[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

I have been reading this thread and it got me to thinking about the ways that I have changed over time. I am sure that my own personal evolution is not unique and if I can be moved to think in different ways so can others.

I used to believe that revolution was the only way to achieve the kind of world I wanted to live in. Tear it all down and start again. I had a favorite fantasy in which oppressed people everywhere would rise up together, throw off their yokes and wrest power from their oppressors. Of course not only is that extremely unlikely to ever happen, but even if by some miracle it did, without some fundamental change in human behavior, before you could say plus ça change, there would be more yokes, and necks aplenty to put them on.

I touched on this a couple of pages back but this moved me to revisit the issue. Like you, I believed that revolution was THE way to achieve a better world. Even after I no longer believed that (and my revolutionary ideas didn't survive contact with my 30s) I kept my mouth largely shut because I did not have a language to talk about what I saw was problematic. Then I spent the last 18 months reading up on totalitarian movements in the 20th century and I had an epiphany that these movements WERE what happened when you got a revolution.

The October Revolution of 1917 started out with the best of intentions. They were going to achieve True Socialism in their time. Not only did they fail to do so but in the process that created a regime of stunning, mind-numbing brutality. The Nazis started out with the best of intentions (although, unlike the Russians, there was a core of evil ideology already present) and in 12 short years turned THE jewel of Western Europe into rubble and brought Europe generally to the very brink of barbarism. In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation, the North Koreans started out not trying to make a truly insane totalitarian state. Rather, Kim Il Song started out trying to rebuild what had been the glory of Korea on a socialist principles. Now North Korea is a state so Orwellian that one who might not know better would be forgiven for believing that 1984 was written *about* that nation.

The lesson I took away from that reading is that come the revolution, what you end up with is another government that has to, just temporarily mind you, suspend freedoms and put off the promised egalitarian paradise. Meet the old boss, same as the new boss has resonance for a reason.

Over time I have come to believe it is possible to invoke change by working toward encouraging small shifts in the ways that people think about a particular issue. If you can change the way that the majority of people think about one thing, for example that marriage should only be between one man and one woman, then I believe you have the beginning of cultural change that will translate to systemic change. Though when it comes to human rights it often seems the laws change and then people adjust themselves over time. But I think the perception of majority sentiment needs to be there before the legislature can succeed.

Your observation about human rights is spot on. I don't know if the majority sentiment has to be there. I would certainly say that my own observation of the United States from the 1940s until the 1970s was that, essentially, the Federal government, in the form of (in order of importance to the effort) the SCOTUS, the POTUS and the Congress, dragged America kicking and screaming into a more integrated nation. When Truman desegregated the military the military did NOT want to go. Brown v. Board shoved integration in schools down America's throat whether they liked it or not. Loving v. Virginia did much the same for anti-miscegenation laws. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were done after Brown but before Loving. But Loving was almost a mop-up operation, a sort of "one more thing as long as we've got the house torn up anyway..." action.

I would have *preferred* that it had all happened through legislation but it couldn't so it happened the way it did.

What am I willing to give up, what will I compromise to achieve my goal? First off I have to figure out exactly what is my goal.

In part, that is why I started this thread. I think we need a discussion along the lines of clarifying what it is we're after.

Mostly it is that I would like to see a global mind shift to where human life becomes of the ultimate importance. Laws should not be made based on values formed from specific belief systems that are placed above human life. There is nothing of greater value and dignity than human life.

Sam Harris (who I don't always agree with) in his book 'The Moral Landscape' talks about morality being something we can look at, without appeal to supernatural entities or cosmic consciousnesses by focusing ourselves on events in the world and how that has effects on states of the human brain. It is a profoundly *human* centered moral vision--or, more accurately, framework for discussing morals.

[lots of really fantastic stuff regretfully snipped]

Cheers
Aj