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The Gandhi Delusion
How history doesn’t really guarantee happy endings for love and truth
A friend of mine posted this quotation by Gandhi on her Facebook page the other day:
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it — always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
Seems harmless, right? Just another person self-comforting with a vapid idea not dissimilar from “Keep searching and you’ll find your true love in the end” or “There’s gold at the end of the rainbow” or “Everything was meant to be for a reason.”
The problem is, I’m not sure it is so harmless. When we bother to look at history we see not at all what Gandhi claimed but rather the precise opposite. For nearly all of recorded human history nearly everyone alive has been subject to the tyrants and murderers. The times and places when people were relatively free from fear and arbitrary violence have been extremely rare indeed.
Our ideas about human society have been formed during an exceptionally atypical time in history. Since 1945 we in the West have lived through the longest period of continual peace since the fall of the Roman Empire some 1,600 years ago. But prior to 1945, war and…
