[FollowingTheDao]

Ghandi set the standard for effective peaceful protests. Most protests I see people doing are laughably useless.

You have to know how to suffer for what is important.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi/Resistan...

"Thus was born satyagraha (“devotion to truth”), a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for resisting adversaries without rancor and fighting them without violence."

[squigz]

Devotion to one's ideals despite suffering for them is admirable, but not an option for many people. They have children to take care of, families to provide for. They just want to live their lives without inviting more pain into it. That is not something I'm going to hold against people or laugh at them for.

[teddyh]

If you are not prepared to sacrifice anything at all for your ideals, you by definition consider your ideals to be worthless.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

The problem is, and always has been, that you can pick a new round of ideals on your next turn in life and, as you grow older, you recognize that most of those ideals are, and I will generalize here, not ideal. The funny part is that most groups would want to tell you that their particular set of ideas are worth dying for. As is often the case, it seems to be only the rank and file and the young is doing the dying part though.

With that out of the way, maybe ideals is too charged of a word. Maybe the right word here is: priorities.

[squigz]

Of course, a more generous reading of my comment would have you realize I didn't mean literally anything, just as GP didn't mean something as relatively simple as giving up meat.

[dotnet00]

Invoking Gandhi's satyagrahas should always come with all the caveats that made the movement successful. It wasn't merely the act of peaceful protest that won India's independence, but the fact that it happened in the backdrop of WW2. Britain had to be much more careful to not risk escalating things into a full-blown revolt. Then, at the end of the war, they needed to focus their resources towards rebuilding.

[FollowingTheDao]

Agree, but he started his work in South Africa with great success. I was just revealing that there are different ways to protest that entail people sacrificing now a little so they do not have to sacrifice a lot in the future.

But I will also argue, imagine if he did nothing?

[dotnet00]

My intent wasn't to say that Gandhi and satyagraha had no contribution, and I agree that there are better ways to protest than harassing people trying to survive and throwing beans on paintings. I just wanted to emphasize that part of the reason satyagraha remained mainly peaceful was that even the people being protested against couldn't risk it turning violent.

> But I will also argue, imagine if he did nothing?

I think that India would still have gotten independence a few years later, since either way, I don't think post-WW2 Britain had the capacity to hold on to India. However, I do believe that Gandhi's efforts ended up playing a significant role in creating a more unified national identity and helped to foster values that have allowed India to be a mostly stable democracy, in stark contrast to many of its neighbors. So, if he had done nothing, I figure that India might've fragmented into smaller countries with too much conflict to amount to much on the global stage.

[highcountess]

Pretty sure Jesus set that standard many centuries before Gandhi. If anything Gandhi was just taking inspiration from Jesus.

[FollowingTheDao]

I agree, but was hoping to avoid religion.

But I am sad to see that bringing up Ghandi here even leads to downvotes of my original comment.

[McDyver]

How about politicians setting the standard for not fucking up the whole world and their fellow humans?

Why must it be the people suffering the consequence of greedy politicians, who must be the ones behaving with the high moral compass?

This seems to me like blaming the victims

Edit to add:

> You have to know how to suffer for what is important.

With that principle, people who have the decisional power should "suffer" by refraining from causing harm to others/the planet

[FollowingTheDao]

> How about politicians setting the standard for not fucking up the whole world and their fellow humans?

I agree. But can we really only blame the politicians? I do not vote because every politician wants war. That is my small protest that aligns with my morals. They have to earn my vote. What if there were a group of people who got together and said we will only vote for the candidate that is against all war or where serious about climate change?

>Why must it be the people suffering the consequence of greedy politicians, who must be the ones behaving with the high moral compass?

Yes, unfortunate, but the only way out is for those of us with a moral compass to act as an example for others. To be the heroes who sacrifice and are remembered through history and change things for the better.

Start in your town. Keep it local.

[nathanaldensr]

We as a species have to figure out a fool-proof test for sociopathy at a specific threshold, beyond which those people are not allowed to hold public office. Without this, the power-hungry will always, in the end, rule over those who seek to avoid conflict.