DN 16 quoted in this topic is one of the suttas in witch Buddha explains how a society functions and how it can flourish. If the people of a society have good traits as individuals, then that society will flourish. Let’s think of some examples of this: If there is violence in a society, if people are violent at the individual level, then eventually they will end up in civil wars or with high crime rates. If there is greed in a society then people will become corrupt and poor because of this corruption, they will all become poorer as a whole.
There is no possibility to force a supposedly enlightened legislation on people and make everybody enlightened through that legislation. For example democracy has been implemented in a lot of countries but it works very different depending on the country. This state that the left expects to solve all problems - IS MADE OUT OF PEOPLE. If the politicians at the individual level are greedy or violent or hearthless, if the judges at the individual level are corrupt, lazy, etc. That state is not going to work too good. Europe for example has no natural resources and until recent history was the poorest and most violent place on earth. But through development of wisdom, it managed to rise to where it is now. When wisdom that has been constantly developed for 2-3 centuries matured, it managed to create this modern world that we have now. And it managed to pull all the other faculties to a higher level. Buddha said the most important of the 5 faculties is wisdom.
People are products of their environment. There are some suttas about this too. The associates of a person matter a lot. If a person is put in a bad school full of violent, greedy and lazy people - he will become like them too. If a person is put is a great school with peaceful, hard working, generous people - the person will start to resemble them over time. Or for example the people in a country can be non-corrupt, smart, etc. and will vote that kind of politicians. On the other hand, people from another country can be greedy, stupid, easily brought with a small pension rise or a bucket of food products 2 days before the election or can easily fall for propaganda. Then they will have bad politicians to govern them. There is that great saying: “People always have the politicians they deserve”.
Like it or not, there is no magical solution or some divine legislation pushed on people to fix their problems. Idealist will hate to hear this but: there is no possibility for a single person to do some miraculous thing and fix the lack of faculties in other people by his own superhuman powers. What we can do is focus on our own development and in that way we are helping the people around us. We can be one of the good people from the class or from our neighbourhood or from our workplace. As Buddha said, " By protecting others, one protects oneself. By protecting oneself, one protects others."
There is a tendency in people, especially young ones, to not accept they are just 1 out of 7 billion humans, who do not accept that they can’t “have an impact” as big as they want to have. One day we need to accept that we can only help a small amount of people around us, not change the world by ourselves. And there is not much to change in the first place in countries like western ones where all that needed to be done was mostly done by people before us already. There is no revolution to do in the best place to live on earth.
As for those who are very famous like B.Bodhi, they can have a much bigger impact than normal people. But the way they can help people is through the mundane, non-spectacular, boring method of teaching about dhamma and arousing faith, energy, wisdom etc. in his readers. That is the way Buddha advised us to help people: by arousing the faculties in them. Trying to make people vote for this political party to impose this particular economic legislation that a philosophy graduate like B.Bodhi understand little about is not the way to go.
If we want to help people, we should rise faith (mundane faith in good and bad) in them, arouse energy in them, speak in favor of generosity with them, stress the importance of wisdom in them. This is what Buddha said we should do. A person that has people around him arouse his faculties, speak in praise of good behavior, he will develop little by little. That is how we developed too, coupled with past kamma/ good tendencies, that we had developed or were predisposed towards developing already.
Chris Arnade has been one of my heroes for years. Thank you so much for sharing this!
) But one of the signatories to that letter recently argued that there is, according to Buddhism, such a thing as “right anger.” I simply don’t believe that.