(no subject)

A lot of pragmatic people will say, […] “You’ve done your part.” They say whatever, “Be safe, live long, be happy.” But I didn’t come forward to be safe. If I wanted to be safe, I’d still be sitting in Hawaii making a hell of a lot of money to spy on all of you. And nobody ever would have known about this, the system would have gotten worse. But the system, the world, the future gets worse every day that we don’t do something about it. […]

All those years I was sitting hoping for someone else to come forward and no one did, that’s because I was waiting for a hero. But there are no heroes. There’s only heroic decisions. You are never further than one decision away from making a difference.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big difference, doesn’t matter if it was a small difference because you don’t have to save the world by yourself. In fact, you can’t. All you have to do is lay down one brick. All you have to do is make things a little bit better in a small way so the other people can lay their brick on top of that or beside that. And together, step by step, day by day, year by year, we build the foundation of something better, but yeah, it’s not going to be safe.

[…] I don’t care if you’re the biggest doomsday prepper with cans full of beans. If the world ends, it’s going to affect you. We make things better. We become safe together. Collectively, that is our strength. That is the power of civilization. That is the power that shapes the future. Because even if you make life great for you, you’re going to die someday, you’re going to be forgotten someday, your cans of beans are going to rot someday. You can make things safer, you can be more careful, you can be more clever, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But at the end of the day, you have to recognize if you’re trying to eliminate all risks from your life, what you’re actually doing is eliminating all possibility from your life. You’re trying to collapse the universe of outcomes such that what you’ve lost is freedom. You’ve lost the ability to act because you’re afraid.

That’s what got us into this mess.

- Edward Snowden, via Joe Rogan (transcript)