Anyone can have a voice in the outcome of their life and society around them. When you give up on this belief, you relinquish power and control to others. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Stop focusing on the power of others, and obtain your own power and influence, and then govern with empathy for others.
Are you saying that people without power do not exist? Or are you saying that when someone does not have power, it is their fault? I am not sure you are saying either of these things, but I am finding it difficult to make any kind of charitable reading of this comment.
Positive thinking only gets you so far. When taken TOO FAR, positive thinking becomes a delusion. We with loving families can thoughtlessly & brutishly suggest to a friend that they “should definitely reconcile with their father”, because the idea of abusive parents is outside our experience.
Same applies to things like companies. I can easily tell people to “obtain power and fix problems” at work, but it is not necessarily possible. If we pretend that conflict does not exist, or can always be solved by the right actions, we’re just hurting people.
I am saying that assuming or accepting you have no power or less power than others is a sure way to create that reality. Are there limits. Sure. But there are countless examples of people that created more than society would have “allowed”.
Put another way. Ignore inequality as it effects you, assume you can overcome it. But acknowledge its existence with respect to others and do everything in your power to create equality.
> Ignore inequality as it effects you, assume you can overcome it. But acknowledge its existence with respect to others and do everything in your power to create equality.
This sounds hopelessly inconsistent to me. Why should I hold myself to a different standard than I hold other people to? If acknowledging inequality elsewhere is required to be kind to other people, that means that ignoring inequality when it affects me is being unkind to myself.
If you assume you can’t do something you definitely won’t. If you assume you can, you may not succeed; you may be blocked by some external cause, but not by something you could have controlled.
In the case of helping others, you may play a role in clearing an obstacle that, not withstanding their own effort and belief, would have blocked them.
In both cases you are assuming you have power. Power to help yourself and power to reduce inequality by empowering others.
It's a good rule of thumb. It's the difference between accepting and acknowledging. You can acknowledge the hardship of others but still fight against your own.
I don't tolerate inequality, but I do know it exists. It will continue to exist if we don't fight it.
Stop focusing on the power of others, and obtain your own power and influence, and then govern with empathy for others.