Regenerative and degenerative violence

concepts · updated 2026-10-26 stated

Regenerative and degenerative violence

Part of his ethics (graded-ethics), from his July 2026 notes (https://exitmusic.world/a-somewhat-ambitious-metaphysical-exploration).

"Living systems depend on violence. They do; there's no way around it." The distinction that matters is between regenerative violence, between members of a living system, which ultimately results in the system's continued flourishing and complexification, and degenerative violence, which seeks or results in the elimination of members, and therefore relations, from the system. "Systems" here means creatures fractally in regenerative relationship with each other, which emerged through counter-entropic complexification.

So the aliveness of all things (relational-ontology) implies neither "try not to kill anything" nor "killing is justified with equal abandon".

Open: how this sits with irreversibility as the triage criterion on graded-ethics; elimination of relations is a kind of irreversibility, which suggests they are the same test.

Provenance: James's published notes at exitmusic.world, read in full 2026-10-26 (raw/notes/exitmusic-world-2026-10-26.md). His statement of his own position; not a sourced claim about the world. Disposition: stated.

Place in the departure-in-place network (author's reading): section 4, a refinement of graded-ethics that the network doesn't yet name.

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