Remarks of Carl Malamud
going on with our environment, I believe we will start to take actions. So I believe the key to change is two things. Gandhi told us that one of the keys to change is love. When you see the Nazis, you don’t go beat them up. One of the things I don’t like about the current debate in the United States is, we have the alt right, right? And then, we have people saying, “Let’s beat up Nazis.”
Well, that’s not the answer. Gandhi and King both taught us that love is the answer. But they also taught us something else, which is that if we want to change the world—that we’re invoking Justice Ranade here—if we want to change the world, we must educate ourselves, and educate our rulers.
Both King and Gandhi, before they committed satyagraha, they spent an intense amount of time educating themselves, and then, educating their rulers. Before Gandhi left for Dandi, he spent a month in that Ashram, training himself, and his fellow marchers. He sent petitions to the government, saying, “I am going to do this,” and so, I believe education, as well as love, is a key thing. Rabindranath Tagore felt that way, as well. When Gandhi tried to remove basic education, because he didn’t like the British schools, Tagore published his Call to Truth, and he said, “Our mind must acknowledge the truth of knowledge, just as our heart must learn the truth of love.” Right? You have to do both.
And so, I believe that knowledge is the answer to fake news. You don’t solve fake news by censoring it, because you can never do that. But you can have better news. You can have true news. If we want to solve the problems of economic opportunity, we have to help, it can’t happen just by itself.
Gandhi was a big fan of what he called “bread labor.” That comes from a Bible quote, and for him, bread labor at first was printing.
When he went to the Phoenix Ashram, everybody had to use their printing press. Every day, everybody did manual labor with the printing press. Later on, it was the spinning wheel. Well, today, Gandhi would say that coding open source software every day is bread labor. It really is. It’s manual labor, and it makes your world better. You’re making something real.
The other thing that Gandhi taught us is about public work. That we must spend part of our time—it’s fine to have a business, it’s fine to make money, that’s good. But we also, if we want to own our governments—which we do, in a democracy—we have to be part of it.
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