Abstract/Summary

Fighting for Hearts, not Destruction

In Gandhi's satyagraha, the goal is to win hearts. Gandhi wrote: "The essence of non-violent technique is that it seeks to liquidate antagonisms but not the antagonists themselves." And: "It does not aim at destroying the tyrant....it therefore seeks to convert the tyrant." For example, the administrator in South Africa told Gandhi that he would not win. Gandhi replied that he would win, and when he did, the administrator would be one of his biggest supporters. Gandhi was right.

More Hearts

Many times you are also fighting for the hearts of the spectators. Gandhi's most important audience was the British people. When they decided they did not want to rule India as a colony, Gandhi's battle was won. So maybe they weren't true spectators. But even when spectators are powerless, they matters. You care about their opinion, and your enemy probably cares about their opinion. Spectators are especially important when they can join the battle -- for you or against you.

Finally, you are fighting for your own heart. As I relate in my story about my little internet satyagraha, I won because my opponents gave up the fight. I think I had more stamina simply because satyagraha gave me more heart. Even if you were fighting against an opponent you will never see again, with no spectators, your heart always matters.

Being Good

Being Kind, Avoiding Harm

When you are angry, you want to hurt people. So anger is an obstruction to satyagraha. Ideally, you would love your enemies. In practice, I think it is enough to treat them kindly and courteously, avoid gratuitous harm to them, and be able to sympathize with them and recognize their strengths.

However, you can be unkind. In fact, you essentially must be unkind to win your battle -- at a superficial level at least, the kindest thing is not to fight. Consider the Buddhist monks during the Viet Nam war who burned themselves to death in protest of the Viet Nam government. Perhaps they thought they were not harming me. And indeed, compared to the typical suicide bomber, or the 9/11 attackers, they were being nonviolent. However, I was still harmed. I did not like reading about them. Because I was an American, I was also faintly responsible, which I did not like. Similarly, Martin Luther King admitted that he was creating "tension."

Your "excuse" for being unkind is that you are fighting for truth and morality. It is well-accepted that it is okay to be unkind in defense of these goals.

In fact, at a higher level, you can argue that you are being kind to your opponents by bringing them to this higher level of truth and morality. This is true, perhaps all the time, perhaps most of the time. It is also a great excuse for being superficially unkind.

But, in the cause of fighting for truth and morality, you minimize harm to your opponents, and you do not gratuitously harm your opponent. The monks certainly minimized the harm to others. Their harm was not gratuitous -- it was the only way they felt they could publicize their plight. They were not trying to destroy me, they were just showing how important this was to them.

Reconceptualizing your "Battle" as Working Together

What are the implications for satyagraha? You are fighting with someone. That is not a good strategy for winning their heart. This is for the most part unavoidable, and you have already decided that giving up the battle is not the right thing to do.

But you can try to minimize the influence of competing and fighting. The technique is simple to reconceptualize the "battle". It is not you versus them. Instead, it is both of you working together, to find truth or morality. You assume that your opponent also wants truth and morality. So you are both on the same side, fighting for the same goal. You just happen to have different opinions about what truth is, or what is moral. For example, Martin Luther King said the battle was against the forces of evil and not individuals.

Of course, you think the mistake is being made by your opponent -- your opponent happens to be engaged in wrong thinking, as we all do at one time or another. But if you fight enough battles, you will sooner or later find a battle where the mistake was yours. And when you do, you will find it much easier to lose the battle graciously if you were working with your opponent to discover the truth.

For example, suppose you are arguing with someone. You could think of it as an opportunity to go one-up on your opponent, if you can just win the argument. Or you could think of it as a mutual search for truth. To the extent you do that, you will be kinder to your opponent and you will fight with truth, not harm. To the extent you can get your opponent to think that way, there will be less tendency for your opponent to dislike you.

You have to explicitly say this -- your opponent will naturally see the battle as a battle between you two, and your opponent will naturally think you are battling against him/her. But you have to back it up with action -- you have to fight with truth, not harm.

With respect to the hearts of the spectators, and your own heart, it absolutely essentialy that you and they see this as a battle for truth or morality. If it is just two people fighting to see who can win the prize, or get their own way, there is no reason for the spectators to have sympathy for you -- and you will not have the extra zeal and stamina you have when you are fighting for what is right.

Winning with Truth

If you use truth to try to win an argument, you still might win even if you are wrong. But as a general tendency, truth favors the person who is right. In other words, if you are wrong, truth will not be a very friendly ally for you. Of course, you are fighting because you think you are right, and sometimes you can be fairly certain you are right. So you fight with truth because you are sure it is on your side. And if ever you found out you were wrong -- you were fighting for the higher truth, you used appropriate methods to get to the higher truth, and even though your side did not prevail, you were both the winners, same as if your side had prevailed.

So why do you fight with truth? First, it is perceived as being good and virtuous, by your opponents, the spectators, and yourself. Second, you are reconceptualizing the battle and a search for some higher truth or morality. You fight with truth because that is the method people use when they are searching for the truth.

Laws and Rules

This is not a particularly admirable way of fighting, and it will not naturally draw the sympathy of the spectators, the friendship of your opponents, or increase your zeal. However, neither should it draw their anger or sap your zeal. It is neutral.

But of course, if you could win with laws and rules, you would not use satyagraha. And I am not sure that satyagraha would be appropriate if laws and rules were sufficient to win. But if you were fighting with laws and rules, you would still want to follow the basic principles of satyagraha, including doing no unnecessary harm to your opponents and reconceptualizing the fight as working towards a common higher goal.

Reprise

But there is more too it. As I discuss these principles, I have taken a very utilitarian perspective. Put baldly, you should be truthful because that will help you win; you should be kind because that will help you win. However, if you are perceived as just being utilitarian, that undercuts much of what you want to accomplish. For example, while truth and kindness are admirable, they are not as admirable if they are done just for the sake of winning.

So, you are more likely to succeed if you actually do love your opponents. You are more likely to succeed if you do love the truth. And I suspect that to the extent you are just being utilitarian, you should admit that.