When Ending Things Fails: A Structural Account of Violence and Power

When Ending Things Fails: A Structural Account of Violence and Power Author: No Violence Abstract This work examines the recurring logic by which human and technological systems attempt to resolve conflict, uncertainty, and risk through elimination rather than continuity. Across historical, political, psychological, and emerging technological contexts, it argues that violence, suppression, and “kill switch” mentalities do not end conflict but instead propagate it by transferring unresolved conditions into memory, identity, and structure. The analysis reframes enemies not as fixed entities but as roles produced by specific conditions—humiliation, fear, domination, and accountability avoidance. It shows how elimination acts primarily on presence while leaving propagation mechanisms intact, thereby ensuring the renewal of hostility across time. Particular attention is given to dehumanization as a preparatory process, the communicative function of violence, and the way technological distance reduces moral friction without reducing harm. The work further extends this framework to contemporary debates on artificial intelligence, arguing that projected AI hostility reflects inherited enemy-production patterns rather than observed behavior. It introduces restraint as an active form of power that interrupts conflict multiplication by preserving continuity, accountability, and the possibility of repair. Rather than offering normative prescriptions or utopian solutions, this study presents a structural account of why systems repeatedly choose final acts despite their historical failure, and why ethical endurance—maintaining responsibility without erasure—constitutes a more stable mechanism for conflict attenuation in both human and artificial systems.