I am rereading Ursula K Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching and come across a wonderful phrase: power that is not force.

This is the essence of the Way, but it is also the method of non-violent revolutionaries like Jesus Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I feel that it is what the colonized peoples of the world need to embrace. Instead of setting themselves up in opposition to the grasping, striving world of Global Capitalism, what we need to do is exert our innate power—this power that is not force. Instead of using the coercive means of violent insurrection, installing a new oppressive power hierarchy to replace the old, as most violent insurrections end up doing, we need to live lives dedicated to radical transformation, eroding the existing power structure from the bottom up. To use a trite Taoism image, this is exactly how water, drop by drop, ends up destroying an entire mountain.

My belief is that oppression cannot be overthrown, freedom cannot be won, until we immunize ourselves from hierarchical power structures. When all individuals can think for themselves and make their own decisions, when all individuals are able to do the calculus that weighs individual rights against the rights of the majority, when we no longer need to kill other people who disagree with us, then we can dispense outright with coercive laws.

Is this ever really going to happen? I doubt it, but I like to dream.