Speech at Lausanne, 8 December 1931; printed in his weekly paper Young India, 31 December 1931
Truth Is God
In December 1931 Mahatma Gandhi traveled through Switzerland on his way home from London. The Round Table Conference had collapsed, and he had won no concessions for Indian self-rule. On 8 December 1931 he stopped in Lausanne to address a meeting of conscientious objectors organized by the Swiss pacifist Pierre Cérésole. A listener asked him to explain his view of religion. For decades he had told crowds that God is truth. That evening in Lausanne he turned the phrase around and told the room that "Truth is God."
The change addressed a common mistake. If you start an argument with the word God, an atheist steps back and rejects the claim. Nobody rejects truth, because even a skeptic admits that facts exist. In Sanskrit the word for truth is satya (SUT-yuh), which comes from sat (said "sut", not like the English word), meaning that which exists. When an atheist works to find out what is so, Gandhiji saw them doing religious work under another name. The reversal moved the conversation away from dogma and placed it on shared ground.
Therefore
When you face disagreement, begin with the facts that both sides already acknowledge. You can build an understanding only from what neither person can deny.
Young India, 31 December 1931
Gandhiji's secretary, Mahadev Desai, took down the address while Edmond Privat translated the sentences into French. Desai mailed his notes to Ahmedabad, where they appeared in Young India, the weekly paper Gandhiji edited, on 31 December 1931. The reversed sentence traveled quickly. After leaving Switzerland, Gandhiji met Benito Mussolini in Rome and sailed from Brindisi. He landed in Bombay on 28 December 1931, and British police arrested him on 4 January 1932. He spent the next years in Yeravda Central Jail, but he kept using the reversed formula for the rest of his life.
A small reminder, on the desk or the laptop, that an argument works best when it begins from what nobody denies.
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