For my paid subscribers only, I thought I’d give you a tiny sneak preview of a portion of my upcoming book, NO APOLOGIES.
This is from a chapter where I share the story of Jodi Shaw. She shares an important point that really stuck to me about authoritarianism/totalitarianism:
“Either you're actively pushing against it or you're complying.”
She understands that people have real reasons to comply. No one wants to lose their job, for example—including her. But she sees this as only the beginning. “If this keeps going, it’s going to be more than a job [that we lose].”
Sometimes you have to look under the rug and see all the dirt that you don’t want to look at, says Shaw. You can’t avoid it forever.
She recalls what someone once told her about the Chinese Cultural Revolution—that only 5 to 8 percent of the population believed in the ideologies that were being forced down. Everyone else just went along with it out of fear. On the other end, she says, there were [only] around 5 percent of the …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Random Minds by Katherine Brodsky to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.