Champion of Change

Leo Tolstoy was spot on when he said, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

There is some great delusion at work in each of our heads that the world changes independent of the people in it. It does change, whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not and whether we actively participate in that change or not. But it does not change by itself, it changes because people change, our ideas change, our minds create the technologies to change, our factories produce the objects that generate change and our societies reflect all changes through the constant development of our values and beliefs.

We are all aware of the world’s most pressing problems. We are aware of these huge, incessant issues such as war, the environment, politics, economics and such like and we drown in the sea of information about them that floods us day in and day out. The delusion in our heads extends on this tide until these problems seem so disconnected from each other and so alien to our personal circumstances that we think we are impoverished, enfeebled and impotent to make any difference. We become ambivalent and detached from them, desensitized from the enormous gravity of the situation. Moreover, we think we have no responsibility for them. But it is just that: a delusion. We think that to change the world we must change the world. Nothing else makes any difference.