Chapter 9. The Uncommon Man

CHAPTER NINE

THE UNCOMMON MAN

VARIATION, AS WE HAVE SEEN, results in progress when the changes are favorable ones. If favorable changes are to be made, they must be the result of free choice. Otherwise unfavorable changes and regression will be the result.

Free choice means liberty.

Thus it is concluded that variation offers the seeds of progress because it is the origin of change; that change will take the form of progress when, and to whatever extent, liberty allows these seeds to bloom into favorable changes.

The capacity for independent decisions and free choice is the precious attribute of humans that makes progress possible. The social insects apparently lack this capacity. That is why, under liberty, it is possible for humans to capitalize on the opportunities arising from the variations that abound in nature in a manner that the social insects cannot.

The analogy of growing a crop may illustrate the contributing forces that lead to progress. Variation is the seed of progress. Liberty is the soil and the climate in which the seed will sprout and grow. Human capacity for independent decisions and free choice is the husbandman who nurtures the crop during the period of its growth and harvest.

The capacity for free choice and intelligent action is a precious and perishable thing, to be nurtured and guarded with care. Rocks do not have this capacity for independent, intelligent action. Nearly all forms of life lack it. The social insects, if they ever had it, seem to have lost it long ago. When unused, it will apparently atrophy in the manner of muscles that are inactive. Without liberty the brain becomes imprisoned as though behind iron doors; thoughts and initiative die.

The capacity for free choice and intelligent action may also become lost in any species of life by the process of adverse selection. Presumably this is what happened to the social insects in their early history, in the manner implied in the Russian fable. In like manner the capacity for progress could become lost in the human race; the firing squad of an authoritarian nation brings this about quickly and vividly.

VARIATION, and the human capacity to compound progress out of this variation under liberty, is the foundation of progress.

Human ability is highly variable. Presumably it follows the law of variation described by the harmonic series.¹ Human abilities are spread over a wide range so that very few persons are on the upside, and the number increases with a downward movement along the scale of ability into mediocrity. The “common man” is well named because there are so many of us. And the “uncommon man” is the one who has developed and put to use his extremely rare abilities.

The person is rare indeed who is capable of the basic discoveries on which progress is built. Among such persons have been Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Pasteur, and Edison, to name a few among the distinctive ones whose accomplishments grew out of this variation among mankind.

But the mere existence of variation is not enough to generate progress. Rocks are highly variable, too, for instance, but something is lacking and they cannot generate progress. Nor can the social insects generate progress. If there is to be progress, variation must be accompanied by the capacity for independent thought and action, the capacity for choice, careful preparation so as to make use of accumulated knowledge, and the willingness and opporunity to proceed alone in the search for truth. Man has these qualities in varying degrees, but only a few persons have all the necessary qualities in the combination required for important contributions to progress. It is to these few that essentially all progress is due.

Extreme glorification of the common man may be popular, but it involves a serious threat to an understanding of the essentials of progress. It feeds the evil of vainglory, dangerously.

A great deal of credit is, of course, due each person who performs as best he can the task he has tackled, using the abilities with which he has been endowed by nature. Most of the activity in the world is that of the seemingly menial tasks necessary for life and happiness to which we have become accustomed; but the performance of all these worthy tasks is not the progress of which we are speaking.

A person with x ability who performs an x sized task with x perfection deserves as much personal credit as one with 100x ability who performs a 100x sized task with 100x perfection; and he deserves more credit if the latter person should deliver to the extent of only 50x, or half his capacity.

In appraising a person, it is what he does with what he has that counts. In appraising the requirements of progress, we are unconcerned with personal glories and it is what is delivered that counts.

Contrary to general impression, the path to greatness is as difficult as it is rare. It is not a rosy path of ease. It is a path strewn with hazards and failures. Just as most mutations are self-destructive, most attempts to discover new truths and to peer into the unknown yield either illusion or failure. The mutant dies of its inborn deficiencies; most pioneering of thought or action ends in failure, and at best one can expect to fail time and time again before any final success.

Not alone that, but the uncommonly great person is generally misunderstood. That is the expected result of being uncommon. Both the genius and the idiotic dunce are “peculiar” persons, misunderstood by the large number of us who cannot really understand either of them. One cannot exceed his own limited capacities to understand which is which, as between the two ends of an array of human abilities.

Most contributors to progress have been treated with either indifference, scorn or derision in their time. Pasteur was forced to endure the greatest of intellectual indignities when first he pronounced his discoveries.

The pioneer of progress most likely will be a lonely and persecuted soul, who must learn to find his reward elsewhere than in the concurrent appreciations of his contemporaries. As Professor John R. Baker has explained, the pioneer of discovery and progress is one with an independent spirit who will tolerate no master; he will bear privation and starvation, if necessary, rather than to surrender to another his rights in the pursuit of truth.²

Only in history are his accomplishments likely to be recognized as noteworthy. To do his work, and to contribute to progress, he must unavoidably be different, act differently and think differently from his fellow men; if it were not so, his works would not constitute discovery and progress. He finds his satisfaction in the discovery of truth as a discovery, not in the personal glory involved; in being right rather than in being popular. He must expect persecution of a sort from many persons, and perhaps even from the “authorities” in the field of his discovery, as Pasteur experienced.

The pioneer of progress is one who believes truth to be something different from the beliefs that prevail around him. There is not much chance for progress when these persons are prohibited from practicing honesty in the expression of their rare beliefs. In requesting the privileges of liberty, he is merely asking for the privilege of practicing honesty in the search for and expression of his beliefs.

He should, of course, be willing to grant the same right to others as that which he requests for himself, and to be tolerant of disagreements. A person of rare beliefs — including the genius of progress — in many instances has so little understanding of liberty and such an intense devotion to his own unpopular beliefs that he tries to impose his personal beliefs on others by intellectual authoritarianism, and tries to grasp the power required for the attempt. That may be the reason why so many renowned pioneers in various fields of knowledge become addicts of a controlled economy, and contribute to the destruction of liberty which is so essential to their own work. This was noticeable in Hitler’s Germany. It is noticeable in our own country, in our day, and has become a serious threat to liberty.

THE RACE FOR DISCOVERY and progress in society is a peculiar sort of race. The actual winner seems to lose and the losers win. As we have seen, the winner of discovery must often endure scorn and other forms of indignity from others who assume that the poor soul is suffering from dangerous hallucinations. Yet the benefits of discovery and progress go largely to those who lost in the race of discovery, and who have even scorned the winner. It is unavoidable that they shall come to consume most of the fruits of discovery and progress.

The “common man,” who has lost the race of making the actual discovery, reaps the harvest of the seeds that he has scorned. It takes little ability to press a light switch, after the rare developments of a Franklin and an Edison have thus mastered and simplified its uses. The world has to wait a long, long time for a Ford or a Kettering, but most anyone can learn to drive a car. The capacity to consume is common, not rare, and most of us are capable of consuming what only the uncommon man is capable of discovering and producing.

The pioneers of progress, as distinct from those who process and use the fruits of progress, derive little direct benefit from their own work. Pasteur consumed little of the vaccines that have been made as a result of his discoveries; he had only one life to lose from disease, but these discoveries are saving innumerable other lives. An automobile inventor drives few of the cars resulting from his invention. Beethoven consumed little of the enjoyment that has resulted from his talents. Those who stood on the shores and derided “Fulton’s Folly” were among the multitudes who later rode on such craft. And among the crowds at the ticket windows of airline offices have been those who jeered at the “foolish notions” of the Wright brothers; little ability is required to climb aboard a plane that is to fly from New York to Bombay. None of these pioneers of progress gained much wealth from their work of discovery, which so many others enjoy.

In this age of political glorification of the common man, of mediocrity, and of the masses and the opinions of the masses, it must not be forgotten that if there had been only common men down through the ages we would still be living as savages. Except for the progress that stems from the uncommon man, ours would still be an existence like that of the lowest animals.

An excellent expression of this idea appeared in an interpretation of Toynbee’s Study of History:³

It will be seen that Toynbee’s is a great-man theory: “human individuals and not human societies … make history.” In a growing Civilization the creative leaders lead “the uncreative mass” by enlisting the faculty of mimesis; in many subtle ways the mass of people “imitate” the Creative Minority so that the whole body social is able to grow en masse and in harmony. In a dying Civilization the Creative Minority is displaced by the Dominant Minority, and repression is substituted for mimesis. The mimetic song of Orpheus, who leads his people into the light of Civilization, is drowned out by “the raucous shouts of the drill-sergeant,” who herds them back into the darkness.

Progress will be slowed to whatever extent the demands of the common man are allowed to rob the uncomman man of the opportunity to generate progress. Liberty affords him this opportunity to use his talents, and nothing else does. Discovery and progress cannot be forced; at best they can only be allowed to occur.

Most discovery results from a seemingly accidental hybridization of ideas, in a like manner as strains of corn are crossed to produce the rarely outstanding hybrid. Perhaps this is why basic discovery so often occurs in unsuspected places, by unsuspected persons whose rare powers of observation and comprehension have permitted them to grasp the significance of something that occurred within their scope of vision or experience, for which they may not even have been searching. Perhaps this is why rigid over-specialization and restriction in the search for new discoveries so often ends in failure to attain the objective; the narrow confines of the search prevents a hybridization of ideas from which progress so often springs. The new things of progress are often found by those who “know nothing about the subject.”

Such is the story of why variation contains the seeds of progress. That is why the fruits of progress will be born only in the environment of liberty, where free play on the scale of variations can generate discovery and progress. That is why the destruction of all liberty would stop all progress, and set in motion the forces of retrogression.

Only under liberty can discovery and the origin of progress rear its lonely head, in some wholly unpredictable time, place and form, by some “unknown” person. Progress cannot be plotted and blueprinted in advance; that is why it is progress. Only in retrospect can discovery be identified.

If the planner could plan discovery for others, he probably would have made the discovery himself in the first place. If he is more able in this respect than the others, he is wasting his time not to do it himself; if he is less able, he can hardly plan it for others who are more able than he is. The notion that a blueprint for discovery can be drawn in advance is to assert that the planner somehow has the power to scrutinize the inscrutable, or fathom the unfathomable. It is not an act of discovery for a planner to buy the discoverer’s groceries or clean his tools, or to be the nominal head of the political bureau which pays his salary.

Much false credit is given to planning for “accomplishments” that would have taken place anyhow. One is reminded of the story of the fly on the chariot wheel which thought that he was the source of the power that propelled the vehicle. A governmental agency empowered to plan the size of the potato crop, for instance, is likely to change its “plans” after learning that farmers' intentions to plant are at variance with their plan as previously announced. It is hardly respectful for a planning agency to have its plans proved “ineffective” (a wrong prediction of what farmers would do in spite of the plan). If a person should become empowered of “planning” the migration of the birds, it would be helpful for him to have some factual information on which to base his plans; he could then plan to have the birds go toward the equator in the fall and back toward the poles in the spring.

Truth, when newly born, is always an ugly stranger amidst the untruth and superstition of its time; it cannot live except as it is allowed the protection of liberty, which serves to protect newly-discovered truth in the same way as a mother protects the newborn child. For the seedlings of progress, like the more advanced forms of life, are unable at birth to care for themselves. They will die in infancy except for careful protection.

¹ This pattern of variation is described in Appendix II.

² John R. Baker, Science and the Planned State (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1945).

³ Richard Chase, “Toynbee: The Historian as Artist,” The American Scholar, Summer, 1947, p. 275.