Apropos of that, I have an Indian acquaintance who is an activist, focusing on women's rights and poverty. She's told a couple of stories stories about going into tiny, remote villages in India and telling people about their basic rights under the law, only to be asked "what is India?" and having to explain that the place these people live is called "India".
In any particular country, each citizen, of course, plays their own tiny part, but ultimately, its truly a tiny part.
For the vast majority of people, they make better decisions thinking about the path of a country as an impersonal force that they can react and respond to, but have functionally no actual control over
when you aggregate the political will of 800 million people, it is largely an impersonal force
Sadly, it's not even that - we don't have a popular vote, so not all votes have the same weight :(
The vast majority of elective public offices in the US are directly elected by popular vote.
And even in the House, where at least some effort is made to scale the number of representatives by population, California has only 53 representatives to Wyoming's 1, which still means each Wyoming resident has 1.5 times as much influence over the House as each California resident.
The most basic duty is participating in civic discussion; voting is secondary. One of the problems with American democracy is the idea that voting is the most fundamental mechanism of participation.
North Korea is basically propped up by China. If China would stop backing the regime, either the local citizens or intervention from South Korea could make the regime collapse overnight.
Eastern Europe had regimes enforced by the USSR. Same story. See 1989 (luckily for these countries).
Can't agree with equal responsibility. Children, for example, are not.
"The West" "solved" a bunch of its problems as it created problems in the rest of the world.
2. The West claims to be enlightened and progressive. Essentially having a manifest moral destiny.
3. Men have been sexist through most if not all of recorded history, treating women as lessor beings if not property. Does that excuse today's men?
3. No, they haven't. Obviously, male and female roles have been socially differentiated over history, but that derived from biology. The impact of biology has been lessened with industrialization, naturally leading to new opportunities for women.