What People Make, People Can Remake
Much of what feels like fate was built by people: the roles we are handed, the ranks we climb, and the arrangements we live inside.
Human agency
What People Make, People Can Remake
You work hard. You stay connected. And you can still feel that life is happening to you, and not through you.
The Buddha saw that feeling, two and a half thousand years ago, and he had a practical answer. Following his life, and the reading of his teaching recovered by Dr B. R. Ambedkar, much of what we call suffering is made by people. It is made through the roles we are handed, the ranks we climb, and the arrangements we build together. An order ranked by birth, a job that uses a person and does not consult them, a day that never quite feels like yours: these are not the weather. What people make, people can remake.
The remaking has a scale. It begins in your own mind, in the story you are willing to step out of. It continues between you and the people close to you. It reaches the wider world, the institutions that hand out roles and then call them nature. The Buddha’s Case for Human Agency lays that out, and it ends in the present: a world under strain, and a new kind of tool that could free human agency or capture it. The question it leaves is what change of mind such a moment calls for.