>I would argue that things would have to significantly worse for people to stand up. I was watching an interesting lecture the other day where a professor cont

>I would argue that things would have to significantly worse for people to stand up. I was watching an interesting lecture the other day where a professor contended this idea. (I really wish I could find it again) Basically his point was that revolutions do not emerge from conditions of total despair but rather from an imaginative vision of what could be better. As an example he compared North Korea in the present and America in colonial times. North Korea has terrible suffering but no real uprisings because the people there don't believe they could win against their government and they're not sure what society would look like even if they did. In colonial America conditions were relatively good, a fair amount of colonists were actually wealthy. But these people were seperated from Britain and so had time to conjure up imaginations of what their country could be. Once that imagination had been set, they were willing to fight and die against the large English empire. I'm not so sure that we need a great man but we do need a coherent vision that people can coalesce behind.