[cutitout]

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm

He said that 1958, in an interview with Mike Wallace. Since then the gap between rich and poor (and between rich and mega-rich) kept exploding, media have been consolidated further, people have been uprooted even more, have been shit on and lied to even more, and have even less stakes in the outcome. Just doing more of the same will never lead to different results, yet by now many use current the state of things to argue for exactly that.