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comments from fifty other eBay users. Next to that is a box that will tell you whether

the seller has had 100 percent positive feedback comments or less, and also give you

the chance to click and read all the buyers' comments about that seller.

The point, said Whitman, is that "I think every human being, Arthur Levitt or the

janitor or the waitress or the doctor or the professor, needs and craves validation

and positive feedback." And the big misconception is to think that it has to be money.

"It can be really small things," said Whitman, "telling someone, 'You did a really

great job, you were recognized as doing a great history paper.' Our users say to us

[about eBay's star system], 'Where else can you wake up in the morning and see how

much people like you?'"

But what is so striking, said Whitman, is that the overwhelming majority of feedback

on eBay is positive. That's interesting. People don't usually write Wal-Mart managers

to compliment them on a fabulous purchase. But when you are part of a community that

you feel ownership in, it is different. You have a stake. "The highest number of

feedback we have is well over 250,000 positive comments, and you can see each one,"

said Whitman. "You can see the entire history of each buyer and seller, and we have

introduced the ability to rebut. . . You cannot be anony

mous on eBay. If you are not willing to say who you are, you should not be saying

it. And it became the norm of the community really fast. . . We are not running an

exchange-we are running a community." Indeed, with 105 million registered users from

190 countries trading more than $35 billion in products annually, eBay is actually

a self-governing nation-state-the V.R.e., the Virtual Republic of eBay.

And how is itgoverned? EBay's philosophy, said Whitman, is, "Let's make a small number

of rules, really enforce them, and then create an environment in which people can

fulfill their own potential. There is something going on here besides buying and

selling goods." Even allow-

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ing for corporate boosterism, Whitman's essential message is really worth

contemplating: "People will say that 'eBay restored my faith in humanity'-contrary

to the world where people are cheating and don't give people the benefit of the doubt.

I hear that twice a week . . . EBay offers the little guy, who's disenfranchised,

an opportunity to compete on a totally level playing field. We have a disproportionate

share of wheelchairs and disabled and minorities, [because] on eBay people don't know

who you are. You are only as good as your product and feedback."

Whitman recalled that one day she got an e-mail from a couple in Orlando who were

coming to an "eBay Live" event at which she was speaking. These are big revival

meeting-conventions of eBay sellers. They asked if they could come backstage to meet

Whitman after her speech. "So after the keynote," she recalled, "they come back to

my green room, and in comes mom and dad and a seventeen-year-old boy in a

wheelchair-very disabled with cerebral palsy. They tell me, 'Kyle is very disabled

and can't go to school, [but] he built an eBay business and last year my husband and

I quit our jobs, and now we help him -we have made more money on eBay than we ever

made on our jobs.' And then they added the most incredible thing. They said, 'On eBay,

Kyle is not disabled.'"

Whitman told me that at another eBay Live event a young man came up to her, a big

power seller on eBay, and said that thanks to his eBay business he had been able to

buy ahouse and a car, hire people, and be his own boss. Butthe best part, said Whitman,

was that the young man

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added, "I am so excited about eBay, because I did not graduate from college and was

sort of disowned by my family, and I am now the hit of my family. I am a successful

entrepreneur."

"It's this blend of economic opportunity and validation" that makes eBay tick,

concluded Whitman. Those validated become transparent as good partners, because bad

validation is an option for the whole community.

Bottom line: eBay didn't just create an online market. It created a self-governing

community-a context-where anyone, from the severely handicapped to the head of the

SEC, could come and achieve his or her potential and be validated as a good and

trustworthy person by the whole community. That kind of self-esteem and validation

is the best, most effective way of producing dehumiliation and redignification. To

the extent that America can collaborate with regions like the Arab-Muslim world to

produce contexts where young people can succeed, can achieve their full potential

on a level playing field, can get validation and respect from achievements in this

world-and not from martyrdom to get into the next world-we can help foster more young

people with more dreams than memories.

India

If you want to see this same process at work in a less virtual community, study the

second largest Muslim country in the world. The largest Muslim country in the world

is Indonesia and the second largest is not Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, or Pakistan.

It is India. With some 150 million Muslims, India has more Muslims than Pakistan.

But here is an interesting statistic from 9/11: There are no Indian Muslims that we

know of in al-Qaeda and there are no Indian Muslims in America's Guantanamo Bay

post-9/11 prison camp. And no Indian Muslims have been found fighting alongside the

jihadists in Iraq. Why is that? Why do we not read about Indian Muslims, who are a

minority in a vast Hindu-dominated land, blaming America for all their problems and

wanting to fly airplanes

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into the Taj Mahal or the British embassy? Lord knows, Indian Muslims have their

grievances about access to capital and political representation. And interreligious

violence has occasionally flared up in India, with disastrous consequences. I am

certain that out of 150 million Muslims in India, a few will one day find their way

to al-Qaeda-if it can happen with some American Muslims, it can happen with Indian

Muslims. But this is not the norm. Why?

The answer is context-and in particular the secular, free-market, democratic context

of India, heavily influenced by a tradition of nonviolence and Hindu tolerance. M.

J. Akbar, the Muslim editor of the Asian Age, a national Indian English-language daily

primarily funded by non-Muslim Indians, put it to me this way: "I'll give you a quiz

question: Which is the only large Muslim community to enjoy sustained democracy for

the last fifty years? The Muslims of India. I am not going to exaggerate Muslim good

fortune in India. There are tensions, economic discrimination, and provocations, like

the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya [by Hindu nationalists in 1992]. But the

fact is, the Indian Constitution is secular and provides a real opportunity for

economic advancement of any community that can offer talent. That's why a growing

Muslim middle class here is moving up and generally doesn't manifest the strands of

deep anger you find in many nondemocratic Muslim states."

Where Islam is embedded in authoritarian societies, it tends to become the vehicle

of angry protest-Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. But where Islam is embedded

in a pluralistic democratic society-Turkey or India, for instance-those with a more

progressive outlook have a chance to get a better hearing for their interpretation

and a democratic forum where they can fight for their ideas on a more equal footing.

On November 15, 2003, the two main synagogues of Istanbul were hit by some fringe

suicide bombers. I happened to be in Istanbul a few months later, when they were

reopened. Several things struck me. To begin with, the chief rabbi appeared at the

ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor,

while crowds in the street threw red carnations on them both. Second, the prime

minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamic party, paid a

visit to the chief rabbi in his office-the first time a Turkish prime

minister had ever called on the chief rabbi. Lastly, the father of one of the suicide

bombers told the Turkish newspaper Xaman, "We cannot understand why this child had

done the thing he had done . . . First let us meet with the chief rabbi of our Jewish

brothers. Let me hug him. Let me kiss his hands and flowing robe. Let me apologize

in the name of my son and offer my condolences for the deaths. . . We will be damned

if we do not reconcile with them."

Different context, different narrative, different imagination.

I am keenly aware of the imperfections of Indian democracy, starting with the

oppressive caste system. Nevertheless, tohave sustained afunctioning democracy with

all its flaws for more than fifty years in a country of over 1 billion people, who

speak scores of different languages, is something of a miracle and a great source

of stability for the world. Two of India's presidents have been Muslims, and its

current president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is both a Muslim and the father of the Indian

nuclear missile program. While a Muslim woman sits on India's Supreme Court, no Muslim

woman is allowed even to drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Indian Muslims, including women,

have been governors of many Indian states, and the wealthiest man in India today,

high on the Forbes list of global billionaires, is an Indian Muslim: Azim Premji,

the chairman of Wipro, one of India's most important technology companies. I was in

India shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, when Indian

television carried a debate between the country's leading female movie star and

parliamentarian-Shabana Azmi, a Muslim woman -and the imam of New Delhi's biggest

mosque. The imam had called on Indian Muslims to go to Afghanistan and join the jihad

against America, and Azmi ripped into him, live on Indian TV, basically telling the

cleric to go take a hike. She told him to go to Kandahar and join the Taliban and

leave the rest of India's Muslims alone. How did she get away with that? Easy. As

a Muslim woman she lived in a context that empowered and protected her to speak her

mind -even to a leading cleric.

Different context, different narrative, different imagination.

This is not all that complicated: Give young people a context where they can translate

a positive imagination into reality, give them a context in which someone with a

grievance can have it adjudicated in a court of

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law without having to bribe the judge with a goat, give them a context in which they

can pursue an entrepreneurial idea and become the richest or the most creative or

most respected people in their own country, no matter what their background, give

them a context in which any complaint or idea can be published in the newspaper, give

them a context in which anyone can run for office-and guess what? They usually don't

want to blow up the world. They usually want to be part of it.

A South Asian Muslim friend of mine once told me this story: His Indian Muslim family

split in 1948, with half going to Pakistan and half staying in Mumbai. When he got

older, he asked his father one day why the Indian half of the family seemed to be

doing better than the Pakistani half. His father said to him, "Son, when a Muslim

grows up in India and he sees a man living in a big mansion high on a hill, he says,

'Father, one day, I will be that man.' And when a Muslim grows up in Pakistan and

sees a man living in a big mansion high on a hill, he says, 'Father, one day I will

kill that man.'" When you have a pathway to be the Man or the Woman, you tend to focus

on the path and on achieving your dreams. When you have no pathway, you tend to focus

on your wrath and on nursing your memories.

India only twenty years ago, before the triple convergence, was known as a country

of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa. Today its image has been

recalibrated. Now it is also seen as a country of brainy people and computer wizards.

Atul Vashistha, CEO of the outsourcing consulting firm NeoIT, often appears in the

American media to defend outsourcing. He told me this story: "One day I had a problem

with my HP printer-the printing was very slow. I was trying to figure out the problem.

So I call HP tech support. This guy answers and takes all my personal information

down. From his voice it is clear he is somewhere in India. So I start asking where

he is and how the weather is. We're having a nice chat. So after he is helping me

for about ten or fifteen minutes he says, 'Sir, do you mind if I say something to

you?' I said, 'Sure.' I figured he was going to tell me something else I was doing

wrong with my computer and was trying to be polite about it. And instead he says,

'Sir, I was very proud to hear you on Voice of America. You did a good job . . .'

I had just been on a VOA show about the backlash against

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globalization and outsourcing. I was one of three invited guests. There was a union

official, an economist, and myself. I defended outsourcing and this guy heard it."

Remember: In the flat world you don't get just your humiliation dished out to you

fiber-optically. You also get your pride dished out to you fiber-optically. An Indian

help-line operator suddenly knows, in real time, all about how one of his compatriots

is representing India half a world away, and it makes him feel better about himself.

The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Indian democracy, and even eBay

are all based on social contracts whose dominant feature is that authority comes from

the bottom up, and people can and do feel self-empowered to improve their lot. People

living in such contexts tend to spend their time focusing on what to do next, not