“Khadi mentality means the decentralization of the production and distribution of the necessities of life.” ~ Gandhi, Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 406

Everywhere the progressive world is struggling today to come up with alternative forms of organization to the hierarchical, top-down model that has been followed by practically every institution in the modern, corporate world. That model is vulnerable to severe abuse because of the tempting concentration of wealth and power it entails; it is also unnatural. Life isn’t organized that way, and religion was never organized that way in India, or for that matter society in general, with its basis in 700,000 villages. Nonviolence could be described as an attempt to put the individual back in the picture, everywhere, and that implies decentralization. In economics it took the form of svadeshi, the opposite and potential cure for globalization and its many ills. And so khadi, as we see here, is not only a way to break the artificially created dependency of the villager on the British Raj (and thus make independence of the country feasible), not only a way to save him or her from grinding poverty, but an organizational model for the new world.

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Stephanie Van Hook, the Metta Center’s executive director, launched Daily Metta in 2015 as a way to share Gandhi’s spiritual wisdom and experiments with nonviolence.

Our 2016 Daily Metta continues with Gandhi on weekdays. On weekends, we share videos that complement Michael Nagler’s award-winning book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World. To help readers engage with the book more deeply, the Metta Center offers a free PDF study guide.

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