There will always be tyrants
I really love fresh corn, right off the cob. But it’s not easy to grow in a small plot in a state with a pretty short summer. This year I was determined to try, laughably determined, my family would tell you: on my knees in carefully fertilized dirt with a tape measure, ensuring the right number of seeds with the right number of inches between them so the wind could carry pollen from tassel to silk to ensure big, delicious cobs.
This year, finally, my efforts worked. Seeds turned to fat stalks taller than me, with several cobs growing on each. We looked forward to fresh corn by mid-August.
Then a raccoon showed up and took down a third of the stalks. After consulting the internet, we put stinky soap on stakes, hung rags soaked with ammonia, and set up a motion-detector light. The next morning, no evidence of the raccoon. The morning after, though, another third of the corn was gone.
I was determined to save the last of it. I’d heard raccoons hate walking through prickly stuff, so I gathered armloads of briars and laid them down between and around the remaining stalks. The next morning, the corn stood. The next night, the animal tried to get into the shed, tore off a piece of the door, but still the corn stood, and the cobs thickened. Last night, we decided to give them one more day before we started to pull them off to eat.
This morning, every remaining stalk was down.
Raccoons remember where they find food, so this one will likely be back next summer. More than one person has suggested we trap it, but it’s not as simple as that. Where I live, animals can’t just be trapped and moved away; they have to be killed to prevent the spread of disease.
And we live on the edge of acres and acres of woods and fields. There’s a creek close by with rocks overhanging – perfect places for raccoons to den. We could get someone to come and trap the raccoon, take it away, and kill it. But there will always be raccoons in the woods.
So I’ll spend the winter learning and planning. I’ll try other ways to protect the garden, and one of these summers, we’ll have fresh corn.
This story is true, every word of it, and I’m struck by its lesson: There will always be raccoons in the woods. And, as Mohandas Gandhi famously said, there will always be tyrants. Not only single tyrants, but pernicious, tyrannical worldviews, systems, and ideas.
There will always be people who follow them, or who do their bidding out of fear, or simply because it pays well, because it puts food on the table. Or they don’t follow, they just go along, philosopher and ILI advisor Elizabeth Minnich writes, “thoughtlessly—without paying attention, reflecting, [or] questioning.”
All that has resulted in terrible harm, universes worse than the loss of my corn. But killing the tyrants doesn't work – it never has. Neither does killing their followers, nor punishing, degrading, or threatening those who go along.
It’s tempting, though – that impulse to put a stop to cruelty by putting a stop to the lives, or at least the freedom, of the cruel.
Violent responses to tyrannical governments fail twice as often as nonviolent ones. Punishment has never been proven to reliably change behavior. Neither has fear, not for any sustained amount of time. Violence begets more violence. Degradation begets degradation. And again, there will always be tyrants.
So where is the hope? I think it lies, at least in part, in nonviolent innovation. The human capacity for innovation is as strong as our vulnerability to causing each other harm. That capacity makes it possible to meet the next iteration of tyranny with new strategies grown in the soil of past failures and successes, informed by emerging knowledge and wisdom.
I am not going to kill this raccoon – because the woods are full of them, and because I’ll do better at growing my corn if I come up with new ways to thwart any raccoon that comes along.
It’s far from a perfect metaphor: raccoons are not tyrants, and my corn is nothing compared to the horrible losses that tyranny brings. And still, I won’t advocate killing the tyrants or their followers. I’ll refrain from degrading those who go along. Instead, I’ll join others in finding new ways to thwart any tyrant that comes along.
Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Founder and Executive Director