Interiew with Dalai Lama

Exclusive Interview - 'I am a supporter of globalization'
Published: Friday, 10 July, 2009

Dharamsala, HP, India, 5 July 2009 (By Joerg Eigendorf, Die Welt) - Getting to the Dalai Lama is a long and treacherous journey. The religious leader and Tibet’s head of state lives in exile at the foot of the Himalayas, two hours north of New Dehli by airplane. Here in Dharamshala his residence lies on an idyllic hill, right next to a Buddhist temple. Those who want to get to him must go through strict controls performed by both Indian as well as Tibetan security guards. Even bare fingers are patted down.

Fears over His Holiness are great. On one hand, the over 50-year-old non-violent fight for the autonomy of the Tibetan state has made the Nobel Peace Prize winner an international superstar. On the other hand, the Chinese have seen him as their archenemy since 1959.
But for years now the monk has shifted his focus from solely the Tibetan question and the fight against violence and has engaged himself in matters of the global economy and the challenge of how wealth can be distributed more fairly. Shortly before his trip to Germany at the end of July the Dalai Lama warns not only against greed, but also against having too much faith in the state.

WELT ONLINE: Your Holiness, for the Tibetans you are a divine king and you have many followers in the western world who idolize you. Do you have any weaknesses?
Dalai Lama: (laughs) Yes, I am lazy. Of course I wake up every morning at 3:30am and do some excercises, mediate, eat breakfast and meditate again. This goes on for four or five hours. In the spiritual regard I am not lazy. But when I sit in an airplane I always see people reading, writing or working on their computers, preparing presentations. I never do that – no homework, no preparations. These are signs of my laziness.

Does it bother you?
No, because when I prepare for something to intensely I always feel like it is too fake. I feel much better when I am spontaneous, because it comes from the heart.

Can you imagine how long I spent preparing for this interview?
(laughs again): You are German, so everything has to be precise. Besides, your questions have to be interesting. If I had to be the one asking questions, I would prepare for it too. But I just need to answer your questions, and if I don’t know an answer, I will just tell you.

Ok, how will we solve the financial crisis in the short-term?
See, this is one of those questions – I don’t know. The politicians must decide this. I am no expert in regards to solving a severe crisis. The same goes for violence and terrorism. In the short-term governments will have to act to prevent from endangering its citizens, which is the right thing to do. But with all the short-term actions we are taking, we shouldn’t forget the root cause of the problem.

What, in your opinion, is the root cause of the financial crisis?
Greed and gambling. Many people and companies only have one goal: money, money, and more money. Greed is ok when you let others profit from it, but greed for oneself is bad, it makes you ill. The egotistical ambition to always want to earn more money harms both the company and the individual himself. That is the biggest weakness of many managers – the financial crisis has proven this.

So it’s ok for someone to earn a lot as long as they share?
Wealth is not necessarily a bad thing when it has been earned in an honest manner and neither other individuals nor the environment suffered for it. As Buddhists we recognize that wealth is a basic prerequisite for a happy life. But a billionaire also only has ten fingers. He can fit three or four rings on each finger, but that would look weird. The satisfaction many millionaires who don’t share their wealth have in their heads is fictitious and not real. Rich people should help reduce poverty.

Some managers earn 10, 20 or even 30 million euros per year. You really don’t have a problem with this?
Just like in the music industry or sports there are exceptions. They can earn as much as they want, as long as it remains transparent and traceable why they earn so much money. Unfortunately there are only few such people. It is, however, unacceptable if a chief executive continues to increase his wealth while the company is sliding into bankruptcy, the shareholders lose their savings and the employees lose their jobs or don’t earn enough to afford a decent standard of living.

Let’s assume a chief executive discovers that he can develop a software in India for a tenth of the price it would cost in Germany. In order to do so, he must cut 1,000 jobs in Germany and create new ones in India. The owners of the company are pushing him to do this. What should the manager do?
The manager should consider the situation from all possible angles – the shareholders, the employees, the clients and society. Yes, even global society. A good manager must have a clear image of the problem. This sounds self-evident, but it doesn’t happen that often. Most of the time it is about maximizing profits.

Companies can’t survive without profits.
Yes, but companies are living, complex organisms and not profit machines. The profit should therefore not be the object of a company, but rather a result of good work. Just like a person can’t survive for long without food and water, a company can’t survive without profits. Not that I would ever reduce the purpose of a human to that, as eating and drinking are the only prerequisites for a meaningful life.

How do you feel about western companies investing in low-cost countries? Is that exploitation or does it help the national economy of these countries to close the gap with industrialized nations?
It depends on the investor’s incentive. I don’t think that many of the companies to invest in Indian or Chinese businesses are really interested in the Indian and Chinese people’s well-being. Quite often the interest lies in exploiting cheap labor, which I disapprove of. Yet if a company has a moral responsibility to improve the quality of life and to help China as a whole, then it is fine to profit from cheap labor. Global businesses can help China to become more democratic, help it to achieve an independent legal system and help to ensure a freedom of the press.

You won’t make many friends among those against globalization with your argument.
I am essentially a supporter of globalization. In the past societies and countries could seal themselves off from the rest of the world, but today this has become impossible. When we search for organizations that have the capacity and ability to improve our world, global companies are at the top of the list. In particular integrated global corporations are in an ideal position to support developing countries to close the gap to leading national economies.

Do you not have sympathy for anti-globalists?
I do when they remind leaders and companies that it is about more than just making profits. At the same time the growing opposition to globalization is dependent on our reluctance to accept the principle that everything is perishable: Meaning, the fact that everything is subject to permanent change. For Buddhists this is one of the basic pieces of wisdom that one must accept.

These liberal attitudes don’t really fit to someone who once called himself a Marxist monk. Do you still see yourself as one?
Yes, I still believe I am a Marxist monk. I don’t see a contradiction here either. In the Marxist theory the focus lies on the just allocation of wealth. From a moral perspective this is a correct claim. Capitalism, on the other hand, values the accruement of wealth – the allocation of it doesn’t matter here initially. In a worst case scenario the rich will keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer.

Why is it then that you are so against communism and socialism?
Communism? What is communism? Is China a communist country? (He laughs out loud). I am confused. The Chinese communists are communists without a communist ideology. But if you mean socialism, like it first existed in the Eastern Block and now in North Korea and Cuba, I believe it goes against human nature; it destroys creativity. It is not enough for people to have just enough to eat, clothes and a roof over their heads. We need to self-actualize ourselves. Buddha encouraged entrepreneurs to become successful through dependability and sales skills. Those who are successful can help others.

Yet you used to be a long-time admirer of Mao Zedong. How could you be so wrong?
I am still convinced that Mao Zedong was a Marxist, who wanted to help workers and farmers, in his early years up until the mid-1950s. In the mid-1950s I spent six months in Beijing and another four months in many other parts of China. The party leaders, to me, seemed really dedicated to their cause.

What impressed you about Mao?
He always looked like a farmer – his clothes were old and ruined. And when he spoke, he did so very slowly, so every word had an importance. He never beat around the bush, never said niceties; he always came straight to the point. All of his party members that I met back then were like that, which impressed me.

How did Mao fail, in your opinion?
Mao once told that the communist party must endure criticism, and that self-criticism was very important. Without criticism every system of power is like a fish without water. But then, in 1957, suddenly all party officials who dared to criticize were eliminated. That was the end of Maoism. The system failed because of its own arrogance and a lack of self-discipline. The abolishment of private property led to many belongings ending up in the hands of a state that devolved into a party elite which exerted an authoritarian reign – much like aristocrats of the past.

What role does the state play for you in the economy?
That is a very hard question. I don’t think that equality can be established on a national level. Nations can cause a lot of damage. This is why I warn against expecting too much from governments when it comes to the redistribution or regulation of the financial markets. People will always find ways around rules and laws – even if they are the best rules or laws. Or do you think it was the lack of regulations that lead to this financial crisis? The rules in the United States were good; but responsible action demands more than law-abidance

In your opinion the free market isn’t performing well, and you also don’t believe in regulation. So what it is that we need?
I call it a "responsible free market economy”. In the end it comes down to every single individual; it is dependent on each individual’s sense of moral responsibility, self-discipline, and values. This financial crisis isn’t purely a crisis of the market economy, but rather a crisis of values.

Alright, so the first thing we must do is send all government leaders and chief executives of large companies to Buddhist convents so that they may learn self-discipline and gain some morals.
(laughs): Three-week seminars in our convents won’t achieve much. It would be like laying a piece of ice on a rock – a little while later the rock would be wet, but nothing more. The rock will still be there. No, it’s unrealistic to expect a rapid systematic change in the global economy. The changes need to happen within each individual person and within the companies. This is dependent on the efforts we make in people’s education; this is about beginning in Kindergarten and not about a few weeks’ worth of discussions.

So what you are saying is that not only mathematics, history and languages need to be focused on in school, but that morality, ethics and religion need to be taught in a much greater scope.
History, math, languages and economics – these are all subjects for the brain. But responsibility – moral responsibilities, responsibilities regarding society – these are things that come from the heart. This, combined with the power of the brain, is what governments and large companies need. I will give you an example: we Tibetans believe that our national issue with China can only be resolved non-violently. This is what we preach from Kindergarten onwards throughout the entire education of an individual. When a Tibetan is confronted with a conflict, his reaction should immediately be: “How can I resolve this in dialogue?” It is important to us that young people in our schools understand that violence is the wrong way, that violence cannot solve problems. This attitude has become a part of many Tibetan’s lives through education and training. The same needs to occur in regards to economy and justice.

How many decades or centuries will it take until we are really ready for a “responsible free market economy”?
This financial and economic crisis will help it to happen faster, because those people who only think about money – even dream about it – are affected the most by it. The crisis is terrible for many people, but it also shows the value of money is limited and the insecurity is huge. Inner values like friendship, trust, honesty and compassion are much more reliable than money – they always bring happiness and strength.

But only few people are promoted because they value friendship, trust and compassion. Isn’t your approach a little idealistic?
What you are saying is one of the greatest contradictions. Those who assert themselves often have very little morale, and those who have a good sense of morale often don’t know how to assert themselves. This problem, by the way, is much larger in socialism than in economics. Often times the incompetent were leaders and governed and constricted the competent. We saw what happens then. A company that behaves the same way will fail because it wastes so much potential and will never develop its own values.

Every good CEO has prerequisites for a suitable successor, yet finding your successor is much more complicated and extensive. Do you worry about it?
No, it’s not so difficult. As a simple monk I don’t need a successor when I die. And in regards to the role of the Dalai Lama as a government leader: I ceded all of my governmental responsibilities eight years ago – we have an elected government, so this is also not a problem. This leaves the question of a successor of the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader. In 1969 I said the Tibetans need to decide themselves whether there will be a 15th Dalai Lama. I gave suggestions, but I cannot and do not want to get more involved than that.

Can you understand that leaders all over the world would like to meet with you – but don’t – in order to prevent endangering their economic relations with China? I think it is fine when a politician weighs all of the options and comes to the decision that abides by the nation’s interest. However, many politicians make it too easy for themselves – for them it is only about their own companies earning as much money as possible. Is this a terrible problem for me? Not really. My main interest is to promote human values like harmony, responsibility and charity. To do so I need to speak with people, not their leaders. If a government leader wants to meet with me for spiritual reasons, I’d be glad to meet with them. If they don’t, then they don’t, and there is no problem with that. I don’t travel the world only for my people and the question of Tibet’s future – I want to reach as many people as I can.

Will this century be marked by China’s ascent?
China has developed enormous power. It is the evidence for how well an economy can develop better under more freedom on a corporate level. What China is missing, however, are values its society can rely on. The standards that were relevant before the communist revolution are long gone. And what has taken their place? Nothing but money. The communist elite only think about power and money, and this can be very destructive.

Religion, states and economy have grown increasingly apart. Do you really believe that religious leaders such as yourself and the pope can change the world for the better?
I do not travel the world as a religious leader. I am a simple person, a simple monk. Sure I have more opportunities because I am welcomed as the Dalai Lama and because I have gathered a lot of experience in my 50 years of living in exile. These are experiences I can share with people. But the moral principles we are talking about here give me an inner strength, and inner strength gives me inner peace. This is how I hope to reach out to people.

How do you feel about staying in five-star hotels when you travel abroad?
To be honest, I don’t feel comfortable in large hotel rooms. Sometimes I think there could be a ghost in the room (laughs). This is why I always ask to be accommodated humbly and simply. I like places I stay in to be modern, clean and comfortable. But most of the time I cannot influence where I stay.

Don’t you get a guilty conscience when you stay in luxury accommodations?
Why should I? When feel good, I can do more for others. But of course it hurts me when I see poor people. Once when I was going to bed in Vienna I saw a man lying on the street outside, and when I woke up in the morning he was still there. I sent him fruits and bread; even though I know it will only temporarily ease his agony.

When was the last time you were unfair or unjust?
(Thinks): Sometimes I lose my patience, but then I apologize. It happens sometimes.
You have written books about how damaging anger is, and still you get angry sometimes?
Of course. It is not about eliminating anger, but rather finding the cause for it and working against it. If you do not understand where the anger comes from and don’t work against it, the anger will grow. Anger is a destructive emotion which is based on arrogance. This is why one must find the cause and counteract it.

You possess neither a credit card nor a bank account. Are there any objects that you really need, ones that you can’t live without? Like for example your home exercise equipment?
No, there is nothing I can’t live without. I learned this attitude when I was a child.
* * *
Translated by Carolin Wittek

HANDLING ANGER - APPLYING ANTIDOTES

Below is a summary of various approaches to anger. They obviously will be most efficient when used with a calm and concentrated mind, either during meditation or at the moment you realize that something needs to be done about your anger. Obviously, the problem during an actual difficult situation is to have a calm and concentrated mind - a regular meditation practice can be of great help then! One of the best ways to really make progress with understanding and changing the functioning of our own mind is to try out analytical meditation, combined with these clues.

ANTIDOTE 1 - Patience

Patience is the main antidote to anger. As common wisdom says: just count to 100... During this time, any of the below methods can be effective. The most effective method will depend on the actual situation. Especially in our age of rush and intense change, patience may not be seen as a positive quality, but take a minute to think impatience can easily give rise to a general feeling of anger.

ANTIDOTE 2 - Realisation of the Noble Truth of Suffering

Once one understands that problems and frustration is a basic fact of life, it can reduce our impatience with our own unrealistic expectations. In other words: nothing is perfect, so don't expect it. If I believe that things should be perfect, it is almost unavoidable to feel disappointed and hurt.

ANTIDOTE 3 - Understanding Karma

As explained in the page on Karma, the real reasons for our problems are our own actions, which are in turn caused by our own negative states of mind. If someone makes us angry, it can have a sobering effect if we dare to think that the real reasons for this situation are our own past actions, and the person is just a circumstance for our own karma to ripen.

ANTIDOTE 4 - Changing or Accepting

Basically, we can find ourselves in two types of unpleasant situations: ones we can change and ones we cannot change. - If I can change the situation, I should do something about it instead of getting all worked-up and angry. Not acting in such a situation will cause frustration in the end. - If I cannot change the situation, I will have to accept it. If I don't, it will only lead to frustration and a negative and unpleasant state of mind, which will make the situation only worse. For some reasons unclear to me, Westerners (including myself) appear to have big problems with accepting unpleasant situations which we cannot change. Could this be a result of impatience (a form of anger) with imperfection (an unrealistic expectation)?Do consider the wisdom in the following remarks (from an online discussion - forgot the writer.):

"How does this effect my Buddhist practice? It doesn't. These reported events are like an arrow shot at my heart but it lands at my feet. I choose not to bend over, pick it up, and stab myself with it."

ANTIDOTE 5 - Realistic Analysis

For example: someone accuses me of something. - If it is true, I apparently made a mistake, so I should listen and learn. - If it is untrue, the other person makes a mistake. So what? Nobody is perfect. I also make mistakes, and it is all too easy to label the other as "enemy", in which case a helpful discussion or forgiving becomes difficult. It may also be worthwhile searching for the real underlying reason of the problem. Of special importance is to evaluate one's own role in the situation: my own fears, insecurity, being very unfriendly, or not being blameless (like leaving home much too late for an appointment and blaming the 5 minutes delay of the train).

ANTIDOTE 6- Realisation of Emptiness

If one deeply realises the emptiness of inherent existence or interdependence of the other person, the situation and oneself, there is nothing to be angry about. The realisation of emptiness is therefore the ultimate means of ridding oneself of unrealistic negative emotions like anger.

ANTIDOTE 7 - Equanimity

Equanimity means that one realises the basic equality of all sentient beings; others want happiness, just like I do. Others make mistakes just like I do. Others are confused, angry, attached just like I often am. Is the other person happy in this situation, or just struggling like I am?

ANTIDOTE 8 - Openness

Be prepared to be open for the motivation of others to do what causes you problems. Talking it over and being prepared to listen can suddenly make a problem acceptable. Did you ever notice the difference when a plane or train has much delay and nobody gives any reasons for it? People very quickly become irritated and hostile. Then when the driver or pilot explains there is a technical defect or an accident, suddenly waiting becomes easier.

ANTIDOTE 9 - Relativity

Ask yourself if this situation is actually important enough to spoil your own and other people's mood. Is this problem worth getting upset in a life where death can hit me at any moment?

ANTIDOTE 10 - Change Your Motivation

In case a situation is really unacceptable, and another person needs to convinced that something is to be done or changed, there is no need to become upset and angry. It is likely much more efficient if you show of understanding and try to make the other understand the need for change. If one needs to appear angry for some reason to convince the other person of the seriousness of the situation, one can think like a parent acting wrathful to prevent the child from harming itself.In general, to be really effective one needs to reflect on quite a number of aspects in one's own mind like; forgiveness, peace of mind, fears, self-acceptance (no acceptance of others is really possible without self-acceptance), habits, prejudices etc. A list of aspects to start with is given in the page about the mind, under the 26 non-virtuous mental factors.

ANTIDOTE 11 - Watch Your Hands

An interesting suggestion from Jon Kabat-Zinn, from 'Wherever You Go, There You Are': "All our hand postures are mudras in that they are associated with subtle or not-so-subtle energies. Take the energy of the fist, for instance. When we get angry, our hands tend to close into fists. Some people unknowingly practice this mudra a lot in their lives. It waters the seeds of anger and violence within you ever time you do it, and they respond by sprouting and growing stronger. The next time you find yourself making fists out of anger, try to bring mindfulness to the inner attitude embodied in a fist. Feel the tension, the hatred, the anger, the aggression, and the fear which it contains. Then, in the midst of your anger, as an experiment, if the person you are angry at is present, try opening your fists and placing the palms together over your heart in the prayer position right in front of him. (Of course, he won't have the slightest idea what you are doing.) Notice what happens to the anger and hurt as you hold this position for even a few moments."

ANTIDOTE 12 - Meditation

Last, but certainly not least, meditation can be the ultimate cure to completely eliminating anger from your mind. In the beginning, one can do analytical meditations (like this meditation on anger), but also meditation on compassion, love and forgiving reduce anger as well. Ultimately, the realization of emptiness eradicates all delusions like anger.

Insult ..

On one occasion, the Buddha was invited by the Brahmin Bharadvaja for alms to his house. As invited, the Buddha visited the house of the Brahmin. Instead of entertaining Him, the Brahmin poured forth a torrent of abuse with the filthiest of words.

The Buddha politely inquired:"Do visitors come to your house, good Brahmin?"

"Yes," he replied.

"What do yu do when they come?"

"Oh, we prepare a sumptuous feast."

"What do you if they refuse to receive the meal?"

"Why, we gladly partake of them ourselves."

"Well, good Brahmin, you have invited me for alms and entertained me with abuse which I decline to accept. So now it belongs to you."

From the Akkosa Sutta

Why I write by George Orwell

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious – i.e. seriously intended – writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth' – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger.' At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished 'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed – at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week – and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my 'story' ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: 'He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,' etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The 'story' must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost –

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism.
Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose.
– Using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature – taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when you are first adult – I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. 'Why did you put in all that stuff?' he said. 'You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism.' What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Summer, 1946

Einstein's thoughts on Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi's life achievement stands unique in political history. He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country, and practised it with greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence he had on the conciously thinking human being of the entire civilized world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time with its overestimation of brutal violent forces. Because lasting will only be the work of such statesmen who wake up and strengthen the moral power of their people through their example and educational works.
We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlightened contemporary, a role model for the generations to come.

Part 4 Letter to a Hindoo

New justifications have now appeared in place of the antiquated, obsolete, religious ones. These new justifications are just as inadequate as the old ones, but as they are new their futility cannot immediately be recognized by the majority of men. Besides this, those who enjoy power propagate these new sophistries and support them so skilfully that they seem irrefutable even to many of those who suffer from the oppression these theories seek to justify. These new justifications are termed "scientific". But by the term "scientific" is understood just what was formerly understood by the term "religious": just as formerly everything called "religious" was held to be unquestionable simply because it was called religious, so now all that is called "scientific" is held to be unquestionable. In the present case the obsolete religious justification of violence which consisted in the recognition of the supernatural personality of the God-ordained ruler ("there is no power but of God") has been superseded by the "scientific" justification which puts forward, first, the assertion that because the coercion of man by man has existed in all ages, it follows that such coercion must continue to exist. This assertion that people should continue to live as they have done throughout past ages rather than as their reason and conscience indicate, is what "science" calls "the historic law". A further "scientific" justification lies in the statement that as among plants and wild beasts there is a constant struggle for existence which always results in the survival of the fittest, a similar struggle should be carried on among human ­beings, that is, who are gifted with intelligence and love; faculties lacking in the creatures subject to the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Such is the second "scientific" justification. The third, most important, and unfortunately most widespread justification is, at bottom, the age-old religious one just a little altered: that in public life the suppression of some for the protection of the majority cannot be avoided - so that coercion is unavoidable however desirable reliance on love alone might be in human intercourse. The only difference in this justification by pseudo-science consists in the fact that, to the question why such and such people and not others have the right to decide against whom violence may and must be used, pseudo-science now gives a different reply to that given by religion - which declared that the right to decide was valid because it was pronounced by persons possessed of divine power. "Science" says that these decisions represent the will of the people, which under a constitutional form of government is supposed to find expression in all the decisions and actions of those who are at the helm at the moment. Such are the scientific justifications of the principle of coercion. They are not merely weak but absolutely invalid, yet they are so much needed by those who occupy privileged positions that they believe in them as blindly as they formerly believed in the immaculate conception, and propagate them just as confidently. And the unfortunate majority of men bound to toil is so dazzled by the pomp with which these "scientific truths" are presented, that under this new influence it accepts these scientific stupidities for holy truth, just as it formerly accepted the pseudo-religious justifications; and it continues to submit to the present holders of power who are just as hard-hearted but rather more numerous than before.

Part 3 A Letter to a Hindoo

The aim of the sinless One consists in acting without causing sorrow to others, although he could attain to great power by ignoring their feelings.

The aim of the sinless One lies in not doing evil unto those who have done evil unto him.

If a man causes suffering even to those who hate him without any reason, he will ultimately have grief not to be overcome.

The punishment of evil doers consists in making them feel ashamed of themselves by doing them a great kindness.

Of what use is superior knowledge in the one, if he does not endeavour to relieve his neighbour's want as much as his own?

If, in the morning, a man wishes to do evil unto another, in the evening the evil will return to him.

The Hindu Kural.

Thus it went on everywhere. The recognition that love represents the highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but words. It was taught that this highest morality was only applicable to private life - for home use, as it were - but that in public life all forms of violence - such as imprisonment, executions, and wars ­might be used for the protection of the majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were diametrically opposed to any vestige of love. And though common sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is to be subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of others, these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn, arrive at a similar conclusion with regard to those who have employed violence to them, and though the great religious teachers of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and above all of Christianity, foreseeing such a perversion of the law of love, have constantly drawn attention to the one invariable condition of love (namely, the enduring of injuries, insults, and violence of all kinds without resisting evil by evil) people continued -regardless of all that leads man forward - to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to torture but even to kill one another.

For a long time people lived in this obvious contradiction without noticing it. But a time arrived when this contradiction became more and more evident to thinkers of various nations. And the old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another, became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had been made so plausible.

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense. And so one might suppose that having lost confidence in any religious authority for a belief in the divinity of potentates of various kinds, people would try to free themselves from subjection to it. But unfortunately not only were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings, benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result of the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine beings, ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and established themselves around them, and under an appearance of governing took advantage of the people. And when the old deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage to a limited number of rulers.