The Power of Nonviolence

“We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love

• Nonviolence is love in action. It encourages living your life as if the power of love, the power of nonviolence, lives within you. As wise teachers of every major religion, race and culture have taught us, love is the strongest power on earth. Nonviolence includes a method of struggle that empowers persons and communities to deal creatively with conflict, oppression and injustice. It empowers us in our personal lives, and guides our behavior with our families, co-workers, neighbors and friends. Nonviolence embraces a love that is compassionate, practical and successful, and lifts the spirits of all involved. It recognizes that all life is sacred and interrelated. It is lived by uniting a tough mind with a tender heart.

• Nonviolence offers us two significant gifts: 
  1) a philosophy and attitude to live by
  2) a method for bringing about justice, social change and peace that is more successful than other methods. (Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict)

• Gandhi used the term “Satyagraha” to capture this powerful combination of love and activist methodology for social change: “Satya” is truth which equals love and “Graha” is force: “Love-force.” A love that is powerful and effective —nonviolence.

• Nonviolence encourages a discerning mind and an open heart. Dr. King described nonviolence as rooted in agape, “unconditional love.” You don’t have to like your opponent to love them because we distinguish the doer from and the deed, and everyone, even the worst among us, is entitled to human dignity.

• Nonviolence does not harm others through actions of the body, speech or mind. Gandhi described ahimsa as “non-injury, nonviolence, non-harm, the renunciation of the will to kill and the intention to hurt any living thing, the abstention from hostile thought, word or deed, and compassion for all living creatures.” READ MORE

• All life is interdependent. All people are interrelated. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (Dr. King)

• The focus of nonviolent action is the transformation of evil systems, unjust policies and oppressive laws through tested nonviolent methods and strategies. It does not seek to defeat or destroy opponents. Instead, it works to convince them of the justice of your movement and cause. It recognizes that your opponents experience their own anxieties, embarrassments and fears. When negotiating, we give them a way to grow and change, along with a way to save face.

• We hold the future of our planet in our hands. Today, with our advanced machinery of death, “the choice is no longer violence or nonviolence, but nonviolence or nonexistence.” (Dr. King)

• Beloved Community is used by civil rights activists as the vision of a nonviolent society, one in which problems and conflicts exist, but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. It is based on the scientific and moral awareness that we are all members of one human family. “Consider those two words,” John Lewis asked. “Beloved means not hateful, not violent, not uncaring, not unkind. And Community means not separated, not polarized, not locked in struggle.” (READ MORE) In all our encounters we conduct ourselves with dignity and self-respect. When they go low, we go high.

• We live today as if the Beloved Community is here. John Lewis wrote: “You live as if you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.” READ MORE

• Nonviolence recognizes that the ends are represented by the means. Peace and harmony cannot come from discord and war, nor justice through injustice. The means and the ends must be in harmony. The seed contains the tree. “Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the ideal-in-the-making and the end-in-progress. Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means.” (Dr. King)

• Nonviolent practitioners are open-minded in the awareness that they do not have all the answers. They are always seeking a greater, deeper and more complete truth.

• Nonviolent practitioners have limitless hope. They have the full conviction that the justice of their cause will eventually prevail because human history reflects a movement, however gradual, toward greater justice, equality, freedom and peace.  

• It takes moral courage to be nonviolent, a strong will and a sense of hope, but the reward is great: peace, freedom, justice and harmony with the earth and all its creatures.

For further inspiration from key personalities of nonviolence, turn to THOUGHTS ON NONVIOLENCE

Dr. King taught that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” In this moment, the arc is in our hands to bend in the direction we choose.