Satyagraha

“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.