Chapter Three

Roadmap II, (Re)constructive Program

I cannot picture to myself a time when no man shall be richer than another. But I do picture to myself a time when the rich will spurn to enrich themselves at the cost of the poor and the poor will cease to envy the rich. Even in the most perfect world we shall fail to avoid inequality, but we can and must avoid strife and bitterness.

—Gandhi

Time to put that basic training to work. Joanna Macy offers a useful model of three kinds of action we should be engaged in: stopping the worst of the damage, building new institutions, and changing the culture. There is desperate need to stop the worst of the damage, primarily to the life-support systems of the planet, and to this we dedicate the outer circle of The Roadmap Model, Satyagraha. New Story Creation in particular, but really the whole of our efforts, in general, can change the culture (more about how at the end of this chapter). Meanwhile, we should come away from the inner circle, Person Power, with a pretty good grip on the basic principles of nonviolence, and it’s time now to imagine how institutions could be built on them—or rather, to look at some examples of how that’s already underway. So much so, in fact, that we can take a look here at just two representative sectors: the economy and conflict. Along the way we’ll notice an interesting connection between them.

EXPERIMENTS IN AN ECONOMY OF PEACE

Down the county from my community, in San Rafael, there’s a great bakery and café called Arizmendi’s. It’s named for Father José Maria Arizmendiarrieta (or just Arizmendi, 1915–1976), who founded the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque region of northern Spain in 1956. Cooperatives had been common in Basque country but had all but died out in the civil war, pushing the region into poverty. Mondragón is an amazing story of alternative economy, but to say that might obscure the way this experiment has repercussions for cooperation, the meaning of work, and other basic principles. In the Mondragón corporations, all workers are stockholders—if you don’t have the capital to buy shares when you’re first hired, a portion of your salary is company stock. Importantly, anyone can attend Mondragón University—free of charge, as education ought to be—and go on to become a manager. Your salary will be limited to three times that of a line worker—not three hundred times higher, as it commonly is in American corporations, and if you perform poorly as a manager, you are simply given some other role. Most importantly, the wide variety of capital and household goods manufactured in the network—a decision that involves all workers—does not include military hardware. Not everything is rosy even in this most advanced business culture, but both the human and economic bottom lines are highly impressive success stories that I’ll say a bit more about later on.

“My” Arizmendi, the café/bakery, is not affiliated with Mondragón except in spirit. It’s worker owned and reflects many of the ten Basic Co-operative Principles of Mondragón: Open Admission, Democratic Organization, Sovereignty of Labor, Instrumental and Subordinate Nature of Capital, Participatory Management, Payment Solidarity, Intercooperation, Social Transformation, Universality, and Education.

This local bakery and the Iberian chain would seem to book-end, in terms of scale, the numerous and growing experiments in new business and economic models. While perhaps not nonviolent according to the technical definition, they rest upon the higher image of human dignity that is the backbone of that principle. Let’s say it’s what nonviolence looks like before open conflict breaks out.

One of the most widely recognized principles of conflict that we’ve learned over the last few decades is that one-off protests are ineffectual at best. Whatever action we’re planning, we do not want it to burst like a soap bubble and be gone. Its real value will be realized when it’s institutionalized. That’s the beauty of constructive program.

As we move outward to the second circle of The Roadmap Model, having paid due attention to our own personal empowerment by way of preparation or basic training, we can bear in mind that CP can be either nonconfrontational, like charkha, Gandhi’s project that revitalized the homespun cotton cloth industry, or confrontational, like the Salt March. When it confronts, when it provokes a response, we are going into the conflict from a position of strength, often with the moral high ground because we are simply building for ourselves what the regime has failed to, and on our own terms.

CP was the backbone of the successful struggle to liberate India from foreign rule. It cannot be said that modern India, much more than any other country (and less than some), has built its economy on those principles. So far, that has been the road not taken for the national economic policy. The grip of the old story makes faith in the principles of CP very difficult. But they are being carried out on a small scale by innumerable social experiments in India and around the planet. And sometimes the scale is not so small. The Mondragón cooperatives have become one of Spain’s most successful enterprises, with nearly €12 billion in annual income earned by 74,117 employees in 260 businesses and cooperatives operating in forty-one countries. None of the earnings, remember, comes from the manufacture of or investment in weapons.

The success of the Mondragón cooperatives at the old-fashioned bottom line is not unusual; it’s also seen in many economic experiments, some of which are a good bit more radical: transition towns, local cooperatives, worker-owned firms, farmers markets, gift economies, local currencies. As for alternative financial institutions, they range from credit unions that are replacing banks or anything too big to fail, to the hugely successful microlending model invented by Mohammed Yunus, who began life as a conventional economist but realized that a system that kept people in dire poverty rather than helping them get out of it was fundamentally flawed. So he started the Grameen Bank system in Bangladesh in 1983. Today Grameen has 2,564 branches, with 19,800 staff serving 8.29 million borrowers in 81,367 villages—and Yunus has a Nobel Prize. On any working day Grameen collects an average of $1.5 million in weekly installments. Of the borrowers, 97 percent are women, and over 97 percent of the loans are paid back, a recovery rate far higher than that of any traditional banking system. Often loans that are ludicrously small by our standards are enough for a village woman to buy, say, a bit of bamboo to make stools or some seeds for her vegetable business. They are too small to fail! And they do a tremendous lot of good. Grameen methods are applied in projects in fifty-eight countries, including the United States, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and Norway.

The book you’re reading right now was published by Berrett-Koehler, one of several thousand B Corps and benefit corporations that have set out with a new triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit—a step beyond the socially responsible funds that simply avoid military and economically damaging investments. Today, there is a growing community of more than 1,400 certified B Corps in forty-two countries and over 120 industries working to redefine success in business; they’re about using business as a force for good.

What’s it like being a Berrett-Koehler author? For the industry in general, publishing a book (or writing for a film) can make you feel unimportant or even exploited, and this is particularly true of writers for television and film. You have to stand by and watch other people who “don’t get it” mangle your best ideas and finest language. Even though lots of editing had to be done on my first book with Berrett-Koehler, The Nonviolence Handbook, I was included and heard from at every stage of the process, from choosing the cover to the marketing needed to get such a “specialty” item to its readers. Nonviolence, as you can imagine (and as I know from experience) is not a hot item out there in the market; yet because of the culture that Berrett-Koehler founder Steve Piersanti had been able to instill in the firm, he told his acquisitions editor, “We’re going to do this book even if we lose money on it.” (Which they did not.) Berrett-Koehler was then a B corporation; today they are a benefit corporation, which gives legal status to businesses who want to expand corporate purpose beyond maximizing share value to explicitly include social and environmental goals. That language is from California’s statutes, and similar language is found now in the relevant statutes of thirty states. Two thousand for-profit corporations now have this status, all viable and growing alternatives to the traditional profit-driven corporation with its hierarchical structure and culture of indifference.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

As mentioned earlier, RJ is spreading through the U.S. school system; in fact, when we turn from “obstructive” actions to CP, from fighting injustice directly (essential as that now is) to building the institutions of the world we want, RJ is a kind of poster child. It can be startling for peace activists. I well remember going with Stephanie, Metta’s executive director, to a meeting on restorative practices in the school system of Santa Rosa, California. It was held at the largest Jewish temple in the city. It might have been a rock concert, the way the spacious hall was packed—and not just with seniors, like your average peace meeting, but also with students as well as parents and teachers. Within one year of RJ being implemented, we learned, suspensions had dropped by 60 percent.

Here is a really striking example. Orchard Gardens was one of the toughest and worst-performing schools in the Boston area. There was so much violence and disruption that when Andrew Bott took over as principal he was warned it would spell the end of his career. But he had a trick up his sleeve. His first act was to let the security staff go! (The school definitely had a prison feel, said Bott.³⁷) With the considerable money thus saved, he restarted the music and art programs, among other measures, and the fighting soon dropped dramatically. Giving students dignity and something to live for accomplished more than holding over them the threat of punishment.

RJ is far less expensive than traditional punitive methods, and where wardens have the courage and imagination to try it, it works not just in schools—where it cuts off the school-to-prison pipeline—but also in prisons themselves. When I participated in a course at San Quentin Penitentiary, I was told that the inmates who elected to go through the program—all serious offenders, mind you—had a recidivism rate that hovered around 2 percent. I hope you realize the significance of that number. The national average is 74 percent. When you remember how recidivism (reoffending after release) has become a political football and a way to scare the public off compassionate methods and the political candidates who support them, you realize there’s a potential for real change here, with benefits beyond the rehumanization of the individuals lucky enough to benefit directly.

In retributive justice, our current system, the person who offended is labeled a criminal. It further posits that criminals can’t be rehabilitated (as far as California is concerned, rehabilitation was dropped from the mandate of the justice system in 1976). They have to be punished. That produces justice. Just as—note the parallel—we cannot change enemies, so we have to defeat them: then we have peace. I once said to someone who was in favor of war (admittedly, this was a bit harsh; I was younger then), “How do you feel about killing people?” He shot back: “Not people—enemies!” The first step away from the vicious circle of mass incarceration and “endless war” is to peel off those labels. In the thinking behind RJ, a person who has committed an offense is just that and no more: a person who has committed an offense; a thinking and feeling fellow human being. Immediately questions come up that are buried when you have a retributive framework: why did they do that? To satisfy what need? What can we do now to make sure they don’t need to do that again? Most importantly: who was hurt in this process, and how can that hurt be addressed: how can we heal the community?

“Community” was the watchword that we heard over and over again at that meeting in Santa Rosa. In the standard approach, an offender has committed a crime against society; in RJ, by contrast, we say that a person has hurt someone or some group of people, and the community itself has to address the hurt of the offender and the victim to achieve healing. The whole community must do some introspection and see where they may have contributed to the need for hurtful behavior: avoidable poverty? Homelessness?

In the 1990s, California, along with other places, implemented a zero-tolerance regime, convinced that they had to get tough to stop the rise of violence that was decimating students of color in particular. Perfect old story logic: “If force doesn’t work, use more”—of the same kind. It was not a great success. Camisha Fatimah Gentry, who worked as a coordinator with Restorative Justice for Oakland, puts it succinctly: punishment doesn’t work.³⁸ James Gilligan, as we’ve seen, even calls punishment the most powerful stimulant of violence that we have yet discovered.³⁹ Oakland schools that have implemented RJ are enjoying reductions in suspensions of up to 80 percent, not to mention the benefits to human dignity. It can cost about $7,000 to call everybody together, pay a trainer, and hold a proper restorative circle. Before you think that’s too high, bear in mind that the national average cost for keeping someone incarcerated is $150,000 a year; in California it’s twice that. The opening gambit in a school setting is often to say something positive about the student who’s gotten in trouble. The facilitators who use this approach today are not the first to discover this counterintuitive, highly effective trick.

Among the Bemba people of what is today Zambia, when someone has committed an offense, that person is made to sit in a circle with the whole village around them. Then each person in turn says something positive about the offender. Usually at some point the offender breaks down and cries; then discussions are launched about how to make restitution for the injury. Indigenous practices have in fact been a rich resource for RJ in our “advanced” industrial societies.

The stark difference between the retributive and restorative approaches has been characterized succinctly and pungently by the late Bo Lozoff of the Prison Ashram Project: “Whereas retributive justice immediately says ‘Get the hell out of here!’ when someone commits a crime, restorative justice says ‘Hey, get back in here! What are you doing that for? Don’t you know we need you as one of the good people in this community? What would your mama think?’ It’s an entirely opposite approach, one that, I think, would result in stronger and safer communities.”⁴⁰

There are various ways to set up a restorative circle, but they almost all involve a direct dialogue (where that’s possible) between offender and victim in the presence of a trained mediator. Each is asked to try to understand the other’s situation and the other’s feelings. Then some kind of restoration or repayment is worked out that’s agreeable to all parties. In one Santa Rosa school where RJ was introduced, the expulsion rate dropped from 16 percent to 4 percent and then to practically zero in the first two years. One young man had been offered the opportunity to do twenty hours of community service to erase the graffiti he’d plastered around the school and neighborhood. By the time of the meeting he had already done fifty hours and was gearing up to do more. It’s not rocket science: obviously people like to be useful. They want their self-respect, and being useful to others is a good way to get it.

RJ never relies on humiliation or even permits it to creep into the process. Humiliation and the deprivation of agency are of course prominent features of the standard system, exacerbating the cause of the problem that James Gilligan so well describes. In another school, in Southern California, 95 percent of the students who got in trouble chose to enter the restorative system rather than go through the punishment mill, and of those, 95 percent were brought to a successful conclusion. This is not surprising. On The Nonviolence Report, our community radio program, we had occasion to interview four teenagers from Santa Rosa High School who had started a group they called Students United for Restorative Justice (SURJ). All four had gotten into trouble; two had had a restorative experiences and two had not. Even though we had met them before and knew how passionate they were about RJ, we were pleasantly surprised and impressed by how astutely they were able to understand the fix society has put them in—you might almost say entrapping them in a culture of violence and then punishing the most susceptible. They were almost bitter about the logic of suspending or expelling a student who loses time just when he or she needs to get reintegrated into the community (and redignified by education). There doesn’t seem to be any party who does not come away from a restorative practice the better for it. One dean, who had been totally skeptical because “it would never work at my school,” became one of the most enthusiastic advocates of RJ, and poignantly explained why: “Every time I used the usual method, I lost a relationship; every time I use the new system, I gain one.” There is no end to how far this could go, even beyond schools to prisons, and eventually even war.

The logic behind RJ (and the view of the human being behind it) can also be applied before trouble happens, as we saw with our young principal Andrew Bott in the Boston area. Either way, when you think of all its advantages, a trajectory suggests itself that you might call three giant steps to peace:

1.  Get RJ established as the norm throughout the nation’s schools. This is the logical place to start. If we lose empathy with our children, we’ve lost our humanity, which is to say we’ve lost everything. The school-to-prison pipeline affects some communities disproportionately but all of us indirectly. Here and throughout the process we’ll be describing, you’ll need to explain to anyone listening why the approach works; how it’s based on a higher image of the human being. That way we’re addressing a particular issue in a way that it helps the whole system.

2.  Move on to do exactly the same in prisons. All of them. This bold idea, called decarceration, loses its terrors when we explain that we’re not ignoring crime; we’re building a better way to deal with it. Every year seven hundred thousand prison inmates are released in this country, most of whom have been more embittered—and better trained to offend again—by their experience behind bars. Imagine also being able to divert vast resources from prisons to, for example, schools.

3.  Now we are ready to go after the biggest prize: war. As the Greek poet Euripides said: never treat an enemy so badly that he cannot become a friend. With a little imagination we can see how the logic of RJ—unlabeling, rehumanization, restoring dignity and agency, emphasizing relationship building and community—could be carried over to the international arena.

INSTITUTING PEACE

Derek Oakley and his team leader, Andres Gutierrez, were having an average day at the UN camp for refugees from the war. It was April 2015, Bor State, South Sudan, a region with over two million internally displaced refugees. The attack came without warning. First stones, then gunshots; a heavily armed militia broke through the defense perimeter. The two internationals wore conspicuous khaki vests and the logo of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, emblems of their training and mission: to protect civilian lives. Derek and Andres started to run for cover. Then they remembered what they’d been taught: you can’t outrun bullets. They herded some women and children into the nearest tent. Before long, the flaps flew open and men armed with axes, AK-47s, and sharpened sticks poured in. Momentarily startled to see two non-Sudanese, they soon recovered from the shock and ordered the two men out. But they were in for a bigger shock. “I’m sorry,” said Derek, showing their badges. “We’re international protection officers. We’re not leaving.” Astoundingly (if you don’t know nonviolence), the would-be killers looked at each other in consternation and backed out. A fluke? Hardly. Two other groups broke in, and each time again Derek and Andres “flipped the script” on them, and they backed out.

Outside the hut, fifty-nine people were massacred and three hundred injured in the space of twenty minutes. But inside, the women and children were safe. Once again, as with the story of Antoinette Tuff, a conventional protection system was in place—in this case, UN troops—that proved useless (they are ordered to not fire in those situations), while an unarmed nonviolent presence saved the day. As Andres pointed out, “If we had had a weapon, we would have been killed.” And Derek sagely added, “We had another weapon.” The motto of Nonviolent Peaceforce: “what you can say yes to when you say no to war.”

No one in the nonviolence community, much less any other community, believes that we will have a world without conflict in any foreseeable future. Nonviolence advocates don’t even wish for that, because when properly handled, conflict is an opportunity for real growth. But we can imagine a world without violence. In practice, when we speak of a nonviolent or peaceable future, we’re talking about a world where conflict is relatively rare because justice prevails in a life-supporting culture; a culture supporting each person to find her or his contribution to the world through meaningful work, and where robust systems are in place—like RJ and UCP—so that people can negotiate solutions to such conflicts as still do occur.

There are two more principles of the new story vision that will help to round out its picture of this world and, in the near term, give us a pretty complete toolkit to tackle other problems in other sectors of the social spectrum.

Unity in diversity

Because it gets down to fundamentals, the new story and critical tool of nonviolence raise all the foundering boats across the spectrum of our society. We can start with the seemingly most intractable and certainly most painful aspect of violence: racism. From the new story point of view, racism is mistaking diversity for separateness—leading inevitably, it seems, to that feeling of superiority to the “other.” Diversity belongs on the surface of life, where it’s actually part of the vital need we all have for autonomy. In a mysterious way, it almost seems like differences exist so that we can work on seeing past them: in fact, this was expressed beautifully in a famous Sura from the Quran, where God says, “O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise [each other])” (49:13). According to the wisdom tradition that’s been handed down to us in many cultures, the natural relationship among living things, toward which our evolution is tending, is one not of competition, but of cooperation. Today science is giving his view needed support, as we’ll see in chapter 5.

A major element in Gandhi’s Constructive Program was heart unity. He pointed out that Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jew, and Christian all worship the same god, the same underlying reality, in different forms. The diverse forms suit diverse temperaments and diverse cultures. He discouraged people (like E. F. Schumacher) from converting to another religion: why jump sideways from one path to another, only to lose traction, when they all lead to the same goal?

In practice, heart unity means that as long as I want you to be happy, I’m responding to the unity at the core of our being. What do I care how much money you have or even how you vote? I can try to get you to do wiser things with your money or get you to change your voting habits, but if I’m to be truly nonviolent, you have to want to. Nor will I lose any respect for you if you don’t. The apparent paradox of unity in diversity can be sorted out pretty easily: unity is to be striven for at the heart, diversity is to be cherished on the surface. Both are equally important, at their respective levels. In his nonviolence classic, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King brought out the indispensable role of diversity in words that should be in every curriculum: “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

I need you to be who you are, to be authentically different from me on the surface. I need that in order for us to be truly one in the deep place of our aspirations and our deepest longings, avoiding the friction of needless competition. We can make this a simple guideline:

Diversity is crucial on the surface of life, as unity is beneath that surface.

Needs and wants, or the illusion of scarcity and the miracle of abundance. Every psychology student knows about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: a pyramid with lower needs like food, clothing, and shelter at the base, building up through higher needs like dignity, to the apex. The model has been a bit discredited among psychologists but still prevails in pop psychology. However, it turns out that Maslow, not unlike Darwin and even Einstein (whose contribution to peace is generally passed over in favor of his one brief contribution to the atomic bomb), was put through the reductionist lens of the old story before he made his way to the general public. In reality, as Lila MacLellan recently pointed out, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is based on an elitist misreading of his work.⁴¹ Maslow had an experience while watching a military parade in 1941, the year the United States entered WWII. He dedicated the rest of his life to developing a “psychology for the peace table.” Back when the field was still dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis and reductive behaviorism, he sought to bring back wonder and awe, transcendence and religion, as one of his biographers puts it. He had these ideas that by changing psychology, he could change the world by founding a theory that would elevate what was positive and unique in human nature. He did not, in other words, construe his theory of needs as a pyramid—a hierarchy—rather, he wanted to show that our higher needs, like dignity and meaning, bring out who we really are. If you think about it, they are therefore the key to ensuring that everyone, but everyone, can satisfy the basic needs of adequate nutrition and safety and need not undergo the indignity of privation.

That privation is an artificial construct, the result of greed, artificially intensified by culture in the modern world. E. F. Schumacher, the pioneer and hero of the new economy, had another way to look at this. He pointed out that we’re consuming the capital of nature instead of her interest—that is, using up nonrenewable resources like coal and oil instead of renewable ones like wind and sunlight. We can live off the “interest” of nature indefinitely, but as any economist will point out, once you spend the capital, it is gone. (I once asked Schumacher, “Wouldn’t you say that the whole appropriate technology movement you write about really grows out of Gandhi’s spinning wheel?” “Absolutely,” he said proudly.) But there’s more. When we push on, into the realm of the third harmony, the reservoir of our inner resources, we discover something remarkable indeed. Resources like love, dignity, and courage are beyond renewables: they grow with use!

Here we meet the positive converse of James Baldwin’s warning that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own. If I respect you, my own dignity increases, since in respecting you I respect your dignity as a human being, in which I share. I touch something real in myself that gives me a deserved feeling of worth that does a lot of good, though it may or may not make itself felt on the conscious level. The same with love, with courage. Thanks to our gradual discovery of the inner world, we’re starting to see through the material paradigm that has trapped us in the mistaken belief that we ourselves are material beings. Scarcity has begun to be recognized in many circles today as not a quality of nature but an artifact of our paradigm. It’s an illusion caused by our outward orientation that turns our face away from the resources within us. Yet the idea that scarcity is an illusion can be confusing when we see scarcity wherever we look. To see abundance takes some practice, but it’s unmistakable.

COMPETITION AND THE NEW STORY

Joe Ehrmann, a former defensive linebacker for the Detroit Lions, retired from football to fill a different role—one that made him what some called the most important coach in America.⁴² And why? Because he passionately believes that the suggestive, modeling power of sports can be used to promote not competition (call it previolence) but community. What we do on the field is what we do in every field, Ehrmann argues, from love to war, with business in between: we compare, we compete. That’s all we ever do. It leaves most men feeling isolated and alone. And it destroys our concept of community. And so at Gilman High, in the tough neighborhoods of East Baltimore, he modeled a great change. As his boys took the field for practice, he would shout, “What is our job as coaches?” and the boys would shout back “To love us!”

He would ask, “What is your job?” and the boys would answer, “To love each other!”⁴³

In his TED talk, Ehrmann speaks passionately about how our culture practices a massive repression of the very thing that makes us human and able to find and carry out our contribution to the world—our compassionate nature—and how he worked to overcome that with his players.⁴⁴ Winning? He doesn’t even bring it up. But if you do, here’s what you find out: Gilman High School football finished three of the last six seasons undefeated and No. 1 in Baltimore. In 2002, the team ranked No. 1 in Maryland and climbed to No. 14 in the national rankings.

I understand why people often say the solution to this or that problem facing us is complicated. But when you get right down to it, in practical terms, is it really? It seems complicated when you’re looking at the surface. Under the surface we find ourselves dealing with the same principles that apply across many fields where conflict can occur—business, sports, wherever—actually, today, where can it not? For example, we’ve seen that the simple principle needed to reorient economics is to switch from the emphasis on wants to needs. This is exactly what we find in the area of conflict. What do we need to practice nonviolence? Dr. Bernard Lafayette likes to say, “The funny thing about nonviolence is, when you step out of the shower in the morning you have everything you need to use it.” The bottomless pit that is military spending can be taken as proof that we’re trying to solve a human problem with objects—material things—and the same is shown by the way we’re wrecking the life-support system of the planet. You cannot solve human problems with material things—and they’re all human problems. As Dr. Vandana Shiva said in a lecture I attended back in 2007, “If you stop the pollution in people’s minds, they will stop their pollution of the environment.”

DESTITUTION AND DEVELOPMENT

It is critically important, then, to understand what we really need—an impossible question if we do not understand who or what we really are. If we think we are mainly or primarily bodies, we will end up thinking we need what someone else already has. Once we realize we are conscious beings with hitherto untapped inner resources, we’ll instead spend our time looking for ways to help others and get on with our common evolution.

This connection between being and needs was brought home by a hard-hitting reflection on wants and needs by the great modern mystic Anandamayi Ma: “Man appears to be the embodiment of want. Want is what he thinks about and want indeed is what he obtains. Contemplate your true being (emphasis added) or else there will be want, wrong action, helplessness, distress and death.”⁴⁵

In the new story, the way to solve the problems of starvation and poverty and save the planet in the process is to become aware of our higher needs and the inner resources we have to answer them. When we begin to sense that we are spirit, this brings with it a sense of connection with others, whom we also begin to see as spirit, and it becomes easy to make the arrangements that work for everyone. In fact, it becomes a joy. This is the reasoning behind Gandhi’s famous observation, which otherwise strikes many people as unrealistic, that there is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed. Greed comes from wrong vision—that we are separate and bodily only—and wrong vision is curable. A person who feels secure, wanted, and worthy will be unlikely to believe that a new kind of toothpaste will make them happy, much less to believe that their happiness depends on the unhappiness of another. Their main concern will be to find out how to make their best contribution to life. Ironically, then, we already have inexhaustible resources within us to supply those higher needs, while the resources that were available to fulfill the lower ones are fast approaching exhaustion. This has led to exploitation and violence, which deepens the alienation from which we are trying to escape—a vicious cycle if ever there was one.

When we dispel the illusion of scarcity from our minds, we have taken the first step toward breaking this cycle. We make the surprising discovery that our higher needs, while they are higher in the sense that they have more to do with what it means to be human, are actually prior in the sense that if we attend to them first they bring in their wake solutions to the “lower” set. Gandhi actually felt that there was a delicate balance built into the universe such that anything we take that we don’t need is in effect taken from the hand of someone who does.

I would plead for a reasonable allowance here. Most of us need, not just want, some comfort and entertainment. But there’s no question that the intractable dilemmas of poverty and starvation that have not yielded to direct approaches will almost solve themselves when the right number of people know themselves well enough that they no longer feel a need to exploit persons or planet.

Recognizing the impact of “wants” or greed, the great apostles of nonviolence have always set themselves in opposition to it. Gandhi again: “A time is coming when those who are in the mad rush today of multiplying their wants, vainly thinking that they add to the real substance, real knowledge of the world, will retrace their steps and say: ‘What have we done?’”

It seems to many, myself included, that the time to ask “What have we done?” is now.

In one of the most revered of the Hindu Scriptures, the Katha Upanishad, there are four hard-hitting words that should be on the desk of every economist (I.1.27): “Na vittena tarpaniyo manuṣyaḥ” (The human being can never be satisfied by wealth). Adopting this bit of wisdom would mean the death of advertising as we know it, whose urgent messaging would have us believe we can be satisfied only by wealth. Have you, like me, ever found yourself heading for the refrigerator only to discover that you weren’t hungry? There’s a kind of referred sensation, where you mistake the need for some peace of mind with the desire to consume something. Since this is inherently impossible, it eventually gets us wrapped up in our own wants to the point where A wants to have more of something than B has, even if neither of them needs it.

Happily, as Gandhi points out, we are approaching the day when we’ll ask, “What have we done?” and start looking for happiness where it is to be found—and for an economy that truly works as if people matter. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was based on the lives and incomes of nearly half a million randomly selected U.S. citizens. They demonstrated that no matter how you turn it, once your basic needs are taken care of, money and other rewards don’t make you happier.⁴⁶ Once we have enough to satisfy our basic, first-level needs, the further satisfaction that we all need and deserve has nothing to do with external possessions. It has to do with bonding, autonomy, dignity, meaning, and the like; in other words, our inner resources, which are not at all scarce and never need to put us in competition with others. Of course, basic needs are basic. If, as Gandhi said, we try to talk to a starving man about God, it would be an insult. He has to be fed first. The obligation to make sure every person has access to food, clothing, and shelter—and health care and education—is universal. But those of us for whom these needs are reasonably met need to build a system that does that for everyone. And such a system can be based on a culture that gives every person a higher image of themself and points out a way to serve life as a whole.

After all, what do we need from the resources of the earth to stay alive? Not very much, as long as human behaviors don’t block us from getting to them. And what do we need to be fully realized? A great deal, but it already lies within us, as we have only begun to be aware. Needs are given by nature, and they can be fulfilled by nature. Wants are exaggerated by conditioning, and they cannot be fulfilled no matter what you do. And so it is with conflict: our real needs are never in irreducible conflict; it’s only when wants are artificially elaborated, usually by external influences, that they seem to be.

THE POWER OF STORY

There is an important way to leverage our work, in whatever sector we choose to do it. Here’s the background. Among the eighteen broad-ranging projects that made up Gandhi’s Constructive Program, one stood out: charkha, spinning homespun cotton. He called it the sun of the solar system of CP. It was a nonconfrontational way to rescue India from poverty, and thus break the grip of foreign domination. Moreover, it was something just about everybody could do. It provided a literally hands-on embodiment of the unity of their struggle. What could do this for us today? We propose that “new story creation” is our charkha. It underlies all the other changes. And everyone can do it—in words, in action, or best of all, in both.

If we want our actions to add to the building of a new culture even while resolving the issue at hand, we should not hesitate to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, to anyone who’ll listen. The point is not that they’ll immediately “get it”; the point is that this is how paradigms change: through repetition that slowly builds up and becomes the new normal. Gandhi, the activist’s activist, never missed a chance to explain what he was doing, based on India’s own spiritual tradition and what he knew of the relevant science at that time. He would say that to not believe in the possibility of peace is to disbelieve in the godliness of human nature, and so forth, explaining his reasoning in voluminous talks and writings, from the earliest days in South Africa until his physical voice was silenced by a madman’s bullets. It was said of him that no one enjoyed conversation as much as he, because he knew how conversation builds relationships, and explanations can point the way to a new world. Every conversation may not result in a radical change of mind, but the heart may experience some little shock of recognition, even register a little twinge of envy. These twinges, experienced repeatedly, reinforced by reason when the heart opens to reason, are the stuff of which paradigm shifts are made.

In the next two chapters we’ll look into both the scientific and the spiritual testimonies for the new story, but here are some of the key points as it relates to human nature:

  We are conscious beings, far from limited to these ephemeral bodies (miracles though they be).

  Therefore we do not need to ravage the earth for material goods to be fulfilled.

  We do not need to defeat enemies to be secure; that’s done by building relationships of trust and community.

  We have control over our own destiny, at least to a significant degree.

  Among our spiritual capacities, the most characteristic of our species is the capacity to offer and respond to nonviolence.

  And finally, if your audience is ready to hear this, too, you can throw in the idea that evolution itself is moving toward ever-greater consciousness and unity.

By sharing these points in whatever version we’re comfortable with when we get a chance to explain why we’re saving whales or blocking a pipeline, the new story will become humanity’s window on the world. It has taken an unending deluge of advertising and other messaging to keep us believing we can be happy only by buying things. It has taken consistent repetition throughout our education, news, and political culture to make us believe that competition is unavoidable and that we can make ourselves secure only by dominating others. It will also take consistency and repetition to rediscover the truth, but far less than it has taken to send us off on this false trajectory. Such is the innate power of truth and the innate dignity of the human being.

In almost no case, as we’ve seen, do we have to invent the institutions of a nonviolent future from whole cloth; in virtually every case they already exist. What we need to do is understand their significance, and then to grow them. In this, the new story and its truer image of the human being will play a historic, game-changing role. And we will realize our destiny as evolving nonviolent beings in a sane world.

What, then, is the actual content of the new story? It’s time to look at what the wisdom tradition has been saying from time immemorial, and still is saying through recent representatives (“new” is of course a misnomer), and how new trends in science support it wherever science overlaps with inner vision. After all, if we want to tell the new story we have to know what we’re talking about, and it’s not likely that we learned it in school. Besides, we all need the inspiration that only truth can give us.