Earlier quoted context omitted.
He did however renounced his wealth and lived a life of poverty. And Buddhism isn’t the story of siddhartha alone. He had many followers that figure in the pali canon quite extensively, and they were poor, rich, some even developmentally disabled. Concurrently, there were a lot of ascetics that siddhartha studied with - Buddhism didn’t spring out of his mind wholly formed, it was a distillation of thousands of years…
Buddhism itself is a very diverse beast to get a handle on in that part of the world. But I agree it serves to preserve (especially male) populations in conditions of little material possibility. It sounds like you are making a different point: that you don’t see anything in the USA like the social/religious systems that have enabled some in SE Asia to transcend difficult conditions. I would say that Christianity ser…
Religious observance in the UK has fallen through the floor since the early 20th century, and is more avidly practiced by our immigrant communities (Muslim, Catholic, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, African Christians) than most "native" Brits.
And yet very few are motivated by Hitchens/Dawkins-style, burn-it-all-down atheism, more of a, "meh, haven't really bothered to think about it" thing. Brits have given up on their own culture out of some kind of depressive laziness, and yet it's often those very same Brits who get angry at immigrants for celebrating their own traditions.
"I hate Muslims because they shut the pub and turned it into a mosque", usually said by an overweight, balding man who stopped going to said pub five years ago because drinking supermarket beer at home was cheaper.
To come back to your original point. People had objectively far shittier lives a century ago, less SLS but perhaps they were just too busy dying of silicosis, industrial accidents or TB.