Erikson, Erik. Gandhi’s Truth: On The Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969.

Seasoned playfulness is long in developing, and I think that in Gandhi’s life it can be shown to have alleviated his moral precocity and to have added a significant dimension to his evolving personal and political style. It even seems to be an essential ingredient in nonviolence. (133)

Real suffering bravely borne melts even a heart of stone. Such is the potency of suffering or tapas. And there lies the key to Satyagraha…(Gandhi, as cited in Erikson, 183)

One can see, then, why Gandhi, in all his preoccupation with sexuality and with dirt, with race and with poverty, gradually recognized the fact that civilized man can overcome his pride in his pseudo-species only by learning to differentiate rationally and compassionately between matters of unhygienic contamination and matters of mere symbolic uncleanness – a modern sense of discrimination which would no longer reject India’s Untouchable castes upon whom all dirtiness had been ritually projected for centuries. But he also saw that “cleanliness,” once it becomes a matter of pious compulsion, can be as dirty as its opposite, even as hypocritical moralism can be as immoral as sin. Thus, to wash compulsively in dirty water can make one fell virtuous and clean, even as today hygiene by detergents can contaminate the very water which is supposed to provide a clean source of health: for man ignores what it really means to be clean because of his vain satisfaction in having acted “clean.” (197)

On this core, they were ready to kill – and it was now Gandhi’s job to convince them that to kill and to be killed was relatively easy: to know how to die without killing and to make one’s death count for life – that was the question. Thus, from this rock-bottom of racial indignity, Satyagraha emerged, step by step. (197)

But an oath, he warned, cannot be passed by majority vote: each individual takes it, facing not his neighbor but his God. Nor should it be taken in order to gain power over anybody but oneself, for the power of an oath is defined by what one man can promise to do, and what he is willing to suffer: insult, incarceration, hard labor, flogging, fine, deportation, and even death. (199)

But for the future it is important to affirm unequivocally that what you call Satyagraha must not remain restricted to ascetic men and women who believe that they can overcome violence only by sexual-disarmament. For the danger of a riotous return of violence always remains at least latent if we do not succeed in imbuing essential daily experiences with a Satyagraha-of-everyday-life. (234)

It is in daily life and especially in the life of children that the human propensity for violence is founded; and we now suspect that much of that excess of violence which distinguishes man from animals is created in him by those child-training methods which set one part of him against another. (234)

It is not enough any more – not after the appearance of your Western contemporary, Freud – to be a watchful moralist. For we now have detailed insights into our inner ambiguities, ambivalences, and instinctual conflicts; and only an additional leverage of truth based on self-knowledge promises to give us freedom in the full light of conscious day, whereas in the past, moralistic terrorism succeeded only in driving our worst proclivities underground, to remain there until riotous conditions of uncertainty our chaos would permit them to emerge redoubled. (235)

And here is the point: not once, in all your writings, do you grant that a sexual relationship could be characterized by what we call “mutuality.” This is by no means a capacity easily developed or sustained without self-control and sacrifice, but as an approximation and a goal, it describes the only kind of sexual relationship in which the other person does not become a mere object either of sexual or aggressive desire. (236)

To kill sinners for a “just cause,” to become a hero in taking the chance of being killed in the act of so killing, and to venerate such heroism in the eyes of God – all this frees us from the common human burden of living guiltily and absurdly. And yet we cannot become one species without assuming, together, that burden. (249-250)

The point is that excess and riot follow repression and suppression when the moral restraints are lifted, precisely because of the autocratic and blind nature of these restraints. (251)

But catastrophes always increase superstition, which in India means a fear of pollution – not by dirty water, mind you , nor by rats or rat-fleas, but by health schemers, who would put public hygiene above caste apartheid. (323)

But what interests us today is not whether he really was or only imagined himself to be deathly ill. The question is what caused this man at that historical moment to become the living and suffering center of a conflict between two alternatives which had always existed in men’s minds: seeking glory and immortality through killing and being killed, in the heroic defense of a territory or world-image deemed in mortal danger – and saving one’s soul at the risk of losing one’s life in extending even to the enemy the faith of human love. As Gandhi now noticed with horror and contempt, not one of his Satyagrahis refused to go to war because of a reluctance to kill: clearly, they simply did not wish to die. (372)

I have come to see, what I did not so clearly before, that there is non-violence in violence. This is the big change which has come about. I had not fully realized the duty of restraining a drunkard from doing evil, of killing a dog in agony or one infected with rabies. In all these instances, violence is in fact non-violence. Violence is a function of the body. Brachmacharya consists in refraining from sexual indulgence, but we do not bring up our children to be impotent. They will have observed brachmacharya only if though possessed of the highest virility they can master the physical urge. In the same way, our offspring must be strong in physique. If they cannot completely renounce the urge to violence, we may permit them to commit violence, to use their strength to fight and thus make them non-violent. Non-violence was taught by a Kshatriya to Kshatriya. (Gandhi, as cited in Erikson, 374)

I present these well-known details because one must try to envisage what has become of man as a military, or maybe one should say a policing mind, in the possession of mechanized weapons. Not that one could entertain the idea of a society altogether without police or should indulge in treating police-men as a separate species, like henchmen. They are only the willing puppets serving an overwhelming propensity of human nature, namely, brutal righteousness. I cannot make this point any stronger than by reminding the reader that, in my open letter to the Mahatma, I had reason to accuse him, too, of implicit violence in his policing and sentencing of the bathing children in South Africa. For we all have become obedient to the policing mind; and once we have learned to reduce “the other” – any living human being in the wrong place, the wrong category, or the wrong uniform – to a dirty speck in our moral vision, and potentially a mere target in the sight of our (or our soldiery’s) gun, we are on the way to violating man’s essence, if not his very life. (390-391)

At the time of the Ahmedabad strike, Gandhi was forty-eight years old: middle-aged Mahatma, indeed. That the very next year he emerged as the father of his country only lends greater importance to the fact that the middle span of life is under the dominance of the universal human need and strength which I have come to subsume under the term generativity. I have said that in this stage a man and a woman must have defined for themselves what and whom they have come to care for, what they care to do well, and how they plan to take care of what they have started and created. (395)

But it is clear that the great leader creates for himself and for many others new choices and new cares. These he derives from a mighty drivenness, an intense and yet flexible energy, a shocking originality, and a capacity to impose on his time what most concerns him – which he does so convincingly that his time believes this concern to have emanated “naturally” from ripe necessities. (395)

Gandhi’s actualism, then, first of all consisted in his knowledge of, and his ability to gain strength from, the fact that nothing is more powerful in the world than conscious nothingness if it is paired with the gift of giving and accepting actuality. It is not for me to say what his power is; yet obviously it demands the keenest of minds and a most experienced heart, for otherwise it would be crushed between megalomania and self-destruction. (397)

As for the rest of mankind, I have an inkling that our response to such a man rests on the need of all men to find a few who plausibly take upon themselves – and seem to give meaning to – what others must deny at all times but cannot really forget for a moment. (397)

Truthful action, for Gandhi, was governed by the readiness to get hurt and yet not to hurt – action governed by the principles of ahimsa…For even where one may not be able to avoid harming or hurting, forcing or demeaning another whenever one must coerce him, one should try even in doing so, not to violate his essence, for such violence can only evoke counter-violence, which may end in a kind of truce, but not in truth. For ahimsa as acted upon by Gandhi not only means not to hurt another, it means to respect the truth in him. (412)

Gandhi remind us that, since we can not possibly know the absolute truth, we are “therefore not competent to punish” – a most essential reminder, since man when tempted to violence always parades as another’s policeman, convincing himself that whatever he is doing to another, that other “has it coming to him.” Whoever acts on such righteousness, however, implicates himself in a mixture of pride and guilt which undermines his position psychologically and ethically. Against this typical cycle, Gandhi claimed that only the voluntary acceptance of self-suffering can reveal the truth latent in a conflict – and in the opponent. (412)

Such truth, however, could not depend on individual impressions and decisions. It could reveal itself only as long as the resisters’ actions remained co-ordinated and were guided by a code which was as firm as it was flexible enough to perceive changes – and to obey changing commands. The leader would have to be able to count on a discipline based on the Satyagrahi’s commitment to suffer the opponent’s anger without getting angry and yet also without ever submitting to any violent coercion by anyone; to remain so attuned to the opponent’s position that he would be ready, on the leader’s command, even to come to the opponent’s help in any unforeseen situation which might rob him of his freedom to remain a counterplayer on the terms agreed upon; and to remain, in principle, so law-abiding that he would refuse co-operation with the law or law-enforcing agencies only in the chosen and defined issues. Within these limits, he would accept and even demand those penalties which by his chosen action he had willingly invoked against himself. (416)

At its unfriendliest, then, “pseudo” means that somebody is trying with all the semi-sincerity of propaganda to put something over on himself as well as on others; and I am afraid that I mean to convey just that. This “pseudo” aspect of man’s collective identities can become dominant under the impact of historical and economic displacements, which make a group’s self-idealization both more defensive and more exclusive. This process is so fundamental to man that, as modern history shows, the pseudo-species mentality refuses to yield even to gains in knowledge and experience acquired through progress. Even most “advanced” nations can harbor, and, in fact, make fanatically explicit, a mystical adherence to the mentality of the pseudo-species. The total victory of this mentality in an enlightened modern nation was exemplified in Hitler’s Germany. (432)

The most frightening aspect of pseudo-speciation, however, is the fact that a “species” which has come under the dominance of another is apt to incorporate the derisive opinion of the dominant “species” into its own self-estimation, that is, it permits itself to become infantalized, storing up within and against itself a rage which it dare not vent against the oppressor and, indeed, often dares not feel. (432)

This can become a curse from generation to generation, leading at first to occasional violence among the oppressed themselves until, at last, all the latent rage can rush into riotous manifestation at a moment when historical circumstances seem to invite and to sanction an explosion. It should not surprise us that such riotousness can be childishly gay even as it is carelessly destructive: for the oppressed have stood their oppression only by cultivating a defensive childlikeness and childishness in their individual lives and a fragmented primitivity in their cultural heritage. It stands to reason, then, that where an emphasis on the pseudo-species prevails – as in much of colonial history – the development of every participant individual is endangered by various combinations of guilt and rage which prevent true development, even where knowledge and expertise abound. (433)