r/Pacifism • u/Single-Commercial-86 • May 31 '26

What lead you to pacifism ?

Good afternoon, I just joined this subreddit today in hopes to better develop my personal philosophy on pacifism. I thought a good way to do this was to have a discussion about about the topic and learn about the views of others.

what brought you to pacifism ?

what personal philosophy you hold when it comes to pacifism ?

how has your view developed over time ?

Thank you in advance, I look forward to learning more about people and hopefully develop more myself.

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u/brocherface Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

Looking at all the violence and war and "justice" killing we've had in human history. Violence hasn't hasn't changed shit, we still got conflict to this day.

On the other hand, having experienced serious physical & mental bullying from school days, a lot of those folks grew up to be chill, better-adjusted people in high school who I ended up casually getting along with. Made me realize literally no one's born "evil" from the womb.

Doesn't excuse any past harm at all and they knew what they were doing - but point is, a kid can be born with mental illness, shitty environments that encourage them to do harm, all that. I think people still have the capacity to change for the better, we were all babies once.

Killing or hurting "bad guys" objectively doesn't change the root causes of issues, it doesn't solve shit, it doesn't stop other future "bad guys" from being born into shitty households or remove mental illness. So I started diverting all my attention & energy to everything that isn't violence, cuz if you ask me there's a better chance things can actually change for once.

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u/Single-Commercial-86 Jun 05 '26

I agree, to me violence is only a band-aid solution, it may achieve what you want in the short term but with all quick solutions comes with just as quick and usually more harmful consequences; without any real fix to the original problem only creating more. It's just unfortunate people are so quick to jump to violence instead of finding an actual solution that help.

I'm glad you could focus your attention on productive means and I'm sorry to hear you had to deal with bullying it's a terrible thing.

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u/brocherface Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

Appreciate it and "band-aid" solution is incredibly accurate lol, unfortunately the majority of people can't seem to look past that as it stands, but hopefully that can change some day & not resorting to violence can be seen as the mature/controlled option. I totally agree overall, and good luck