• @MisterScruffy@lemmy.ml
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    19 months ago

    You won’t ever be able to overcome the ills of society alone, by yourself you’ll never be able to “break free from the fetters and find your own way” Making a better society requires coordinated collective effort. Religion bonds people together in a very rare way. You can’t get people to work together in a coordinated way without some ideal in their minds, they have to believe that their effort might not help themselves directly but might help make future civilization a better place. That takes faith of one kind or another.

      • @MisterScruffy@lemmy.ml
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        19 months ago

        Here’s the context of that sentence that you are quoting: “You can’t get people to work together in a coordinated way without some ideal in their minds, they have to believe that their effort might not help themselves directly but might help make future civilization a better place. That takes faith of one kind or another.”

        I was talking about getting people to work together for a better world, not an individual choice"

    • @uriel238
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      19 months ago

      You’re right that changing society requires a movement, but I was talking about the individual process.

      And yes, few of us find a real opportunity to find a way to create for ourselves some wiggle-room such as Winston and his nook-journal hidden away outside the surveillance of Big Brother. (Our world teems with infant perishing from famine or infectious disease, so just by getting literate and on the internet, you’ve gotten far.)

      I think of the chaos of complexity that allowed cloned dinosaurs to breed, to migrate off Isla Nublar and to survive despite a lysine dependency. Our oppressive system is rife with such opportunities even if it’s to pirate movies for diabled folk who couldn’t otherwise afford to otherwise see them. Or for that matter, our own kids.

      Steps to escape the cages might be tiny in the moment, but they can sometimes add up.