Visionaries

So, yeah, I’ve been musing over visionaries, prophets, leaders who propel others toward their vision of how things should be. Some people say it’s an agenda, but it seems to be the active sight of a different way. I suppose the problem comes in when one must rely on others to change their walk in order to align with your vision. That’s where leadership comes in, but that’s tricky as well. Some who have no true leadership abilities seem to rely on authoritarianism, fascism, anything that removes the individual right to choose. That’s why UUs are so bloody annoying – their vision is sound but their insistence on individualism at the expense of it can drive a pacifist to homicide. But, I digress.

I believe there are limits to vision, though. Was Charles Manson a visionary? In his own demented way, I think so. He believed that a race war between Blacks and whites would do something more in line with how he thought things ought to be. I’m not quite sure what that looked like, but pursuit of his vision seems toxic, malevolent, evil. It induced suffering for the sake of suffering, pain for the sake of pain, negative consequences for no reason other than the high of the kill.

There have been malevolent dictators and commanders across the globe who resemble Manson’s malignancy – Nero, Chairman Mao, and others. Their vision seemed to be limited to their supreme and unbridled personal authority over the political state, not whether life improved for their citizens. The vision seems to be only to deify themselves, eliminate resistance to that, and thereby achieve the vision. I find that malignant and malevolent as well, but I suppose that’s my opinion.

When it comes to leaders closer to home, what can we make of the domestic terrorist crowd, the anti-government militias, the radical right? They have a vision, and in their minds it supersedes all others. In their minds, their vision more closely aligns with the founding principles of the nation, and if they can, they’re willing to do anything necessary to implement that. The only thing stopping them is numbers, money, and the fact that government has sophisticated means and opportunity to resist them. These are the reprise of the same people who took over Wilmington in 1898, the same people who engineered massacres in Tulsa and other places, the same people who showed up on the shores of Africa and packed human beings like sardines in the cargo holds of ships to farm their land thousands of miles away. Malevolence, selfishness, greed, malignancy. No appreciable difference between that and Manson, Chairman Mao, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and on and on and on.

So, how do these malevolent visionaries differ from the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, or even further back to the Founding Fathers? While I don’t agree with every single aspect of the visions of the aforementioned, I don’t see any of them as intentionally malevolent. Particularly in the cases of civil rights leaders, their vision had little to do with the state, but with the citizenry. The Founding Fathers envisioned a strong state, but that was a different state of affairs – there wasn’t a state to begin with. They were creating one, but even within that effort there was attention paid to the quality of life for the citizenry.

Allowing the 45th President to once again rise to the White House again would give credence to those amongst us who have the same malevolent visions that he proclaims, where certain people are devalued and persecuted, and others elevated because of a preconceived notion of their value. That vision would more than likely eliminate people like me, and people I care about. It would bring a return to a rigid caste, where second-class citizens had no real hope of vacating the assigned caste. He wants a civil war as part of the way to etch that vision into stone, and I cannot see how that’s not malevolent. It’s also not a particularly hopeful outlook for our nation.