What follows is the third part in our three part series on how the principles of nonviolence bring about positive, meaningful change for society and can help us to finally arrive at that every elusive “better tomorrow” that has always been promised by those in power but which has never actually manifested.
You can find Part 1: The Protests here and Part 2: Changing the Government here.
Greater peace is one of the greater blessings of nonviolence. Dr. Erica Chenoweth, found that nonviolent movements are far more likely to usher in less oppressive political institutions and are much less likely to devolve into conflict than violent revolutions, which typically end in equally oppressive political system as the one before and that in turn inspires further civil war to overthrow the new regime. But even her studies were done within the confines of the Statist mentality. Understanding the poison of the State and its true purpose we can take the power of nonviolence farther. We can move beyond the passions that justify the State altogether and achieve the Beloved Community. The first step along that path is reconciliation
Reconciliation
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:44-45)
Once you eliminate the State you eliminate the centralizing force and instead allow people to naturally gravitate towards the systems and methods that best benefit them. Because there is no longer a State to set everyone fighting over who gets to control the single system everyone must follow much of the social discord and violence that exists in society dissipates. Instead of the disparate groups of people fighting over who controls the various organs of the State to ensure and enforce their ideas upon everyone else, people create the differing systems that they believe will best serve their needs and promote them to the world by their success (or warn the world away by their failures.) Once the system of control disappears, the anger and hatred generated by the attempt to manipulate and control people against their will disappears. Without the State, exploitation is impossible.
The result is greater social harmony for all of society and that allows for the next great possibility- reconciliation. We begin to see others not as evil and our enemies but as people who themselves have been victimized by the poison of evil ideas. In the words of Dr. King:
The nonviolent resister must often express protest through noncooperation and boycotts, but the resister realizes that these are not ends in themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.
…It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. If she is opposing racial injustice, the nonviolent resister has the vision to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: ‘tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And, if there is a victory, it will be a victory not merely for fifty thousand Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be injust.’
The ultimate outcome of violence is bitterness and hatred that continues to divide people for decades and centuries to come. The outcome of building a nonviolent society is reconciliation and love. We begin to see how others are not themselves evil. Rather they are victims of evil which has corrupted their minds, blinded their eyes, and twisted their actions. Our goal becomes not to destroy them, but to love them and save them, and in saving them to heal the scars and wounds of society, to bind up broken hearts, and to build a better society.
As the Prophet Joseph Smith taught:
Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin, as to take them by the hand, and watch over them with tenderness. When persons manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what power it has over my mind, while the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the harsh feelings and depress the human mind.
….The nearer we get to our Heavenly Father, the more are we disposed to look with compassion on perishing souls – we feel that we want to take them upon our shoulders, and cast their sins behind our backs. My talk is intended for all this society; if you would have God have mercy on you, have mercy on one another.
As we love our enemies, pray for them, serve them, help them, hope for them, and forgive them we will discover something that will seem magical- we will no longer have enemies. And without enemies war is impossible. That should ever be our goal. It is not enough to triumph in any single struggle, but to open society and fill it with such service and love that conflict itself becomes a thing of the past. It means letting go of our obsession for ” pure justice” and embrace the pure essence of Christianity- love, mercy, and forgiveness, which in turn creates reconciliation and unity not just between God and man, but between each one of us. Marshall McConkie explains it excellently:
As a prosecutor, I would know what justice and sentencing demanded and then I would read the background of the defendant, and I would get sick. I couldn’t bear the thought of doing justice, when justice would bring further harm. Justice in and of itself is straightforward—make right what you made wrong. Receive the punishment that you deserve. You know, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Let’s balance the scales and move forward. But Tevye wasn’t kidding that the end result of that type of justice is a bunch of blind and toothless people.
I hate justice.
I hate justice because balanced scales don’t always result in fixed situations—very often justice makes two sides broken instead of one. The scales are balanced, but they aren’t balanced in peace, they are balanced in pain. Blood cries out for blood, and justice without mercy, without forgiveness results in a world soaked in blood and drowning in “justice”.
I’ve seen justice without love—it balances scales and it equalizes pain. I’ve seen justice with mercy, and it ennobles, lifts, and balances justice’s scales with a healing balm in the flow of its gentleness. To paraphrase Shakespeare, mercy blesses both the extender and the receiver of it. Mercy is godly, and it allows us to function more like Him. In a world where true justice is impossible—can you be truly just without omniscience?—mercy allows for others that which we would beg for ourselves. Mercy allows for mistakes, for growth, and for progress. It does not demand suffering, but it does make room for healing.
That doesn’t mean disagreement becomes a thing of the past. Rather it means that society will be so open that if you disagree with another you will have no reason to fight him or her over it, after all there will be no State regulation that forces you to follow only the path it has decided you should walk. You will be able to go and follow your vision to either fruition or failure. In either case you will not be embittered at others because you had your opportunity, and that is all that can be asked for in a world where success is never guaranteed. Instead of trying to take everything we can and hurting each other as much as we have been hurt, we turn towards healing suffering, binding up the hearts of the wounded, helping the blind to see, mending the broken, and creating peace.
One of my favorite examples of reconciliation in action and its power to transform hearts and minds and heal society is Daryl Davis. The man is a hero.
Daryl Davis is a black man who has convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes, abandon their ideology of hate, and to leave the KKK. And he hasn’t done this without preaching at them, holding protests, or even trying to change their minds. He has done it by becoming their friend. His odyssey began when he was young. As a child living abroad he didn’t quite understand what it meant to be black in America. When his family move back to the States, Daryl joined the Boy Scouts. His earliest memory of racism is when he was walking in a parade with the Scots and people started throwing things at him. At first he thought people were throwing things at the Scouts, but as the adults rushed to surround him and protect him, he realized that he was the only one being attacked by this spontaneous act of hatred. It dawned on him that the problem wasn’t that these people hated the Scouts, it was that they hated him, the only black kid in an otherwise all white Scout troop. From this point in his life he developed a desire to answer one question that he simply couldn’t answer on his own, “How can you hate me without even knowing me?”
As an adult he became a musician and began touring the USA. As he did so he began to meet actual white supremacists and realized that now, as an adult, he had the opportunity to answer his unanswerable question. So he began talking to them. Not yelling. Not screaming. Not canceling. Not even arguing. Talking. He discovered that when you talk with people you find things about them that you have in common with them. The more you talk, the more you find in common. As you find things in common with one another you build a relationship with one another. That relationship turns into friendship. As these racists became his friend they found themselves questioning what they believed and many of them, ultimately, realize that what they believed was wrong and changed. As the man himself explains, this is at the core of what he does and why it works:
I never set out to convert anybody and I still don’t say that I’m out converting people. The media says that. What I am is the impetus for their own conversion. They come to the conclusion that there’s a different way to think and believe based upon information that they have received or the friendship that has developed with me and they turn themselves around. So yes, I’ve been the impetus for many to get out of that ideology. Initially, it was curiosity on my part. Now the impetus has expanded. I never thought anyone was going to change. I just simply wanted to know ‘why?’ How can you hate me when you don’t know me? That was my initial quest. When people began changing based on conversations I would have with them, over time they would renounce that ideology and we would become friends. The reasons why I continue doing it is because I see the need for it. Our country is so divided and granted, everybody is not going to change but if one person changes, it can change a generation.
Former KKK Grand Dragon Scott Shepherd explained how his relationship with Daryl and his encounter with people of multiple races sparked change within him:
I was forced to take a cold, hard look at myself and find out what the true problem was. The true problem wasn’t with black people or other races, the problem was me.
There is too much to Daryl’s story to include here. To learn more about this man, you can watch the documentary about his life called Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America as well as watch this in depth interview with him. But Daryl, and the many other stories like his, illustrate the principles of nonviolence and the power of love to transform the lives of men and women and bring about reconciliation- healing and unity.
Reconciliation operates under many names. Dr. King called it the Beloved Community. Latter-day Saints speak of Zion. But the reality is that it is all within reach if we follow the path of peace and refuse to engage in or revert to the ways of the animal kingdom. And a society based on reconciliation is one where racism, nationalism, sexism, hatred and bigotry of any kind no longer have any power or purpose, because the power of those in power to force their views on everyone else will have been eliminated along with the thing that makes such a thing possible- the State.
The Better Tomorrow
You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
(Matthew 5:48)
In response to his critics who asserted the supposed impossibility of his positions, Gandhi said this:
I justify entire non-violence, and consider it possible in relations between man and man and nations and nations; but it is not “a resignation from all real fighting against wickedness”. On the contrary, the non-violence of my conception is a more active and more real fighting against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness. I contemplate a mental, and therefore a moral opposition to immoralities. I seek entirely to blunt the edge of the tyrant’s sword, not by putting up against it a sharper-edged weapon, but by disappointing his expectation that I would be offering physical resistance. The resistance of the soul that I should offer instead would elude him. It would at first dazzle him, and at last compel recognition from him, which recognition would not humiliate him but would uplift him. It may be urged that this is an ideal state. And so it is.
We often speak of idealism as if it is something impossible, utopian in nature, and therefore not worth even trying for. But the truth of the matter is that the exact opposite is true. Believing that the State -a society based on the concept that brutality, theft, and violence will create anything other than oppression, discord, division, and hatred- is utopian nonsense. The pragmatist and idealist both realize the power of nonviolence not only to win individual battles -such as those currently taking place between the police state and its oppressed peoples in the streets of America today- but also the power of nonviolence to make oppression and rioting both things of the past.
The ideal will not be achieved overnight, obviously. But it can begin right this moment. If we do so we will take the first steps not merely towards overcoming racism and the systemic violence, brutality, and abuse of the State, but towards creating a better society altogether. If we really want to achieve our goals there is simply no other way to achieve them. And if we really want to achieve them then we must begin to actually pursue them instead of returning to the State like dogs to their vomit. We must recognize that the State is not merely an outside invention imposed upon us, it emerges from the violent and hateful parts of our souls. To counter that we must embrace the light within and follow the ideals that create the world we wished we lived in and not the ones which have created the one we currently inhabit.
A better world doesn’t have to wait until a tomorrow that never arrives. We can begin building it today by following the path of transformation laid out in the Principles of Peace- nonviolence, noncompliance, exposing the State, overwhelming the State, dissolving the State, and reconciliation. And these aren’t just society wide actions. They must take place within us as well. We must expose, overwhelm, and dissolve the State within us so that our examples will serve as ones to follow instead of ones to abhor. As we do so, everything else will naturally follow without compulsory means, forever and ever.
