"I think that we need to get along together if we want to survive in the twenty-first century"
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Polley’s line lands less like a fortune-cookie plea for unity and more like a quiet warning from someone who’s watched cooperation fail in real time. The phrasing is deliberately modest - “I think,” “we need” - as if she’s resisting the celebrity reflex to issue commandments. That restraint is the point: she’s building credibility by sounding like a citizen, not an oracle. Yet the last clause snaps the sentence into urgency. “If we want to survive” reframes “getting along” from a moral preference into a hard requirement, the way you’d talk about oxygen, not etiquette.
The subtext is pragmatic and political. Polley came of age in a culture where public discourse is increasingly monetized by outrage and fragmented by identity, algorithms, and tribal media ecosystems. In that landscape, “get along” isn’t code for bland consensus; it’s a demand for functional pluralism: the capacity to stay in the same room, argue, and still build something. She’s implying that the biggest threats of the twenty-first century - climate breakdown, pandemics, authoritarian drift, inequality - are coordination problems. No single hero narrative, no lone genius, no charismatic leader fixes them.
As an actress-turned-filmmaker known for socially attentive work, Polley’s intent reads as an artist’s pitch for empathy as infrastructure. Not sentimentality, but a survival skill: the unglamorous labor of living with people you didn’t choose.
The subtext is pragmatic and political. Polley came of age in a culture where public discourse is increasingly monetized by outrage and fragmented by identity, algorithms, and tribal media ecosystems. In that landscape, “get along” isn’t code for bland consensus; it’s a demand for functional pluralism: the capacity to stay in the same room, argue, and still build something. She’s implying that the biggest threats of the twenty-first century - climate breakdown, pandemics, authoritarian drift, inequality - are coordination problems. No single hero narrative, no lone genius, no charismatic leader fixes them.
As an actress-turned-filmmaker known for socially attentive work, Polley’s intent reads as an artist’s pitch for empathy as infrastructure. Not sentimentality, but a survival skill: the unglamorous labor of living with people you didn’t choose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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