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Quote by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world. Bottom line: Your actions determine the direction the society should take. We often think how alone our action can make a difference. However, it can and it make. If every individual starts doing the right then it sets a good precedent, it serves as an example to others to toe the line.”

Quote by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

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“The perfect society can be defined as a group of people who come together with shared morals, shared values and wish to move forward as one, working together for the good of the community whilst not forgetting the rights and importance of the individual. This community cohesion relies on a shared sense of consciousness held by the people who make up that society.”

SocietyIndividualismCollectivismWestern CivilizationCollective ConsciousnessShared Values
Book:The Fall of Western Man
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“And therefore the responsibility of raising the challenge is typically in the hands of those who recognize that they have a subordinate status. It's very hard to recognize that. I mean, people lived, you know, for millennia without recognizing that they are being subordinated in systems of power. I mean, it's true of women, for example, or slaves, you know. I mean, most slave societies were accepted by the slaves as legitimate and, in fact, necessary. And the same is true of, for example, people have jobs today in our society, almost without exception, they consider it legitimate for them to be in a position where they have to rent themselves in order to survive. That's certainly not obvious, you know. And in fact, if you go back a century ago, it was not only considered not obvious but it was considered outlandish by American working people. I'm not talking about Marxists or socialists, or anybody like that, but say, millhands in Lowell, Massachusetts, who never heard of socialism, who regarded it as a form of slavery, and were complaining that they had not fought the Civil War to replace chattel slavery by wage labor and that therefore, those who work in the mills ought to own them because that's the republican rights that we won in the American Revolution, and so on and so forth. So, you know, it's not obvious, but by now, I think, enough indoctrination and propaganda have taken place so people do regard that form of subordination to external authority as legitimate. Whether they should is another question, but the fact is they do, just as for most of history, women have accepted a subordinate role as correct and proper and so on. And slaves did, and people living in, say, feudal societies. In a feudal society, people had a place, you know, some kind of rule, and quite typically the societies were stable because people regarded those structures as legitimate. The same is true of religious structures, and I mean, throughout human life, there's a whole variety of systems of authority, and oppression, and domination, and so on, which are usually accepted as legitimate by the people subordinated to them. When they don't, you have struggles and revolutions, and sometimes changes, and sometimes brutality, and so on.”

PowerSocietyAuthorityDominationSubordinationWage Slavery
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Dominance hierarchy is probably as old as mammal societies. Among behaviorally complex mammals, certainly among chimpanzees, patterns recognizably like ethics and politics have appeared, how long ago we don't know, but probably millions of years ago. And mammalian play, the seedbed of later capacities, goes back probably at least as far.”

ReligionOrderSocietyCivilizationHierarchy
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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