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Role of Pioneer

(7)        The Subconscious becomes conscious in the Pioneer.

By the social subconscious becoming conscious in one individual a Pioneer is born. At the same time there is a parallel inner movement in the Pioneer from his own subconscious to his conscious comprehension.

As one walks through a street or bazaar, he consciously sees many things but his sub-conscious SEES every detail on the street without fail.

His subconscious sees subconsciously all that occurs subconsciously around. When something is lost-say a pen-perceptive people automatically go to the spot where the pen is.

It is so because, though he has consciously lost it, in the act of losing it, his subconscious kept the record.

Now that he is awakes and is searching for it, if his subconscious too awakes he goes to the place where the object is.

In delirium, on the death bed, in old age, in moments of depression, at times of intense longing the subconscious is partially awake. Then it knows what cannot be ordinarily known.

A devoted volunteer, a mother, one in love can know in a vast crowd whether his leader, child, or beloved is there. They know it subconsciously. A pioneer is a lover of pioneering.

His whole subconscious life was awake or half awake all his life and was accumulating into it the needed information.

It may be opening a new kind of shop, making a fresh tool or advocating a new policy.

Karl Marx, Voltaire, Lenin, Gandhiji were so open in their subconscious life to the goal of their souls -- Socialism, Equality, Revolution, Freedom.

An open subconscious learns in one year what one will take sixty years to learn.

All poets have undergone the subconscious education and awaited their time.

Researchers now bring to light in the writings of famous authors their early subconscious impressions.

What opens the subconscious is their intensity of passion.

In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth visits Hunsford reluctantly after repeated invitations from Charlotte.

But when she reaches there she finds Darcy visiting his aunt.

Darcy subconsciously lived in the contemplation of Elizabeth which all lovers do.          

It is that subconscious awareness which brings him there.

In every Pioneer, no matter what the field is, the subconscious is open and is being saturated over time.

When it is overflowing, the idea emerges in his consciousness.

By consciousness we mean his mind.

By subconsciousness we mean his body.

A pioneer is shaped in his subconscious and is presented to the world in his conscious Mind.

(8)        Through the Pioneer the entire collective becomes conscious.

IBM, later Apple were pioneers in computers. Now they have gone to the back ground. Even the companies do not matter for the user. What matters is the power of the computer. We can safely say, at least in the West, the entire collective society has become computer conscious. We cannot equally say that today of the Asian countries. Pioneers arise everywhere, do their work, and go into the background almost to be forgotten by the public, the WORK remains.

What is so plain today about the mobile phone and the computer has been the history of the world with respect to all earlier technologies.

It is not only found in technologies, but no field is exempt from this universal phenomenon.

The Wright brothers are not unknown today for the ubiquitous air passenger but he is not on his mind just now.

It is through the Pioneer and only through the Pioneer the world got a spoken language.

Dr.Samuel Johnson was a pioneer in writing a dictionary.

Today every software system has its own dictionary.

In these days of universally compulsory education in each country, it is worthwhile thinking about the unknown pioneer of education in the earlier centuries. The British, French, Danish Missionaries were the pioneers of education in India in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Tata was a pioneer of air routes in India and in his passionate idealism he did not fail to fly a plane empty on many routes. It was during those days he begged the government to send their mail bags free from Bombay to Madras or Calcutta.

Today the whole of India is consciously using air-courier services in all major Indian cities where an airport is located.

The early sellers of clocks used to request householders to let them leave a clock in their houses and pay weekly visits to wind them till the house hold was enamoured of having one.

There is no field devoid of pioneers.

In the early days of Indian Freedom Movement, no one used to attend public meetings. Volunteers used to visit beaches with a stool and a petromax light and place it near a group of beach goers and stand on the stool to deliver lectures till the crowd dispersed!

Today public meetings are organised by companies for a fabulous fee.

It is not easy to introduce a new habit like tobacco in the beginning.

It needs a pioneer.

The steam engine was discovered in the 2nd century but could not see the light of the day till the 17th century

The officers of the British Admiralty refused to see the ship fitted with a steam engine.

Pioneers had a struggle to put up in all fields till today.

(9)The four stages of survival, growth, development, evolution are clearly seen in the life of the Pioneer.

These four stages are there in every act.

The life of a Pioneer is no exception to it.

It is easily seen that apart from the life of the Pioneer, the stage in which the Pioneer emerges in the life of the society also determines the nature of the stages the Pioneer undergoes.

To persuade shopkeepers to introduce Hire Purchase now-a-days is different from doing it thirty years earlier in India.

No one in India started a school or college in the 40s or 50s. Now schools and colleges are springing up everywhere.

Today to abolish exams in the Indian schools is a near impossibility in classes higher than 5th grade or standard.

Days are changing in the attitude of people towards hire purchase, credit card, micro credit, corruption, abolishing of exams, etc.

In tracing the four stages of any pioneer, one should take into account the stage in which the society is with respect to that issue.

Marriage may be all but abolished in America. It is not so in India. Women may have all their rights in Europe, but not in the Middle East.

A woman pioneer espousing the cause of woman's liberty, education, etc. is certainly in a different position from her compeer in India or USA. Before the civil war there were abolitionists. During the 1960s there were pioneers pleading for the abolition of segregation. The cause remaining the same, the period, the issue, the country plays a determining role in the lives of various pioneers.

But these - Survival, growth, development, evolution - are phases which all pioneers have to pass through in differing measures invariably.

In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth was on a crusade, unconsciously, in the destruction of Darcy's Pride. Darcy perhaps launched on a similar crusade consciously to disillusion her of her prejudice.

The role of an investing partner with his technological counterpart or vice versa pass through the same hurdles as that of a crusading Pioneer.

The first duty of a pioneer is to survive. He will do so if he has family status like the Buddha or money. Strength of personality is necessary but is not enough. Nehru's wealth gave him a strength which he might not have had otherwise.

Having survived, he must GROW , i.e. multiply horizontally as Sears Roebuck did.

Ford developed through assembly line while GM evolved a private corporation centred in production to a public corporation that is market oriented.

(11)      Social evolution can be seen as two phases.

  • a) The emergence of the Pioneer by the maturity of the subconscious into consciousness.
  • b) The spreading of that maturity from the Pioneer to the entire collectivity.

The principles of being a Pioneer.

  • Creative capacity that innovates.
  • Creative capacity of the physical must go along with the requisite skill supported by its own essence of capacity.
  • Should it be in the field of ideas, he must be an organiser of ideas and actions that will support its presentation and survival.
  • This needs mental courage which is distinctly different from physical, vital courage.
  • Mental courage emerges from mental clarity and mental organisation.
  • Physical courage is one that looking down a great height the body consciousness enjoys that action which is an adventure.
  • Generally vital courage is known as courage which loves danger for the sake of danger as the nerves thrill to their availability.
  • In an organisation the courage to stand upto authority of injustice which is strong enough NOT to be victimised is partly mental and partly vital.  It comes from idealism.
  • Social idealism tends to conform.
  • Pure idealism invites social ostracism.
  • A gregarious personality will not be able to spearhead any kind of idealism.
  • The Pioneer who defies the society so that he may dominate must become a Pioneer of Organisation  for the entire society to benefit by his pioneering work.
  • Leadership, organisation, presence of mind, persuasion, accommodation, endurance, knowledge of the rules of accomplishment, capacity to accept injustice of various types as justice of work, patience, ability to see the other man's point of view, knowledge of pulse of work, people and atmosphere are some inevitable essentials of a Pioneer of any type.

(14)In a mature society, the Pioneer becomes a leader whereas in an immature society he becomes the rebel.

The topic of Pioneers is a wide one. The Pioneer and the leader belong to different dispensations but occasionally overlap.

  • There are major and minor pioneers.
  • He who fits an already discovered steam engine to a ship is a pioneer in his full right but he is a secondary or a minor one.
  • There are pioneers of thought-Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
  • Asoka was a Pioneer who after great conquests renounced wars and espoused Buddhism to propagate it all over Asia.
  • Apollo is a technological pioneer in one sense while Microsoft is so in another sense.
  • Sometimes hundreds of dedicated people do a pioneering work whose results are given to the world by one great scientist which is becoming common now-a-days.
  • The break through in any field comes from one major discovery such as electricity but millions of engineers, technicians, builders of cities do pioneering work to consummate the original discovery. The German Engineer who wrote a book on Electric State was behind Lenin's inspiration to industrialise Russia and make California a flourishing state in the USA.
  • Columbus was undoubtedly the greatest  pioneers of all time who discovered America. But the Quakers, Puritans, Irish leaders and millions of settlers who peopled the West crowning the frontier are all PIONEERS in the best sense of the word.
  • C.Subramaniam who sponsored Green Revolution is certainly a pioneer in organising the nation's food production for self-sufficiency.
  • The man who created the hotmail deserves the name Pioneer in an ample sense.
  • Every year we see new dishes in the restaurants as a result of invisible pioneers unknown to the world.
  • In all these cases the principle of Pioneering remain the same.
  • Money back guarantee was a pioneering movement in USA.

When Iacocca extended it to the car market in a small but significant way, he played the role of a pioneer.

  • A pioneer can be hailed, crushed, crucified, neglected, forgotten, rendered invisible as the conditions permit.

(15)      Society destroys a Pioneer appearing ahead of time.

Animals destroy children that are weak. Society destroys leaders who are stronger and weaker. A bolt admits only the size of the nut of its own size. The rest are rejected. Society generally rejects by liquidation. In the conception of the society all that does not belong to it fully and richly are its enemies to be annihilated. The woman who is the greater member of creativity has that instinctive dislike for any other woman. The truth of this statement incidentally announces that society is all, even the Pioneer is nothing. In certain games children play they draw a line at a distance and take turns to throw discs or balls towards the line. He who is nearest the line is the winner, not the one who crosses the line. Even in the coffee what is appreciated is not an abundance of sugar, but the exact appropriate measure that we require.

  • There are places where the greater the strength, the greater the rewards.
  • In exactly opposite conditions such as lapses, the less the better.
  • In the lottery that one ticket, not the big number, wins.
  • In the constitution of the society there are various relations between parts. In the Social Development such relations do have a place of study. This study does not choose that area as this is a small project like a university degree, while that belongs to a wider Quest of knowledge all over the world. That aspect of society or those aspects belong to a study of Social Development as an integrated process culminating in Integration. Our aims is not broad, but very narrow  a planning tool for governmental planners, perhaps to international planning for higher production.
  • We know the phenomenon of photograph, a process of taking an image by the incidence of light on the object. Here the film when exposed to light even for a second is spoilt. It can be used only for the given purpose in that split second.
  • That speaker who addresses the urges of his audience at the exact point where it presses, wins the applause, not the wise man who pours out his wisdom which is above their heads.
  • These are hey days of divorce or Non-marriages. Even today we can occasionally see a couple after several decades of wedding enjoying the company of the other and is unable to be away from it. Here each has the manners of goodwill that will precisely make the other person's prosperity flower in the way in which they cherish. Integrated society is one where each component of it directly or indirectly relates to every other component for its best productivity and creativity automatically. Recently Pride and Prejudice was acclaimed as a great novel by the British readers. One reason for  that is Jane Austen made the Proud Darcy condescend and transform himself so that his part will immensely please Lizzy, Jane, their mother, father, Bingley and himself. The social equilibrium of Pride and Prejudice destroys Darcy's excess of energy directed towards his class consciousness.

(16)      The collective appreciates its own perfection in the individual, not his.

An organisation yields most of its results to the benefit of the boss who presides over it. Most of such organisations even today frown upon any individual from the ranks making any contribution. When a foreign VIP came to a university to deliver a lecture, after the lecture, one student met him and had valuable talks. The professor abused him and threatened him for having met the VIP without his knowledge and permission. At this stage organisations act as individuals endowed with ego. Apart from the boss appropriating the advantageous aspects of the organisation, the ORGANISATION itself has such a personality. At such a point a Martin Luther arises, creates a rival organisation and runs it more autocratically. Autocracy is a bar to social development; autocracy is the goal of society. This apparent contradiction is found everywhere in the society. We can say the society is shot through and through with such an autocratic behaviour. The contradiction resolves itself if we see autocracy with respect to the LINE which is one of our bases. Today America rules over the world, not Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt. They were all great in their times, did great service but they were a drop in the ocean. The individuals however great they are in their times count little in the final scheme of things. In India where several thousand years ago Rishis discovered the significance of Energy and its origin no one knows their names today. Knowledge is impersonal and the person does not matter, what matters is knowledge. The French Revolution for some years had not had a leader. When its gains were to be consolidated it fell to the lot of Napoleon who was not part of the Revolution in its initial phase. The Indian National Congress is synonymous with Gandhiji who came into it only in 1915 about 30 years after its inception. It was founded by an Englishman, a retired ICS officer so that Indians could petition the British Government for a fair role - At a time Indian Freedom Movement was at its peak it was Gandhiji who guided her destinies. A few months before the advent of Freedom in August 15, 1947, Congress refused to listen to its august leader, accepted the advice of the British viceroy. Gandhiji was not present in Delhi for the celebration of the inauguration of free India.

  • The collective matters, the collective alone matters when it comes to the Society.
  • He who makes that collective possible and effective, often presides over its destinies for centuries and millenniums.
  • Often the later society follows in the name of such an individual the very opposite of his ideals, as Buddhists worship the idol of the Buddha.
  • These are instances when the collective receives a sterling service from an exceptional Individual, as soon as he renders it, the society dethrones him as in the case of Winston Churchill and Michael Gorbachev. (To explain this phenomenon a longer explanation, out of place here, is required.)

(17)Though the Pioneer is the conscious expression of the subconscious society, it turns against him when his appearance is too soon. It adores him when he emerges in right time. He can act as an instrument of the Society but he cannot, on his own, impose his will on the Society.

  • The Society is all; the Individual has no separate existence.

At no time the individual has been in a position to lord over it on his own. Those who have done so first got its approval for him to be the leader. Suppose it is otherwise, it is not tenable in fact. The leader is a SINGLE person when the society turns against him. Pioneers are of various types. The types are limitless. There are pioneers at various stages of social growth will appear to be different. They fall into two broad categories. 1) A pioneer who personifies a cause for its own glory and his own personal satisfaction 2) One whose initial success challenges the entire establishment. The society is so constituted that even if some one's work does not directly relate to them, when they perceive that that work contains the germs of future possibilities that is a rebellion, they will set about destroying him in full vigour. Pioneer remaining the same in all phases, it is worth considering the variations of that species.

  • What Copernicus came up with challenged the foundations of the society.
  • Socrates was not bothered by his society, but he went round and powerfully provoked the 12 wise men to his detriment.
  • Hitler was a pioneer of Evil.
  • Edison was one in productively creative work in commerce.
  • Einstein's relativity challenged the basis of thought, not existence.
  • Jesus, though he was not in the way of anyone, was seen to be one whose mission would destroy their society, their beliefs.
  • FDR's New Deal questioned the very foundations of America that one should stand on his own legs. By 1929 society has become so well organized that the scope of the individual standing on his own legs was abridged and in some areas was extinct.
  • A disciple who does better than his master is not considered a pioneer but an impertinent upstart.
  • A farmer who introduces a new crop is often prevented to grow it.
  • A teacher has lost his job several times when he departed from the traditional method of teaching poetry.
  • There are revolutionary pioneers and evolutionary pioneers.
  • In a poor society every dynamic man is treated as a pioneer and given his ‘due' since they are incapable of emulating him and therefore want to destroy him.
  • Even the impersonal paper currency in USA was given the treatment of a pioneer of a new institution and a President headed up the opposition.



story | by Dr. Radut