#4 - Avatar Aang's Nonviolence Makes Him The Perfect Hero

So today we're going to talk about Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is one of your favorite TV shows. It's a children's show, and we're going to use it to explain some of our anarchist philosophies. And if you're thinking like, "Oh, what the, you know, you're going to use a children's show to explain very complex and deep topics, and, you know, ideas and philosophies?" Actually, it being a children's show is able to sort of distill down to the most basic level, the anarchist philosophy of non-violence and non-aggression. This was a TV show that I had watched when I was a kid. So I'm not going to say it's my favorite TV show, because it was such a long time since I've seen it. Also, at that time, it was just one other TV show, right? Whereas you first saw this show in 2018. So you were definitely an adult by then. And so this show had a totally different impact on you. In fact, I think you've seen it three times?

That's right. I've seen it three times. And I've actually seen commercials of Avatar: The Last Airbender when it first came out on Nickelodeon. And I remember being so intrigued by the world-building, and I really felt like I wanted to watch the show, but I never got the chance when I was 11. There was actually something that turned me off about the show when I was a kid, which is how, okay, so the commercials on Nickelodeon always showed Aang going into the avatar state, and then the commercials would show him fainting. So after he goes away from the avatar state, he faints. And when I was 11, and I had my expectations of how I want my superheroes or main characters, I didn't like seeing them faint. I just thought it was lame. So that's actually why I did not watch Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is really pathetic. I would say, like, you know, looking back at how like judgmental and prejudiced I was at 11. But I'm so glad that I was able to overcome that. And well, it wasn't even like in my conscious mind in 2018. Like, you just told me that, "Hey, Avatar has really good world-building." And I was like, "Oh, I like stories with really good world-building." So I was like, "Okay, fine. You know, I'll watch it." And I just fell in love with it.

So you said world-building. For those who aren't that familiar with the show, the world of Avatar, this is actually a world with two series already. In fact, I think there are other official like novels and books that are set in the same world. And what makes this world special or magical besides the creatures and the fantasy land, is that there are some people who have magical powers and they can bend the elements. And there are four elements that you can bend, there's earth, fire, water, and air. Usually, you can only bend one element, and you can't bend any other element, except for the avatar. Who is this, like, Chosen One-esque, kinda like the Dalai Lama. That's the closest like real-world example I can think of where every time the Avatar, The Chosen One dies, who's supposed to be like the spiritual leader of the world. Whenever they die, they're reincarnated as another avatar for the next cycle. So to say, and in this story of Avatar: The Last Airbender, there is a Empire, the Fire Nation that wants to take over the world. And there's a prophecy that says that the next Avatar is going to be an airbender. And so he wages war on the Air Nation, Air Nation? Air nomads. Yeah, they're not a nation. They are actually an anarchist society. What do you know, big surprise there. And they get massacred. The entire Air Nomad like population or race get completely wiped out. And that's because they have this very ingrained principle of nonviolence. And this principle of nonviolence is best showed or are demonstrated in the show by how they engage in combat.

I just want to correct you a little bit because you said that the Fire Nation was able to wipe out the whole Air Nomad population except the one except one, which was the Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yeah, we'll get there. So to answer your question, their combat style is very different from all the other bending styles because of its evasion. That may be why some people would think that airbending is probably the weakest form of bending, because you're not really attacking, you're always just escaping or deflecting, or redirecting. And we've seen those forms of airbending combat styles throughout the show. So for example, with evasion in the first few episodes when Aang gets captured by the fire nation, Aang is able to just blow these guys away or blow himself away so that he can run away like he has that like air bubble thing that he just rides on and goes around people. Right so that's evasion right there. As for the deflection, or redirection, there have been instances where he has done hand-to-hand combat with Zuko. And Zuko is in the Fire Nation. So he strikes with fire and Aang is able to just blow that fire out or just move his hand away, so that the fire goes elsewhere. And then the other thing that is maybe also quite interesting, but I think this has more to do with like the mindset of an airbender or with Aang, is using the opponent's blows against them. There's this episode, I think it's one of the first few episodes where Aang is just about to learn fire bending, and he is going one on one with this fire nation captain, his name is Zhao. And Zhao gets really frustrated about not being able to capture Aang. And so he gets kind of careless, with his fire bending, like he just tries to like, create as much fire as he could, and, Aang being playful or smart about it, however, you want to look at it, Aang goes to different parts of Zhao's ship. And what Zhao ends up doing is setting his own ship on fire. And Aang eventually tells Zhao that he's lost this fight, and Zhao asks him how: "you, Aang, never threw a single punch? How could you say that I lost?" And Aang says, "I haven't thrown a punch, but you have." So it's really interesting how they are very committed to this idea of nonviolence to the point that the one who does not commit violence is the one who is morally good, and is the one who, quote-unquote, wins in the end, compared to the one who is violent.

So the airbenders are committed to this idea of non violence. And that is actually a choice that they make. It's a conscious decision that they make. And of course, it's taught to them by their culture by, you know, by their masters, and it's passed down. But that doesn't mean that they're incapable of committing violence. It's not the nature of the air that makes them like soft, right? The show gives an example of an airbender who is using airbending to commit violence. He does that by sucking out the air out of people's lungs. I don't remember his name, but. Oh, yeah, that's right, Zahir. That's not actually from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Zaheer is a character from the sequel, Legend of Korra.

He could be anarchist. I mean, like he seems anarchists, right, because he's against hierarchy and rulers, but he kills the monarch by suffocating her, getting the air out of her lungs, right? And that causes chaos.

He claims he's an anarchist, right. And we know He claims he's an anarchist, because he says the reason for him committing violence, he says, is to remove authority, right, to remove the monarchy, which he sees as a root of evil. And by removing them, he can sort of bring back peace,

And people can be free.

And people can be free. That's right. But that's actually not the way of the Airbender. And that's certainly not the way of Avatar Aang. In the show, there is really this contrast between Aang, who is the only Airbender so we can say Aang and airbenders, and the three other element vendors. The three other element benders, the way they approach their problems is in a very direct approach. So they have a problem. And there is usually someone or some authority that's in the way of their, of solving their problem. And they think it is okay to justify direct action on these people to achieve their goals, because their goals are good and noble, it's now worth committing that violence, right? Aang takes a completely separate view on that and says, "If there's someone in the way, I will not commit violence to them under any circumstance whatsoever." And when we say I will not commit violence under any circumstance whatsoever, it's actually quite an extreme position to take. No violence under any circumstances? In libertarian ideas, there is this idea called Non-Aggression Principle. It's just kind of the same thing. Except under Non-Aggression Principle. You are allowed to commit violence if it's in self-defense, whereas the Airbender slash, you could say, Airbender, nonviolent purist, or an anarchist purist, even in self-defense, that is not a reason, a good enough reason to commit violence, and they paid the price. Their entire nation except for one person was completely wiped out. So we can really see that this is a conscious choice on their part. And so what that means is, if you don't have a solution to your problem that is nonviolent, airbenders would rather run away, they would rather wait until they can come up with an alternative that's nonviolent. And we see Aang do exactly that. In fact, it's called The Last Airbender because he managed to escape and while he escaped, the rest of the world tumbled into chaos. And when he woke up and he realized what happened while he has escaped, he had to live with this internal conflict of guilt, because he thought that his choice of running away was the reason for why the people he loved were killed. And he lived with that guilt for a long time. And so, on the surface, at first glance, it seems like this is a weak person who is not willing to face his problems head-on and would rather just run away. At first glance, it's kind of a turn-off. I mean, you brought up earlier in the introduction, when you said how you saw this young boy fainting all the time. And it's not really that strong, punch my way through all my problems, because I'm super confident character that maybe most of us would be attracted to.

Yeah, there are a bunch of things that I do want to point out from what you said, the first being, I like that you pointed out that it is not because they are airbenders, or it's not because of the element of air. I want to highlight that a little bit, I do want to make an example of Aang because he is the Avatar and he's able to control all the other elements. And there's this fight that he has with Azula, when she's trying to conquer Basing Se, say something like that, and, Aang at this point has learned waterbending. And as he is fighting with Azula. And when Azula is going to strike him with lightning, what Aang does is he kind of like uses water to just like splash her hand, so that she's not able to generate lightning. And so I think it's very clear because Aang uses waterbending here, he is still following that principle of nonviolence of deflecting or redirecting whatever the opponent does. And then as for this idea of running away and with guilt, I can empathize with Aang. I obviously have never gone through the same thing. And it's actually quite interesting that the showrunners decided to make this very heavy storyline for a kid's show for the main character.

It's heavy, because this is a guy whose entire family and all of his loved ones were massacred.

Yeah. So I can really understand the guilt where Aang is coming from. But I don't think that the running away or the escaping is necessarily a bad thing. I know. That's what Aang blames himself for. But I love how Katara is able to reframe that. The way Katara looks at it is what matters is you are here now and let's do something about it. We'll help you learn all the other elements so that you can be the Avatar. In a way, you can say it's a very proactive approach with Katara. But I think what I want to emphasize here is that running away is not the defining factor of whether or not you are a strong or a weak person. Running away, it's part of our fight or flight response. It can be a natural reaction. In Aang's case, he might have run away because he was scared of suddenly becoming an Avatar when he hasn't reached that age yet. He had to learn how to be an Avatar, even if he's too young because of the Fire Nation becoming more aggressive, right? And he might have fled because of the pressure, the responsibility, this intimidation, like this new life is so daunting. Okay, that is normal, we can still empathize with that. I think what Aang blames himself for ultimately, is that loss of control, because suddenly he put himself in an iceberg. It was even like an avatar response. And he was just there for 100 years. That is what he blames himself for: losing control. If I could bring it to real-life scenarios, maybe, there are communities in Zomia, which is in Southeast Asia, mainland Southeast Asia, you have the highlands, or the mountain areas there. And that's called Zomia. And you have the societies there who are rather anarchist and the way they are able to maintain this anarchist lifestyle or live freely is precisely by running away.

That's how they formed.

Yeah, you can see running away as being weak instead of like, oh, you know, fighting, whatever. But running away seems to be a method. The story doesn't end when you run away. You do something after. What is the thing that you do after? In the case of these Zomia societies, they make very interesting choices so that a state will not form in their new society. So they are able to make choices about what they eat, how they source their food, how they grow their food, where they grow their food, how they organize as a society, so how they work what the dynamics are.

Even how they tell their stories, right and their history.

So it really is very intentional. So I don't like framing running away or escaping as an act of cowardice, it is just I would argue, a means for you to achieve what you really want. If what you want is really freedom, if what you really want is time to like sort yourself out, it is okay to take a step back,

Two things I want to react: first really quickly is that running away, it's not that you're running away from your problems. That is what seems cowardly is just running away from your problems. I think to be very specific, it's more about if the only solutions you can think of is violence to solve your problems, then it's better to run away. The other thing I wanted to react to is the last thing that you said about taking the time to decide on how you're going to react. A lot of the time when the solution is violent, it also comes with this rhetoric that follows the line of we need to be decisive, we need to act now because we will not get another chance. Again, that actually shows up in the show. We were supposed to talk about this later on. But I'll bring it up now. When Aang asks advice from previous versions of himself, one of them tells Avatar Aang, that you need to be decisive, you need to act now. And funnily enough, in the context that he's asking the avatar for advice is, should I kill the Fire Lord Ozai? But we're jumping ahead of ourselves here.

You know, this reminds me of how we usually criticize, slow decision-making, and we actually have a term for it: analysis paralysis. And I've heard that as a criticism when I learned the term back in university in my theology class. And I did think, I mean, because I was learning about that term, it did come across as negative, I mean, the phrase itself implies that this is a negative thing, right? Because you are paralyzed, we do not want to be paralyzed, we want to keep moving. We want to move freely, and so on. And I would like to critique that term, because I don't think it's wrong to take your time and discern or find a way out of whatever choice that someone presents you with. Because the choices that you think are there, limited as they are, doesn't mean that those are really your only choices, right? You're just told, so I do want to make the case that it is okay, you should, between being impulsive and jumping into it and having your whatever project that you think people should adopt, because it will benefit them, chances are, it's also going to backfire in ways that maybe you also did not know because you jumped into it. Right? You don't really know how your idea or how this thing is gonna affect other people. And so it is good not just to take a step back, but also be humble as well, that whatever action that you have, can have unintended consequences.

Yeah. And when those actions that you take are violent, the unintended consequences tend to also be violent. And so just like the firebender that you mentioned earlier, who couldn't control his fire, and it spread around and just actually ended up destroying his own camps, his own ships, when we commit violence to achieve a better good, we actually also destroy ourselves in the process.

I think now's a good time to define some terms a little bit. Okay, when we talk about violence or nonviolence, what does it mean? Because right now, it might seem as though we're just maybe promoting pacifism. Right. And I mean, airbenders are pacifists, right? And I would say that pacifism is love for peace. If you love peace, then okay, you can call yourself a pacifist, but that can easily be corrupted and become radicalized or manipulate and manipulate. We've seen that historically. People have waged wars or killed people for peace, whatever peace that they imagine, right. And this is where I bring up nonviolence. I think pacifism is good as a mindset and nonviolence, I would say is a method, at least for me, when I think of nonviolence, I think of it as not using force, not using coercion, and not punishing any living thing for not obeying my will.

You mentioned in history, but I want to talk about specifically, for example, anarchists in history, the anarchist movement, I would say arguably, right? This is a relatively modern phenomenon, like the last 100 years. I mean, as a conscious sort of idea. The point is that when anarchists started becoming popular about 100 years ago, anarchists had this vision, this peaceful world where everybody is noncoercive, and we're all voluntarily interacting with one another. And it was such a nice world in our imagination, and anarchists saw the power structures in the way of that utopia and they wanted it now, they wanted to solve it as soon as possible so that people today or then didn't have to suffer. And that justified the violence that they committed, right? They said, It's okay to burn down bridges. It's okay to blow up train tracks, it's okay to blow up power plants, for example. These are all instruments that the state uses to exact violence. And by destroying them, the state can't commit violence anymore. But what ended up happening is they used violence or they justified violence, and it backfired. Now, when people think of anarchists they don't think of "these are nonviolent purists." They don't think of anarchists as people who are so peaceful that they're willing to die than commit violence and self-defense right there. They're like Airbender purists, in a way. Now they're tainted with this violent trope. And that ended up being very detrimental to the anarchist movement.

I would even say like on a super side note, because we're getting into anarchism, and I do want to learn anarchism from fellow agents. And it's just so interesting that what Google shows me are quote-unquote anarchists who have attempted allegedly to assassinate the figurehead. And I honestly don't know if they intended to assassinate? These could just be claims, right? But that's exactly what could turn other people off. It's like, "Oh, okay. These are people who just assassinate leaders," you could easily dismiss them as such. And maybe the only basis is a journal, right? Like, you could just say that, "Oh, I want to kill let's say, Hitler," for example. I don't want to speak for everyone, right? What I would say safely is that thing that you wrote that you want to kill Hitler can easily be used against you, whether you're an anarchist or not. If you are an anarchist, or "anarchist," with quotes, your whole movement can be brought down, because you have that urge to commit violence on the human being.

So we've touched on a lot of things. And now the question is, if violence is never the answer, right, if you don't have an answer right away, that's nonviolent, it's okay to fall back. Right? It's okay to gather yourself and sort of see alternative options you have. We've touched on that a little bit. But the question on everybody's mind is, well, how do we, you know, solve the problem? So to say, right, if violence is not the answer, then what should we do? Because we're trained to be active in how we approach problems, right? We're trained to think of what we need to do and not what we shouldn't do. So what should we do? And I think the show has a really good way of answering this question. The final scene or I should say, the culminating event of this show is the final showdown between avatar Aang, and Fire Lord Ozai. And Aang had this conflict because he's presented with a binary option, right, which is either he kills Fire Lord Ozai, and saves the world or "saves the world" in quotes, or he lets Fire Lord Ozai kill him and the world continues to be, I guess, exploited by the fire nation. So how did he end up approaching it?

Aang takes a step back to discern. And the way he does that is he asks everyone the question, "what would you do?" And not everyone is able to give him an answer. Zuko is not able to give Aang an answer because that is Zuko's dad, right? Zuko is also torn about it, right? Aang is his friend, Ozai is his dad. Sokka is more on the side of "you need to do your duty as the avatar, you need to protect the world." I don't know what Toph says, I don't remember. Katara assures Aang that he will know what the right thing to do is. I love that. Anyway, Aang is not entirely happy. I mean, those are just like what, two, three opinions. So kind of like goes on a soul-searching mission on an island and he decides to consult his past lives, the previous avatars, because he thinks that they would have wisdom to offer him because they are avatars and he is an avatar. This is the problem for an avatar to solve. And so as you said earlier, the avatars that he talks to a lot of their advice, or each other piece of advice is based on a personal experience. If it's a shortcoming, for example, I don't remember which avatar was not decisive. But yeah, so the avatar who was not decisive tells Aang you should be decisive. And Aang is not particularly happy with the advice that he got from Avatar Roku, the Fire Nation avatar, Avatar Kuruk, the waterbending avatar, and Kyoshi, the earthbending avatar. He's not happy. He feels like they don't understand his principle because they don't have the same upbringing of this idea or this commitment to nonviolence. So Aang has this idea of "you know what, I'm gonna ask an airbending avatar," so he calls up Avatar Yangchen...

On his phone or something?

It's like, projection. Actually, maybe one day we'll have an episode about meditation. But meditation is a huge part of Avatar and even Buddhism, right? Like, mindfulness and all that stuff. But anyway, he meditates and he's able to like call on Avatar Yangchen. So Aang presents her with the problem. And Avatar Yangchen is able to empathize with the whole, like "nonviolence, the monks were right to tell you that all life is sacred," but Avatar Yangchen says something that disappoints Aang. When I saw this, like you said in 2018, I was like, "Yes, Avatar Yangchen, you rock!" Because what she said was very firm. And I thought that was principle. And I wrote the quote somewhere here. She says, "Selfless duty calls you to sacrifice your own spiritual needs and do whatever it takes to protect the world." And at that time, my interpretation of that is, you should be willing to compromise your principles to do your duty to do the right thing. To be fair, there is a point there that our values, our morals, I mean, we have, we see a lot of like self-righteousness going around, especially with social media. Like these are things that we put up as part of our identity, or we want to identify with certain values. And Avatar Yangchen says, "You have to give those up, these things that you want to identify yourself with, because there's an even greater thing than those values." And so when Aang hears that, Aang was like "shit." I mean, he doesn't say that, but it's like "all of them tell me that I have to kill Fire Lord Ozai." And I mean, when I saw that scene, I was like, "yep, you have to kill Fire Lord Ozai." And the interesting part is that the island starts moving and Aang feels that and decides to see why the island he's on suddenly starts moving. And he discovers that the quote-unquote "Island" is actually a lion turtle. This is something that people or fans of the show, I haven't seen it talked about by fans of the show, which is how Avatar Aang got the ability to energybend or remove someone's bending abilities and, Aang asks the lion turtle for advice. I love that part. Because it really shows his commitment to discerning, right, like when you are in discerning when you are trying to get as many opinions as you can, like sincerely, and you're committed to that, you will really seek out everyone else's opinions, not just of your friends, not just of people you think are capable, right? Not just experts, Not just experts. Aang asks this random-ass figure. I mean, we know from the show that it's a spiritual, mythical creature, and he's ancient, and he's ancient, but Aang decides to ask him, "What do you think? This is my dilemma." And here's the thing, if Aang had not asked that from the lion turtle, I don't think he would have been granted energybending. So going back, I like that he asked for the lion turtle's advice. And Aang even says that all his past lives have told him that he should kill Fire Lord Ozai. But it doesn't feel right to me. And I love the response of the lion turtle. I mean, I didn't understand it before. But now that I've become older, and hopefully wiser, and plus, I'm an anarchist now, like, it just feels more awesome, I guess. So this is what the lion turtle says. "The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can tough the poison of hatred without being harmed. Since beginningless time, darkness thrives in the void, but always leads to purifying light." It's not really an answer of like, "Oh, should I kill Fire Lord Ozai?" And then this is this is the answer that you get right? If you want clarity, it could have been a yes or no.

Yeah, it's not imperative. It doesn't tell you what to do, or what you shouldn't do.

But I love that with the seemingly deep, wise, convoluted reply, Aang gets the assurance that he needs that "what if all these things that other people are saying with their own values, what if those are still delusions? And what if my firmness to this idea of nonviolence, what if this is the truth?" And sure enough, after the lion turtle says that, he grants Aang the ability to energybend.

He touches his forehead. Yeah. So there's that there's that enlightenment imagery once again, you know, the third eye, The Shing, what we call The Shing, the Buddha Third Eye enlightenment moment where there's this profound truth that you finally understood, and in a way, well, when humans get enlightened, we don't get energybending. But we do get this kind of like superpower in a way that at least in the story manifests itself with an actual superpower. One of the things that they always are talking about is whether that is a deus ex machina event where the writers didn't really know what to do. And so let's just give him the superpower. But if you look under the hood a little bit and you realize his superpower was knowing that if he could stay true to himself, if he knows his truth and is firm with his own truth and what he believes in, then he can consistently be right, right?

And you can find ways to get out of these dualities or dichotomies.

And if what he wants more than anything else is to avoid violence, if what he wants more than anything else is non-aggression, nonviolence, and that is his truth, then he can basically maintain that and know and be confident that it's the right decision.

Speaking of energybending, because you said that our superpower or us being enlightened, we don't learn energybending from that, right? But it's so interesting because the lion turtle tells Aang, or this is a flashback already, when Aang energybends on Fire Lord Ozai, we get a flashback. And it cuts to what the lion turtle tells Aang as he gives the energy bending. And the lion turtle says something like "before we bent the elements, we bent the energy within ourselves," which sounds profound. I don't know if this is a stretch, but I do think maybe there could be a parallel with everything that we're talking about here with nonviolence, because it is not weak, right? Like there is something to say about restraint and full capacity to regulate your emotions to hold your own, to stand your ground and not submit to a system you find corrupt, right? There is a strength in that. And, you know, Gandhi says that this form of resistance is truth force or soul force, it is strength of the spirit, not strength of the body, which is brute force. I don't know if like that is really what energy bending is. But definitely, if you think of it as being able to show restraint and sort of like regulating your emotions, I think those things are admirable, especially in, I guess, Eastern philosophy as opposed to maybe Western philosophy, which is all about, "oh, you got to do this, you got to do this," and like, you know, very proactive, very pro action, as opposed to being more mild and being able to wait. It's funny, because the best benders on the show are the ones who know how to wait. When Aang wanted to learn earthbending he wanted his old friend King Bumi to teach him how to earthbend and Bumi... I don't remember why he said he couldn't teach Aang but he said that the perfect earthbending mentor is someone who listens and waits. And we see that with Toph, right? She's blind. And so she doesn't make the first strike. She waits for people to move, and she has that seismic thing going on. And then she makes the attack.

She's reactive.

Yes. So there is that ability of waiting, tempering all your urges of just fighting, releasing your pent-up emotions. Even with the firebending when Aang wanted to first learn firebending and he finds this the deserter named Jeong Jeong, Jeong Jeong didn't want to teach Aang first, he said that before you learn the discipline of bending elements, you need to be disciplined yourself. And as a fire bender, he understands that the nature of fire's to spread and as a fire bender, what you do is you control that so that it doesn't spread if you don't want it to spread. That can apply to our emotions, or even our worst instincts: greed, envy, ego, pride, rage.

Yeah. So Aang finally is granted energybending, and he is now on the final battle with Fire Lord Ozai. And he doesn't kill Fire Lord Ozai he removes Fire Lord Ozai's ability to firebend.

Yes, he does remove Ozai's ability to fire bend. And I think this goes back to like what the lion turtle said about "everyone has all these illusions or delusions." And when it came to the previous avatars, I mean, not to say that they were like wrong or flawed or whatever. I don't want to make any moral judgments. But they did equate the person of Fire Lord Ozai, to be the thing that corrupts, the thing that oppresses, that's why he has to be killed. Whereas what we see and what Aang learns, maybe through the lion turtle himself, is that it is not the person of Fire Lord Ozai, it is Fire Lord Ozai being this OP firebender that has made him capable of ruling the world and conquering all these different places. And for Aang, because he's now able to energybend, we see that it is that power is the one that has resulted in suffering and oppression and not the person. And that's what Aang takes away, the ability to bend.

So what is evil isn't the person, it's the power, right? Humans, man is good. But power is evil, and Aang was able to correctly identify that difference. And even in our own lives, we look at all these politicians, bureaucrats, CEOs of Big Pharma, hah CEOs of Big Pharma... CEOs in general, whoever is our villain, right? You know, the classic "would you kill Hitler as a baby?" You have to realize that it's not the people that is evil. It's actually the power, the position, the authority, that's evil. And when we correctly identify that as the evil, then we don't need to start killing people to solve our problems. We don't need to use violence to solve our problems to remove that power. Removing that power actually is not about the power, but it's more about ourselves. Because the power people have over us is because we allow ourselves to be ruled. We submit ourselves to that power. And when we say no, when we resist the power, that's when it vanishes, right?

That maybe alludes to this idea of passive resistance. And actually, Gandhi doesn't like that term.

Was he the one who coined the term passive resistance?

I think passive resistance has been a term for a while. But Gandhi doesn't like it. I mean, not just because it's an English word, but he feels like it doesn't capture the essence, or like what makes passive resistance, a good form of fighting back, quote-unquote, I hate that we have to say fighting back, because that's really not what do you want to say. The English language just kind of like makes us say that. But yes, Gandhi doesn't like that. Because it comes with all the implications of weakness, cowardice, not being able to be effective. So he coins a word from his native tongue, which is Satyagraha, which he calls truth force, or soul force. And the very idea of that is you following your own principles, and not letting yourself submit to things that you find wrong or evil. And that also means that you will be punished, right? If you disobey laws that you find unjust or not, right, and part of this Satyagraha is accepting that punishment. So that means you have to be strong enough spiritually, to take those blows, because they will come.

You have to be strong spiritually. And that is an understatement, I believe, because it is, usually, if you are staying strong, you're staying strong by yourself. Everybody around you would rather avoid conflict, would rather avoid punishment, and they will not stand with you, right? And so it takes an incredible amount of strength to stand alone, but firm in what you believe to be true. To me, that's not cowardice at all. To me, what's more cowardice is to be part of a mob that wants to use violence to fight for good. I don't want to say that's cowardice, but compared to standing by yourself for what you believe to be true, I think that is real bravery. In fact, I think that's how Mahatma Gandhi describes it. And by standing alone, that act is actually infectious. We were talking about earlier about time, and taking your time. And by standing alone to what you believe in. It means you also recognize that you're willing to wait, and you're willing to take time for other people to see you standing up and for them to hopefully come to the same realization as you did. It means you're not going to force your opinions on other people, you're not going to tell people, "Hey, I'm enlightened, and I figured it out. This is exactly how I got there, and you can get there too." And worse yet, "I'm enlightened, I know how to get there. And I know how to propagandize the entire population and force people into this mindset." In fact, Gandhi himself said that Satyagraha is not something that we need to force on people. It is imperative on every person. In fact, he calls it their duty to live this Satyagraha, to embody this Satyagraha, and he doesn't care how long he needs to wait. And he said that himself. And I think that is the right approach, when it comes to fighting for freedom is just to just to stand true to what you believe. Other people will see that truth and stand with you. And I think the story of the human race in a way is this story of people realizing that over time. Mahatma Gandhi is already long been passed. So he never actually saw that. I don't believe in my lifetime I'm going to see it either. This like, anarchist purist society, as if you know, like the airbenders as if that's that we would see that in our lifetime. But it is a trend that's happening and it doesn't matter how long it takes. What's most important is we don't commit violence in the name of nonviolence.

Yeah. Earlier you asked how we can sort of remove ourselves from very corrupt paradigms. How in our lives you have these quote-unquote choices of the right thing to do, but they don't really feel like they are life-changing choices right? Earlier, my answer was just based on the show. And you know, it was about discernment, right? And now that we've moved on to Gandhi, and this idea of Satyagraha and standing your ground, not submitting, following your truth, being committed to the truth, I think there's another thing that Gandhi also tries to say, which is that each of us will have our own way of going about that truth, living out that truth that we value. For other people, if that's by talking about it, like what we're doing now, then, yeah, you should talk about it. For people who are maybe the type that like organize directly help the people they think are helpless in the community. All right, fine, go. Have all these like voluntaryist groups, mutual aid groups. Alright, that's great. So yeah, each of us would have our own way of standing our ground or like plugging out or opting out of this corrupt system. And the methods that we come up with will be informed by our own discernment as long as it's grounded in nonviolence and the result that we want, right? If it's helping or spreading an idea, you will find creative ways because you already have the foundation right?