Unto Others has a great section about this. In a bunch of studied tribes who live generally pre-industrial lifestyles, the anthropologists were interested in how they “organize” big projects like building a house, and when they watched them, wondered what made them so willing to just do it.

Long story short, they saw how the kids watched them and subsequently “played” at doing things like building houses, carrying things together, etc. They essentially concluded that the “work” they did was understood more like play–that without any coercion to labor beyond meeting their needs, they were surprisingly eager to do that boring stuff because they made it into the day’s activity rather than grinding “work.”

TL;DR unalienated labor schniff and so on

Okay people of this thread you gotta just accept the fact that activism is always gonna be at the end. Like I don’t intend for this to insult anyone’s intelligence, I promise, but you gotta understand that it’s matter of love. Spend enough time in a headspace in which funky lizards and ugly insects and smelly lil rats are your companions both physically and mentally and these things matter to you in ways that approach your love for people, it’s just the truth of it. I’m surprised Attenborough docs aren’t all activism and calls to action at this point, it’s so frightening and overwhelming that I myself have drifted away from field research because in my cowardice I just couldn’t bear to get more attached.

But yeah sadly he’s too old (British) to be able to summon anything like a cohesive call to action, which sucks ass