Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Our world is filled with authoritative people who preach a gospel of personal insignificance. We cannot fight city hall, they say, asserting that we must each succumb to the inevitable.
Some seem to do so out of love. Family and friends do not want us to be ground under the proverbial tank treads of historical necessity for making a quixotic stand against an overwhelming power.
In academe, learned professors damn the Great Man Theory of history, that suggests great leaders are born, not made. Instead, they contend that the real drivers of history are impersonal, socio-economic mass movements. Individuals may ride the waves of history, but no individual ever really makes a difference. To them, one spokesman is as good as any other.
This assault on the historical significance of any individual is a siren song of despair. It kills initiative, stifles courage, and inevitably brings defeat. While masquerading as compromise, it is actually advocating surrender.
Be not beguiled by their blandishments. These would-be political thought leaders assert that we need not think for ourselves. Instead, they advise us to focus on discerning these socio-economic trends, and then reshape our thoughts, words, and deeds in accord with the masses.
Such a reflexive ideological servility would amplify the influence of those very cognoscente who purport to represent historical necessity. Such leaders need never abandon their own distinct individuality. Instead, cults of personality always grow up around these self-appointed avatars of the collective will.
This appeal to a desperate communitarianism quite intentionally undermines any hope that a single individual can ever positively change the world. Any person who is bereft of hope is sundered from their very humanity; ripe for slavery.
Every one of us should cultivate personal sensibilities about right and wrong, good and evil, and about what we should support and what we must oppose. Our best destiny is to become a person of good character and steely integrity.
The key to doing this without becoming a fanatic is an honest humility. No cherished belief should be beyond honest criticism. No beloved dogma should be unquestionable. No groupthink should ever be abided.
History is most certainly not defined by mass movements of impersonal socio-economic forces. Individuals make history. Consider these few examples, not widely taught in today’s woke schools.
Zoroaster, Abraham, Prince Gautama- the Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Jesus, Mani, Mohammad, Luther, Calvin, and Marx all changed the world, for better or worse, with their original ideas about the meaning of life.
Phidippides ran the very first Marathon, preventing an Athenian surrender to what seemed to be an inevitable Persian victory.
Alexander the Great began the fusing of Eastern and Western thought that, with the insights and efforts of St. Paul, culminated in a Hellenistic Christianity.
Augustus ended Rome’s civil wars and its republic, initiating a stable empire that forms a basis for all subsequent Western governments.
Charlemagne revived hope for a resurgent Christian West in the midst of the Dark Ages.
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Menno Simmons, and John Wesley all reformed Christianity.
John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau inspired our Founding Fathers to risk their all for the hope of freedom.
Only George Washington’s choices saved our republic from becoming a theocracy, monarchy, or president-for-life dictatorship.
Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all murdered millions to serve their vainglorious ambitions.
Admiral Jacky Fisher, Air Marshall Hugh Dowding, and General Curtis LeMay all made possible the Free World’s victories by, respectively, strengthening Britain’s World War I Royal Navy, Britain’s World War II Royal Air Force, and the USA’s cold war strategic air command.
Winston Churchill personally saved the West, really the whole world, by going against conventional wisdom and refusing to surrender to Hitler in the summer of 1940.
Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump each redefined the USA, for better or worse.
Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King all defeated the powers of compulsion with the power of conscience.
No, learned professors, real human history does not resemble your mass theory. Each of us has the capacity to change our world for the better. Reject their siren song of despair.
