June 5:

“It is not so much the British guns that are responsible for our subjugation as our voluntary co-operation.”

–Gandhi (Young India, February 9, 1921)

 

There comes a point when our common understanding of conflict is insufficient and we need to reach deeper.  And this is not always easy, for we just may see our own responsibility staring us in the face.  But what a relief, really, to break out of the spell cast over us when we feel threatened: all our attention goes to the other: “They are doing it to us: get rid of them.”  But this is so disempowering, for the flip side of that spell is “we have no agency, we are helpless.”  Everyone likes to be guiltless, but no one likes to be helpless.

Beginning in 1909 with his classic tract, Hind Swaraj Gandhi argued “The British did not take India; we gave her to them.”  What a wake-up call!  And he, of course, carried it out on a gigantic scale, as the double Nobel-Prize winner, Albert Szent-Gyeorgyi astutely observed: “Gandhi taught the world that there are higher things than force, higher even than life itself; he proved that force had lost its suggestive power.” Or rather, in our vocabulary, threat power had lost its suggestive force.

No conflict can be resolved if both parties are in an “us-vs.-them” mindframe; it behoves the nonviolent party to step out of that frame and own our own responsibility — and power.

 

Experiment in nonviolence:

Try this out on our own scale: the next time we feel we’re being threatened or held down, ask, “are we perhaps overlooking our own power here?”