The Basis for ‘Amazing’ Accomplishers
There are substantial accomplishers, and these outnumber by far the ‘amazing’ accomplishers. I suppose there are expected failures, and these outnumber the unexpected failures. What do we mean by ‘amazing’ accomplishments anyway? Given his environment, Lincoln would not have been expected to achieve any amazing accomplishments. He was essentially without any formal education, his parents and relatives were what today we might call trailer park trash. He didn’t have any physical ‘Presidential’ looks, he had a high pitched almost shrill voice, he had no wealth to speak of at any point in his life, he was certainly not favored to be nominated by the Republicans to run for President, and yet when the dust settled, it was Abraham Lincoln who engineered the end of slavery in our country.
Granted, if Lincoln had not been unable to succeed here in such a task, someone else would have succeeded later since evolution works that way—what is best wins out, what is inadequate fades away at a glacial evolutionary pace, not human time spans. Nevertheless, the intriguing question remains—what was there about Lincoln which enabled him to succeed? The answer seems to be that Lincoln was different—substantially different—from other others in many and major ways. It would be hard to find anyone who had less prejudice toward any diverse groups of humanity, or more understanding of human nature than Lincoln. Obama is in the same category, he too seems never to find a race or religion or culture or economic class for whom he does not genuinely want to help them achieve justice and contentment in their lives. We tend to say he was the first black President, but he is no more black than he is white. Plus, color is but one small segment of anyone’s genetic makeup. That being the case it is a tad weird so much emphasis is given by so many to race. Likewise, in most cases religion is inherited and yet for so many this becomes the identification which is so important to them, with so much hatred toward their designated ‘heathens’—so much so that they sometimes engage in conflicts in which the heathens must not just be killed but be killed in the cruelest of fashions. History is filled by the carnage created by all the major religions in history. Maybe the Quakers and Buddhists have been the least blood thirsty.
Christianity, as practiced by Jesus, would be expected to be a very peaceful and justice-for-all religion, but the carnage regarding Christianity over history is just as bloody as other religions. Humans really are basically humans regardless of race or religion—at least this is how Lincoln and Obama genuinely believed. Notice that while Lincoln achieved an ‘amazing’ accomplishment via his unique individuality, I am not claiming that Obama achieved any ‘amazing’ accomplishments—though that is not to say he did not achieve accomplishments. In part this is probably because Lincoln had one really huge but major problem to solve (slavery) whereas Obama came to office facing several huge major problems, all of them global, all of whose nature was not only global, but due to the consequences of flawed human defects, which the evolutionary process will no doubt deal with in time to come. Despite the self serving belief that we humans are now driving the evolutionary process, we are not. If dinosaurs could think at human levels, they too would have assumed they were driving the evolutionary process. Like what species would ever doom them? I guess no species ever did, but the evolutionary process did doom them. Humans live such a short life span that we often die believing to the end that we humans are now running the show, or at least those of us with the right religion, race, and culture.
If Obama could not engineer an effective collective global effort soon enough and effective enough to solve the problems of human overpopulation, climate change, pollution, grossly misbalanced distribution of wealth, eradication of ghettos, and livable wages for all workers, then it would be hard to imagine what kind of person would ever be more likely to engineer success in these areas. The lives of so many people were not getting better after a long succession of Republican and Democrat Presidents, so out of desperation and frustration on their part we ended up with Trump. I guess we will find out how that works out.
While Lincoln succeeded, if getting assassinated for the accomplishment is really a success, it need be remembered that his very ‘different’ personality was hardly appreciated en route by huge numbers of American citizens. He was assaulted as the ‘Original Ape’, a non Christian heathen, a rigid dictator, a weak and vacillating imbecile, an uncultured bozo, a nigger-lover, the ugliest man alive, an awkward disjointed freak, dreamy eyes that seem to look through you without looking at you, ears which had been taken by mistake from a head twice the size, a body enclothed with badly fitted clothing, and so the insults piled up along side the ultraistic complements which came from some members of every diverse cabal of human distinction existing in America. Only when he was assassinated did almost everyone in our country realize they lost someone who was not only their friend, but had the wisdom to bring out the better angels of human nature regarding justice and assistance for all our citizens.
‘Amazing’ accomplishments can be achieved at all levels and kinds of achievements. But in each case, it was their different personality which enabled them to become amazing accomplishers. Yet at these lesser levels, it is far easier to focus on their different personality and demean them for that instead of what they accomplished. People who do that are simply reflecting their own ignorance of human nature. The best example here is Terrell Owens, not that his achievements of being one of the best wide receivers in NFL history is being compared to slavery and other major human hurdles involving all of society. Most top athletes in most sports have innate athletic talent which becomes obvious by junior high. They were excellent to begin with and just got better with a lot of help from a lot of coaches and attention from others—to the extent many became rather spoiled brats socially, in terms of responsibility, priorities, modernistic materialism, and often just not the best of citizens in society. Terrell Owens also has a genetic gift, that of an extreme reservoir of will power. Science understands now that will power can be used up (known as giving in) but with Terrell Owens he never lacked for reserve willpower his whole football career. His grandmother taught him how to focus, to see priorities, and to never trust others in power not to make every effort to put him in his place and keep him down on the farm, so to speak. He was a loner, self focused, intelligent, never let others get to close to him, was a one man band when celebrating personal achievements on the football field, and virtually ran over, around, or through every hurdle on his way to the top. When he finally got to the top there were an ample number of fans and media pencil pushers who hated the very personal characteristics which enabled him to get to the top and therefore, their reasoning goes, he should get reduced credit for getting to the top. His very uniqueness becomes a liability in the eyes of many. It is what it is. Interestingly he seems to be unfazed by it all, having all his life been subjected to their displeasure. To his credit he simply focused on becoming one of the best wide receivers in the history of the game. After all, his stats are what they are, not something that his enemies can eradicate or demean with their character assassinations. Ironically, in what other profession, outside of politics, is character assassination and throwing people under the bus as big a component to their profession as being a media critic?
Thus, it seems evident that ‘amazing’ accomplishments are those achieved via unique personalities who achieve remarkable results via their unique human essence. Since length is seldom a barrier for my musings I will go with one more illustration. Victoria Woodhull’s home was a shack in a small town in rural Ohio with only one intersection in the middle of the town. She was the sixth of ten children in an indolent family which was considered town trash. Her education was three years of elementary school. For whatever reason young Victoria insisted she could communicate with the dead. Her father put out a shingle advertising Victoria, fourteen, and Tennessee (her sister) as mediums for $1 per visit. Two months into her 15th year she married her doctor. He was 28 years old. While every phase of her life is intriguing, let’s leap to her ‘amazing’ accomplishments. Perhaps we should mention here that her doctor husband became an alcoholic and she divorced him and married one of her ‘medium’ clients, a Colonel James Blood—a veteran of the Civil War who had 7 bullets still lodged in his body. Her family, for almost all her long life, consisted of Victoria, Blood (her husband), her former doctor husband, her parents, her two children (one handicapped) and her sister Tennie.
From this beginning who would have ever predicted that Victoria would have become the first in so many categories. Woodhull was no minor figure during her lifetime. She dominated four major suffrage conventions, she was the first women to run for President, she was the first major female player on Wall Street, the first Woman to be granted high level appearances before Congress, a major focal point in the national debate over pornography, the major figure to exploit and condemn the double standard for females in business and sex, a major publisher of popular weekly newspaper that served as an outlet for alternate political and social views, a major supporter of labor rights, of environmental protection, of the need to regulate and limit corporate excesses, of civil service for government employees, of the need for a graduated income tax. She was so advanced of her times that then President Grant told Victoria in the Oval Office that someday she would be sitting in his chair. She became one of the wealthiest women in the country and campaigned on the premise that “a system of society which permits such arbitrary distributions of wealth is a disgrace to Christian civilization.”
Victoria pushed for graduated direct taxation, the regulation of monopolies, laws to protect laborers, a civil service to be based on merit, giving ownership of land, mineral, and water resources to the people, guaranteed employment to all, and the establishment of a universal government with international arbitration for wars. Except for the last two, all of these eventually became law far down the future path.
Prior to her becoming a well known force to be dealt with by the establishment of the time, she was very popular with well known establishment figures. Once she tried to use her popular influence to bring about all the changes above, the establishment turned on her with a vengeance. They tried to jail her on trumped up charges of pornography for her lifestyle, living arrangement, and ideas about the equal rights for women. Every time the case went to court she won and since women were nowhere near having the vote, she could not win any election to be President. She eventually moved to England and lived her latter years well heeled financially and a prominent figure in English social circles. No other person of that era came close to predicting the kind of changes that would be made in American society the next 150 years. If she probably couldn’t communicate with the dead, she most certainly was extremely accomplished at predicting the future.
At any rate it just seems that those whose personalities and strengths are outside the norm should never be criticized for their ‘strangeness’ and instead honored for their “amazing” accomplishments. Human nature has just not yet arrived to this level yet. Then again, the evolutionary process will continue to move on, and changes will always be the rule.
We all get but a minuscule glimpse of life between two eternities. I have not much ability predicting the future, even for tomorrow, but I will predict none of us will escape from this world alive.
