ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interplay of value and devaluation in violence. Human violence is an ongoing phenomenon that continues to warp individuals, distort relations between people and communities and shape the destiny of nations. In narratives of violence, victims report feeling stripped of their worth and dignity. The tortured landscape of human violence often discloses a significant reality. The traumatic roots of violence lie in harm visited upon us resulting in an injured psyche that looks for redress. The chapter explains the idea that violence is a forcible exchange of value, recovering someone’s value through a dehumanising reduction of another. In many societies, the patriarchal code of honour and shame both generates and obligates male violence. Powerlessness is a strong theme in discourses of racial violence. Rene Girard suggested that envy poses an existential threat to the society and gradually builds up until order and reason give place to rule by the mob, to chaos and violence.
