Here in America, social networking has caught on in a big way. Anytime you meet anybody, you swap business cards. But in some places on this shunned planet people are still afraid to make contact. And they're terrified of asking for help or realizing they could help others. Instead of taking things in their own hands — for example, by forming coalitions for political change — they pray to God. And when He fails to answer them, well, we all know that God works in mysterious ways. Better to just keep your eyes lowered, your nose to the grindstone, and mind your own damned business.

At this point I doubt I could stand living in a nation of frightened children. But, of course, there are groups in every nation that are encouraged to remain frightened children because that makes them easy to control. Catholics are trained from birth to be sheep, and their priests are encouraged to refer to them as a flock. What luck for rulers, Hitler once said, that men do not think.

I hate Americans when we elect stupid rulers and get away with bullying the world. But I hope Americans aren't the only people with attitude. If we are, then the world is in serious trouble. Every culture has something to recommend it, of course. Germany, for example, gave us Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. And these men were nothing like sheep. Jeffrey Dane, in his article "The Beethoven Mystique," tells us: As Beethoven and Goethe walked, some of the nobility passed with their entourage. Goethe politely stepped aside and bowed deferentially to the nobles — while Beethoven, in a typical gesture, strode almost defiantly right through their midst, with his hands behind his back and without acknowledging the presence of the nobles, who had no alternative but to give him clear passage. When Goethe asked Beethoven how he could so disrespectfully treat these nobles, the composer replied, again characteristically, "There are countless 'nobles', but only two of us."

Please remember that there are countless humans, but only one you. It is not megalomaniacal for you to embrace this truth. It merely reflects your awareness that out of all those countless humans, there is but one whose fate is entirely in your hands. And if you let yourself down, it won't matter how much good you've done for the rest of them. They will have lost a precious example of how best to live, which no amount of material bounty can ever replace. Don't give them fish. Don't even teach them how to fish. Show them how to be fishers of men.

Unfortunately, you will find countless people who are afraid to become conscious. They fear that if they wake up from the collective apathy they will not know what is expected of them and panic. They'll ask you, what right do I have to change how others live? Or they'll explain that they simply don't have time to try to change society — even though they paradoxically have plenty of time to let a train wreck of a society head towards the cliff without grabbing the controls away from a dead conductor.

Don't give a flying fuck about what such people expect of you. Figure out what you can afford to expect of them, if anything. A lot of hand-wringing goes on in this country about whether we're doing what our "founding fathers" expected of us. I don't. Instead, I wonder whether our founding fathers really understood what might be good for their descendants in the long centuries to come. I judge them from a 21st-century perspective. I don't let them judge me according to an 18th-century mentality. If you believe in progress — the sort of progress they believed in — you give yourself permission to do things like that.

And you can easily calm frightened sheep by setting an example of consciousness that is not panic-stricken. If people see what a healthy conscious person looks like, they'll know they have nothing to fear. Children are brilliant at spotting this. Social progress sped up once children started watching television and could see examples of people who were both more conscious and more happy than their parents. Once they see a person more mentally healthy than the people around them, they know what they must do. Just try to stop them.

I was always impressed by the dedication and focus of schoolmates who believed in social protest. But their political goals were too shallow to absorb me completely. They wanted to win concessions for their side — to force the opposition to agree to things the opposition believed were immoral. I wanted instead to change the minds of people who were without prejudice so that no concessions would be necessary. I believed in education, not political clout — enlightenment, not an oppression of "the opposition" which might ultimately lead to locking them up or even exterminating them. So I decided to study history before thinking I deserved to make history, particularly the history of those underlying social ideas which inspire all our political aspirations.

Eventually I came to see "protest" as the tool of losers. It can become a thinly disguised form of mob violence, actually. If I were a political leader, I would very much resent "protesters" telling me what to do. And I would never compromise with them. I wouldn't enjoy smashing them or getting police to crack their skulls, of course. I just wouldn't do what they were telling me to do, for the simple reason that it isn't democratic to listen only to the squeaky wheels. All us wheelies need to be greased equally or the train goes over the cliff.

In my discussion groups, I'm always careful to lead by example first, and through ideas second. And when strangers on the street ask me for directions, I always smile and do the best I can for them. Then I'm sure I've set a good example, however trivial, that they can emulate. If you practice being good in little ways, you'll be better prepared for big challenges. Oddly enough, this is also how you get to Carnegie Hall! Most of all Voltaire wanted philosophy to be useful, to change the way people behaved. In "The Ignorant Philosopher" he argued that philosophy is useless if "no philosopher has had any influence even on the morals of the street where he lived."

— Richard Osborne, Philosophy for Beginners, 1991