Matt recently made a memorable post about people who fixate on one political or social issue at the expense of all others.

With his trademark sense of the absurd, Matt compared this attitude to someone focusing on fried chicken wings.

Even if someone were a Nobel laureate who had cured cancer, one-issue people would want to know whether the cure had anything to do with chicken wings—and if it didn’t, they wouldn’t want anything to do with it.

A thoughtful reader wrote in and asked whether it was in fact true that the world owes a lot to so-called one-issue people.

Was not Lincoln fixated on ending slavery?  Was not Gandhi a one-issue person for passivie resistance, Mother Teresa for feeding the poor and diseased, Gloria Steinem for equal rights for women, and so on?

Matt responds:

All of your comments are right-on—except that I believe that to be able to truly imagine peace in our species, we must think not only inside the box of history, but outside the box of what could have been, would have been, and what really happened in total.

When we use broad words such as liberty, Communism, capitalism, racism, all the –ism’s, it’s easy to just grab a bite.

It’s like a big pizza pie.  You think of it as one thing, but within it you have dough, you might have tomatoes, zucchini, sausage, and a myriad of other ingredients that makes it into the pie.

My point is that to come to a real consensus, we as a species must meet with everyone we hate and everyone we love, cherish, and despise—and then we all talk it through.

We never really come to a conclusion, but we realize there are many different ways of looking at the world.

But to sit, encased within one narrow test tube, is what has gotten us where we are.

The real movers and shakers—people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandella—were able to work on a broad spectrum that had a point in the center that was where they were trying to arrive at.

From my experience, nothing goes in a straight line.  Everything has its detours, curves, unexpected consequences, its great delights, its supposed failures.  It isn’t made up of one, it’s made up of many.

When we look at the complex organisms we call the body, we see a synthesis of many different elements:  blood, skeleton, veins, hair, and on and on...  It’s such a unique, complex, and wonderful manifestation of either the universe or God if you believe in God, that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

In a similar way, I believe that some of these supposedly one-dimensional issues are also so complex that they’re almost impossible to comprehend.

But we have to tear them apart, contemplate, and meditate on what we know, what we don’t know, where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how we’re going to get there.  We have to have conversations that allow other people to enter into this sacred place that we call the one issue, and we have to give and be given respect, time, and latitude.

We do not have to agree with anyone, but we have to keep our ears open and listen; otherwise, all we are is a pounding drum, an empty horn, a one-handed clap.

It isn’t easy.  In fact, it’s very, very trying.  And if you allow it to be, it can make you feel uneasy to think of all these different things.  Very possibly—the unimaginable could have happened:  Maybe we really don’t know everything!  Isn’t that a strange place to be?

The people you named in your comment—Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Gloria Steinem—are great examples of what can be done by people who are dreamers and doers.  They were the generals who continue to fight as human beings to come to consensus.

What they showed us is that the impossible dream can become possible when the person who is singing the song isn’t always singing it with a choir that agrees with them—but is singing songs with all kinds of people.

When that happens, finally, some magical form ensues where the unthinkable all of a sudden becomes relevant and the norm.

The biggest problem that I run into, is people telling me everything is impossible.  I am personally enchanted and challenged by the people you brought up in your comment—in my Don Quixote fashion of trying to change the world by painting an umbrella.

In past times I would probably be in a straightjacket in some very sterile institution.

Matt