Be the Change: Personal and Social

'Be the Change You Want to See in the World'

This quote has been attributed to Gandhi and in essence what he believed, however as Brian Morton of the New York Times (2011) points out, there is 'no reliable documentary evidence' that he said it, whereas the following is verifiable:

'If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.
... We need not wait to see what others do.' 

Plaque outside Gandhi's house in Mumbai, India 2011

As Morton contends, Gandhi is saying 'that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough.' 

I visited his home in Mumbai and was easily able to imagine, amongst the few possessions he owned and the simple life he led, why he believed in satyagraha - holding with the truth, a way of life to be developed, habits to be adapted, practises to be changed and virtues to be cultivated (as Joseph Geraci, from the Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies, would put it)

Morton, N. (2011) 'Falser Words Were Never Spoken', New York Times, August 29, 2011

Do the Most Good Thing: A Most Violent Year

Abel Morales tries, in A Most Violent Year, when the paths fork, to 'do the most good thing'. We should not be surprised when his name is a play on the words able and morals. It is a tense thriller with violence and the constant threat of violence and we wait on tenterhooks to see if he will give in. Will he take, what some call, the 'easy' route? The path of least resistance for everyone else .Everyone around him wants him to fight violence with violence. Will he? How far will he go? We wonder,  what we would do in his situation?

A brilliant examination of the morals of business in New York in one of its most violent years, 1981. It would be interesting to see how Abel Morales would apply the Theory of Change to achieving his goals. Does he heed Gandhi's plea to:

'Be the Change You Want to See in the World'

...or does the world change him instead?

Other posts on doing the right thing...

• Morals & Ethics: How to Live Well
• Doing the Right Thing
• Doing the Right Thing Right

10 Reasons We Should Make Mistakes

"Make glorious, amazing mistakes" was Neil Gaiman's advice in his New Year Wish, "because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something."

 

Many amazing inventions (and possibly inventors) have been born of mistakes, from penicillin to Xrays. We think of mistakes as things that are problems and cause injury and death. We think of things aa mundane as spelling mistakes, as worring as forgetting to turn the gas off to tragedies like the sinking of the Titanic.

We don't think of mistakes as learning tools, as ways of experimentation, as ways to find out what works from what doesn't work. It's not call 'trial and error' for nothing!

Quite a few people, according to Quote Investigator have thought similarly about mistakes over the last 150 years:

1. He who never made a mistake, never made a discovery. (Samuel Smiles, 1859)
2. The man who never makes enny blunders seldum makes enny good hits. (Josh Billings, 1874)
3. A man who never makes a mistake will never make anything. ( Mr. Phelps, 1889)
4. It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes. (Joseph Conrad, 1896)
5. The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything. (Theodore Roosevelt, 1900)
6. The man who does things makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all—doing nothing. (Poor Richard Junior’s Philosophy, 1903)
7. Every man makes mistakes; they say a man who never makes mistakes never makes anything else. (G.K. Chesterton, 1927)
8. The man who never makes a mistake must get tired of doing nothing. (Will Rogers, 1993)
9. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein, 1995)

10. In 1891 Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” 

As Gandhi said:

“Freedom is not worth having 

if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

(Cited in Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts, 2013 by G. Beri)

Doing the Right Thing

'It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.'

(Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre)

Or to paraphrase the Bible:

Turn the other cheek.

However in the Bible it is providing an alternative tack to take to 'An eye for and eye, and a tooth for a tooth' . So rather than seeking revenge in equal measure to the crime committed, the advice appears to be to provide instead an opportunity of equal measure for the offence to be repeated. This time not out of anger or perhaps in the cold light of day. Is it providing an opportunity for the person to do the right thing? Is it to give them a second change?

Otherwise we are saying that people who suffer domestic violence should just put up with it. Or is it saying that it is as equally ridiculous to use the mantra 'An eye for an eye and an tooth for a tooth' as it is to say that if some one hits you on one cheek that you should give them the other to hit too. Or perhaps it is expanding on the idea that revenge is self-perpetuating and will eventually come back to bite you.

So what is the 'right thing'?

• I've heard parents tell their kids to hit the bully back.
• I've heard the tit-for-tat goings on of messy divorces.
• I've heard the neighbourhood ASBO threatening battles.
• I've heard the sentences prisoners judges and juries have doled out for crimes.

What is the difference between punishment and revenge? Does it matter? Do either make the world a better place?

I remember a 7 year old saying to me how 'horrible' someone was all the time, that the boy just didn't know how to 'behave'  and everybody said he was 'naughty' so nobody liked him or wanted to play with him and he got into 'trouble' a lot.

We talked about how 'sad' it was that he should make people feel like that but we also discussed how sad it was that he had no friends and how that must feel. But out of the conversation, the most important question was:

'How can someone know how to behave if they are not shown?'

 

If every time someone behaves in the manner in which they have been brought up or are accustomed to,  they are punished or experience some other form or reinforcement of negative behaviours how will they ever know what appropriate behaviour looks or feels like or have the positive association of reinforcement?

Its trust. How can we expect people to do the right thing if we don't do it ourselves? What will they learn from us?

• If he hits me and I hit him back. I am saying it is ok to hit. 
• If he attacks my home and I bomb his back. I'm saying its ok to bomb.
• If he kills someone and he is given the death penalty. I am saying its ok to kill.

It's not ok to hit, bomb or kill, whatever my justification...whether by tradition, law or military force. We must overcome our baser, immature and reactionary natures. Evolution can't come fast enough. 

Turn the other cheek. If only to give yourself time to think of what to do next, time to develop a plan, a way of dealing with the issues at the root of the problem. To prevent recurrences of the same problem for the same reasons.

Like Gandhi said:

 'An eye for and eye only makes the whole world blind.'

And as Martin Luther King Jnr said:

'Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.'

 (King, 1958, p.213)

52 Quotes on War & Peace  and  some thoughts on Hope

 

King, M, L. (1958) 'Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story', Harper & Row, New York