India produces a surplus of food, yet a vast population still starves. Throughout the world, income inequality has increased greatly instead of narrowing. Disease, inadequate water, and poverty afflict far too much of the world.
And then there is the violence. The violence of the state against other states and against it’s own peoples. The shocking violence of terrorism, of community against community. The individual violence of rape, murder, and abuse.
Sam is a technology optimist. He believes we have an unparalleled opportunity in our modern times. We can cure disease. We can have clean water. We can make the Internet high speed and universal, we can make it free. We can address global warming.
But, to do any of these things, we must redesign our system of governance, how we run our world. Sam often says we must not focus exclusively on human rights, we must add a focus on human needs.
When Sam finished, Dinish Trivedi spoke. A long-term member of parliament and an intensely spiritual and religious person, Sam and I had been staying at his house in Delhi, and I had come to admire him deeply.
Dinesh said one of the key problems in our modern world was communities blindly hating other communities. This depersonalized the hatred, allowing individuals to believe they had no responsibility to decide because hatred was the consensus, the way it was done. It depersonalized the victims of violence, they were no longer individual human beings, they were simply the hated others.
This violence often stems from nationalist or ethnic differences, but all too often it comes from religion. Dinesh said we must look into ourselves, that what the world needs is not a focus on religion, but a focus on spirituality. It is up to us to change ourselves, only then will the others change.
Dina Patel then spoke. She said the way you stop violence is you stop it yourself. She told the story of a young man who was drafted during the Vietnam war. He wrote to Einstein and asked him what to do. Einstein wrote back with a simple reply: “Do like Gandhi.”
The boy was puzzled, and wrote back to Einstein and asked him what that meant. Einstein replied, “disobey the law.” That boy went to jail for three years.
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