10 years ago, gay Americans could not get married and have it count in all 50 states
20 years ago, you could be made uninsurable because you got sick once
30 years ago, HIV was a death sentence
40 years ago, acid rain was still a problem
Dedicated public servants keep pushing good things forward
Don’t mean to be too bong-rippy here, but I honestly think it comes from a lot of people (and Western philosophers/critical theorists in the past) undervaluing the awesome but gentle power of persuasion and implementing systems of social consensus, and overvaluing ideals of “power” or “control”.
If you’ll forgive some Christian references and some (shudder) golf references, there’s an old 70s essay by a seminary prof who laid out Two Conceptions of Power: Unilateral/Coercive vs Relational, and how Western Civ, since about Plato, has been all coercive www.religion-online.org/article/two-...
We tend to think of power as the “ability to affect others without ourselves being affected”, but another form of power is “the capacity to influence and to be influenced by others”, that we often ignore or deride. Marx did a LOT to enshrine the instrumental relation of coercive power/knowledge.
