If a building is destroyed, it creates scrap material that will be removed and repurposed. It creates a new plot of land with a new history and new possibilities for another construction project. The original building is in ruins, but the ruins are not eternal.

Something new will seize upon the opportunity. Human ingenuity will have a new idea. Animals and plants will colonize. Geology & weather will return the ruins to the Earth.

Consider what violence does to people. A violent encounter creates a "winner" & a "loser". It separates the "strong" from the "weak." Both are unstable lives. People cannot live peaceful lives as long as they remain in either faction. Really, both the "victor" & "victim" are victims.

Whoever survives the violent encounter has to remember it, think about it, interpret it. Humans cannot avoid telling stories, and in time the stories change how we act, change our habits of thought & practice.

The story of our life guides who we are. The violence becomes a personal history, which creates a new personality. The new personality will create new relationships, new thoughts, new habits. If the experience was traumatic, the violence creates new habits in the unconscious body too.

Violence creates a new personality, but the new personality is unstable. It is not at peace, and the things it goes on to create will not be at peace either.

Victims burn for revenge and seek release from shame. The strong cannot remain strong forever because humans grow old and die. The strong cannot even hold onto their strength for a full day because everyone has to sleep.

Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes & Frank Underwood all understood the immediate problem. Wear a crown & your head immediately becomes vulnerable.

Victors become prideful. They commit an unforced error due to hubris. Hubris is the beginning of every tragedy, including every Greek tragedy. The ancient Greek playwrights understood that once someone is taken by pride, doom soon descends upon them and their loved ones. Pride can manifest in a few different ways. Perhaps they desire political power, social prestige, or wealth.

No one person can exercise perfect control over any of these goods. They all depend on a certain amount of luck, and bad luck can rip them away. Or victims become conspirators and rip them away by force. There are forces in the world stronger than humans. We usually call them Fortune or Fate. Even though we claim that power "belongs" to the victor, it's a legal fiction. Power truly belongs to forces which no creature could ever control.

My point about fate is built into the word "disaster" itself:

Disaster
dis - bad, ill (from French & Italian)
aster - star (from Greek & Latin)

Literally "a bad star." The word comes from an age when astrology was popular, so the point is "a bad fate caused by unlucky stars."

Greeks & Romans knew that violence is a creative force, and its creations are unstable. In fact, they knew their civilizations were creations of violence.

The Greek founding story is the Battle of Troy, as told by Homer in The Iliad. It's difficult to express how important Homer's Iliad was in ancient Greek culture. Think about how much cultural power Disney movies have today. Combine all of them, and you'll get a sense of Homer's influence on the Greeks.

Unlike most Disney movies, however, the Battle of Troy is a violent tragedy.

The Greeks suspected the entire universe was a creation of perpetual violence too. Near the end of The Iliad, Odysseus (Greek archer hero) tells Achilles (Greek infantry hero) to think of the human corpses littering the battlefield as a grain harvest offered to Zeus:

The old gods fed on human violence. At the heart of the universe was a toxic relationship between violent gods and violent humans. The relationship could create cities, birth new life, forge political alliances & win wars, but none of it would last.

Tomorrow's violence will consume yesterday's creations. The arrangement is just stable enough to keep the universe running. The brutal drawback is that every particular thing will have its turn at annihilation, its return to chaos.

Greeks believed this was simply the cruel truth, life couldn't be different, and it would continue forever. The Romans accepted it as truth too. The ancient pagans believed they were at the mercy of violent forces outside their control.

Violence birthed them and would eat them too. But in the meantime, it might throw them some good times if they figure out how to manipulate it.

Look at the genealogies of the Greco-Roman gods. Gods were fighting, cheating, & eating each other since the beginning of eternity.

Violence all the way up, violence all the way down.

Name it whatever you want: Fate, Fortune, Strife, Nemesis, wars of the gods; the pagan founders of Western civilization believed in an eternal plague of violence, and there is no saving grace.

We imagine Western nihilism is a new problem, "it's postmodern!".

In truth, nihilism is an ancient problem for Western civilization. It just came back into bloom about 200 years ago.

Perhaps now you can appreciate, reader, why Christian doctrine revolutionized pagan Europe. The Church declared One God in Three Persons. God is a family (sort of), and He is at peace with Himself. God created the universe to share in the peace. Humans created the violence, and we ought to stop. God commands us to stop.

The Church further claimed that God Himself became a human named Jesus Christ. He taught lessons on God's peace, allowed people to beat Him to death, then resurrected & continued demonstrating divine peace.

If the Christians are correct, then humanity had been dead wrong about the world for eons. Since time immemorial, humans had been evil, and they rationalized evil as "just the way things are."

Then a Church appears, claiming to have true knowledge of the real peaceful God and sacraments that will literally connect us to that God. These are answers to the ultimate questions - the stakes could not be higher. They are either revolutionary lies or revolutionary truths.

If the Christians are correct, humans must leave behind everything they thought was true. The truth would require contradicting their ancestors and abandoning spoils won from violent conflict.

If the Christians are wrong, their errors would halt the creative violence that kept the universe running. The gods would starve, humanity would starve, and the universe would burn out in a whimper. If the Christians are wrong, it's violence all the way up.

Christ's Church leads the West to a dire crossroads: either repent or persecute. Either learn peace or sacrifice the peaceful. Some of the West repented, some of the West has not. The perennial struggle against nihilism in the West is a consequence.

Western civilization remains torn over what kind of creation it wants to be - a creation of peace or a creation of violence.