplate. And human beings do it every day,

There are places where it's more surprising or less surprising to see a person of a certain race. And people feel very bad. We've all been trained to ignore those facts, which again, we can, in many cases, just instantly and intuitively surmise.

If we allow ourselves to drain the political ugliness from this term, we can simply define it as the process of gathering information about a potential threat in our environment so as to inform our interaction with it. What kind of information can be gathered from seeing a figure on the same side of the street as us? Well, there's the likely sex of the person to start. There's the height and build of the person, which may be easier to track depending on the clothing they're wearing, which can itself reveal important information. Are the clothes appropriate for the weather? Do the clothes look expensive? Does that signal that this person has a lot of money and likely isn't thinking about robbing someone? Or are the clothes extraordinarily trendy and expensive, which makes you suspect that they're more likely to target you and your very trendy shoes? Are they wearing a suit, a torn and stained T-shirt? Is the stain fresh? Are they stumbling? Does that indicate intoxication?

There's information to gather about their hands. Are they holding something? Do they have pockets that could be concealing anything? Does the person have tattoos? Are they on the forehead or on the forearm? There's even non-visual information to gather, like the odor that might be coming from the person. Is it alcohol or cologne? And there's contextual data to incorporate regarding the time of day, year, and the neighborhood. This data colors the previous data points. A tank top at 3 a.m. in winter is very different from one at noon in summer. You can keep gathering more and more nuanced data down to non-obvious things, like seeing the logo of a specific sports team on the person's hat.

Did that team just lose the Super Bowl in the final minute? Does that data combine with other pieces of data, like being on a street in Las Vegas and raise the likelihood of your guess that this person is very drunk and maybe just lost a big bet? Does that raise the threat level for you? All of this internal activity is building a kind of profile. There's a famous cliche delivered to children everywhere that reminds us not to judge a book by its cover. And of course, there's some wisdom in that quote. Warning against being too certain of our judgments, given just surface-level information. We should always remain open to the possibility of being surprised and be wary of writing people off with limited information. But this doesn't mean the cover of a book doesn't provide some useful information about its contents, right? A book cover is actually not a terrible bit of information to scrutinize when making a prediction of what's inside. Of course, reading the whole book is always better. And to truly judge something, one likely needs more information than can be gleaned from the cover.

But often we don't have the time or resources available to do that. We only have so much time in the bookstore. And when people are walking down the street in our direction, we're seeing something like human book covers rather than a whole life story. As Debekker points out, much of the response in this situation happens at a gut subconscious level that simply delivers a signal to you in the form of an emotion of calm or anxiety and fear. We have incredibly active detective agencies working in our guts all the time, trying to constantly avoid dangers. And as Debekker reminds us, they're pretty good at keeping us safe. But as Sam also throws into the mix, there's also data to gather about the race of the person. This of course is where the political landmine usually explodes and the tightrope snaps. But let's see if we can cling to it and avoid the fall. Race and ethnicity are just other pieces of data in the profile. And it's possible to simply downgrade their weight significantly or ignore them entirely. And nearly all data on crime rates would encourage that downgrade if you had data on much more relevant factors, such as poverty level, education level, distraction level, political leanings, et cetera.

But if you don't have access to this kind of information or other physical indications of it, one must grapple with the reality of correlations that inform probabilities. This is a very good moment to pause and repeat the common refrain that correlation does not equal causation. Of course, there is nothing inherent in a level of skin pigmentation, which causes one to be more likely to commit violence. The causes of the likelihood of violence are much more related to the aforementioned factors of environment, education, poverty, substance abuse, parenting, belief, societal treatment, and so on. But given the political and historical inequalities and the unbalanced realities on the ground, it's undeniable that different ethnicities have clustered in such a way which also aggregates some of those unfortunate causal factors for violence. This, of course, does not justify any of the inequalities themselves. In fact, it ought to alert us to the absolute emergency to rectify as many of those as we can as quickly as possible. The predicament is horrendous, grappling with this reality where it's useful or informative to incorporate any accidental genetic feature while building a danger profile. The usefulness itself, though, can quickly become a vicious, self-fulfilling prophecy where the very act of engaging in this kind of profiling increases one of the causal factors for violence by increasing ostracization and negative societal treatment. This is what could be called the profiler's dilemma. Now, most times, the profiling conversation is centered around security screenings where we also have to layer in the factor of limited resources. Security only has so much time and energy to devote to careful screenings.

So who should they focus on, if anyone, to put ourselves in the profiler's dilemma? Let's imagine that we've been hired to run security for a folk music festival in a small New England town. We're tasked with selecting attendees every so often, checking bags and patting them down to ensure the safety of the event. The vast majority of attendees at this folk music festival pose very little threat. But before the event, your small security team is alerted to a potential threat by the local police force. They've received some intelligence that a local group of neo-Nazi skinheads have made some threats directed at the festival because of a particular band that will be performing pro-immigration folk songs. Now, you're standing at the front of the line as a string of harmless people stream through. You find and confiscate the occasional glass beverage container or a marijuana pipe that's a little too obvious. It's nearing the end of your shift and you have time to do a thorough check on a few more patrons who are standing in the line. You scan the line. You see an old woman with a Joni Mitchell t-shirt, a black man with dreadlocks and a floppy red and green hat, a young Asian woman with a peace sign tattoo on her shoulder, and a white man with a bald head and a leather jacket. Even in this fictional story, you are likely filling in these verbal descriptions with stand-in mental images of these people.

You're profiling their likely danger and you're making guesses as to what's in their pockets. As evolved humans, we simply can't help but engage in this tenuous process, hopefully with care. In the context of the folk festival, would it make sense to pay closer attention to the white man with no hair than to the other three? He could just be a bald man who likes to ride motorcycles. In fact, he probably is. But in this particular scenario, his race actually is an indication of the profile that correlates with heightened danger. If he were a bald brown man in leather, his odds of being a neo-Nazi skinhead plummets. Again, it's not the whiteness of the man's skin per se which causes this likeliness. It merely correlates with it. But what now? What do we do with that correlation? Considering the self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of profiling, especially racial profiling, do you pull this man aside and pat him down?

Do you do that to every hairless white man in the crowd? This may not seem like such a big deal at this folk festival with a specific threat. But would enough of these instances actually cause the danger they purport to keep at bay? When they're scaled up to entire national policies? When they're happening at several international borders? When they're stretched over decades such that it eventually sows sufficient resentment in the targeted population? This illustrates why enough reasonable instances of racial profiling can actually become a causal factor for violence. Hence the absolutely wicked problem of the profiler's dilemma. This complication is not a mystery to security experts. There are mitigation efforts like randomization that can be folded into the strategy. And if security can glean non-physical profiling data like the biographical and environmental factors we mentioned before, these would be favored over weaker correlations like race. If you had a quick scan of the resume and travel history of the person walking towards you on the street, this would tend to be more useful than what you could gather from their appearance alone.

And it would likely inform the visual data. The hairless condition of the white man waiting in line changes quite a bit if you know he had recently traveled to the alopecia treatment center. The kind of profiling based on data trawling carries its own dangers of course. Our compilation on social media and the information landscape looks a bit at some of those concerns. But in any case, regardless of anything we've looked at here, the personal treatment of those subjected to profiling does not need to be as inhumane and heartless as it often is. This helps absolutely no one, but the thorny ethics of profiling remain. We could swap out the variables of our folk festival story with policing the streets in America, security checkpoints in Israel, detention camps in Asia, and just about every airport on earth since 9-11, and the deep pitfalls of profiling amplify exponentially. We'll recommend two episodes of making sense that go deeper into profiling. One of them is a solo episode called What I Really Think About Profiling, where Sam echoes the position laid out here, but also attempts to clarify a run-in he had on social media which flared up after a Muslim boy was sent home from school after he brought in a homemade clock that a teacher mistook for a bomb. In that audio essay, he describes his view as anti-profiling in that it's not focused on singling out any particular kind of people, but instead emphasizes the logic of not wasting time and scarce attentional resources on targets who are exceedingly unlikely to pose a danger, like the Joni Mitchell-loving grandmother waiting in our line. The other episode which explores the practicalities of profiling in depth is with a security expert named Juliette Kayyem, and it's called What Keeps Us Safer. We aren't going to listen to those episodes here, but we'll recommend them in our outro, along with plenty of other essays and audio pieces.

Sam certainly recognizes the paralyzing nature of the profiler's dilemma, but as he'll continue to reiterate in these clips, ignoring a very bad and difficult situation doesn't help us understand it any better. Phew, so hopefully we made it over the profiling tightrope in one piece, but this compilation isn't going to get any easier or less precarious for us. We're about to talk about guns. We're going to episode 25 with a guest named Scotty Reitz. Reitz is a 40-year veteran of policing, but he's speaking in this episode in his capacity as a gun usage and self-defense instructor. Sam has been training with Reitz for decades. After this exchange, we'll get into Sam's view on gun ownership and the politics that go along with it. But first, we'll hear from Scotty Reitz as they open up the topic of guns and the disturbing thought of being in the presence of someone who seems to justify their necessity. This is Sam with Scotty Reitz from episode 25,

Well, here you have two suspects that are kind of looking around for something to do and they just happen to see the wife go into the bank and then one thing led to another and another. You know, the whole police response, as I understand, was ineffective and there's a lot of controversy over that. I got it. But the bottom line is a lot of times you're on your own and some people say, well, I could never shoot another human being. Then fine. I understand that. One thing I tell people is imagine, and this is to me, one of my worst nightmares is having a person that's a real bad guy and you have to understand there are bad people out there that you cannot negotiate with. There is no negotiation with these people. You can't reason with them. There's no logic. There's no morality. There's no empathy.

There's no compassion. There's nothing. We're talking about people that will kill you, people that will hurt you, people that don't care about the outcome, they don't care of the results, they don't care about the ramifications, they simply don't care and having a person like that threatening your sons, your daughters, your wife, your loved ones and you have no ability to counter that,

I wanna be nice and soft and warm and friendly to everybody and nurturing. There are people out there that are not going to respond to that, that all they wanna do is hurt you. And because we live our lives in a certain manner, we tend to ascribe our moral values and ethics unto other people. Why aren't you understanding what I'm saying? Why can't you feel the empathy for me? When those suspects rape those two girls, tied into a bed and burned them alive, do you understand that you can't reason with all people?

He also expresses understanding that this mentality is not for everyone and even understands the rationality of avoiding these kinds of topics altogether. This is Sam from episode 19,

Encountering my lengthy ruminations on violence and self-defense, these readers have begun to worry about my sanity. Although I might find a few useful things to say to such readers, let me concede that the bar is probably set too high. Thinking about violence is not everyone's cup of tea. Again, I did not consider ignoring the whole business to be necessarily irrational, depending on where one lives or one's responsibility for the security of others, et cetera. It is irrational, however, to imagine that such insusions can pass for an informed opinion on how best to respond to violence in the event that it occurs. I have now heard from many people who have never held a gun in their lives and are proud to say that they never would, but who appear entirely confident into claiming upon the limitations of firearms as defensive weapons. Before proceeding, perhaps there's a general rule of cognition we might all agree on. It would be surprising indeed if avoiding a topic as a matter of principle were the best way to understand it. Because beliefs about violence can directly impact people's safety, I feel a special responsibility to address some of the questions and criticisms I've received in response to my writing on this topic. Here I will gradually build an FAQ on self-defense, guns, and related matters, revising my responses as needed. Comments can be submitted through the contact page on this website. So, and I did that, and it's been a while since I've revisited that FAQ.

I'm not aware of anything that I recommend being controversial among people who know more than I do about self-defense and firearms and law enforcement. And in this FAQ, I deal with some of the objections that were raised and very likely some of the objections that might have occurred to you while listening to my original article. I talk about the countries that have much stricter gun laws and much less gun violence. But I'd like to read a few of these questions because I think they're important and some of this material probably should have been in the original article. Here's one. You seem inordinately concerned about violence. As you must know, you are far more likely to die from cancer or heart disease than you are to be the victim of a home invasion. And by keeping guns at the ready for the purpose of self-defense, you seem guilty of the very reasoning bias you describe in the beginning of your essay, wherein one's perception of danger has been distorted by rare dramatic events. If the statistics tell us anything, they tell us that by owning guns, you impose greater risks on yourself and your family than you mitigate. Hence your own behavior should strike you as both dangerous and irrational. I think you'll agree that's a great question. Okay, here's my answer.

I do not believe that it is irrational to prepare for very low probability events, which, should they occur, would produce the worst suffering imaginable for oneself and those one loves. And as I pointed out in my essay on self-defense, the actual probability of encountering violence, even in the relative safety in which most of us now live, is not as remote as many people think. And again, I would have you consult that essay, but yes, the probability of being the victim of a violent crime, even if you live in a very nice area of a very nice city, is not as low as many people think. It is certainly not as low as getting into a plane crash. Here you are talking much more on the order of a risk of one in several hundred each year, not one in a million or not even one in tens of thousands. Back to the text. There are also several psychological and social benefits to self-defense training, which offer further reasons to engage in it. If I thought, for instance, that practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu made people more fearful and neurotic, I wouldn't recommend it. Or I would tell people to do the absolute minimum to familiarize themselves with the problem of grappling on the ground. But I think BJJ makes people much more confident in the world and for good reason. The art is so extraordinarily useful in the unlikely event that one needs it. And it also brings many other benefits.

Thus preparing for violence in this way need not be justified by a narrow focus on statistics. Whatever the likelihood of needing to use it for self-defense, BJJ is a good thing to learn. I would extend the same reasoning, albeit less emphatically, to owning and training with firearms. I sleep much better knowing that I'm prepared for certain low probability but worst case scenarios. And I find the process of training for them more empowering than onerous. Of course, I realize I am much more likely to die of heart disease than I am to be the victim of a home invasion. I also realize that handling guns and keeping them in my home increases the risk of being accidentally injured or killed by them. I'm also aware that other gun owners occasionally commit suicide or murder members of their families, or both. And it could be that guns are more often used this way than they are to defend against crime. But reliable information on the defensive use of firearms is very difficult to come by. But I don't think that these broader statistics apply to me, and I don't think this judgment is the product of a reasoning bias. Just as I can say to a moral certainty that I'm not going to open a meth lab or start a dog fighting ring, I can say that I'm not going to commit suicide or murder my family.

There are people who experience much more chaos in their lives who can honestly not say the same. Such people should not own guns. Let's see if there's anything else here. Many other questions. But this entitlement to firearms puts you on a slippery slope. Why not own a tank or a surface-to-air missile? Once again, the fault lies with an unwillingness to think about how violent crime actually occurs. No one has a legitimate need to destroy whole buildings or city blocks in self-defense. I view the question of gun ownership as primarily an ethical one. A couple of sociopaths break into your house for the pleasure of killing you and your family. And the police cannot arrive in time to stop them. What should you be permitted to do in self-defense?

That really is the core of it for me. There are certain rare situations, and again, they are rare but not rare enough, where a peaceful, honest person finds himself in the presence of murderous lunatics who may or may not be armed, but very likely are. What should he or she be able to do to protect himself and his family? That is the core case. That is the situation where if you say people should not ever be able to have access to guns, you have said this person should not be able to have access to a gun. And that I think is a very hard argument to make even in a society without guns. Ethically speaking, I think this is a hard case. If you have an island nation where no guns have arrived yet. It's something like the UK, although I'm sure that's broken down somewhat, but you have a society that has no guns and has strict regulations against them. And the question is, would it be ethical to allow people to have guns along the lines that I have described here? You have to get training analogous to getting a pilot's license to get a gun. That is a hard case for me.

I think the societal benefit of not having guns anywhere available because you have totally stopped the influx, that may outweigh any individual's personal right to have the best weapon available to protect himself or herself. I don't know, I could be argued either way on that topic. And again, the emergence of truly non-lethal alternatives to guns would make the case moot because then you would give that to the woman who lives alone

And I don't know if there's more to say about that. It's just, you do encounter people who think that this whole area, I'm sure many of you listening, who think that this whole area of interest is perverse and a symptom of pathological fear. And in my case, it's, I don't know how anyone really thinks that. I mean, you actually know that what I do has raised my security profile to a significant degree. You know that I receive death threats. It's by no means frivolous for me to think in terms of security in my life. But I don't think it's frivolous for an ordinary person with no public profile to think about it either. The numbers, the statistics on violent crime are such that it is a low probability event, but it is not so low that you are crazy to take some measures to prepare yourself for a crime. And again, the act of preparing for it is not this onerous burden. It is, in fact, a kind of guilty pleasure. It is, there's a lot of fun that comes in training in any of these relevant disciplines, with firearms, in martial arts. It's a, you know, dealing with this area of life, taking some responsibility for it.

Being your own bodyguard is not starkly motivated by fear in each moment. I mean, you're not feeling fear every time you put on your seatbelt when you get in your car, presumably. You just put it on because it's the wise thing to do,

For context, this episode comes from January 2016 while much of the Middle East was still dealing with ISIS's rampage. This is Sam with Jaco Willing from episode 26,

Or if they did, I wouldn't want to know about it. Then you make even clearer cases. And I've had people tell me that you could put a thousand girls being asphyxiated in a warehouse somewhere by an evil genius and I would not sanction the torture of this person, or the waterboarding of this person, or the prolonged sleep deprivation of this person. And again, my argument with respect to torture is not that it should be legal. I just think that there are clearly cases where you would have to be a monster not to break the law when push comes to shove and that if you did break the law in those cases no one's going to prosecute you because you believe yourself to be in a pristine ticking bomb case or say you've got the person who you know had nukes and because you've got his laptop too and he even claims that there's a bomb ticking in Times Square or whatever. People are acting like there's nothing like these cases that would ever happen but worse I meet people who say that even in the presence of such a clear case that they think that the morally enlightened position is never to make another person deliberately uncomfortable

But there was a guy and we knew his name but we didn't know what he looked like. But as soon as I saw this one guy who was a murderer of innocence and he was just an evil person, but as soon as I saw this guy, I didn't know who he was But I looked at this guy and I said, that is an evil human being, right there. I've never even seen a person like this. I've never seen a person. I've never seen that look in someone's eyes. And sure enough, as our interprets came in or Iraqi counterparts came in and started talking to him, they figured out who this guy was and he was the foreign fighter and he was an evil person. And you could see that. You could feel it, you could feel it. And then in Ramadi, same thing, now we were dealing with, we were seeing bodies in the street. People skinned alive. People's heads, the father of a family's head being left on the doorstep of the homes. That's evil.

And that is a real thing, it is a real thing. Evil is a real thing. And it cannot be stopped through debate, it cannot. Be stopped through charity, it cannot be stopped through hugs. These truly evil people have to be stopped with violence.

The complications of doing that may outweigh its extremely rare and limited deployment. That word outweigh points to Sam's strong consequentialist moral framework. We again will recommend the compilation on morality to fully explore his navigation of these truly difficult and disturbing topics. In that compilation, we reference the now-famous trolley problem, where you're given the choice of flipping a switch to divert an out-of-control trolley to a track where it will kill one person tied to the tracks, rather than the five people tied to the tracks if you do nothing. How would a pacifist answer the trolley problem? Let's go back to the clip and underline Sam's point about pacifism and Gandhi's particular version of it being helpless to the pressing practicality of the reality of violence. Here's a telling quote from 1938. Gandhi wrote, if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province. And the full Gandhi quote that Sam was referencing in his exchange with Jaco goes like this. Hitler killed five million Jews.

It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions. It's a bit difficult to reconcile how an act of mass suicide, which Gandhi suggested would be an act of heroism, still fits into a conception of pacifism. But this may be the kind of absurd outcome that a true commitment to pacifism would entail. To be fair to Gandhi, he was vague about the details, but he insisted that all of these nonviolent, sometimes suicidal responses to violence eventually deplete the will of the perpetrators to inflict violence, and that somehow this would eventually subdue the evildoers and defeat them. It's clear that Scotty Reitz would be highly skeptical of this strategy's success for an unfortunately large number of people. But to lay off Gandhi a little bit, let's go to the flip side of pacifism, which might be something like the notion that certain behaviors actually deserve to be met with violence. How do we address that end of the spectrum? Is this psychologically healthy or philosophically sound? How would one decipher the line between meeting out justice in the form of returned violence without falling into pathological vindictiveness?

This is what our final clip is going to address. The guest is Tamler Summers, who's an author and philosopher at the University of Houston. Tamler has spent a lot of time studying free will and moral responsibility, which he addresses at the top of his conversation with Sam. Eventually, this obsession led him to take a closer look at what's come to be called honor and honor societies. This term is slippery and hard to pin down, but in the clip, he attempts to characterize honor and ultimately to provide a fresh look and genuine defense of it. In some ways, he took on this task because no one else was, and as a response to what he feels may have been drained from certain post-enlightenment Western societies that have come to delegate justice and retributive action to third-party entities and abstract systems. That delegation may sound like a good thing, and Sam provides that predictable pushback, especially regarding the infamously shocking norms that honor societies can generate. But Tamler's thesis and argument does surface more of the constant tension between philosophy and psychology that we've been tracing in many of these compilations. And it does seem to hit on some important aspects of honor cultures, which can hijack our evolved thirst for retribution in order to prevent situations from spiraling out of control. To mention Gandhi's thoughts on violence just one final time, he famously warned that, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But Sam begins this clip by pointing out that an eye for an eye certainly seems to at least deliver a sense of satisfaction. We'll listen in on Sam's conversation with Tamler Summers from episode 126, which carries the same title as Tamler's book,

In some cases herself, okay, there's some great videos where women wind up destroying the guy who's harassing them. Those are especially satisfying. And it's hard to see what's wrong with it except when you scale it to the rest of society. If you're going to run a society this way, you have to acknowledge that the full chaos and dysfunction of vendetta and vigilantism is the result. And civilization, as you mentioned Pinker, as he's pointed out again and again, in large part depends on our outsourcing the use of force to the state. And yet these videos would be very different if they just entailed somebody getting on the phone and calling the police and watching the police show up and arrest the guy, which is how it has to work in an orderly society. As a counterpoint to this, I would say that almost the reductio ad absurdum of honor as a force for good is that the concept of honor killing, which you see in, it's very widespread. In the Muslim world, it's not only there, but in traditional societies, it's often imagined that the honor of the family is fatally threatened by any sexual indiscretion on the part of any of the women in the family. So if a man's daughter refuses to marry the person he's chosen for her or has sex out of wedlock or just is caught holding some guy's hand to whom she's not married, in these societies and in these communities, even within our own societies, you often hear about a father or a father and a brother killing a young woman for the imagined offense to the family's honor that has been given here. And so, if you could see a YouTube video of that, there'd be none of the satisfaction for anyone standing outside of that circumstance.

And that is exactly what is lost when you marshal out these kinds of conflicts to some impartial third party. That's why I say in the book, it's not justice porn. It's not even remotely justice arousing to have the bully be taken away by a security officer or the principal and get suspended or even expelled. At that point, it's like, well, maybe the bully, maybe the school needed to do that because of the harm that he was causing, but that's sort of the lesser of evils rather than an assertion of self-respect. Now, sometimes that's not possible and that's the problem. That's the problem with honor cultures is sometimes the power imbalance is too great and you can't stand up for yourself and you need third parties to come in and prevent great injustice. And that's where this idea of containment comes in, but we shouldn't lose, and this is one of the things I feel like we've lost, we shouldn't lose or reject the value of standing up for yourself, of being willing to take a risk that maybe you will get your ass kicked or something, but at least you are showing that you can't be pushed around and you're not immediately turning to a third party to handle a conflict that directly involves you. Okay, so that's the justice-born one. That's the easier example for me. Honor killings, I think, are an extreme example of one of the problems with honor, which is that there is very little restriction on the content of honor norms. So all honor groups have norms and codes that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated within the community. And there are some commonalities, but there are also a lot of differences, and there's nothing within the sort of honor morality that constrains what those codes are.

So if you have a community like certain cultures where just the suspicion or the reality of extramarital sex on the part of a family member will reduce the honor of the family, that will make the family dishonorable, and you called that imaginary, and it's imaginary, it's not imaginary for them. They are dishonored, and they are treated poorly by the people in that community. Now, that's a fucked-up, are you allowed to swear on this podcast? Yes indeed, you are. That's a fucked-up norm, right? That's a fucked-up way of allocating honor and dishonor, and especially dishonor or shame in this case, but that's what happens in these communities is that the family honor and all the privileges that come with being an honored member of the community and all the the shit that comes with being a shamed member of the community. That will happen to the family unless they act in the way that they feel they need to act. And often they don't wanna do it. Often if it's like a duty, it's like some sort of weird perverse duty, moral duty that they feel like they have to kill the sister that they love or the daughter that they love in order to preserve the family's honor for generations. And so this is a huge problem with honor that we don't have those kinds of restrictions about what the norms will be that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated. And that's another goal of containment is to make sure. So, you know, in my world, if you find an honor community where this is their way, this is their value, this is their way of allocating honor and dishonor, then you just, then you don't allow that.

So you do need some kind of higher authority that will enforce a minimal respect for human rights in a way that would rule out honor killings. But again, that doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater. That doesn't mean that you, the fact that there are honor killings in the vast minority of honor cultures across the world and throughout history, I mean, it's a tiny, tiny percentage of cultures that find this to be morally acceptable or not dishonorable to kill a family member. The fact that that exists doesn't mean we should throw out honor

If this compilation has frightened you enough, intrigued you enough, convinced you enough, or simply given you enough new courage to look closer at this subject, we will strongly recommend a 2011 essay by Sam entitled, The Truth About Violence. The essay goes through Sam's recommendations and advice to be safe and respond to the prospect and reality of violence. We'll end this compilation by reading his closing paragraph of that essay, which may be as close as Sam has come to uttering a prayer. It is unpleasant to study the details of crime and violence. And for this reason, many of us never do. I am convinced, however, that some planning and preparation can greatly reduce a person's risk. And though there are exceptions to every rule, I don't believe that there are important exceptions to the advice I have given here. May you never have occasion to find it useful. Here is suggested reading, listening, and watching on the subject of encounters with violence. The episodes of Making Sense featured in this compilation were episodes 132, 90, 25, 19, 26, and 126. Jaco tells heart-pounding stories from the front lines of war and De Becker, Reitz, and Voss are all full of potentially life-saving advice. Tamler Summers explores the concept of honor in depth and finds examples of it in some surprising places.

All of the guests have published recommended books on this subject. Here are the relevant titles. Gavin De Becker's The Gift of Fear, Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference, Scott Reitz's The Art of Modern Gunfighting, and Tamler Summers's In Defense of Honor. Sam's concluding essay contains two fantastic book recommendations from Rory Miller. One is called Meditations on Violence and the other is Facing Violence. In 2013, Sam conducted a roundtable conversation with Rory Miller, Steven Graff Levine, and Matt Thornton, which is hosted on samharris.org and titled Self-Defense and the Law. The dialogue is certainly worth a read and has a focus on the legal lines of violence. Sam also recommends two books by Jeff Thompson. One titled The Fence, The Art of Protection, and the other is called Dead or Alive, The Choice is Yours. These two books focus on self-defense techniques. We mentioned some episodes of Making Sense that we didn't include clips from here, which we'll recommend now. Sam's conversation with Juliette Caim from episode 36 entitled What Makes Us Safer?

is a thorough examination of profiling and practice and lets Sam parse and define his stance further. We also recommend episode 17, a solo episode called What I Really Think About Profiling. Sam has written about police violence many times. We didn't tackle that subject directly in this compilation. We figured it had enough exposure already, but we absolutely recommend Sam's conversation with Glenn Lowry from episode 42 entitled Racism and Violence in America. It's also the subject of a solo episode that Sam recorded entitled Can We Pull Back from the Brink? That one is episode 207 and was released in the midst of social protests and civil unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd's death. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was referenced in this episode and remains a literary classic, having sold more than 100 million copies with translations in over 30 languages. We also recommend a book called Machete Season by Jean Hattsfield, which is comprised of interview transcripts from participants in the Rwandan genocide. Sam gave a one sentence review when he said, if you want to see what it's like when things go about as wrong as they can go, read this book. Sam and Reitz also referenced the case of the Pettit Murders. Sam wrote about that case in his book Free Will.

The case was also chronicled in an HBO documentary called The Cheshire Murders, released in 2013. We recommend two runs at Gandhi's pacifism. Shmuly Boteach wrote a scathing opinion piece on Gandhi for the Jerusalem Post in 2016 called Reputiating Gandhi and Pacifism in the Face of Mass Murder. The other is by the author Norman Finkelstein, who published a book in 2015 entitled What Gandhi Says, which tries to pinpoint Gandhi's approach and provide a bit of defense for some of the eyebrow raising quotes we shared in this compilation. When it comes to films, the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes starring Mark Wahlberg got a mention in this episode. But we'd be crazy not to know that the original 1968 version is the must watch in the franchise. And we'll let you know that the forgotten sequels from 1970 and 1971 aren't bad either. They take the moral dilemmas to some surprising places, which are relevant to our compilation devoted to nuclear war and existential risk. Hollywood famously loves making films about violence, sometimes being accused of glorifying it or desensitizing audiences to the true depths of its horrors. We hesitate to recommend anything too specific here, but we'll point listeners to Quentin Tarantino's infamous catalog of violence-laden films, with Reservoir Dogs being as fine a place to start as any. Stanley Kubrick also explored violence in his adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and his Vietnam War classic Full Metal Jacket. Martin Scorsese's exploration of mafia cultures and violence in films like Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and The Departed would be a fascinating trio to watch in light of Tamler Summers' careful defense of honor cultures.

We highly recommend two films from 2007 that are forever linked by their shooting locations and themes of violence, vengeance, honor, and pride. Those films are the Coen brothers, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name. In Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, loosely based on an essay titled Oil by Upton Sinclair. We could recommend a visit to any history or art museum for a stroll through endless stories of violence and countless allegories of violence being depicted on artifacts and in religious iconography. We'll recommend a survey of the stunning works of 19th century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who rose to fame with his representations of the immediate aftermath of human violence throughout history. We'll point you to our favorite piece of his, which is an 1857 painting entitled The Dual After the Masquerade, which seems to capture the expansive range of human emotions after engaging in violence. Its foggy, mysterious, absurd, bloodstained clearing sets the mood for a somber and serious meditation on violence, something which we hope we've helped you embark upon during this compilation. This episode was edited, compiled, and written by Jay Shapiro and read by me, Megan Phelps-Roper.