Changing the World for Better and for Worse
Who doesn’t love this (unsourced) quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” It sounds so right, certainly something that we desire to be true, or is it?
Margaret Mead is certainly one of the most influential voices in 20th century American culture. Her “work”, along with the Bloomsbury Group’s ideas and Kinsey’s “research”, ignited the sexual revolution. (Yes, those are sneer-quotes.) Unfortunately, like Kinsey, Mead’s ground-breaking study has been determined to be not only incorrect, but fraudulent.
The frightening thing is not that a researcher would come to wrong conclusions or tweak results to match a preconceived conclusion. The frightening thing is that our media, with liberty consisting of the right to speak freely and the responsibility to report the truth, was not only eager to swallow their lies, but that even now they cling to them and to the values they espoused. Dr. Martin Orans, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, opens his book “Not Even Wrong” (Harvard University Press, 1983) with the sentence “Occasionally, a message carried by the media finds an audience so eager to receive it that it is willing to suspend all critical judgment and adopt the message as its own.”
In this case, a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens has indeed changed the world. Too bad it wasn’t for the better.
Consider, the impact of Martin Luther, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Marchers, Gates and Allen’s “Microsoft”. Consider the impact of Jesus and His small group of thoughtful, committed citizens upon our world.
For better and for worse, this blade has two edges.
