We became aware of suffering. We knew we had to work to change things. The first step was learning. We read as much as we could, we started talking about how things could be different. We didn’t know what to do.

We became aware of power structures. We saw an opportunity to work towards change. We navigated through the channels offered to us by the elite. We felt a sense of agency, and saw possibilities.

We wanted to change the structure. We realized that the deck was stacked. We knew the struggle was a long one, but thought good will and hard work could overpower greed and corruption.

We became disillusioned with the structure. We understood the structure was fatally flawed, and we despaired. To work within the structure was, in and of itself, to endorse the illegitimate authority which sustained it.

We wanted to overthrow the structure. We understood that reform was impotent. Small structural victories were simple appeasement and the larger battle could never be won when the elite wrote the rules. We knew we had to destroy the structure in order to truly be free.

We abandoned the structure. We gave up revolutionary ideology, understanding that we had simply used it to endow ourselves with a false sense of agency. We realized that we could never extinguish the existing structure with only the promise of what we would create in its place–we had to start creating it right away. If we created something good, then it would naturally overtake the existing structure, and that was our task. We removed ourselves from dialectic struggle, circumvented the existing structure, and set about building something beautiful.