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In your society, and to some extent in others the natural communication of aggression has broken down. You confuse violence with aggression and do not understand aggression’s creative activity or its purpose as a method of communication to prevent violence. You deliberately make great effort, in fact, to restrain the communicative elements of aggression while ignoring its many positive values, until its natural power becomes dammed up, finally exploding into violence. Violence is a distortion of aggression.
Birth is an aggressive action – the thrust outward with great impetus of a self from within a body into a new environment. Any creative idea is aggressive. Violence is not aggressive. It is instead a passive surrender to emotion which is not understood or evaluated, only feared, and at the same time sought. Violence is basically an overwhelming surrender, and in all violence there is a great degree of suicidal emotion, the antithesis of creativity. Both [sides]…in a war, for instance, are caught up in the same kind of passion, but the passion is not aggressive. It is its opposite – the desire for destruction.
Know that yearning is made up of feelings of despair caused by a sense of powerlessness, not of power. Aggressiveness leads to action, to creativity, to life. It does not lead to destruction, violence, or annihilation.
-- Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality
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