You’re only powerless if you stand alone
We’ve all got a grain of sand’s worth of influence over our world. The historically unprecedented democratization of information and our ability to network and communicate like never before has given us all a grain of sand’s worth of power to open eyes and win hearts and minds over to a more revolutionary worldview.
Drop a grain of sand on your enemy’s head and it’s functionally the same as doing nothing. Drop a thousand tons of sand on your enemy, and it’s an entirely different story.
We’re not on a hero’s journey here. That’s Hollywood faff, where only the hero saves the day through his (always his) individual macho actions.
That isn’t the sort of thing that’s called for here. We’ll all have to work hard as individuals to win, but it will only be so that we can throw our own tiny grain of sand onto the head of our powerful foe. Our power lies in our vastly superior numbers, not in our own might as individuals.
That’s all you need to remember when you are feeling powerless: that feeling of powerlessness only makes sense from the standpoint of the individual hero’s journey. But the human adventure is not about an individual hero’s journey, it’s about billions of people waking up to reality together and becoming a conscious species. —Caitlin Johnstone, You Are Not Powerless, Because You Don’t Stand Alone
- previously: think in ecosystems, not systems — the collective diversity instead of the heroic despot
- see also: individuality is inseparable from community
- see also: any human power can be changed by human beings