“Satyagraha can rid society of all evils–political, economic, and moral.”

Do you agree with Gandhi’s remarks? Why or why not?

Some criticize the use of violence as immoral while others criticize nonviolence as being ineffective and weak. Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement proves the latter of those criticisms otherwise. Satyagraha is translated into Truth or love force. Love not in the sense of an affectionate or sensual love, but love as in caring about the “Welfare of All” to save everything in the cosmos from the evils of those who wish to control it. This is a wonderfully radical idea that Gandhi made famous as a foil to violence as a way to solve economic, political, and moral problems in the past during his time, our present era, and in the future. If Satyagraha was always used more than violence, the world would be a much more just place to live. Satyagraha can solve most if not all of the world’s issues if people can overcome the common problems that both mass revolutions and Satyagraha face today.

There are contemporary problems with Satyagraha that are hard to overcome and need to be addressed when thinking about Gandhi’s main principle of ridding the world of evil. For example, Truth needs to be a part of all the lives of everyone involved, but the media, government, and the education systems today, in America, lie to its people all the time, so discovering truth, whether apparent, spiritual, or political Truth, is quite difficult. It is vital though because in order for Satyagraha to be utilized, people have to know the truth about what is wrong in society. And once they discover the truth and go beyond the lies they need to think about the truth so it can actually be sustained and kept in their mind as a catalyst for future development and enlightenment.

It takes an enlightened individual knowledgeable of Truth to be a Satyagrahi and to use nonviolence. However, I believe that it is hard for some to become enlightened on this subject literally because of the words nonviolence and Satyagraha. Most people take the word Satyagraha less seriously because it’s a foreign word to them. There aren’t many people that know the language where that comes from so it’s dismissed as not valuable. It’s also hard to take nonviolence seriously because when people are looking for something besides violence they just brush it off because it has the word violence in it. Also nonviolence simply negates violence so someone unaware of the actual definition just draws a blank on what it could be so they just go right back to violence as the only active option on how to solve a problem and rid the world of it’s problems. For an example on how the root word “non” might work, let’s say that there is no word for war or violence, only nonpeace. Well what’s nonpeace? It’s when something happens that isn’t peaceful. What would the world be like if there was no war, only nonpeace? People may have had a harder time starting wars in the past if they had no idea on what it was and the same goes to nonviolence today.

Thirdly on the problems of people using Satyagraha, Gandhi said “In order to figure out what Truth is, you need to obey the laws to find unjust ones”. The problem is that most people experience the unjust laws everyday and are ok with them. I would say that when it comes to unjust laws most people are like the Untouchables in that they’ve accepted the idea that that’s how it’s always going to be and nothing can change that. It almost requires a very special person every time like Gandhi to motivate the masses and to show them the light, but the problem with that is these special people are very hard to come by. Gandhi, Jesus, and Martin Luther King Jr. are a few people that come to mind when I mention special, motivational people. The unfortunate correlation between these three people, that I think most people see is that they were all assassinated for trying to better the world during their time in history.

I have a very pessimistic view on those in power like the British during Gandhi’s time. I am guessing that it was the people in power that had those three people mentioned murdered. I can’t really imagine a normal, rational person murdering any good person like Gandhi unless he had something to gain. Gandhi was not a fan of the economic system of Capitalism, but Capitalism is and was a big part of the global economy and it revolves around money. In psychology, money is a secondary extrinsic motivator. Money could be the thing that Gandhi, Jesus, and Martin Luther King Jrs’ assassins could have had in common. The people that have always have had money throughout history were the people at the top. Not the slaves during Jesus’s time, the Untouchables during Gandhi’s time, or the blacks (for the most part) during MLK’s time. It was the Kings, the British, and the capitalist rich white men during MLK’s time that had the money. To sum up my points of the last few paragraphs, you don’t find many people enlightened and willing to be assassinated enough in the present day. If there are people like that in the future however, I think that Satyagraha can in fact eliminate the all problems that will ever face society.

All problems are in some way moral issues, but let’s more specifically look at political problems and even more specifically racism. Politics is the study of power and according to contemporary Social Psychologist Dr. Zimbardo, “Evil is nothing more than a demonstration of power”, so political problems are really evil problems. The Love Force has already successfully defeated one major evil problem that we all know about. During the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, police officers that thought it was ok to consider them 2nd class citizens, very poorly mistreated black men and other minorities. During the Civil Rights movement, the minorities working to have better lives endured so much and they accomplished what they wanted through the ideas of Gandhi’s Satyagraha ideals, even if Martin Luther King didn’t specifically call it that. They were jailed, physically beaten, and suffered for years before America and its citizens started to see that they loved us more than we could punish, humiliate, and beat them. They used Satyagraha so much that the privileged people of that time started to see them as human and deserving of the same equal rights that they already had.

Peace, freedom, and equality are three ideas that my mentor used to encourage me to use as my basic tenets of life. There are no ways to create problems if those are three goals that people strive for. I think Gandhi would have agreed with my mentor on those beings goals to aim for in society. Satyagraha is a moral way to solve problems, but in the best case scenario there wouldn’t be any problems and therefore no need for Satyagraha. I personally think that Satyagraha has some relevant issues in today’s society because the world is much more different than when Gandhi left it. Those issues however have the ability to be resolved and Satyagraha could change into something even better than when Gandhi came up with it.