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Comment by ultimafan | Hacker News Reader

The interesting (to me) part about such a philosophy is that it seems like it can only really survive and prosper within a society where someone else is willing to pick up the burden of doing the killing for you.

It seems like in nature or on its own such a mindset would be akin to being in a death cult- you're just going to get rolled over by someone else and your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.

But if you live in the midst of a society full of other people who are willing to kill or be killed to protect those in it beliefs like that can grow and gain followers without any risk of external challenge putting their faith to the test.

Reading my comment I realize it may sound a little bit inflammatory or perhaps bloodthirsty- that's not my intention, I don't know how to word it better. Just a passing thought on this topic

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Note that Quakers never rejected the possibility of being killed for their beliefs, just the choice of killing others for them. Pacifism does not equate to passivism, after all: it simply means that they reject the notion of visiting violence on others.

It's also important to note that pacifism has been a divisive issue for Quakers from very early times. The play 'Sword of Peace' that's performed throughout the year in Snow Camp, NC, is about Meetings in the US struggling with the question of pacifism vs. the desire to aid their nascent country during the American Revolution. It was a debate for Friends during the US Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and onwards – one of the tenets of Quakerism is the need to wrestle with those issues by listening to the 'still small voice within' rather than blindly accepting the dictates of others. For many Friends, the threat posed by British colonial rule, the Confederacy, or Nazi Germany simply outweighed the demands of their conscience not to bear arms.

Friends often refer to the anecdote of William Penn asking George Fox (one of the founders of Quakerism) whether Penn should stop wearing his sword because he was now a Quaker. Fox told him, 'wear thy sword as long as thee is able' — meaning he should give it up because his conscience dictated it, not because he was a Quaker.

Thanks for the background! I am admittedly not very familiar with Quakers or their history. The clarification in the first part of your post helps with the context, I'll agree it's an entirely different story if it's a moral that is strived for but not strictly enforced (follow this or you're not one of us)

>your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.

This is an atheistic understanding of the world that a Quaker obviously wouldn't share. Self-sacrifice aren't genes or memes your tribe reproduces, they're divine truths, the logos of the world so to speak that everyone will eventually be drawn into (represented by Christ as a person).

You can't destroy self-sacrifice any more than you can kill beauty or empathy or gravity. You can kill every good person, but not goodness ultimately. The entire starting point of the faith is Jesus dying on the cross, which in early Rome he was mocked for[1] according to exactly this logic "what, you worship a guy who just died on a cross, how will that religion continue to exist?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

It is not a comment on the religious/philosophical validity of the belief as I initially understood it.

Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.

I don't think this comparison to early/mainline Christianity is entirely fair. It was murder, not "just" killing that was prohibited by their values.

>Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.

Literally every Quaker could die today and their beliefs would still survive because we can do things like write books and publish websites now. The spread of knowledge and culture isn't limited to direct person-to-person transmission, and it doesn't depend on anyone doing violence on anyone else's behalf.

How often do you see people trying to recreate the lifestyles or belief systems of extinct cultures / societies for themselves to live by in a genuine day to day manner, and not in a academic or archeological capacity?

The content of their belief system might be known and recorded in that scenario but the teaching of it as a genuine belief/truth to live by and to be passed on from generation to generation probably wouldn't be.

Isn't that basically what neopaganism is?

Quakerism is still a form of Christian faith. And for a Christian the life on Earth is but a small episode of existence. The point is to obtain the life eternal, the salvation. To suffer and be put to death for the refusal to reject the principles of the faith, aka martyrdom, is a known way to practically guarantee a salvation.

Of course, from a game-theoretic perspective, such ideas can only persist if someone else protects the pacifists from being killed, likely by use of lethal force. In this situation the only morally acceptable choice for the pacifists is to not be afraid of death, and not demand somebody to do the dirty work for them. Which is what we see.

>The interesting (to me) part about such a philosophy is that it seems like it can only really survive and prosper within a society where someone else is willing to pick up the burden of doing the killing for you.

This seems to assume the "the burden of killing" is not only necessary but unavoidable, as if violence were a constant which should be equitably distributed amongst everyone. If so, I would presume the Quakers would disagree, and would be perfectly satisfied if no one bothered killing at all.

And historically speaking not a lot of people have been willing to kill to protect pacifists like the Quakers who have little capital, social clout or political power. So it isn't much of a burden to begin with.

It's not a condemnation of the morals within their belief system, and not a demand that everyone should participate equally in (potential) violence that comes along with protecting a community/country.

Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military. I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.

Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.

>Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military.

People have no choice but to offload the "burden" onto the police and military, that's the entire premise of civil society and the state's monopoly on violence. Your ability to commit violence within society is already legally proscribed, and except in the case of military conscription, has never been required.

>I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.

No, because it is explicitly an expression of opposition to the violence of secular society. In the absence of such violence, such a belief wouldn't be necessary.

>Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.

We're going to have to agree to disagree that the purpose of the police and military, or most equivalent groups throughout history, has ever been to "protect the whole."

You do have a choice, because the state/police/military aren't an opaque non-human monolith. They are made up of people who DID make the choice to take up that burden, for any given reason, it doesn't have to be an act of selflessness or duty or love for people or country. It just requires some subset of your population being morally at ease with that.

Being able to endorse extreme pacifism long enough to have your belief turn into a large group with many followers is a privilege of being a subgroup in a society where someone else isn't bound by that particular moral outlook. That's all I meant by offloading the burden. You can oppose the violence of secular society, as you put it, while also accepting that that opposition would only ever have worked at any point in history if only a part of your population agreed with you.

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