If most people are oppressed, why do unjust systems still survive? Because the oppressed themselves unknowingly support them through inner ignorance. No structure can sustain without the participation of those it exploits. Real change cannot begin outside; it must begin within. When individuals see clearly and refuse to remain complicit, the system collapses. Blaming the system is easy, but transformation demands responsibility for one’s own life.
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Questioner: Sir, after I started listening to you, I listened to more revolutionaries or so-called revolutionaries, people like Karl Marx, and I couldn't help but realize that these conversations that we have about self-knowledge, about self-inquiry, about understanding things, come from a place of privilege. I have a certain comfort in my house where I can sit down and think about, “Okay, this is religion. This is what spirituality means. This is wisdom literature,” and so on and so forth.
But if I go outside in the real-life scenario on the ground and I meet, for example, a Dalit person, statistically speaking, 92% of sanitary workers in India are of that caste, and I go up to him and he asks me this question: “I go through suffering every single day. Systemic oppression. Not because it's my fault, not because it's my friend's fault, but because this is the norm that exists. This is the society that we exist in.” And anytime I ask someone, “What should I do?” They tell me, “This is society. There's nothing you can do about it.”
I go up to him and I tell them, “Look, the answer to all your problems is actually self-knowledge, self-inquiry.” I can't help but think he would slap me across the face and tell me, “I have a million things to do, a million oppressions to suffer, a million people telling me why I'm not supposed to exist in this world and I'm not worthy of life.”
