Being the Change Isn’t What You Think

Three Lessons from Gandhi

The Sayings of Abu Francis

I'm with Gandhi: get busy building the world you want to live in and save the protesting for when they try to stop you.

The news has been pretty grim these days. Wars are expanding, the planet keeps warming and the rising cost of living has everyone on edge. Think I’ll build a greenhouse. There are labor strikes, populist crusades and anti-war marches unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. Think I’ll plant some more potatoes.

All the talk of resistance and protest has got me re-reading my Mahatma Gandhi. He was a singular success story. The way he drove out the British Raj with nonviolence is iconic and unparalleled. Five years after Gandhi declared that the British should “Quit India,” they packed up and quit.

What would Gandhi tell us if he gave a Ted Talk today? The title would probably be, “Be the change you wish to see in the world” – a pithy bumper-sticker phrase he never actually uttered during his lifetime. Maybe the title would be, “Go build a rainwater catchment system.” I think he would advise us to quit all the protesting and social media brawling by unpacking the notion of “be the change” in three important lessons.

1. We must not tolerate our oppressors.

Gandhi was unswerving in his criticism of the British Raj. A foreign power had come to impose its will and civilization on India. This power sought the destruction of India as it had been evolving for centuries. The aim of this domination was to enhance the economic position of Britain.

“The British people appear to be obsessed by the demon of commercial selfishness. The fault is not of men, but of the system,” Gandhi told Louis Fischer in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. “The true remedy lies in England’s discarding modern civilization, which is ensouled by this spirit of selfishness and materialism.”

He went on to say Britain’s “modern civilization” had destroyed India’s “village system” and given rise to sorrowful cities like Calcutta and Bombay.

“The railways, machineries and the corresponding increase of indulgent habits are the true badges of slavery of the Indian people, as they are of Europeans,” he said.

Like India of the 1930s and 1940s, we face an oppressive system rooted in selfishness and materialism – let’s call it the Corporate Raj. It doesn’t seem like a foreign power, because it looks and acts American. It speaks English, calls itself Democrat and Republican and Christian.

All the same, it is a system bent on consuming natural resources and energy, aimed at enhancing the economic position of the wealthy. It is crippling the planet’s ability to sustain life as we know it.

In many ways, the Corporate Raj is a more brutal regime than the British Raj could ever imagine. It’s a Death Star! The system is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed by holding more elections or pushing incremental reforms at global climate conferences. I believe Gandhi would warn us not to tolerate such a system, even if makes us comfortable for now.

2. It’s more important to build a new system than resist the current one.

When faced with a huge power dedicated to destroying his country, Gandhi developed a vision of Swaraj – Independence.

He was convinced that Complete Independence could only be won through nonviolence. Using violence to overthrow the British would make Indians just as bad as their oppressor. Gandhi coined the term “satyagraha” to describe the “truth force” that would vanquish the enemy by turning him into a friend.

Satyagraha had two main components – Resistance and the Constructive Program. In essence, oppose what is bad and build what is good. While Gandhi is most widely known for his use of Civil Disobedience to oppose British oppression, he gave top priority to the Constructive Program.

And make no mistake – holding up signs, attending rallies, calling elected officials and signing petitions are not acts of Civil Disobedience. They are all legally accepted activities of the status quo, better labeled “civil obedience.”

“The Constructive Program is the truthful and non-violent way of winning Poorna Swaraj,” Gandhi wrote in his 1941 pamphlet, Constructive Program: Its Meaning and Place. “Its wholesale fulfillment is Complete Independence, designed to build up the nation from the very bottom upward.”

Civil Disobedience – breaking unjust laws and accepting the legal consequences – is simply a tool to aid the Constructive Program, used only if the oppressive power tries to stop what you are building. Gandhi concluded: “Civil Disobedience without the Constructive Program will be like a paralyzed hand attempting to lift a spoon.”

I believe Gandhi would admonish us to be very busy building the kind of communities we want to live in regardless of who is driving the world towards the brink. His vision of a “Free India” would be right at home in Chapter 14 of Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, “The Strategies of an Alternative Global Nation.”

3. Imagine and work for a new “Free America.”

Central to re-building the Indian village system was reclaiming skills like making salt and spinning thread. The British prohibited the manufacturing of salt and forced Indians to buy it from British merchants. Making traditional Indian garments allowed villagers to boycott the booming British textiles industry.

Gandhi and his followers symbolically make salt by evaporating sea water in 1930. He and about 60,000 Indians were subsequently arrested for breaking Britain’s Salt Act of 1882.

Permaculture shares a vision of self-reliant communities building local food, water and energy systems. These are tools to re-create the village system that has been destroyed by the Corporate Raj. A Free America would reject the commercial selfishness of modern civilization and move ahead to the past (like Peter Maurin wrote in “Regard For The Soil.”)

“We have long been accustomed to think that power comes only through legislative assemblies. I have regarded this belief as a grave error brought about by inertia or hypnotism,” Gandhi wrote. “It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. The village would become a self-governing unit living its own life.”

Rather than centralizing power in a national government, Gandhi saw power spread to India’s 700,000 villages, with representatives moving up a very small ladder to a bare-bones federal assembly – not unlike the United States in its first decade under the Articles of Confederation.

All village residents would participate in village governance and send one representative to a district assembly to deliberate on broader affairs. Districts would field one representative to a provincial assembly, which would then select a president to act as national chief executive.

Imagine all the time and energy spent wrangling in Washington, D.C. shifted to building local self-reliant communities! Imagine people meeting their basic needs at home rather than chasing after consumer goods from all over the planet!

I believe that if Gandhi had a podcast today, he would be walking the same talk he did in 1941 – spinning his own thread, making his own salt, embracing his Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian and Jewish neighbors and saving his non-compliance for the time when the police or military tried to stop him.

I say, get busy building the world you want to live in and save the protesting for when they try to stop you.

What say you?