The person is not the problem. The more you respect people, the more readily they will listen to your needs.

We consider this one of the great secrets of nonviolence. We never hear about this in the mass media. But everyone needs respect. And when you respect someone, they suddenly are no longer your opponent, but they’re a partner in solving the problem. And that makes it possible to solve the most amazing intractable problems.

There are a lot of examples in nonviolence history of yielding to the temptation to humiliate or insult the opponent which only makes things much worse. On the other hand, there’s also wonderful examples, often from Gandhi, of surprising opponents by showing them respect. And that leads immediately to a solution.

All of us have the same basic needs. It’s always possible in principle to find a win/win solution. 

So, this is the idea of nonviolence. Instead of a me against you, it’s you and me against the problem. A win/win situation is one in which we both come out ahead. And the great secret underlying nonviolence – I almost said underlying life – is that every single conflict we face really can be resolved in a win/win structure. There really is no basic insoluble problem. There are problems with strategy, but not problems with really basic needs. When we understand that life and conflict resolution become a lot simpler.

Nonviolence will always make things better, but not always in the short term. Violence will always make them worse. 

And I might add, usually both short and long term. The idea is we need to be able to look under the surface and see the long term effects of the nonviolence that we have engaged. Sometimes it really looks as if we have lost, we have failed, only to find some unexpected solution coming up later. One case that I can think of, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the great result came up 20 years later. And it helps us to be able to look under the surface, see the force, the principle that nonviolence is operating on human life, even though we can’t see the results immediately.

Once we get to that point, this principle becomes obvious. Nonviolence will always make things better. Violence will always make them worse.

Each of us has a piece of the truth. None, including us, has the whole truth. 

This is the great secret of humility that Gandhi discovered, that conflicts become unsolvable when we think our position alone is right, when we realize that we never can be completely aware of the truth. We have a piece. Our opponent has a piece. Then everything works out for the better.

Of course, all these principles reinforce one another. This has a lot to do with the respect that we started out with at the beginning.

No one can really humiliate us or make us hate without our permission.

Power and freedom lie within us. Remember what Martin Luther King said, “I will never let anyone bring me so low as to make me hate him.” To hate another person is degrading and harmful to our own mental wellbeing and inhibits us from acting successfully. And we just plain don’t have to do it. Let other people hate us as much as they want. Let them humiliate us. We simply will not feel humiliated and we will not hate in return. Once again, this one is going to require a lot of practice, but be so worth it.

 “Unearned suffering is redemptive” – Martin Luther King.

When we accept it and persist in a just cause, we awaken the power of nonviolence. Now, we have to be careful here. We are not talking about masochism. We’re not talking about making a play for sympathy. We’re talking about choosing to take on the suffering that’s inherent in a situation rather than inflicted on someone else. That startles the opponent, makes him or her feel less threatened. And once again, leads the way to a nonviolent solution.

Nonviolence resists in both constructive and obstructive modes.

That is by creating solutions, including parallel institutions, and by standing in the way of injustice. Know when to use which. So, this discovery of constructive program was one of the real great breakthroughs of Mahatma Gandhi. And it is catching on among people who are socially active today. We realize that if you do your part of the work, partly by working on your own community where it needs to be improved, working on your own self, where you can do with some improving.

And then creating what you want instead of demanding other people to give it to you, that makes the rest of the nonviolence work much, much easier. There still will be places where you need to resist, but when you’ve done your constructive part first, you’re in a much stronger position strategically to do that resisting, that standing in the way. 

One example springs to mind of some group that failed to do this. It was an insurrectionary group in Peru years ago called, “The Sandero Luminoso.” And they killed and killed and wrecked and destroyed things. But they never demonstrated any capacity to build anything. And finally, the Peruvian people simply rejected them.

So, let’s not make that mistake. Always look for constructive solutions first. And then go on to the resistance. You know, most of the time what you see is people doing it exactly the opposite way.

Never disrespect another person or let them disrespect you.

We're going to be talking about compromising soon. And compromising on anything is helpful except your self-respect. Remember the secret here. When you disrespect another person, you are disrespecting yourself in some mysterious way. James Baldwin discovered that. Gandhi discovered that. Many people have discovered that. This is one of the reasons that nonviolence always succeeds. It always works. It always does good things to the social environment. Because if in nonviolence you are showing respect to your opponent, you’ve already improved things – in yourself, in the opponent, in the world at large.

So, those are two aspects to this profound strategy. Not disrespecting others. Not accepting disrespect when they try to offer it to you. Remember Harriet Tubman just getting up one morning and saying, “I am not a slave.” And that changed history. People tried to tell her that she was a slave. She wasn’t having any.

Know what’s essential. For example, the dignity of all parties and cling to that. Be willing to compromise on anything else. 

Gandhi was such an incredible compromiser that often the people around him thought that he had lost, he had given away the store when what he had actually done was compromise something inessential and guaranteeing his success on something essential.

So, before you go into any action remind yourself and the people working with you what is the basic thing we will not compromise on? We will not negotiate away? For example, in the Free Speech Movement, what we wanted was the ability to speak freely on campus. And instead we got pulled away by a lot of things having to do with, you know, whether we were going to be punished or not and things like that, as I’m confessing. And we lost – well, eventually, we got what we wanted, but it was much more difficult than it needed to be.

Very often people get hung up on inessentials like, “Am I getting exactly what I wanted? Are they making me move in a direction I don’t want?” And they get so hung up on these things that they forget what they were really after. So, it’s very, very powerful to A, be aware of what cannot be compromised, which is usually very minimum. It often has to do with dignity. And be more than willing to compromise on anything else.

Do not yield to threats or make them yourself. Remain open to the person or persons making them and offer to meet their real needs. 

Now, there’s a gray area here between telling opponents that you’re going to have to do something if they don’t stop doing something else and threatening them, saying, “Darn it, you better stop right away or I’m going to hurt you in some way.”

Pauline Jacobi, 92 years old, bit of a disability, climbed into her car with her groceries in the parking lot of the supermarket. Then suddenly, a man jumped into the car from the other door with a knife and said, “Give me all your money.” Pauline calmly explained, “Young man, Jesus is always with me in this car. If you kill me, I’m going straight to heaven and you’re going straight to hell.” They talked on a little bit and before you know it, the young man was in tears, put away his knife, started to back out of the car. And Pauline said, “Wait a minute young man.” And gave him all her money which was about $10 at the time.

This is a perfect example of threat in nonviolence, how not to yield to it. You are willing to help a person in need, absolutely. Willing to yield to a threat, never. So, that’s one side of our equation. The other side, of course, is not to make threats yourself. And here we have to draw a distinction between making a threat, which is saying, “You better do something that I want or I’m going to do something you don’t want,” versus having to, out of politeness, tell your opponent that if he or she or it doesn’t stop doing X you’re going to be forced to do Y. So, that’s not a threat because you’re upholding the best for all parties whereas the first example, “Give me what I want or else,” is a situation of enmity which is a win/lose situation.

So, that’s pretty much the story with threatening in nonviolence, how it never fits in with neither a giver nor a receiver.

When you succeed do not try to work in a new issue or yield to the temptation to triumph over your former opponents. 

Remember the goal is not to “win,” but to rebuild relationships. So, trying to work in a new issue is often the case with parties that feel weak. They feel disadvantaged. They've gotten somewhere and the tendency is to rush in and grab more than you had asked for in the immediate circumstance. Now is the time, you feel, to push for your advantage. But actually, that’s often the time when you lose the very advantage that you just gained.

If you try to add what’s called, “A fresh issue,” again, you change the situation from a conversation to a power struggle. The famous case, Lech Wałęsa in Poland, just about to sign an important agreement. They had worked for ten years to get the government to agree to this when someone came rushing in and said, “While you’re at it, why don’t you add this? And add that their should be no punishment of the people arrested and so forth.” So, he quickly added those two things and the government quickly withdrew. And everything they had tried for collapsed.

Similarly, Martin Luther King warned people not to triumph over their successes, for example, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott because that again means, “We won. You lost. And I’m glad about it.” That is about the last thing that you want to signalize in a nonviolent interaction, which is, as far as I’m concerned, means any interaction that leads to short and/or long-term success.