Page:Gregg - Gandhiism versus socialism.pdf/17

 remain useful as a medium of exchange and as a partial measure of certain economic values. But Gandhi’s full program tends to restore reality to economic, political and social relationships, and to correct a symbolism which has gone wrong. True trust is created not by the issue of coins or pieces of paper by a bank or government, but by unselfish service. In relation to such trust, every man will, so to say, become his own banker, will control the extent to which people trust him. Money can not be a store of such value.

After money, the next most powerful and frequently used means of government is physical violence, with its appropriate set of symbols—uniforms, martial music, military parades, display of arms, etc.—controlling people by fear of violence and the prestige of its power. Furthermore, the participation of the people in wars or in counterviolence thwarts them as much as the violence used against them by the State. By fully accepting any scheme of values and its symbols, one is at the mercy of those who are most experienced and skilled in the use of those values and their symbols. By being violent themselves, the people tacitly make a fundamental agreement with the ruling class—namely: that violence is the surest way of settling conflict. When they accept the system of violence values, they are thereby bound and restrained by it, and must do the will of those most skillful with the weapons of violence.

Under Gandhi’s program, Satyagraha does away with such fear and prestige and deprives that system of values and symbols of its former power. The ruling classes may control guns, soldiers, navy, airplanes, poison gas, police and courts, but disciplined mass Satyagraha abolishes the customary results of those things and lowers the morale of