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Comment by Exoristos | Hacker News Reader

In Hades, yes. Vanishingly few of us actually control our fates or societies even to a small extent. The modern tendency to think like we do is a form of mania. By indulging it, we damage the only control we really have, our relative health and peace of mind.

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Pretending that you don't have a part to play in the fate of society is escapism at best, and learned helplessness at worst. Democracy is explicitly a system that functions off of the sum of individual participation, and if the quality of that participation is poor it will produce bad outcomes even barring subversion by other powers. Pessimism like yours cedes control entirely to those who would take it through undemocratic means, and the result will be a markedly worse world.

You don’t have a part to play of any value to anyone outside of your direct orbit. Nothing you can do will impact history. You will be forgotten shortly after your death. There is no afterlife, you’re nothing more special than a bug other than being complex enough to think that you are.

Just live your life however you want, you only get one, and it’ll be brief.

How do you square this opinion with the fact that people actually do get voted into office and enact policies with grand repercussions on history and society?

"People" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Did you? Are they reading this? Until they do it remains true in fact and not just in spirit.

The people reading this thread are not in your orbit. Yet you seem invested in convincing them of something.

To care about the world and the people in it is human. To numb yourself to that is self-deception, and to advocate for that is harmful.

> Yet you seem invested in convincing them of something

Justify that

I'll admit I'm assuming that you are writing with the intent for your words to be read, understood, and integrated in some capacity into other minds. That is, you are engaging in communication. The contents of your communication are an argument, advice to think about and participate in the world in a certain way. Perhaps this was a total accident, though, and you didn't mean to convince anyone of anything, and were merely pressing keys at random, in which case I apologize for reading intent into your actions.

You appear to lack both imagination and sound reasoning ability

Political movements can certainly be an important factor of modern power given the right instigators, but transferring the importance to oneself is, again, damaging mania.

>Democracy is explicitly a system that functions off of the sum of individual participation, and if the quality of that participation is poor it will produce bad outcomes even barring subversion by other powers

We don't live in a democracy. We live in plutocracy where people with capital and influence have an outsized influence on policy.

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