Essay: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE POWERLESS

The setting is a 1966 U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing to determine whether Detroit's car manufacturers are sufficiently safety-conscious, and Ralph Nader a young lawyer of Lebanese descent, is there to repeat his belief that they are not. To the subcommittee members, Nader presents a fascinating figure—a David to Detroit's Goliath. "Why are you doing all this, Mr. Nader?" one of the Senators asks. "I became in a sense incensed," Nader replies in the convoluted courtroom language that is his customary way of speech, "at the way there can be a tremendous amount of injustice and brutality in an industrialized society, without any accountability without any responsibility. This is a problem of individuals confronting complex organizations. It is not an equal contest."

MOST Americans would agree with Ralph Nader that the contest is unequal. Not that individuals have ceased to count. In a sense, they have never been more important, never more respected for their talents and skills Technology makes everyone a specialist whom everyone else depends, whether to fly planes, raise food or teach children. But somehow, the specialist-managers are losing touch with the specialist-citizens. Too many institutions have grown too big, remote, indifferent. Or so it seems to millions of people the world over, who have made "powerlessness" one of the chief complaints—and clichés—of the age.

To the angry, the answer lately has been protest, demonstration, not. And violence does bring a sense of power does achieve change—though more often it brings only violent reaction. There are other ways, and they work "Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down,' says John Gardner Yet even in despotic societies, good men have managed to rise against the odds and become the architects, not of revolution, but of peaceful change. This is true not merely of the obvious geniuses and unique innovators but of seemingly ordinary people.

A Strange Form of Love

A catalogue of individual American shapers would fill an encyclopedia. Margaret Sanger advocated contraception in the face of laws that branded her a criminal. Novelist Upton Sinclair sanitized Chicago's abattoirs with his 1906 shocker, The Jungle. Henry Ford wheeled a nation and established the principle of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. All these and a host of others were evolutionaries who worked change without revolution. Ralph Nader, for all his abrasive qualities and puzzling motives, is very much their inheritor.

The record suggests that many, if not most of the world's successful reformers have worked within the system that outraged them. True, they achieved their successes in simpler societies. But in a mass society, everything is so interrelated that small actions may have big effects, all of them widely reported by mass communications In short, today's individual is anything but powerless against The System. He can easily disrupt it—for good or ill.

Given such power, the disrupter for good is all the more impressive. He is the Doer, an everyday activist who resembles Camus' rebel, one who retains "a strange form of love" for the society he attacks. He wants to improve it, not kill it.