[p2p-research] Google celebrates Mahatma Gandhi's 140th birthday; related sci-fi

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Just an archival note that today is Mahatma Gandhi's 140th birthday, and 
Google has changed its logo in his honor, which goes to this search:
   http://www.google.com/search?q=gandhi&ct=gandhi09&oi=ddle

I don't know how to make a permanent link to the image currently here:
   http://www.google.com/

 From a Wikipedia article on Gandhi's life, quoting some parts of relevance 
to issues discussed on the p2p list:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi
"""
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the 
pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian 
independence movement. He was the pioneer of satyagraha -- resistance to 
tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon ahimsa or total 
non-violence—which led India to independence and inspired movements for 
civil rights and freedom across the world. ... After assuming leadership of 
the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns to 
ease poverty, expand women's rights, build religious and ethnic amity, end 
untouchability, and increase economic self-reliance ...
   As a practitioner of ahimsa, he swore to speak the truth and advocated 
that others do the same. Gandhi lived modestly in a self-sufficient 
residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven 
with yarn he had hand spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and 
also undertook long fasts as a means of both self-purification and social 
protest. ...
   Gandhi was a self-described philosophical anarchist, and his vision of 
India meant India without an underlying government. He once said that "the 
ideally nonviolent state would be an ordered anarchy." While political 
systems are largely hierarchical, with each layer of authority from the 
individual to the central government have increasing levels of authority 
over the layer below, Gandhi believed that society should be the exact 
opposite, where nothing is done without the consent of anyone, down to the 
individual. His idea was that true self-rule in a country means that every 
person rules his or herself and that there is no state which enforces laws 
upon the people. This would be achieved over time with nonviolent conflict 
mediation, as power is divested from layers of hierarchical authorities, 
ultimately to the individual, which would come to embody the ethic of 
nonviolence. Rather than a system where rights are enforced by a higher 
authority, people are self-governed by mutual responsibilities. On returning 
from South Africa, when Gandhi received a letter asking for his 
participation in writing a world charter for human rights, he responded 
saying, "in my experience, it is far more important to have a charter for 
human duties." A free India for him meant the existence of thousands of self 
sufficient small communities (an idea possibly from Tolstoy) who rule 
themselves without hindering others. It did not mean merely transferring a 
British established administrative structure into Indian hands which he said 
was just making Hindustan into Englistan. He wanted to ultimately dissolve 
the Congress Party after independence and establish a system of direct 
democracy in India, having no faith in the British styled parliamentary system.
"""

If Gandhi were around today, I would ask him what he thought of Manuel de 
Landa's points about the need for a balance between meshworks and 
hierarchies, which it seems to me much of Gandhi life might have involved in 
practice:
   http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding 
meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to 
make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, 
as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real 
life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot 
be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. ... 
But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity 
articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. 
After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do 
not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property 
that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, 
demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to 
all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards 
the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of 
reality itself seems to call for."

This sci-fi story has a section on a world run by Gandhian-inspired ideas:
   "And Then There Were None" by Eric Frank Russell
   http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php

James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" has related themes as well, and he 
has some amusing comments on that:
   "Summary of Voyage From Yesteryear by the author"
   http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"""
   ...
   In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the 
end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a 
population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the 
repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. 
The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for 
bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power 
structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the 
promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious 
presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, 
armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods 
encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?
   The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I 
received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an 
underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the 
publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name 
there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would 
be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that 
time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern 
Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, 
apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an 
oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, 
they were all doing it!
   So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the 
contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via 
satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on.
   In 1989, after communist rule and the Wall came tumbling down, the annual 
European s.f. convention was held at Krakow in southern Poland, and I was 
invited as one of the Western guests. On the way home, I spent a few days in 
Warsaw and at last was able to meet the people who had published that 
original magazine. "Well, fine," I told them. "Finally, I can draw out all 
that money that you stashed away for me back in '85. One of the remarked-too 
hastily--that "It was worth something when we put it in the bank." (There 
had been two years of ruinous inflation following the outgoing regime's 
policy of sabotaging everything in order to be able to prove that the new 
ideas wouldn't work.) I said, resignedly, "Okay. How much are we talking 
about?" The one with a calculator tapped away for a few seconds, looked 
embarrassed, and announced, "Eight dollars and forty-three cents." So after 
the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and 
the rest--all of it.
"""


--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/