Lessons from Gandhi

Non-cooperation with evil is the strategy we need right now

“Non-cooperation is the nation's notice that it is no longer satisfied to be in tutelage.” - Mahatma Gandhi

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For all the recognition that Mohandas K. Gandhi has received in the last century, the genius of his work remains poorly understood by the general public. In particular, his movement was never “passive” in the way we tend to understand that word but extremely direct and confrontational.¹

“Non-cooperation is not a passive state; it is an intensively active state, more active than physical resistance or violence. Passive resistance is a misnomer.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

It was also extremely psychological. Gandhi understood the psychology of tyrants and the corresponding psychological development necessary for anyone who hopes to resist that tyranny effectively. His thinking was well-honed over decades. A lawyer who steadily became a spiritual and political leader, Gandhi created an international movement of nonviolence that helped to bring down the British colonial empire.

This movement began with a focus on “non-cooperation with evil,” an idea that led to the Non-Cooperation Movement, encouraging all Indians to withhold their spending and labor from anything that "sustained the British government and also economy in India.” This meant not buying British goods, not working at British jobs or attending British schools. It’s the thinking underlying the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Dr. King’s leadership in the American Civil Rights Movement. The goal is to starve an unjust government of its economic resources (money and labor), while also uniting people across class, religion, and race in a common cause of their own agency and empowerment.

To get to how we need to incorporate non-cooperation into American life today, we need to start with a recap.

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What’s happening?

The radical, rapid assault on our democracy is unfolding through three broad-scale strategies:

1: They are picking individuals off one by one.

Individuals like Rümeysa Öztürk,² Mahmoud Khalil,³ and Kseniia Petrova,⁴ hundreds of Venezuelan men with tattoos,⁵ and countless other human beings who are in the States legally and illegally are being kidnapped off the streets, detained, and deported under entirely false or highly questionable pretenses.

The intended effect of these abductions is terror, of course, as well as a sense of helplessness. Who will they take next? How will we protect them?

Make no mistake: while some people are more vulnerable than others to this kind of fascist policing, we are all at risk, no matter our level of citizenship or anything else. (First, they came for the immigrants.) Cruelty is their currency. They trade in chaos. For all the charges of idiocy, this government is sociopathic in its level of calculated violence.

By attacking specific individuals according to specific charges, the government not only enacts violence, they break apart alliances based on spurious claims of gang membership or the fight against antisemitism. To be clear: “not a single one” of the tattooed Latino men who were deported and forced to pose for a white-supremacist photo-op with Kristi Noem⁶ were members of the Tren de Aragua gang;⁷ and deporting pro-Palestinian students under the guise of defending Jewish people is another way to sow discord between Arabs and Jews, thereby amplifying the likelihood of violence and chaos while splintering liberal groups. This is their goal. It is a longstanding strategy. They are not trying to protect anyone.

2: They are destroying institutions. Through mass layoffs, building closures, website deletions, burning of records, and the withholding of billions of dollars of legally allocated funds, countless recently functional organizations are being blown apart with administrative wrecking balls.

These groups were (are) exemplars of humans working together on shared goals that I think we have largely taken for granted. These are organizations that have been the infrastructure of our nation and the foundation of international diplomacy. The cumulative effect of this wrecking ball is genuinely unfathomable, but one very direct result is the splintering of solidarity groups and communication networks at breakneck speed. Colleagues lose contact with each other when their email addresses are suspended and the doors to their workplaces are locked overnight. Meanwhile, the employees left are under strict orders not to organize with each other, and can’t entirely know who to trust.

For our collective memory, this genuinely shocking destruction of institutions over the last two months includes (but is not limited to): USAID,⁸ The Department of Education,⁹ The Social Security Administration,¹⁰ The Internal Revenue Service,¹¹ The Department of Veterans Affairs,¹² The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service,¹³ U.S. Institute of Peace,¹⁴ USPS,¹⁵ TSA,¹⁶ and The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.¹⁷ (Please add to this list in the comments.)

3: They are keeping us in a state of shock. Like trying to survive in an abusive, chaotic household, we are being forced to live just as they’d wanted: in disoriented terror of an unpredictable, unsafe father.

All of this confusing mayhem is the national equivalent of cowering in terror as Dad drinks and screams and breaks things. We are meant to feel overwhelmed and unable to find our sense of self and orientation to reality. We are meant to feel powerless.

This administration believes that we are children who do not know what is best for us and that Daddy (modern American machismo mimicking genuine adulthood) is here to fix it if we would just shut up like stupid children should and endure the violence and chaos in frozen submission. It’s gaslighting on a national scale.

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So what do we do? Non-Cooperation with Evil.

First, we need to stay conscious of what is happening to combat the tendency toward frozen disorientation.

This might sound painfully obvious, but I do not mean that we simply need to stay well-read and informed. The broadscale, constant attacks exist to keep us in frozen, brain-melting overwhelm.

So by “staying conscious,” I mean consistently shaking out of the trauma state that is being imposed on us day after day. With every individual who is stolen off the streets and disappeared, every institution that is dismembered, every powerful ally that is yelled at in the Oval Office (we’re so sorry), and every nation that is publically taunted as being better off if they’d just join the US (so, so sorry), it is easy to slip into a state of stunned silence. This is the effect of constant gaslighting and abuse.

In addition to staying well-read, I propose that we also practice staying “well-written” too. Start a journal. Tell yourself what is happening. Every day, or once a week. Write down what is unfolding so that you don’t forget — not twenty years from now, but a week from now. Help shake yourself out of the haze of this perpetual national-scale abuse that can start to just sound like an awful hum in the background if you’re not directly affected.

Second, we need to begin employing Non-Cooperation with Evil on a very large scale.

Gandhi woke people up to the paradigm of abuse being inflicted upon them, and then taught them how to fight that abuse without becoming embroiled in the cycles of trauma, violence, and anguish themselves. The result is what he called “militant non-violence” and “non-cooperation with evil.”

“Non-cooperation is an attempt to awaken the masses to a sense of their dignity and power. This can only be by enabling them to realize that they need not fear brute force if they would but know the soul within.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

How do we do that?

MONEY: Withdrawal of financial support through boycotts.

As we’ve all felt for a very long time, our lives are in a constant, disquieting entanglement with the evils of capitalism. This is a chance to shake out of all kinds of collective complacency. We need to very actively fight back and endure inconvenience and hardship while we withdraw our funds from people and corporations actively funding this fascist, anti-democratic government.

There are many different lists out there right now that name where not to spend money. My inclination is for a very strict withdrawal of support from a select number of corporations that are actively participating in the dismantling of democracy. The more focused we can be, the more impact we can have together.

This also means divesting from those companies.

We need to organize around precise, high-impact boycotts. I think many of us have already agreed to withdraw funds from the following companies, and we can continue to emphasize this as a goal for ourselves and our loved ones:

• Amazon, Audible, Whole Foods, The Washington Post, and all of Jeff Bezos’s other companies, including Twitch, Zappos, and Blue Origin.

• Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), and all Elon Musk’s companies.

• All Trump-owned businesses, obviously. But he’s got his name on most of those things, so that’s easier.

ATTENTION + DATA: Get off social media.

We all know that social media is a primary source of national and international disinformation campaigns, and that it’s a primary driver of emotional and mental stress too, which contributes to feelings of helplessness and fear.

I know, for many people, social media has also historically been very valuable for positive organization and the spreading of solidarity. I personally believe that the dangers have long outweighed the benefits, however. Global tyrants and corporations are extremely skilled at dominating our brainspace and stealing our personal information.

Full disclosure: I have never had a significant stake in social media, nor enjoyed being there, so the sacrifice to me has not been huge. But I have loved being entirely off of social media and believe that it’s a core component of modern Non-Cooperation. By withdrawing mental and financial participation in these primary actors of disinformation and mind control—primarily owned by Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg (all bleh)—we could effectively shut them down. Imagine the impact if tens of millions of people worldwide just deleted all of their information and accounts from Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok! Imagine.

This is a separate argument, and many people have pointed it out before me, but social media is also an extremely unsafe place on which to share location and demographic data today. Our activities and lives are all being monitored in ways that are hard to fathom and ways that can be used against us. If you’re even considering deleting your accounts, here’s your nudge to take the leap completely. Non-Cooperation!

LABOR: Institution/organization-wide strikes.

We are, of course, much stronger together. Seeing collective action is not only good because of its impact, it’s good for psychological health and to reclaim a sense of reality in this chaos.

The chaos of this government is a constant declaration that they are not fit to lead. If the individual actors within institutions continue to join together to make collective statements, we will all be better off. This should mean not only withdrawing money and attention/data, but withdrawing our labor as well in widespread national strikes.

We need to flip the script and shut down their institutions to keep them from functioning or being able to govern. We need to stop participating.

A nationwide movement of Non-Cooperation with this government is necessary across every professional field.

“Non-cooperation is a protest against an unwitting and unwilling participation in evil.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

1. Teachers and school administrators can join together in a national strike to protest the dismantling of the Department of Education and the decades of inaction on sensible gun rights legislation.

2. Doctors, nurses, and scientists can join together to strike against the assaults on the National Institute of Health, the dismantling of centuries of effective disease prevention, and the intrusion of extreme political ideology into patient care for women’s reproductive rights and trans healthcare.

   But also… teachers and healthcare professionals have been on the frontlines protecting our country and most vulnerable people for years now. So…

3. Members of our military and veterans can join in a strike to protest the widespread destruction of the Veterans Affairs Administration and the quite horrifying security breaches (Signalgate, for one) that put armed forces directly at risk. They might also join with those involved in national intelligence and diplomacy to protest the sudden embrace of… Russia as an ally.

4. Lawyers and members of the justice system can join together to protest public attacks on judges, law firms like Perkins Coie, and the basic rule of law. Some of this has started recently. Imagine what true solidarity could do to grind this country to a halt and draw a collective, clear line in the sand.

5. Financial planners, portfolio managers, and people on the stock exchange can strike to protest the reckless policies that are tanking the once-excellent stock market. Is this unlikely? Yes. Is it needed? Yes. None of this is business as usual, and we can’t act like it is or pretend that we’re powerless.

6. College administrators and professors, regardless of institution, can join together to protest the attempted government takeover of education policy, DEI initiatives, grants, and free speech within institutions—let alone the kidnapping of students.

7. Employees (current and former) of the IRS can strike to protest the firing of 20,000 employees and the destruction of essential tax enforcement. Any professional concerned about our country's financial welfare and the fidelity of tax laws can join them.

8. We can all, together, agree to withhold taxes until billionaires are forced to pay their fair share and employees of the IRS—many of whom are employed to guarantee that some of the super-rich pay their taxes—are returned to their post.

9. Organizations like the AARP and groups defending the rights of retired people and caring for the elderly can join together to draw attention to the active dismantling of Social Security.

10. Pilots, flight attendants, air traffic controllers, and employees (current and former) of TSA can join together to demand a return to safer air travel after a string of shocking crashes and near-crashes. This can’t continue!

11. Foreign service workers and everyone involved in international diplomacy can join together to protest the 180-degree flip in international policy from alignment with NATO to alignment with Putin and his American puppet government.

12. People in the arts at all levels can join to strike and protest the ideological takeover of the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and beyond. Those demonstrations would no doubt be extraordinary and oh, so life-giving.

13. ALL OF US can join together in a national strike for all of the above, regardless of affiliation. Where and how can we withdraw our data, labor, money, and attention from supporting this fascist project? Where and how can WE shut THEM down?

This government was not elected by a significant majority of Americans, and they’ve only been in power for two months! We can act fast, all together, and shut this country down through Non-Cooperation, proving that they are far less powerful than they appear and entirely unfit to lead.

To start, find your local April 5th protest and bring your friends!

And talk with your colleagues, former colleagues, neighbors, family, friends, and strangers: what would full Non-Cooperation with this government look like?

We need to declare our refusal to participate in our own tyranny.

“The duty of non-cooperation with unjust men and kings is as strictly enjoined by all the religions as is the duty of co-operation with just men and kings.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

Related:

Men

Entering the Darkness

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.

1. For those who might make the connection, my parents named me after Gandhi’s nonviolence movement, Satyagraha. I began exploring his work on my own in my early teens and studied it in much more depth in college.

2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/28/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts-ice

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-deportation-case-hearing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.pdMH.xeWiiouH8uEo&smid=url-share

4. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/3/28/hms-researcher-detained/

5. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-minister-says-jailed-deportees-us-not-tied-tren-de-aragua-2025-03-21/

6. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/kristi-noem-el-salvador-prison-photo-op-new-low?srsltid=AfmBOoo-lWUzcviXQy4wkk59bb1gpPP3BSQjCf-Hidy4mAorNYBOf8l_

7. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-minister-says-jailed-deportees-us-not-tied-tren-de-aragua-2025-03-21/

8. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/us/politics/usaid-trump-doge-cuts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.8Sjc.MiWN7s6O5Wej&smid=url-share

9. https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/trumps-attack-on-the-department-of-education-explained

10. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/doge-is-disrupting-social-security/

11. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-doge-irs-cuts-will-cost-more-than-savings-trump-musk-deficit

12. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/us/politics/veterans-affairs-doge-cuts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.m6V9.3h9LDjjjw4HK&smid=url-share

13. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/26/doge-labor-agency-fmcs-trump-order

14. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/18/headlines/doge_operatives_force_entry_into_us_institute_of_peace

15. https://apnews.com/article/us-postal-service-doge-agreement-daf3bf54fa0718908791fcb368b4d9d8

16. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/k9-doge-cuts-trump-veterans-b2715284.html & https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-ends-collective-bargaining-50000-airport-security-officers-2025-03-07/

17. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly48101n19o