How do I deal with a bully, without becoming a thug? | Scilla Elworthy | TEDxExeter

In this wise and soulful talk, peace activist Scilla Elworthy maps out the skills we need -- as nations and individuals -- to fight extreme force without using force in return. To answer the question of why and how non-violence works, she evokes historical heroes -- Aung San Suu Kyi, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela -- and the personal philosophies that powered their peaceful protests.

I'm so delighted to be able to see you.

In half a century
of trying to help prevent wars,

there's one question that never leaves me:

how do we deal with extreme violence

without using force in return?

When you're faced with brutality,

whether it's a child
facing a bully in the playground,

or domestic violence,

or on the streets of Syria today
facing tanks and shrapnel,

what's the most effective thing to do?

Fight back?

Give in?

Use more force?

This question,
"How do I deal with a bully

without becoming a thug in return?",

has been with me ever since I was a child.

I remember I was about thirteen,

glued to a grainy,
black and white television

in my parents' living room,

as soviet tanks rolled into Budapest.

And kids not much older than me

were throwing themselves at the tanks

and getting mown down.

And I rushed upstairs
and started packing my suitcase,

and my mother came up and said,
"What on earth are you doing?"

And I said, "I'm going to Budapest."

And she said, "What on earth for?"
And I said, "Kids are getting killed.

There's something terrible happening."

And she said, "Don't be so silly."

And I started to cry.

And she got it and she said,
"OK, I see it's serious.

You're much too young to help.
You need training.

I'll help you,
but just don't pack your suitcase."

(Laughter)

And so, I got some training,

and went and worked in Africa
during most of my twenties.

But I realized
that what I really needed to know

I couldn't get from training courses.

I wanted to understand how violence,

how oppression works.

And what I've discovered since is this:

Bullies use violence in three ways.

They use political violence to intimidate,

physical violence to terrorize,

and mental or emotional violence
to undermine.

And only very rarely, in very few cases,

does it work to use more violence.

Nelson Mandela went to jail
believing in violence.

And twenty seven years later,

he and his colleagues
had slowly and carefully honed the skills,

the incredible skills that they needed

to turn one of the most
vicious governments the world has known

into a democracy.

And they did it in a total devotion
to non-violence.

They realized
that using force against force

doesn't work.

So, what does work?

Over time, I've collected
about half dozen methods

that do work --
of course there are many more --

that do work and that are effective.

And the first is that the change
that has to take place

has to take place here, inside me.

It's my response,
my attitude to oppression

that I've got control over,

that I can do something about.

And what I need to develop

is self-knowledge to do that.

That means I need to know how I tick,

when I collapse,

where my formidable points are,

where my weaker points are.

When do I give in?

What will I stand up for?

And meditation, or self-inspection,
is one of the ways --

it's not the only one --

one of the ways of gaining
this kind of inner power.

And my heroine here, like Satish,

is Aung San Suu Kyi, in Burma.

She was leading a group of students

on a protest, in the streets of Rangoon.

They came around a corner,

faced with a row of machine guns.

And she realized straight away

that the soldiers, with their fingers
shaking on the triggers,

were more scared
than the student protesters behind her.

But she told the students to sit down,

and she walked forward,

with such calm and such clarity

and such total lack of fear

that she could walk
right up to the first gun,

put her hand on it and lower it.

And no one got killed.

So, that's what
the mastery of fear can do,

not only faced with machine guns,

but if you meet a knife fight
in the street.

But we have to practice.

So, what about our fear?

I have a little mantra.

"My fear grows fat

on the energy I feed it.

And if it grows very big,

it probably happens."

So, we all know that
3-o'clock-in-the-morning syndrome,

when something
you've been worrying about wakes you up.

I see a lot of people.

And, for an hour, you toss and turn,
it gets worse and worse,

and, by 4 o'clock,
you're pinned to the pillow

by a monster this big.

The only thing to do is to get up,
make a cup of tea

and sit down with the fear,
like a child beside you.

You're the adult.

The fear is the child
and you talk to the fear

and you ask it what it wants,
what it needs.

How can this be made better?

How can the child feel stronger?

And you make a plan and you say,

"OK, now we're going back to sleep.

At half past seven, we're getting up.
That's what we're going to do."

I had one of these
3-a.m. episodes on Sunday,

paralyzed with fear
of coming to talk to you.

(Laughter)

So, I did the thing.

I got up, made the cup of tea,

sat down with a digital,

and I'm here.

Still partly paralyzed, but I'm here.

(Applause)

So, that's fear.

What about anger?

Wherever there's injustice there's anger.

But anger is like gasoline.

And if you spray it around,

and somebody lights a match,

you've got an inferno.

But anger as an engine,
in an engine, is powerful.

If we can put our anger inside an engine,

it can drive us forward,

it can get us
through the dreadful moments,

and it can give us real inner power.

And I learned this in my work
with nuclear weapon policy-makers,

because, at the beginning,
I was so outraged

at the dangers they were exposing us to

that I just wanted to argue,

and blame, and make them wrong.

Totally ineffective.

In order to develop a dialogue for change,

we have to deal with our anger.

It's OK to be angry with the thing,

the nuclear weapons, in this case.

But it is hopeless
to be angry with the people.

They are human beings just like us,

and they are doing
what they think is best,

and that's the basis
on which we have to talk with them.

So, that's the third one. Anger.

And it brings me to the crux
of what's going on,

or what I perceive
is going on in the world today,

which is that last century
was top-down power.

It was still governments
telling people what to do.

This century, there's a shift.

It's bottom-up, or grass-roots power.

It's like mushrooms
coming through concrete.

It's people joining up with people --

as Bandi just said -- miles away,

to bring about change.

And Peace Direct spotted quite early on

that local people,
in areas of very hot conflict,

know what to do.

They know best what to do.

So, Peace Direct
gets behind them to do that.

And the kind of thing they're doing
is demobilizing militias,

rebuilding economies,

resettling refugees,

even liberating child soldiers.

And they have to risk their lives
almost everyday to do this.

And what they realized

is that using violence
in the situations they operate in

is not only less humane,

but it's less effective

than using methods
that connect people with people,

that rebuild.

And I think that the US military

is finally beginning to get this.

Up to now, their counter-terrorism policy

has been to kill insurgents
at almost any cost.

And if civilians get in the way,

that's written as "collateral damage".

And this is so infuriating

and humiliating
for the population of Afghanistan

that it makes recruitment
for Al Qaeda very easy

when people are
so disgusted by, for example,

the burning of the Qur'an.

So, the training
of the troops has to change,

and I think there are signs
that it is beginning to change.

The British military
would have been much better at this,

but there is one magnificent example

for them to take their cue from,

and that's a brilliant US
left-tenant colonel called Chris Hughes.

And he was leading his men

down the streets of Nadjaf,

in Iraq, actually.

And, suddenly, people were
pouring out of the houses,

on either side of the road,

screaming, yelling, furiously angry,

and surrounded these very young troops

who were completely terrified,

didn't know what was going on,
couldn't speak Arabic.

And Chris Hughes strode into
the middle of the throng

with his weapon above his head,

pointing at the ground,

and he said, "Kneel!".

And these huge soldiers,
with their backpacks

and their body armour,

wobbled to the ground.

And complete silence fell.

And after about two minutes,

everybody moved aside and went home.

Now, that to me is wisdom in action.

In the moment, that's what he did.

And it's happening everywhere now.

You don't believe me?

Have you asked yourselves

why and how so many dictatorships

have collapsed over the last thirty years?

Dictatorships in Czechoslovakia,

East Germany, Estonia, Latvia,

Lithuania, Mali, Madagascar,

Poland, the Philippines,
Serbia, Slovenia...

I could go on --
and now Tunisia and Egypt.

And this hasn't just happened, you know.

A lot of it is due to a book

written by an eighty-year-old man
in Boston, Gene Sharp.

He wrote a book called
"From Dictatorship to Democracy",

with 81 methodologies
for non-violent resistance.

And it's been translated into
26 languages,

it's flown around the world,

and it's being used by young people

and older people everywhere.

Because it works. It's effective.

So, this is what gives me hope.
Not just hope.

This is what makes me feel
very positive right now,

because, finally,
human beings are getting it.

We're getting...

practical, doable methodologies

to answer my question,

"How do we deal with a bully,
without becoming a thug?"

We're using the kind of skills
that I've outlined.

Inner power, development of inner power
through self-knowledge.

Recognizing and working with our fear.

Using anger as a fuel.

Cooperating with others.

Banding together with others.

Courage.

And, most importantly,

commitment to active non-violence.

Now, I don't just believe in non-violence.

I don't have to believe in it.

I see evidence everywhere of how it works.

And I see that we, ordinary people,

can do what Aung San Suu Kyi,

and Gandhi, and Mandela did.

We can bring to an end

the bloodiest century
that humanity has ever known.

And we can organize
to overcome oppression

by opening our hearts,

as well as strengthening
this incredible resolve.

And this open-heartedness is exactly

what I've experienced
in the entire organization

of this gathering,
since I got here yesterday.

Thank you.

(Applause)