3. Inequality outweighs war and is the root cause of negative disads

(Bandy X, Medicine&Law@Yale, Causes and cures VII: Structural violence Aggression and Violent Behavior Volume 28, May–June 2016, Pages 109-114)

Behavioral violence, in measurements by the tolls of street violence or war, is more noticeable, even though the “tranquil” waters of structural violence may contain much more violence. American violence scholar James Gilligan (1999) compared structural violence to the most deadly military conflicts: estimating 49 million military and civilian deaths from World War II, or about 8 million per year from 1939 to 1945, or even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the United States and the former Soviet Union at 232 million, could not even begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year, during times of peace as well as of war. In other words, every fifteen years, on average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating thermonuclear war or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. He also described structural violence as increased rates of disabilities and deaths among the people who occupy the bottom class. He noted that the suffering of people from lower classes are the product of people above who have collective bargaining power making choices that determine the allocation of resources. Unlike behavioral violence, its lethal effects operate continuously rather than sporadically; it can occur independently of any intention to kill anyone (for example, it can be a byproduct of wishing to maximize one's wealth and power); and it is usually invisible, in the sense that deaths from structural violence may appear to have other causes, natural or violent. More recent figures bear out these conclusions even more startlingly, as we will see in the next section. Gilligan (2001) also articulated how, through the mechanisms of shame, humiliation, and inferiority, the disparities in classes are the most potent cause of behavioral violence, such as suicide, homicide, warfare, or capital punishment (Bloom, 2001). American anthropologist Paul Farmer (2003) also developed the concept of structural violence by first defining structure as a pattern of collective social actions within institutional practices, law, economic policies, and other habitual elements. These structures can materially manifest through facilities such as roads, server systems, hospitals, and schools. He described violence as suffering resulting from social arrangements that put individuals in harm's way. Since the exertion of structural violence is systematic—that is, indirect—by everyone who belongs to a certain social order, no one is at fault, at the same time as everyone of that order is at fault. Cumulative historical forces and processes work together to constrain individual agency inversely, if not always neatly, with the ability to resist marginalization and oppression, and deny them the benefits of social progress.