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harangues of his violent coaches — and now, abruptly, he realizes that their advice makes sense. “It is as if the subject had earlier been partially deaf,” Athens writes, “and has only now heard what his coach has been telling him all along: resorting to violence is sometimes necessary in this world.”
    Struck by his insight, which takes on the force of a personal revelation, and convinced of its correctness, the belligerent subject now “firmly resolves to resort to violence in his future relations with people.” This first violent resolution — resolving to seriously injure or even kill someone should the circumstances arise—is a landmark in the subject’s life, but it is still strongly qualified. “The subject is prepared to resort to potentially lethal violence,” Athens explains, “but only if he deems it absolutely necessary for the well-being of his body and mind and if he believes he has some chance of success.” That is, he resolves to use violence—but only defensively, to protect himself or the people he values against imminent danger or at least purposeful and cruel antagonism. Why these qualifications? Because personally attacking someone with serious violent intent involves risking serious injury, even death. No one confronts such risks lightly, not even seasoned police officers or combat soldiers.
    In making this mitigated violent resolution, the subject moves from belligerency, stage two of violent socialization, to stage three: violent performances. Given the right circumstances, he undertakes to use serious violence against someone who has seriously provoked him. A subject can win or lose such a violent confrontation, or the fight can result in a draw. Defeat, especially repeated major defeats, may lead him to question the wisdom of his violent resolution, to decide he has little aptitude for violence and to resign himself to nonviolence. Then his resolution may wither away, or the still-fragile new identity he has been trying to construct may shatter as his old identity shattered, leaving him once again fragmented and derelict. Suicide and violence are inversely correlated in specific populations, for example, suggesting that suicide is an alternative outcome to resolving the conflicts that brutalization presents. A few Einsatzgruppen personnel made that choice, as did, of course, a much larger number of Jewish victims.
    But success with defensive violence marks a turning point in the subject’s violence development. He has proven his resolve, which gives him great personal satisfaction. He has also answered the painful question he identified during the belligerency stage of how to protect himself and the people he values from violent subjugation. Stage three of violent socialization appears in fact to be relatively stable; many people who have been violently socialized to this point stop here and move no further, remaining prepared throughout their lives to use serious violence only when physically threatened or seriously antagonized — in Athens’s terminology, marginally violent. Modern Western societies are composed of mixed populations of pacifist and marginally violent people: people who are not prepared to use serious violence even if physically threatened or seriously antagonized and people who are. Neither population considers itself to be violent, since its violence, if any, is essentially defensive. Modern Western societies also, of course, include small populations of fully violent people, a deviant minority that law enforcement agencies work to restrain.
    Institutional violence training is designed to socialize officials to the point of defensive violent performances — that is, to make them marginally violent—but to block further violence development. Police and soldiers are violently socialized to this third stage to prepare them to control and protect the rest of us. Many remain marginally violent throughout their careers. But stage three can be a slippery slope,