Thinking Big
Changing the world is no small task. Every day, many people engage in “world-changing” activities such as performing community service or preaching an inspirational message to a church — the little things. These things can have an immediate and powerful positive effect on those nearby. Unfortunately, “nearby” is the key word in that sentence. As much effort as you may put into organizing a community cleanup day or serving at a soup kitchen, and as beneficial as those projects may be to your area, they do little to help the oppressed citizens of China or the starving children of Africa.
Any truly world-changing movement would require some level of service to local communities — you can’t do everything from Washington, D.C., as some say. However, you certainly can’t do everything from the comfort of your own home, either. In short, the philanthropic activities in which we most commonly engage are necessary but not sufficient to achieve the goals to which we aspire… or at least those to which Don’tASQ aspires.
Thinking big requires more than just an expansion of our current thoughts into new real estate. We can’t use the same strategies to affect one million lives that we use to affect one life. Let’s say, for example, that we’re strolling through an African desert on a camel (call it a low-budget safari). We come across a starving homeless man who begs us for something to eat. There’s no sign of civilization anywhere (we decide not to ask how he got here in the first place). The first solution which comes to mind is probably to give him some food and wish him well, right? But upon further consideration, we realize that we don’t have enough food to keep him alive indefinitely, and it’s pretty unlikely that any other low-budget safari adventurers will be traveling this way anytime soon. We have no choice but to take him back to our camp and point him in the direction of the nearest town.
Looking at the real world, we see a similar scenario for millions of Africans as well as people on other continents. Logically, if we extend our solution to the one starving man, we come to the conclusion that we must migrate every starving family to a different part of the world. It doesn’t take much thought to point out the reasons why that would go terribly wrong.
Our current solution to the large-scale case seems to be to throw food and money in their general direction and pat ourselves on the back for being altruistic. (Disclaimer: This is a very simplistic and only partially-realistic example. I have no idea how large the actual “feed the world” efforts are nor what methods are being undertaken.) This doesn’t work for the same reason why we wouldn’t have given our homeless man food and left him alone — we can’t give enough for an indefinite period of sustainability. Our starving beneficiaries will become dependent on our aid while we work doubly hard to generate enough food to feed them as well as ourselves.
As kind as that is for us to indefinitely provide for the rest of the world, it’s not exactly efficient. The best solution for long-term sustainability of any system is for that system to sustain itself with no reliance on outside effects. In other words, we need to teach these impoverished nations to fend for themselves.
In the case of our starving children in Africa, it may be difficult to teach desert agriculture if we ourselves don’t know anything about it. To solve this problem, we could invest more money into the research of arid-zone agriculture, and provide a solution to Africans once we’ve discovered something feasible. Hey, that’s simple enough, right? Just funnel millions of dollars into R&D, wait a few months, and watch the solution hatch!
Unfortunately, as we all know, it’s not nearly that trivial — hence providing us with another “opportunity” to think outside of the box. To feed Africa, we need research. To do research, we need money. To get money, we need a miracle- I mean, uhh… help from the government. To get help from the government, we need to convince some very stubborn people that our cause is worthwhile. And to do that requires a bit of charisma, a bit of word-twisting, and a lot of luck. Of course, any step in this process could be circumvented by a sufficiently altruistic person (e.g. the researchers could work for free), but then we’d still have to worry about convincing someone to personally invest in that manner. Who’d have thought that feeding a starving man could be so complicated? 
Regardless of the specifics, any world-changing movement requires a fundamental shift of thought if it is to succeed. We cannot scale the solutions for a small region to the entire world, just as we cannot feed one million people in the same way that we can feed one. One of my reasons for launching Don’tASQ was to instigate major changes in thought, such as thinking from a global perspective rather than a local one. This will likely be a topic about which we write consistently (”we” meaning either myself or other writers), because I feel that it’s an important one.
Until next time… think big!
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