In a chapter of his autobiography Path without Destination, Satish Kumar describes the influence Gandhi had on his life. Below, Kumar offers his thoughts on some of Gandhi’s guiding principles and how they relate to life at the end of the twentieth century.

— Ed.

 

ON TRUTH
The quest for truth is a liberating journey; it liberates me from dogmas, both religious and political. There is no final point at which I can say that I have found the truth, and that this is the truth for everyone. The moment truth is imprisoned in a belief system, it is lost. Truth cannot be preached; it can be communicated, if at all, only in dialogue and, more important, through living example.

Seekers of truth must be free from all kinds of fundamentalism. It is easy to see the fundamentalism of others, but difficult to recognize one’s own. Christians may criticize Muslim fundamentalism without recognizing their own fundamentalism. Similarly, capitalists may criticize socialist fundamentalism and forget that the fundamentalism of the free market is no less oppressive. Those who preach the superiority of Western democracy are as much a danger to tribal cultures as those who preach the politics of the one-party state.

The fundamentalism of the global economy suppresses ideas and information in the name of trade secrets, intellectual property rights, patents, and copyrights. Monopoly businesses create monoculture economies and monoculture of the mind, which blocks the search for and discovery of multifaceted truth.

 

ON NONCONSUMERISM
Excessive possessions are a trap to bind, imprison, and enslave us. If I were caught in the trap of wealth and power, much of my time would be absorbed in taking care of houses, cars, furnishings, paintings, silverware and china, computers, yachts, and umpteen other things. I would need to work hard to earn enough not just to meet my needs but to service these possessions. A point would come when my possessions would possess me, rather than my possessing them.

Possessions are signs of status, success, position, and power. It’s no wonder that our modern society has been called the consumer society. Unlimited economic growth has become the ideal of every nation in the world. In order to achieve such growth, we have destroyed lives, families, the social fabric, and our relationship with the natural world. We have passed the point of increasing human well-being by increasing material wealth.

Material wealth is only a means to an end — and that end is living a good life: spiritually, psychologically, socially, and artistically. Living a good life entails good human relationships throughout. But in our culture, the means have become the ends. We are pursuing wealth for its own sake. Having has become more important than being.

Nonconsumerism is not asceticism, nor is it a principle of denial; it is knowing the limits and enjoying the abundant gifts of nature without possessing them. Nonconsumerism is integral to a life that is simple in means and rich in ends.

 

ON PHYSICAL WORK
People the world over are divided into two categories: those who work with their hands and those who work with their minds. Peasants, farmers, craftspersons, factory workers, and other laborers work hard but get little in return. Lawyers, professors, accountants, managers, bankers, stockbrokers, landowners, and aristocrats use only their brains and are highly paid.

There is always a deep tension between the intellectual workers and the manual workers. Such a divided society is unhealthy. The practice of daily manual labor can heal that division. It gives an opportunity to all to use their hands as well as their heads.

Working with one’s hands is much more than making or producing things. Physical work is a form of worship. It is a spiritual practice. It is a healing process, a therapy. It is an antidote to alienation and exclusion. Our hands have tremendous transformative power. They can turn a lump of clay into a beautiful pot, a block of stone into a sculpture, a pile of bricks into a home, a heap of wool into a tapestry. Sacrificing hand skills at the altar of technology can only bring disenchantment and confusion. However sophisticated the technology, it cannot fulfill the deep urge of the body to do and to make.

Even if we have a good income from our profession, that is no substitute for work with our hands. All of us should be able to bake bread with whole flour. Dependence on denatured, mass-produced bread causes the loss of home culture. What value has a home without a proper kitchen, where members of the family celebrate food, work, and life together?

When I have engaged in manual labor, I am satisfied with less. The work itself is a source of satisfaction. But when I have not engaged in the process of making, I am hungry for something, and I do not know what. Wanting more, I seek satisfaction in shopping, yet I remain dissatisfied. True satisfaction cannot be derived from things; it comes only when mind and body join in making something beautiful, useful, and durable. Tribal people, traditional craftspeople, and illiterate peasants make artifacts of exquisite beauty. They make these things for practical purposes. And these objects are durable; they last until their natural end. The older they become, the more beautiful they look.

 

ON LOCAL ECONOMY
All of us have a place where we live. That place sustains us, and we should sustain it. Better than centralized government would be a confederation of self-governing, self-reliant communities where people fulfilled their needs from the products of their own localities. When all people are looking after their own patch of land, then every place will be looked after. In a local economy, people derive maximum benefit from the bounty of their own locality and refrain from desiring, obtaining, and controlling the resources of other localities. They do not permit damage to the local people or environment. “Not in my back yard” is a perfect slogan, as every yard is somebody’s back yard. If every back yard is protected, no yard will be damaged.

This means local apples, local butter, local vegetables, local cheese, local crafts, local industry, local shops, local schools, local hospitals, and in all other matters turning to local goods and services before others. Maximum economic and political power, including the power to decide what is imported into or exported from the local community, should remain in the hands of the local government.

Federal governments put severe restrictions on immigration but allow the dumping of goods in countries where the same goods are plentifully available. For example, New Zealand butter is dumped in England while the English produce a mountain of butter themselves. California wine is pushed on the French, who know not what to do with their own lakes of wine. Japanese cars are forced on the American people while American cars sit unsold, occupying vast acres of parking lots. Meanwhile, the transportation of butter, wine, cars, and other goods is causing depletion of the ozone layer and global warming. Who, other than the giant corporations, benefits from this massive movement of goods?

Recently the Wuppertal Institute in Germany asked: How many miles does a container of strawberry yogurt travel before it reaches the kitchen table of a German household? They discovered that the yogurt — including the plastic container, the label printed on it, the sugar, milk, and strawberries — had traveled eleven hundred miles. If that yogurt had been part of the local economy, it would hardly have traveled at all.

Economist E. F. Schumacher related the following incident to me: He once observed a large truck bringing biscuits made in Manchester to London. A few minutes later, he observed another truck taking biscuits made in London to Manchester. Schumacher started to ponder the economic rationale behind this. What could it be? If the specialty of a Manchester biscuit was desired in London, the biscuit manufacturer could send the recipe to London on a postcard. Schumacher could not understand what benefit was derived from congesting the highways, polluting the air, and making truck drivers sit alone for the better part of their lives, all in the service of moving biscuits around. In some desperation, he said to himself, “Oh, well, I’m an economist, not a nutritionist. Perhaps the nutritional value of these biscuits is increased by transportation!”

This was in the early 1970s, before globalization of the economy, the stranglehold of GATT and NAFTA, and obsession with world trade.

Schumacher was not against trade. If there was something in Manchester that could be made only there, then it was reasonable to exchange it for something that could be made only in London. But to ferry identical goods around in the name of free trade is economic insanity. The trade between nations and regions should be minimal, like icing on a cake.

World trade is the most irrational system yet devised. Everyone loses except the global corporations, and the environment suffers most of all. The globalization of the economy is colonialism pure and simple, but it wears the mask of free trade, progress, development, science, technology, modernity, and the promise of utopia. Today there is a net flow of resources and wealth from the poor countries of the South to the rich countries of the North.

The answer to globalization is the development of local economies. Whatever is made or produced in a locality must be used first and foremost by the people of that locality. Each local community should be a microcosm of the macroworld.

This principle is not against cities, but it is against sprawling suburbs and megalopolises. If all cities were of one to two million people and flanked by greenbelts and sufficient amounts of supporting farmland, then New York would not depend on lettuce imported from California, and London would not depend on potatoes imported from Egypt.

This is not about personal self-sufficiency or family self-sufficiency, but self-sufficiency of the bioregion. In conjunction with the principle of manual work, we should form an economy based not on centralized and mechanized modes of production, but on decentralized, homegrown, handcrafted ones. In other words, not mass production but production by the masses.

Excerpted from Path without Destination: The Long Walk of a Gentle Hero, by Satish Kumar. © 1978, 1992, 1999 by Satish Kumar. It appears here by permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc.