Congratulations to Garret Ean of Concord on his second-prize winning essay of the 2009 NH Liberty Essay Contest! For his winning essay, Garret has been awarded $100. Garret’s essay is reproduced in full below:

The Moral Necessity of Non-Violent Resistance

David Hume famously concluded that it is not by reason which we live, but custom. If such damning conclusions can accurately speak to the nature of human action, would it be possible for man, perceived to have free will, to break from the cycle of a destructive, yet customary behavior?

Such is the nature of government; a solely-destructive, yet customary geographically monopolistic institution. Assuming the aforementioned conclusion is already understood, how are individuals then to go about altering or abolishing the customary vice of government, if all acts of revolution have only led to the current state of affairs? What is the just path, the one with true potential to lead humanity away from institutionalizing preemptive violence, without becoming its own enemy in the instant that it becomes superior?

Non-Violent Resistance seems to still possess and aura of utopian means, a perceived ineffective quality which enables it to often be dismissed as an ideal rather than accepted as a material solution. To the layman, there still holds strong a self-contradictory notion: that the ideal in theory and the ideal in practice are often, if not always, incompatible. This is seldom recognized, as it properly should be, as moral nihilism; the belief that there is no objective truth. To separate theory from practice is to draw the conclusion that reality is indescribable, and thus, all thought is in error. The very act of making such an assertion negates the conclusion in itself.

Though it is no doubt convenient to use such a thought-terminating cliché to dismiss that which is undesirable for the individual. In government schools, I was often told the myth that Communism, a form of militant egalitarianism, “only works in theory.” This gives the anti-moral political ideology far too much credit, almost begging the question as to why such a theory is not properly applicable in practice. Consequently, it gives the impression that egalitarianism is a platonic form of social interaction, that it is an ideal to strive for as the religious treat life without sin, unattainable. On the contrary, it is through theorizing that economists are able to point out precisely why Communism, or all other forms of coercive egalitarianism, do not “work”, in theory or otherwise. An explanation of such has been the focus of much literature in the past, and as it is not the purpose of this essay, I will not go further to illustrate the reasons why.

So does Non-Violent Resistance work in theory? The answer depends highly upon the scenario put fourth. The question is made irrelevant when given an example of Non-Violent Resistance transcending the limits of human imagination and becoming successful in practice. For a real-life success story of Non-Violent Resistance, one may look to the Satyagraha movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, which resulted in the collapse of British rule over the land and people of India. Members of the movement not only considered violence to be ineffectual, but also considered it the antithesis of their very movement. Though the motivations for these beliefs may have been spiritual, they were nonetheless practical as well.

It was Henry David Thoreau who, as a philosopher, believed it was time that actions began speaking louder than words, and refused to pay a tax he found to be not just immoral in its application, but anti-moral. He found compliance with such a tax to be an immoral act on the part of himself, the victim of the tax. Thoreau was one of the thinkers and activists who would inspire Gandhi, leading the most successful campaign of Non-Violent Resistance the world has seen. Though other massive non-violent revolutions may at present seem far off, the singular demonstration of the effectiveness of peaceful protest proves its potential. The custom of violent revolution and repeated cycles of institutionalized violence can be broken, once individuals make rational, peaceful interaction the custom by which they shape their lives.

Let us consider that, in conflict, there are traditionally two disputing parties. Through violence, one side is sufficiently weakened to the point that military victory is impossible, at which point they either surrender to the will of the opponent, vacate the area of the dispute, or end their own lives. In a violent dispute, there is no assurance that the victor is the one who is in the right, as the conflict can only determine who has superior military capabilities. Violence can only serve a utility when a disputing party knows themselves to have the military advantage, but whether such an act is moral is independent of its utility.

In contrast, Non-Violent Resistance causes no direct bloodshed. In speaking of the psychological evolution of man, Linda and Morris Tannehill point out in The Market For Liberty, “In order to survive, men had to acquire certain behavioral knowledge and capabilities–for instance, the knowledge that voluntary cooperation is good and the capacity to stop clubbing each other.” The clubber of early days either was victorious in his assaults on man (and died alone), or was seen by the masses as the enemy and either destroyed or shunned. In either case, the instant fight reflex when met with opposition was not sustainable and not naturally selected for survival–at least on an individual level. When a mass of humans get together and systematically commit the same acts, the victim, either unable to see the plunder or destroyed for their opposition to it, found themselves also either quickly removed from the gene pool, or deemed an outsider (with similar outcomes). Non-Violent Resistance defies the natural reflex which for so long had allowed violence among the masses to rise to the top. Such an analysis of social interaction stretches beyond individual interaction and speaks to the moral zeitgeist, the social spirit of the time.

Socialists and other coercive egalitarians often claim Gandhi as a figure sympathetic to their cause. While it is true that he often reflected a desire for egalitarian outcomes, he clarified that he did not agree with the utilitarian principle that the end justified the means. In an article entitled, “Socialism and Satyagraha”, from the publication Harijan in 1947, reproduced in the compilation of his works, Non-Violent Resistance, Gandhi opens, “Truth and ahimsa (non-violence) must incarnate in socialism.” He goes on to say, “This I do say, fearlessly and firmly, that every worthy object can be achieved by the use of Satyagraha…Socialism will not be reached by any other means.”

Based on these writings, it is clear that Gandhi separated what he envisioned as ideal human interaction from interaction which is justifiable to forcibly impose. For what morality can their be without volition? A decision which one makes out of fear of punishment or want of reward is not a moral decision. If an ideal can at all be considered moral, it must remain a option that one is capable of deciding against.

Karl Marx, the pioneer of Communism, used the dialectic interpretation of history presented by George Hegel to base his own dialectic ideals and political ideology. His focus was on human conflict, which he saw steaming toward an end goal of egalitarianism. To speed this process along, he claimed violence and governmental dictatorship justified. What was ignored was another dialectic evolution, one which must precede all others in order for any subsequent moral system to found itself in any ethical purity. The ignored piece of the puzzle was voluntaryism. As far as moral systems go, Marx seemed to fashion himself more a scientist of history than a moralist. In supporting coercive means to reach his goal, man is treated as a machine, serving only a utility, and having no intrinsic value in and of itself. Through the support of any violence outside of just and limited self defense, man is purporting himself to be the owner of other men, their superior. Such tactics have proven not universally preferable on the individual level. The next evolution of man is to understand these tactics to be equally morally reprehensible on the collective level. Whether preemptive violence can serve a moral utility has proven itself to be a self-contradictory question. How to most effectively continue to live morally is what we as activists must continue to ask of ourselves and continue to provide answers for.