The key difference between King and many other revolutionaries who have preached similar ethics about the need to directly overturn systems of order for the sake of justice is that King was deeply committed to the doctrine of Christian love as the guiding and restraining principle that tamed and legitimized those violent instincts and prevented them from descending into mere partisan warfare and destruction.

MLK believed you could resist evil without resorting to violence of either word or action, that the goal of action was to build friendship and understanding (not confrontation, revenge, or humiliation), that it was human evil not humans that needed to be resisted and focused on, that redeeming love and hope were essential guiding beliefs, that a willingness to suffer and not respond in kind and not to give in to hatred of or resentment of your opponent were essential qualities to maintain.

Not all his contemporaries agreed, and many preferred not to be restrained and handcuffed by such meek Christian values in what was in their eyes a war. Divested of all the moral content that restrained it and focused it and proved the transcendent rightness of his cause, the mere appeal to forceful action is morally neutral, and is as likely to energize the worst instincts of humanity as the best ones.

The problem with many revolutions is that, as King said, darkness cannot drive out darkness; they only turned the wheel of who was being crushed.
King, of course, was terribly grieved to find that he received what to him seemed only lukewarm support from people who he had hoped would passionately support his cause. His frustration with them was understandable, because his arguments seemed to align well with the stated values of the people whose support he was seeking. They just didn’t seem to recognize it. And he wanted to go very far very fast and had a lot of ideas and wanted to see results, and he believed in the power of government action to achieve those results. And he was a passionate man and over time grew less optimistic and more frustrated, as so many have.

Isolated from the rest of his overall beliefs and arguments, his criticisms of moderation and care and patience and his urging on the need to act and take what is owed are themselves not so different from the arguments of Marx or Mao or Mugabe or Hitler or Trump or the French revolution. The transformative moral content is in the context, in the expression, in the reasoning, in the details, in the careful alignment of those arguments behind transcendent moral principles whose claims stand over all men and women, and the definition of justified purpose that restrains their action according to its intended goals.

An incitement that inflames resentment, anger, retribution, and division, however effective it might be at mobilizing people and achieving its short term goals, will ultimately only create new enemies and perpetuate old conflicts. It will only turn the wheel, not break it. And although we can learn to love justice and kindness and goodness and hold it up as a light in our society, you can’t legislate morality into the hearts of mankind by main force.

The current incitement merely to take what is deserved, no talk, no arguments, no caution, will likely encourage violence. Rioting. And in places and against people who have absolutely no control over that situation, no connection to it except having heard of it and the guilt of association by class, no power to either investigate or punish the perpetrators. It will inflame resentments, not resolve them. Disconnected from a clear guiding ethic and purpose, mob emotional responses tend to be destructive rather than productive, because that’s a far easier goal to pursue. Anger is always easier than love, and it’s much easier to act thoughtlessly than with wisdom. Especially when people are looking for a reason to be angry.

Unfortunately, in a situation like this, no one will be talking sense. One side will scream at the other that their lack of reaction and failure to get behind the outrage is a clear sign of their lack of humanity, that they are the awful villains of the piece, for their reluctance to join the crusade, for their unwillingness to emotionally and morally engage or show sympathy. They will resist any discussion or criticism, any call for caution or restraint or nuance, as an affront to the entire cause and to human decency, marking you as a monster and an enemy. If you aren’t moved to where they are by the lever of someone dying, then you must be inhuman. If you have any arguments to make, any hesitation, then you’re in the wrong side.

And the other side will criticize the other for their raw reactionism, for their hasty judgements, for their unbalanced criticism and for their embrace of a narrative without fully justified cause, and their desire to slow and resist it will harden their hearts to callousness, a refusal to be moved at all, a cruelty of excuses and indifference, lest showing any crack might bring down their whole edifice and let the walls be run over. They isolate themselves and insulate themselves from any possible intrusion.

The desires of both sides to have their feelings and concerns be validated and their voices be heard will make them harden themselves into an immunity against any word from the other, a deafness to anything they have to say, an assertion that any argument is an affront to the whole cause or that any concession is an afrront to the whole cause. Both imagine that if anything but their own thought and their own feelings were allowed any purchase that it would be end of everything, a betrayal, the destruction of the world of meaning that they have built.

And maybe they’re right. Maybe their ideological worlds based on their respective moral-emotional instincts (and attendant rational structures) have grown so far apart in their foundations, in their interpretations of reality, that there really isn’t any space left for them to coexist or integrate. Maybe they are truly different realities that we’re born into. Maybe the only way to live in peace is to separate those worlds, isolate and insulate ourselves, or silence the other voices by force (of outrage or law or violence).