People always seem to focus on the top of an organization, but even when someone is in charge they aren't exactly in control. The person at the top makes the hard decisions, because in our hierarchical system someone has to have that job, but if the people at the bottom don't work, or do their work poorly then even the right plan can fail. But Human society's tendency to focus on the leadership often obscures an important truth: you don't need faith in leaders, you need faith in humanity to "get it right" over the long term. Just try to clear the path in front of you for now, and let the next generation worry about the weather.
History focuses on the individual because it is trying to tell a story, but the amazing thing about civilization isn't just that one person invented the light bulb (for example). It's that we then went and made lightbulbs for everyone in the world. And then we built a better lightbulb and made enough of those for everyone in the world to have the better lightbulbs. In an open society, there's this marvelous self-organizing system in place for us all to break down and improve every part of our lives, and to share those important changes at an almost frightening speed.
Alot of people are skeptical or even afraid of this because they want to believe that there's a plan somewhere, and that someone is in control of the whole thing. This is an understandable throwback to both an earlier time in history, when there was more central control, and to an earlier time in one's own life when there was someone to tell you what to do, and how to live, and decide what was important. But there is no way for a central planner to work when faced with massive numbers of people each of whom have their own needs and wants. The planners would need to be both omniscient and able to make very good decisions in a limited amount of time. Obviously, such a system has never actually existed.
But on a larger scale, you don't just need to have faith in a market, or a political system, or even in our leaders. You need to have faith that the people around you are also struggling to make their part of the world a little better than they found it. Price is just a number, and money is just little pieces of metal or paper. The true measure of a society is in the way the human energy that money represents is distributed. If we are working towards our own personal pleasures, and trying to fit as many worthless trivialities as we can into our lives, then we are going to inevitably bankrupt our futures. But if we take the resolve to improve our world, even by a small amount, and multiply it by the millions or billions of people, then the result will be much more than could be accomplished by even the best leaders.
