On one of the mercifully warm days in March, I ventured out of my apartment and ended up wandering around a North Side beach where I saw the words "One person can change the world" elegantly scrawled on a pier. I smiled to myself, snapped a picture, and threw it up on Instagram. But in the time it took me to hit "post" I realized that graffiti is a lie. In fact, one person can't change the world. At least not without a little help
Yet our pop culture is obsessed with singling out individuals. We love superheroes and underdogs, chosen ones and anti-heroes. We enjoy watching one character beat the odds, defy expectations, or define a moment in history. Even our most complex ensemble dramas generally feature a recognizable protagonist. And everything from our sports to our news comes prepackaged with a personal, human-interest angle. It's much harder to tell a story without singling out a key player, and anyone other than a few supporting characters or sidekicks generally fades into the background ( that's why blockbusters try to insert as many close-ups as they can in big fight scenes—we need personal storytelling to understand stakes ). So we simplify our narratives to center on individual achievements; we tell the stories of people, not groups.
That spills over into our understanding of history as well. We credit great men and women with Herculean accomplishments, forgetting that these people only succeeded because of the support around them. Even our greatest icons did their work in a larger political and social system. The end of slavery is not something Abraham Lincoln gifted to America. Abolition was a complex movement fought by thousands of people including Black thinkers like Fredrick Douglass, feminist groups, Congressmen, political negotiators, and slaves themselves. Lincoln may have been the most high-profile player, but he didn't shape history alone.
The danger of focusing on individuals and not on movements is that we are subconsciously led to believe that only inherently "great" people can change the world. And that sets a huge barrier for activism. If we can't live up to the legacies of Lincoln or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gloria Steinem why should we even try? But if we think of Lincoln, King and Steinem as one of many voices in a larger movement, it feels less daunting to try to follow in their footsteps.
And while I've been discussing this individualism in terms of history, it has a massive impact on the present as well. The environmental movement is a great example. The majority of conservation advice centers on the things individuals can do: change a light bulb, take a shorter shower, recycle more. These are important small-scale steps, but they also ignore the truly massive scale of the problem. Corporations produce enormous amounts of pollution each day, and to deal with that problem people will have to unite in support of environmental legislation. It will require the force of a movement, not the lifestyle changes of an individual. But since that complex goal is harder to achieve ( and less satisfying ) than simply replacing one light bulb with another, we focus on our tiny individual contributions and assume someone else is looking out for the big picture. We think one of the mythical "chosen ones" of history and pop culture will swoop in to save the day.
But there's no guarantee such a person even exists, and it's dangerous to assume someone else is out there fighting for marriage equality or civil rights ( as the recent "religious freedom" laws in Indiana and Arkansas have shown ). So instead of thinking of ourselves as the hero and the masses, let's think of ourselves as dominoes. We can't all cross the finish line, but when, where, and how we fall can change the course of history. The individual domino matters, but so does the chain.
I heard a great piece of advice at a recent Black Lives Matter protest: Apply the skills you have to the causes you believe in. I may not be a great political organizer, but I have a knack for telling stories so I focus my activism on the written word. I won't be remembered in history books, but maybe I will help the cause of someone who is.
Because in the end one person can change the world, but only if they work with others to do so.
