A 1940 letter that has not changed the course of world history, YET

On Ricardo’s comparative advantage and Gandhi’s non-violent non cooperation

 

ABSTRACT (aka tl; dr)

The present article centers around a letter Gandhi wrote in 1940 to convince the designated recipient, Hitler, to renounce violence. It includes an introduction about “competition” (more specifically, comparative advantage) but then moves on to show that “freedom” as conceived of by Gandhi is not part of that sphere, since it cannot be achieved via linear progress [viz. exerting power a.k.a. violence]. In the middle part, I trace back shared symbolism and a shared life moment of metempsychosis of both sender and addressee, then discuss the atomic bombs with statements by Oppenheimer and Pirsig. Finally, the essay closes with a kind of dialectic synthesis of competition and freedom in the form of a 1908 plea by Tolstoy for love. The Russian writer both through his published texts as well as through private correspondence was inspirational to both Mandela and Gandhi. For speed-readers, this article is about India and briefly touches upon Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” ;).

 

Competing within a paradigm

At a graduate class I was sitting in around a decade ago, IESE Professor Joan Enric Ricart taught the importance of David Ricardo together with fellow classical economists Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Based on Ricardo’s 1817 treatise, he is mainly known for the notion of “comparative advantage” and for being an early voice in the developing field of political economics. (On another occasion, Ricart helped me discover another intellectual treasure stone called This book needs no title, by logician, magician, pianist, Raymond Smullyan).

Yet the underlying mechanism is embedded deeper in my psyche and life history. For a person in my main sport, in case s/he focuses on results (rather than process as in the inner game of tennis [aka Yoga tennis] of W. Timothy Gallwey for which he received significant inspiration by Indian "guru" Prem Rawa), there is only victory and defeat, not much else. Unlike in chess, football or life, there is not even a draw, ever. The ELO rating system in chess, football and table tennis designed by Arpad Elo represents a measurement system of great efficiency, even elegance and fruitfulness. So much that it inspired Aaron Sorkin’s script and the Zuckerberg movie The Social Network in a scene about the oil market. Given the scale of performance is unidimensional (like psychometric scales or anything where one may strive to the top), this aspect reflects “gradualism”, the Darwin’ian mantra of “natura non facit saltum” (pace quantum theory and discrete mathematics), and what Thomas S. Kuhn called, “normal science”.

Presumably, the idea of “comparative advantage” when applied recursively leads to the notion of an “elite”. Belonging to such a group, real or imaginary (cf. Anders Breivik), one may feel proud and/or special without actually doing anything of merit. Retrospectively, beginning a Fellowship position at IESE Business school in 2007, this competitiveness (together with not having had any intimate relationship or another path towards emancipating from the parental home except in arcane endeavors such as taking up Taekwondo, Latin, Russian, fencing, Classic Greek, marathon running) may have rendered me susceptible to a potentially cult-like organization called “opus dei”. As an aside, in business studies, Edgar Schein from the MIT has studied both organizational culture and brainwashing based on interviewing American captives of the so-called “Vietcong”) even though intellectual understanding may differ significantly from personally undergoing such an experience.

 

Gaining awareness of freedom

Complementary to a search for improvement along such a unidimensional scale (call it Pirsig’s “quality/arête”, call it Spearman’s “g”, and most of the bschool kids plus Leonard Cohen may call it “the money and the flesh”, while in academia it may correspond to citation figures) taken up in my childhood and expanded in my youth, I started to become interested in political figures pursuing freedom such as Gandhi (temporarily a South African citizen), Mandela (a South African connected to Russia by drawing inspiration from Tolstoy) and Vaclav Havel (a Czechoslovakian coming from an entrepreneurial family disowned by the Soviets of whom I borrowed many books around 2007-09). While there had been a brief episode at geography class in high school where I got to know liberation theology and world systems theory after Wallerstein (in the meantime enriched by having studied Spanish and thus discovered García Márquez, Cortázar, Eduardo Galeano etc.), the aforementioned three role models may have started to interest me at the beginning of this century when a brief experience in the German military service (Jaroslav Ha?ek’s “?vejk”, anyone?) and 9/11 woke me up from an ahistorical slumber. A memory in this trajectory is from late 2001/early 2002 when I received Mandela’s autobiography A long walk to freedom from my then tennis coach Neil McAffer (himself ex-coach of Lars Rehmann and Barbara Rittner and native of New Zealand, temporarily residence and workplace of Karl Raimund Popper). As an aside, The Panopticon Puzzle represents such a “long walk to freedom” in a circular shape by the human inmates that I also call circumambulation (reflecting the shape of a ring from Lessing’s Nathan the Wise). Circumambulation can either take place clockwise or counterclockwise, a topic to which we will come back.

 Studying the case of Gandhi

The starting point of the present article is the second letter by Mohandas Gandhi to Adolf Hitler dated December 24th, 1940. A few months ago, a friend visited the museum Mani Bhavan in Mumbai where the first letter from July 27th 1939 is exhibited. It had previously been visited by Barack Obama and by Martin Luther King (in pretty good company, A.M.S., ain’t ya?). The first letter inspired a movie from summer 2011 “Dear friend Hitler” which received a not at all impressing ranking on imdb with some reviewers claiming it misrepresents aspects of history apart from copying scenes from “The Downfall” verbatim. In any case, neither letter got a reply in reality; what is more, apparently neither was delivered to its designated recipient as India was at the time occupied by British forces so that the Third Reich constituted enemy territory. The first letter is reprinted here and the second one here (cf. Letters of Note 2013).

 Competing and its limits: The method of non-violent struggle for freedom

Gandhi thus begins his second letter from 1940:

That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed.

Via its content, one can see here that in certain life circumstances, Ricardo’s “convergent” perspective not necessarily encompasses the whole picture. Once we apply “comparative advantage” via Gandhi’s writing to the area of military offense/defense, it implies getting better weapons than an enemy, yet such a struggle tends to end in destruction:

If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however skilfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war.

In fact, after the first nuclear test, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Indian classic, the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I have become death the destroyer of worlds”. One might thus view the perspective of someone fighting for freedom such as Gandhi as divergent, as his goal diverges from the status quo, ergo moving beyond the contemporary paradigm, being in a true Kuhn’ian spirit, “revolutionary (though not science)”. At the same time, this is unrelated to strength of will which may exist in varying degrees in both convergent and divergent approaches, an area in which Gandhi excelled.

Basically, there are several points Gandhi and I agree on, such as universal friendliness/brotherhood/sisterhood as described in the letter which mirrors the “Weltgeist”/omega point/the spirit of Spinoza of my last article. Second, the will to resist harm while favoring peaceful intervention potentially up to the point of martyrdom. His arduous fastings are well documented. Third, a belief in samsara/moksha/synchronicity as in the movie The green mile due to personal experience (see below for an excerpt of Gandhi's own report). The personal intuition that my own life might continue in the reincarnation of the life of a baby around 2009 reflects Gandhi’s experience of taking care of his father towards the end of the latter’s life as a sixteen year old. Gandhi was guarding his father then leaving the scene to make love to his wife, an event that apparently coincided with his father passing away (also cf. Rudolf Steiner, Artur Koestler and Fyodor Dostoevsky on experiences of “synchronicity” which in The Panopticon Puzzle represents the “aliens” turning all lights on simultaneously at both beginning and end).

Gandhi’s willingness to offer his body to his rulers in what he calls a “do or die” approach in the second letter to Hitler reflects Socrates’ serene willingness to accept the sentence of his tribunal (the “origin myth” of philosophy as well as of Western civilization), whereas in Robert Pirsig’s ZMM (Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), the word “martyr” appears in the following excerpt,

He stares at the wall in a cross-legged position upon a quilted blanket on the floor of a bedless bedroom. All bridges have been burned. There is no way back. And now there is no way forward either. For three days and three nights, Ph?drus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Ph?drus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.

He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.

But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Ph?drus begins to come apart—to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world. A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, "You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You’ve got to cross it by yourself." It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana. "No one else can cross it for you," it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. "You’ve got to cross it by yourself."

He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one’s dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.

And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.

The nice thing about “intense writers” preoccupied with transcendence such as Pirsig (diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia), Dostoevsky (diagnosed with epilepsy) and Gandhi (diagnosed with depression after a failed suicide attempt according to Nassir Ghaemi, cf. Nash and Snowden being treated for schizophrenia respectively epilepsy) is the following. In a world of fake Prada bags, fake Instagram airplanes, fake it till you make it mantras (with mantra in Sanskrit being transcribed as ??????), fake you name it, one does not make this chain of events up, though the accounts themselves may to some extent be fictionalized.

Pirsig speaks about a “Christian” song, Dostoevsky has Jesus Christ in mind as implicit protagonist of The Idiot called Myshkin, Weininger regards "Christ [...] the greatest human being because he overcame the greatest adversity [as] the only Jew who has ever succeeded in defeating Judaism”, and Gandhi not only sends the letter to Hitler around Christmas, but makes the date of sending it an explicit topic (self referentially, recursively) in the body of the message, while making clear, “In non-violent technique, as I have said, there is no such thing as defeat.” In a way, all four of them, Pirsig, Dostoevsky, Gandhi, Christ, are beyond Ricardo’s paradigm of “comparative advantage”. So much about origin myths, scapegoats and martyrs. As concerns sexuality, there is the aspect of yin and yang inside the same body (as in the previous Pirsig quote about feeling “loathsome” as one half of him struggles with the other half), with Gandhi after his father’s passing way aiming to live asexually as (supposedly) Jesus Christ and Dostevsky’s Myshkin (Dostoevsky himself was not exempt from “running for the money and the flesh“ to quote Leonard Cohen, also cf. the monk question discussed in Heat), with Pirsig/Phaedrus just separating from his wife when he goes on his roadtrip.

After these alignments, on the other hand, there are not too many points on which the author of the letter and myself do not fully agree. Part of it is the question whether Gandhi taking a certain pride in his approach is really offering the one and only way (cf. the notion of "multiple realizability"). Personally, every time I reflect e.g. on tank man and the satirical/deconstructivist memes stemming from it, it gives me goosebumps. On the other hand, I also (hermeneutically) understand the forces of “normal science” (~the inquisition from Sevilla in the Brothers Karamazov) attempting to defend the status quo, fearing a revolution from the inside which is what I described in a previous post about a movie with Jack Nicholson. There is a fragment in chapter 12 of ZMM when Phaedrus (the alter ego of Robert Maynard Pirsig, no obvious connection to the "Maynard" of Pulp Fiction, though) asks a spiritual teacher in India who has continuously preached the illusion (the veil of Maya as in the novel by Jostein Gaarder) of anything this-worldly whether the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki too were an illusion (cf. Noam Chomsky as a kid walking into the woods [not sure whether he embraced a tree like Thomas Muster did in the Bois de Boulogne of 1995] and crying). Pirsig/Phaedrus leaves the country for good when getting an answer in the affirmative. One might see this as the latter not willing to concede 100% to divergent (or idealist) approaches and 0% to convergent (or materialist) approaches but searching for a synthesis.

The other point not convincing me entirely is Gandhi’s view that “there is no monopoly [on power]”. I fully agree at his time and see it as a crucial tenet of our cherished liberal cum secular democracy. In addition, the nonexistence of "absolute power [poder absoluto]" makes the attempt to murder ["deberiamos matar"] it as announced by my former colleague Jordi Canals quite futile. Thankfully. ROFL. But then, my intuition is that there could be a singularity in the future or in a sublime realm (cf. Brouwer’s/Kakutani’s fixed point and Arrow’s impossibility theorem that got incorporated into Indian thought via Amartya Sen). Something that arises from artificial intelligence and that might achieve a certain degree of divine omniscience (pace Kurt G?del’s “incompleteness” theorems, e.g. as in de Chardin’s omega point and noosphere or the tower of Bentham’s and Foucault’s panopticon). And indeed the Turing test has been syntactically passed by the mere architecture of The Panopticon Puzzle. Finally, does not homo sapiens have a quasi-monopoly of power over the rest of the animal world that in case one would have “asked” [in fact no language, not even Proto-Indo-European, existed then, but still] human beings 10,000 years ago, nobody would have believed?

 Tracing the history of a ‘forbidden’ symbol

What the individuals spoken about in the present article have in common is that they communicate in an Indo-European language. More narrowly, in spite of the sender and designated recipient being polar opposites as to whether to resort to violence or not to achieve certain goals, there is an aspect of symbolism that connects Nazism and Hinduism/Buddhism. I am speaking about the swastika and sauwastika which represent ancient and intercultural fertility symbols before developing into a near “isomorphism” (check out DiMaggio and Powell 1983 on Max Weber’s iron cage based on institutional theory) with Nazism. One of my recent research topics is the roots of Nazism in social psychology (Morton Rhue, Philip Zimbardo, Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, in a more distant way also Foucault), including an experiment I did with some of my students in Liverpool to stimulate critical thought (inspired by a ~1993 birthday party game called "In the desert" using an eye mask instead of a blanket, in which the point is as well when the chain of command is broken). In the meantime I encountered voices claiming that a repetition of Milgram’s experiment in the 21st century was not to be accepted as insight into human programming but rather into a supposed evilness of the experimentator, potentially in the “innocent until (you're) investigated” Syriana spirit of Gaghan, for being too “traumatic and stressful” (related to trigger warnings, e.g. at some places faculty members are warned not to discuss emotionally charged texts from the bard).

As concerns symbolism, I discovered certain aspects related to this archeological topic when investigating “circumambulation” on wikipedia in early January 2013 a few days after inventing The Panopticon Puzzle. In the spirit of archeology and said symbolism, unforgotten is the Indiana Jones scene with Sean Connery/Harrison Ford, having just thrown a Nazi out of a Zeppelin, saying, “no ticket/Keinen Fahrschein”, thus practicing a shibboleth while demonstrating how humor can be disarming ;).

The history of that ancient symbol goes back via Troy (cf. 19th century archeologist Heinrich Schliemann) potentially to ten thousand years, with the meaning of 10,000 being the homophone “wàn” of the auspicious symbol in Chinese. A connection to previous articles is e.g. that Tony Kaye depicts this symbol, both in one of his Tiscali spots (the Italian 60 seconds version) as well as in American History X. One of the earliest times I came across the symbol independent of the Third Reich (e.g. watching “Schindler’s list” with my high school class around 1995) was during two relatively brief stints with Taekwondo at the Sporthochschule K?ln where I had a Persian coach B. F. (November 2000 to March 2001, coinciding with both my “Bundeswehr/?vejk” episode and my first semester at university, plus April 2002 to late summer 2002, interrupted by a one year stay in Castelldefels/San Pedro de Alcantara for playing the ITF tour in tennis during which 9/11 happened). Being an ambitious student inspired by George Leonard (though his writing is predominantly about “Aikido” in which he had gotten a black belt) and wishing to advance my skills via home study, I went to my cities’ library and borrowed a VHS cassette about the sport. It contained the poomsae of all levels, both Kup (Korean for student, corresponding to Kyu in Japanese martial arts) and Dan. And there it was, at the Dan level, the so-called “Ilyo (or Ilyeo)” and most advanced form. For a moment, I was stunned that this material was publicly available in a German library and tried to get further advice from a trusted elderly person, but then it dawned onto me that the Nazis had borrowed it from certain older traditions not the other way around. The training ended for me as the coach made authoritarian and for me apparently immoral/conspiratorial remarks (during warm up nobody may run in the dojo faster than a person of higher rank; which country gets how many medals in the Olympic Games is usually decided in advance), upon which I once stopped five millimeters short of a glass window while doing poomse and on another occasion let myself be hit by a sparring partner without even trying to hit back or defend myself upon which the coach, a fourth dan, told me he feared me due to my nonviolence and that he had nothing more to teach me. As a side note, I wrote a short report about the course of events briefly later and give regards to Mika.

In any case, I buried the symbol watching episode in my subconscious when returning the video at the library around fifteen years ago, and after a few weeks of writing on the present article it emerged again. To get a closure to the present digression, maybe, just maybe, Xavier Naidoo also fits somewhere into this puzzle as a freedom-loving person of Christian faith with South African/Indian roots who published an album entitled “Zion” (with S?hne Mannheims, also cf. the eponymous place in the Wachowsky's Matrix), potentially having a boundary issue of not knowing exactly what to talk about/not to talk about with whom, thus being associated with a movement I do not condone. Again, I do not identify myself with any nationalist perspectives, as I consider my outlook to be global or even intergalactic (as in The Panopticon Puzzle).

 Uplifting versus degrading humanity

If we continue with a close reading of Gandhi’s second letter to Hitler, a key point described by the former is his own nonviolent struggle as well as the fact that the latter via his course of action is “degrading humanity”, together with Gandhi’s attempt to convince Hitler of laying down the weapons with the words

You will lose nothing by referring all the matters of dispute between you and Great Britain to an international tribunal of your joint choice. If you attain success in the war, it will not prove that you were in the right. It will only prove that your power of destruction was greater. Whereas an award by an impartial tribunal will show as far as it is humanly possible which party was in the right.

Unfortunately, we now know, this appeal was not met with success. Personally, I might consider the internet as a potential tribunal of its times as a modern adaptation to the Hegel'ian phrase that "Philosophie [ist] ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfasst". A third force beyond the German-English competition developed a more powerful weapon, just as Gandhi had intuited when writing “If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon.” Said weapon, the atomic bomb, was briefly considered for usage in Germany, but as that country was being encircled anyway, “Fat Boy” (no, not Ed Sheeran in his sumo costume at the end of Shape of you) and “Trinity” (no, not the one from The Matrix) were headed for Japan. How Gandhi developed this intuition is not clear, though he and Einstein (who signed a letter written by Szilard to POTUS Roosevelt on August 2nd, 1939 asking for an effort to build such a bomb ahead of the Nazis, which in turn led to the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos) did exchange letters in 1931.

Being aware that public opinion not always follows objective facts, but that media influences it (what one may but does not need to call, “propaganda”), Gandhi tries to reassure Hitler that he is aware the latter is no “monster”. He writes:

“We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents. But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in universal friendliness.”

In my view he strikes a solid balance, not being ingratiating to a criminal, yet briefly adopting a hermeneutic attitude by trying to walk in the other person’s shoes (as the native Indian saying goes, also cf. Harper Lee speaking through "Atticus Finch"). The “monster” term has a certain history in Hollywood, as in Monster’s balls (2001) and Shutter island (2010). Concerning schizophrenia, the former movie incorporates a decision by a family of professional henchmen whether to execute a death row candidate. The latter happens to be lover of a woman, played by Halle “Make me feel good” Berry who the actual henchman then starts an affair with, reflecting a case of metempsychosis. From a micro-sociological perspective watching the movie with a couple was for me a formative moment in remaining abstinent during my 20s. Both had been classmates between ages ten and nineteen, the boy my best friend up to the moment he fiddled her while using me as alibi (of which I was made aware when she called letting me know that he had told her she could speak to him by dialling my number, provided the truthfulness of her statement [and/or my appropriate interpretation of it]), leading to myself being drawn towards her side mentally and emotionally, but not physically, i.e. agape without eros. It was her who suggested the three us watch the movie together at my home (a few weeks earlier the three of us had watched Verneuil's I comme Icare, a movie chosen by me, at his place). Weeks later, it culminated in a situation similar to the Rogozhin/Myshkin conflict of Dostoevsky’s Idiot with my friend warning me I might get the treatment her half-brother had gotten during his military service (sabotage of his bike resulting in a bloody skull just short of his deceasing), and me leaving them to sort things out themselves. Warm regards to L.B. and A.F. here. The other movie with the “monster” term at its heart, Shutter Island, reflects the final scene in which the DiCaprio character says "You know, this place makes me wonder...Which would be worse: to live as a monster or to die as a good man?" From a macro-sociological perspective, maybe it is a coincidence that Ben Kingsley who had starred as Gandhi has a crucial role in “Shutter Island” when getting into Mahler and psychology, but maybe, just maybe, not. Just as it might be coincidence that this very crucial scene intermeshes the American Civil War with the freeing of the Dachau concentration camp during WWII, or maybe not. Interestingly enough, they talk about an elaborate role-playing experiment just as Davila recommended me in autumn 2008 to try out acting/dissimulating/role play before actually comparing me to Bruce Willis in autumn 2009 (with the other equivalences of Zed/Maynard/the Gimp/Marsellus Wallace following canonically and creating an intertextual link to the American Civil War, since the person subjected to rape in “Pulp Fiction” is an Afro-American).

And then, how grateful can one be to Scorsese as a Hollywood representative for his openness and self reflection that a crime against Nazis is not spared out from public discourse, even though Col. Howard A. Buechner’s account in “Dachau. The Hour of the Avenger” about the so-called Dachau liberation reprisals has not generally been accepted as fact by historians (cf. David Israel, Jürgen Zarusky)? In any case, the fictional psychiatrist who is introduced to DiCaprio’s figure by Ben Kingsley’s figure is not quite right in one of his diagnoses. The “wolves” answer belongs to the supposed Freud'ian category (cf. Caspar Hauser and the Hobbes’ian motto “homo homini lupus est”, counterposited by Ludwig Feuerbach’s “homo homini deus est”, also cf. its 2015 rebirth via Yuval Noah Harari). However, the moment in which DiCaprio/Andrew Laeddis/Teddy Daniels talks about a presumed relationship between psychiatrists and “booze”, is not merely an example of Freud’ian “defense mechanisms”. It actually goes beyond that and represents a “counter-punch” (warm regards to Joan Enric Ricart and my Jamaican-Mancunian tennis coach Chris Hamilton through whom I originally acquired that self-labelling around 1997).

The movie (Shutter Island, not Marvel’s The Avengers which frankly speaking escapes my sphere of interest) is of personal importance, since hours after the aforementioned experiment/role play/Milgram-like study I had conducted with some of my own students in June 2014, I mentioned it in an email to a colleague in Liverpool. A few days later, I took off for the English track of the Camino de Santiago (warm regards to my fellow travelers of Franciscans). In addition, the movie reflects to some extent the situation I was undergoing before being discharged from the German military service in the first months of 2001, which in itself reminds me of Pirsig’s line from my last and the present article, “A mind divided against itself”. On the one hand I was believing in pacifism (basically, I had acquired a huge respect for its defenders due to hearing via my father of Bertrand Russell, himself also occasionally imprisoned, though not in a panopticon), on the other hand not deeming it realistic/pragmatic.

Gandhi’s aim is freedom from the tyranny of violence not dissimilar to the inmates of The Panopticon Puzzle. By contrast, Hitler’s aim seemed to be enslavement and thus like the “aliens” of the puzzle, he was actually taking prisoners and putting them into concentration camps (about the Spanish and Anglo-Saxon history of concentration camps, check out Giorgio Agamben on “homo sacer” or the usual suspect, Wikipedia). In a way, Gandhi mirrors a former NSA employee in that the former talks about

“the most organized violence in the world which the British power represents”,

whereas Snowden might have shifted that epithet transatlantically when he says “You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk.” In the Oliver Stone movie “Snowden”, he even went so far as to compare the NSA overstepping its limits to Nuremberg war crime trials.

 While the general picture painted by Gandhi in the letter includes relatively simple comparisons and differences

-         both Germany and India oppose the British forces,

-         the leader of the former country does it with violence, the one of the latter without,

a few points are not mentioned by Gandhi. First of all, unlike Gandhi and the Indian resistance, the people who became Nazis were deluded, initially by the so-called “Protocols of the Elderly of Zion” (fictional plagiarism dressing up as factional testimony), then by losing WWI, the Versailles Treaty, hyperinflation, finally combining these events together in one image, the “Dolchsto?legende/stab-in-the-back myth” (cf. my subsequent article on conspiracy theories). For Gandhi on the other hand, the culmination point was a real event, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. Secondly, people of Nazi conviction construed their country to be in opposition not to just one nation –as India did in its struggle to break free from its occupier until it succeeded on August 15th, 1947– but to several opponents. In their paranoia bordering on “megalomania” or “delusions of grandeur” (both epithets that Pirsig uses thrice in chapter 28 about himself, and they may apply to Dostoevsky and several of his characters, too, with another voice actually telling me that even Socrates and Jesus Christ may not have been exempt from such incommensurable perspectives, though in a heroic rather than an anti-heroic way), the Nazi leadership thus opened two fronts, in addition to a further imagined key opponent, people of Jewish faith that were considered as a fifth column inside the own country. In any case, the Nazis committed their crimes [Преступление], with punishment [наказание] following.

Samsara based on intimacy of body and mind

Another way of looking at the letter is that both sender and receiver might be considered as two persons with non-standard sexual lives. From a sociological angle, this is related to “norms” of behavior. While I do not consider myself an expert, neither in the field of study, nor about the two personalities, and accept Karl Popper's tenet of empirical "fallibilism" (not dissimilar from Nietzsche's earlier "perspectivism" or the Kant'ian differentiation between "Ding-an-sich" and "Erscheinung"), intuitively one might interpret the designated recipient as potentially traumatized by the suicide of a former lover, his half-niece Geli Raubal, and the sender as potentially traumatized by the death of his father in exactly the same moment he copulated with his wife, reflecting samsara/karma/metempsychosis. A further common point is their nationalism, even though it can hardly be stressed enough that they were polar opposites in their methods, one a role model in his humanity, and the other one a demagogue and mass murderer. One apparently had a strong urge to death (the one of others during most of his life), the other one a strong will to repress natural urges of hunger and sexuality (his own). A “tertium comparationis” would be Wilhelm Reich and his supposedly universal theory of “orgiastic potency” in the spirit of Czikczentmihalyi’s notion of “flow”.

A riddle at the beginning of 2018

In case a reader wishes to keep believing in the generic Kuhn’ian “incommensurability” of the two protagonists of this article, I would understand it. However, that is not my approach in spite of my full awareness of the stark asymmetry that the ethical person in the dyad tries to hermeneutically understand the politically violent person evoking the common humanity while the latter recommended British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in 1937 to pick up weapons to reduce Gandhi to pure matter. I write it in full awareness of the moment of tension that flared up when Habermas reviewed a publication of Heidegger in the FAZ. In full awareness of the speech by then President Weizs?cker in 1985 on my fourth birthday (my mother gave birth to me on Victory in Europe day) according to which Germany was “freed” at the end of WWII rather than “beaten” (cf. my original distinction with which the present article begins as well as the NYT article).

The reason it is not my approach, is that when moving from childhood to youth, I stopped believing in “miracles” (also cf. Hannah Arendt’s notion of “banality” of evil). Milgram's notion of six degrees of separation has been corroborated with the internet, and the fact that Gandhi wrote a letter had the potential to bring the dyad's number down to one. We have just seen one way that connects the two individuals, Gandhi and Hitler, with the “tertium comparationis” being Reich (or yin/yang in case you will). There are two further closely related names of two individuals through which a connection between the sender and the designated recipient of the letter may be drawn, one reflecting a beginning, the other an end. The prize for solving it is, as has become a tradition, a magnum bottle of champagne. As a further hint, both names sound in a “dangerous” way (Michael Jackson, anybody?) close to the person who scored the decisive goal in the 2014 World cup final against Argentina.

 On the occasion of this riddle, I would like to make one point explicit. Milgram argued that every living individual of the human species is connected to any other living person via six degrees of separation. With the internet, this has become a common trope, also via Hollywood (six hyperlinks of Wikipedia and six degrees of Kevin Bacon). In case one establishes a “tertium comparationis” that connects two elements this has nothing to do with ethical or another kind of equivalence. For example in case there exists evidence that both Hitler and Einstein adored Karl May, a 19th century writer famous for the “Winnetou” series who temporarily sat in jail and invented worlds including uncorroborated stories about his own life (some might cry “fake news” here ;)), this does not mean any more than that Hitler adored May’s texts and Einstein adored May’s texts. Tarski’s 1936 “semantic conception of truth”, quod erat demonstrandum. Just like when Steven Pinker (a commenter of The Panopticon Puzzle in May 2013, a fortnight before the Snowden affair became public), points out the dangers of the alt right and calls them smart, it does not mean he is one of them.

It just means, take them seriously, and lift your game to the next level to disarm them with the better arguments, apart from Einstein tending towards an universal outlook in his pursuit of truth, thus resembling Gandhi’s pursuit of ????????? [satyagraha]. Maybe humor is a better way of working at the overcoming of tension than Diamond’ian/Spengler’ian fear of the “collapse” of the “Abendland” (2005 respectively 1922), via the novel adapted to a movie, “Er ist wieder da”. The latter phrase is of course another example of “reincarnation”.

Finally, an emerging synthesis

In previous LinkedIn posts, I have referred to Hegel, both explicitly when mentioning Emmanuel Macron’s speech, and when speaking about the “Weltgeist”. In the present article his dialectics reappears both via the “tertium comparationis” from the riddle and due to inspiring human rights champions such as Martin Luther King who claimed in the “Stride Towards Freedom,”

The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.

I have begun this essay with convergence, struggle, unidimensional progress based on an economist, Ricardo, who I appreciate as a self-made man whose writings contributed significantly to advancing a whole field of academia. Afterwards, as an anti-thesis, I used a letter by Gandhi as a defense of “freedom”, together with Havel and Mandela, all of whom contributed significantly to advancing human and civil rights. I would like to conclude with a synthesis based on Tolstoy. It was written over a century ago, but at a time when in Ian Bremmer’s jargon, no one is driving the bus (maybe, just maybe, Ian got inspired by Speed; I am referring to the 1994 Bullock and Reeves movie, not to α-methylphenethylamine ;)), it actually sounds quite contemporary. Please, господин Leo Tolstoy (from a less literary and more scientific perspective, cf. Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development and Kohlberg’s stages of moral development), go ahead with “A letter to a Hindu”, and may all Leos (not just the three mentioned in this article, Tolstoy, Szilard and B.) and all flowers in the worlds be blessed just as the writer:

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has outgrown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity. I believe that such a time has now arrived — not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of life which has for centuries occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the solution will evidently not be favorable to the outlived law of violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the nature of man.

But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for centuries.

To save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the ballast, which though it may once have been needed would now cause the ship to sink.

Thank you for presting me your attention. I would be delighted to hear comments/criticism/requests for clarification.

PS (January 24th, 2018). Before aforementioned Hollywood directors began talking about "monsters", Aldous Huxley had used the word to refer to Sir Isaac Newton, claiming in a 1934 interview: "If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb." In spite of suffering from tulpenmanie, obviously.

Oh, by the way, I am acutely aware of a threefold criticism uttered against Muster by close friends of mine, some of whom claimed a lack of sociability, of superior gift of game and/or of intellect. I would kindly like to ignore these comments and instead focus on an aspect he shares with me, the feeling of being held ransom (as if he were in a Panopticon?, also check the usual suspects about "framing" such as Erving Goffman, Kahneman/Tversky, etc.) and then released into freedom (when he was finally allowed on the court for the Roland Garros final 1995). And "no", unlike the three de facto protagonists of this article he is not a vegetarian.

PPS. (January 31st, 2018) Given my mind tends to work in a holistic, nonlinear way, kindly allow me to add possibly the deepest motivation to write this piece about Mohandas Gandhi. Actually it is surrounded by a double "focal point" (here, an impression conveyed by a quote, cf. Thomas Schelling). The first focal point happened while walking down the streets of Liverpool with CB and HK at the end of 2014. A topic of my situation in the city popped up and I replied with a phrase written by Gandhi in 1922, "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority." [sometimes quoted, unsourced as: Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth]. The background was that I carried over [read, metempsychosis/karma] to Liverpool from Barcelona the memory of an event in which a female pregnant fellow student who I might even call a former soulmate had been physically mistreated, with nobody from the FT newspaper wishing to expose this event nor subsequent examples of more severe violence [in the aforementioned vain attempt after 'absolute power'], upon which I was not too satisfied with these authorities, thus wishing to imbue a sense of "civil disobedience" [Thoreau, Gandhi, Pirsig, Eric Hoffer, Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, etc.] in my own students when confronted with authoritarianism via a thought experiment/role play, upon which I stood accused, not of the willingness to help nourish critical minds, but by a hundred eighty degree turn, of being that which I tried to warn them of, namely falling for close-minded/xenophobic streams of thought akin to what the Germans fell for in the 1930s (cf. the Marx quote, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."). After I had used the quote with my two acquaintances in broad daylight, a person I had never seen before who overheard it got all worked up, jumped at me and shouted how I could utter such nonsense. Apparently, he had not noted the tongue-in-cheek aspect of my quote which sounds familiar given one remembers how Farage and friends narrowly misinterpreted the originally quite funny Tango commercial. The second focal point is a quote by Nicholas Klein 1914 who himself was indebted to Gandhi when he said,

"And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."

While more poignant than the first story, the quote has a rather lengthy background, going back via the words by Gandhi and others to Arthur Schopenhauer, with the connections described here.

PPPS. (February 18th, 2018) Apparently, Bibi (no, not Blocksberg) has beaten me by two days on this topic (apart from visiting Gandhi's home). Furthermore, I would like to use this addendum to point out the connection between the location where lobotomies of Shutter Island supposedly take place, a lighthouse tower, with the tower of the panopticon where the guards are placed, and most crucially to Einstein's comment he would have loved being a "lighthouse keeper" in case he had not worked as a physicist.

PPPPS. (April 5th, 2018) Upon re-reading the Weininger quote on Jesus Christ above, I began wondering why anyone would want to overcome her/his own Jewishness in the first place (though I am of course aware of Theodore Lessing's 1930 concept of the "self-hating Jew"), thus applying Newton's tenet that "actio" equals "reactio". In that spirit, one might after 1945 come to inversely believe that the greatest adversity ripe for overcoming is that of being a Nazi. Maybe, just maybe, Agent Smith is not hundred percent "external" to Neo, after all.