Your Personal Revolution Isn’t as Lonely as It May Seem
When you embark on your personal revolution, you may feel alone, but you should expect to find company. When Gandhi was asked “what can a solitary satyagrahi do?” he answered confidently: “Such a satyagrahi will not find himself single-handed for long. The village will unconsciously follow him.”
A personal revolutionary is attractive—not necessarily to everyone, but to his or her natural allies and comrades. Personal revolutionaries find one another, encourage one another, and inspire new recruits—without necessarily having any conscious designs to do so.
Hennacy and Thoreau had faith that if you begin the personal revolution, this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and you will find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had.
Hennacy felt that “if a person had the One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward those others who felt likewise.” In his case, that led him into a powerful and mutually-influential relationship with the Catholic Worker community.
Thoreau believed that only by pursuing the solitary revolution would it be possible to cooperate with other people in a more than superficial way: “Men talk much of cooperation nowadays, of working together to some worthy end; but what little cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a simple result of which the means are hidden, a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to.”
Notes and Citations
- Gandhi, M.K. “What can a solitary satyagrahi do?” Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha) (1961) pp. 376–77 (quoting from Harijan, 8 April 1940)
- Hennacy, Ammon “Social Work, 1930–1942, Milwaukee-Denver” The Book of Ammon (1970) p. 43
- Thoreau, H.D., undated journal entry (1837–47 range), from The Price of Freedom (2008) p. 41