In Defense of Windmill Tilting

I would be hard-pressed to define myself without somehow using the word "cynical" somewhere; I even get pissed off at billboards when I feel they're trying to screw me over somehow. There's an idealist in there somewhere, but he's well-tempered by experience and does not choose his battles lightly. I sometimes wish that I was as able to trust now as I was at four, when everyone I had met in my life was worth trusting.

But today, while quietly surfing the web when I should have been crunching numbers for my company, I came upon this man. I was so taken aback by the story of a man who gave up almost all he had for a belief that what he was doing was right that I read the story no less than three times. I can barely believe stories like this anymore - I inevitably attempt to find key phrase which will explain why this man is really doing what he is. He has lost everything, yet he still pushes on against the people he believes are wrong. My second thought, of course, was "what a crazy person!" Our own era's Don Quixote.

Of course, despite our wry smiles at the futility of his quest, it's hard not to love a man like Shahbazi. Don Quixote really did believe in all of the virtues he espoused, and that is why he is such a sad object of ridicule - no one else in his world did. He refused to learn the hard lesson that most of us learn sooner or later: none of those ideals come to much when placed alongside our need for security.

Because the cynics are undeniably correct: nearly everyone in the world is motivated first and foremost by survival. This need to maintain one’s existence is extended to all aspects of life, and securing that survival means building up a base of material safeguards - a bank account, a means of transportation, a shelter – only when you go beyond these necessities things do you reach what a reasonable person would call “excess.” But can you honestly call having more money, more valuable things which could translate to money, “excess”? In a time of need those chandeliers and that diamond broach could be sold for food or defense, and the more one has, the better equipped they are when all of that money becomes necessary and not superfluous. And it is this mode of reasoning that will eventually lead us to say that nothing, not personal jets or private islands or whole nations, will ever really be enough.

Americans are lucky, and I don’t believe that anyone should fault them simply for that, whatever their inclination. Like it or not, we have inherited all that the greed, ambition, and hard work of our predecessors has sowed, and without uprooting the system which supports us and throwing all of that luck away, we are forced to live with it. You’ll note very few movements devoted to taking 40% of each American’s salary and giving it to the poorest countries in the world – such a movement would be rightly described as hopelessly extreme. On the other hand, confronted with the absolutely astounding mass of wealth that we have acquired, each successive generation of Americans has chosen in large part to sit back and enjoy it rather than promoting change and putting what we have to better use. Why do you suppose that is? The need to survive only goes so far. The purchase of one’s third SUV should be enough to give one pause: why, really why, do I need this?

The acquisition of material things, for reasons described above, is inherently cyclical. The more you have, the more you want. A starving man wants only food to fill his belly – what does he care of a Taj Mahal or a Porsche 911? If he were told that those things could be his, it would not matter to him until he had been first been satiated and sheltered… I would wager that he would find a way to sell that car to accomplish those things before he did anything else. I believe that most people are very aware of their limitations, and that is probably one of the most important reasons that America is in the state it’s in today: this country has removed most of our material limitations, and the only ones we have now are our own. We’ve been told since we were children that our potential was all but limitless - 20 years later, what you’re left with is a generation of people who believe that they have infinite potential and have achieved almost none of it. And every one of us is pissed off. We all want more and we’ll take it where we can get it, even if it means the local BMW dealership.

This is why I feel that the Don Quixotes of the world are so important: they want something else. This is why I refuse to ridicule the true believers of the world, no matter what it is they believe. I don’t believe there are many of them, and by today’s standards each and every one of them are certifiably insane, but they deserve our respect nonetheless. They differ from the rest of the population in only one way: they put their beliefs above everything else, including their own survival. For this reason we have cause to fear these people as well: they are probably the most dangerous people in the world, and the only ones truly committed to enacting change in a world they do not and cannot fit into. It is not by chance that America is finding fundamentalist terrorists to be such a great threat, despite their small numbers: these people are true believers, and that makes them far more powerful than most of us will ever be.

These people will never be happy in our world; they will never be satisfied. No one who resorts to violence to further his or her beliefs is deserving of praise, but to fail to respect the potential of these people would be foolhardy as well. On the other end of the spectrum, of course, others who believe equally strongly are working to enact changes that would benefit those around them, usually largely without any success. I doubt Jesus himself was ever much pleased with how things were in Jerusalem, either, nor was Buddha content with the state of the Hindu world during his lifetime. But those two men devoted their lives to making things better, to teaching people a better way to live, one not wholly devoted to survival – later, of course, more common people used those teachings to further their own selfish ends, but the words themselves still resonate with us because they reflect a worldview that we find so hard to reconcile with our own: one which assumes that there is more to life than simply making it to tomorrow.

America, it seems, suffers from a deficiency of true believers. I find it hard to take these people seriously who stand outside my door asking me if I’ve found Jesus yet. I’m inclined to believe that most of them are standing there because they were told to, because they want to belong, or because they simply haven’t thought much about the infinite on their own. On some days I simply get angry because they are very likely the same charlatans who have twisted the world’s greatest religions into callous means of population control. Most of the folks who preach these days are just more Tom DeLays, feeding off their power trip and reveling in the easy righteousness they've created for themselves.

Yet despite that anger and that skepticism, I try my best to give them the benefit of the doubt. Because maybe, just maybe, they really believe what they’re telling me. And those people, for a great variety of reasons, are always worth paying attention to.