The challenge was to help others develop their unique selves and to bring to the fore their potential as problem-solving agents. As Baker noted, “My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice,” she told Lerner. “People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.” This realization depends upon encounters through critical participation that can generate self-trust, which enables collective efforts among the most unlikely of agents to transform unjust conditions. This view undermines traditional models of prophetic and heroic leadership that condition us to look through the eyes of others. Instead, we come to hold the view, as Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted in an exquisite riff on the Parable of the Talents, “that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Baker commends a view of leadership commensurate with my efforts to reconstruct our understanding of the prophetic and the heroic. Speaking with Lerner, she put the point quite powerfully:
In … political life I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him, and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.
Our attention must turn from the glare of the supposed gifts of the prophet and hero toward the cultivation of dispositions requisite for genuine democratic life. For Baker, each of us has a moral imagination; each of us can in fact, no matter our material circumstances, engage in reflective efforts to reach beyond the challenges/constraints of the current moment and grasp undisclosed opportunities that can, without guarantee, upend the order of things and make possible new ideals and ends. We do not need “the prophet” or “the hero” for this. What we need, above all, and this is not always self-evident, is trust in ourselves—at least this is how I understand Baker’s famous dictum: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” The cultivation of self-trust—resulting in a robust sense of individuality within community—becomes the basis for democratic collective action and allows for a multitude of prophetic and heroic moments.