BREAKING NEWS: Violence is not good or desirable. Sometimes it is necessary, and there will be events in which it’s forced upon you. But most reasonable people separate violence into different categories of wrong. We grade it on a scale.
We know this not just by searching our hearts, but by looking at our laws, which make distinctions for First-Degree Murder, Second-Degree, Involuntary or Voluntary Manslaughter, etc, etc.
This might be the only area of life where it is more desirable to say “I lost control” than having been in full command of your faculties.
Knowing that most of us think this way about “comparing sins”, I was thinking the other day about some Star Wars characters who acted out based on Anger vs Desire. Luke and Anakin Skywalker both came to mind.
Anger is a response to violation, either real or perceived. At best, it reflects what we value and hold up as important. For some, Anger serves as an addictive drug that they take for its own sake. They “need” it to live and no longer care about its cost on their own life or that of others.


There’s a passage in Marcus Aurelius’ stoic text, Meditations, that speaks to this and how the stoic emperor was thinking to himself about crimes of passion and crimes of self-satisfaction.
In comparing sins (the way people do) The philosopher Theophrastus says that ones committed out of desire are worse than the ones committed out of anger: which is good philosophy. The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems more self-indulgent, less manly in his sins. Theophrastus is right to say the sin committed out of pleasure deserves a harsher rebuke than one committed out of pain. The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked to anger by pain. The other rushes into his wrongdoing on his own, moved by desire.
There’s more to this story though.