Creative Nonviolence is…
Creative nonviolence is a force for truth, justice, and the well being of all that is neither violent nor passive. It challenges the power and belief system of violence, which is a destructive force designed to defeat and dominate others. It is a witness for justice and a method for helping to create it. It pursues this goal, not with passivity or retaliation, but with the third way of creative engagement and loving and determined resistance.
Creative Nonviolence is organized love. It is an orientation, a set of principles, a method, and specific strategies that puts love into practice. In this context, love is the process of acknowledging, safeguarding and engaging with the humanness, woundedness, and sacredness of the other, while creatively challenging and resisting her or his violence and injustice.
Creative Nonviolence has “two hands” that are in creative tension: noncooperation with injustice AND steadfast regard for the opponent as a human being.
The Method of Creative Nonviolence includes:
- Exposing and critiquing the reality of violence and injustice;
- Seeking to break the cycle of escalating and retaliatory violence;
- Withdrawing consent from it;
- Reaching out to opponents and potential allies;
- Unleashing people-power by alerting, winning and mobilizing the majority; and
- Supporting the long-term emergence of the larger truth:
first it is ridiculed; second it is fiercely opposed; and finally it becomes self-evident.
Principles of Creative Nonviolence:
- Creative Nonviolence acknowledges, repairs, and transforms the infinite relatedness and unity of all life.
- Injustice depends on either active or passive support (resulting from silence, indifference or fear) of the majority. Violence is any personal, interpersonal, institutional or systemic act, attitude or policy that dehumanizes, diminishes or destroys. It thrives by passive or active support. Creative nonviolence is the process of transforming this support for injustice by mobilizing and unleashing nonviolent people power.
- Each of us has a piece of the truth and the un-truth. Creative Nonviolence is a process of acknowledging and revealing the pieces of truth and untruth on both sides in a conflict as the basis for a just and constructive solution. Creative Nonviolence seeks the truth rather than the conquest of one side over another.
- Creative Nonviolence is the process of transforming Us vs. Them thought and action.
- Creative nonviolence unifies rather than threatens; integrates rather than fragments and destroys; draws us closer rather than excluding and separating; and challenges all double standards.
- Creative Nonviolence recognizes that each of us has tendencies toward both violence and love. It maintains, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line dividing good and evil cuts throughthe heart of every human being.” Each of us has only a piece of the truth, and therefore each of us possesses a piece of the un-truth. Creative nonviolence fails when it is arrogant or self-righteous, especially when it claims to be free of violence, or when it asserts that only othersare violent.
- Creative Nonviolence is stronger than the Power of Violence, which is a destructive force designed to defeat and dominate others and that oftenseeks to separate “us” from “them.” Creative Nonviolence, for this reason, disputes the claim that violence establishes peace, justice and order in any just and lasting way.
- Creative Nonviolence pursues its goal, not with passivity or retaliation, but with creative engagement and loving resistance. It willingly faces the consequences of its engagement and resistance.
- Creative Nonviolence is nurtured and strengthened by community, relationship-building, ongoing education, and practice. It requires training and experience in love, courage, creativity, and relentless persistence. This includes examining and transforming the ways that violence and injustice has been consciously or unconsciously internalized.
- Creative Nonviolence is not a path toward an idealistic utopia but a process for envisioning, weaving, mending, and honoring the web of personal, interpersonal, social, global and ecological relationships. The spirit and methods of Creative Nonviolence are suited to this ongong creation and re-creation of the world.
