I notice you didn't mention that we'd have eaten your food... 'cause that would have made rebellion a certainty.Chips wrote:You'd have paid your taxes and we'd have drunk our tea!
You've got an interesting point that should be expanded, I think.
Do all activists see themselves as "righteous warriors?"
Let's take a common view of someone we'd define as an "activist." I don't mean people who volunteer as citizen scientists for Green Peace and never make the "front page." It's not about the lawyers who volunteer to defend someone's "Rights." I mean the wholly dedicated "activist" who makes "activism" their life in a more personally defining way. The women who burn their bras in public, the PETA people who throw blood on someone if they're wearing a leather jacket, the "One Percenters" that squat and crap on the grass, leaving garbage everywhere and destroying public and private property because they say it's "their right to do so."
We know what happens to people when they believe that they are a "righteous warrior," right? The "cause" becomes their lodestone on which their judgement of right and wrong is based. All for the cause and the cause for all... There come a point, the deeper down the rabbit-hole you go, where an "activist" could become a "fanatic."
It's not inevitable, of course. Many activists are level-headed and well-meaning people, right? But, the world creates ideas based on extremes. We're great at doing that. It's part of what I fell afoul of in an earlier post, pushing the meaning of "activists" to the extreme of... "extremist."
So, when is an activist a fanatic and when is a fanatic capable of actually doing good?
When "The Colonies" got pissed and dumped a bunch of tea into a harbor, was that extremist act "good." /shrug? And, once the American Revolution got started, mostly through the hard work of "activists" backed by some deep pockets and notable figures, was that good? Well, we seem to think so. But, what did those fanatics do while they were "doing good."
Loyalists were persecuted, sometimes even killed. Many had their property confiscated. Many were imprisoned. Eventually, those that remained Loyalists were deported with nothing.
ALL of these things were things that the "Founding Fathers" would have abhorred and they actively promoted laws to protect against such things... for their own people.
Sure, "revolutionaries" can do good things, but they have to ward themselves against committing atrocities while they're doing those "good things."