RESILIENCE & MINDSET

Whose Shoulders Are You Standing On?

Newton credited the giants who came before him. But he was thinking of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus. Dr. Mouna Esmaeilzadeh argues we have been looking at the wrong giants all along — and that the shoulders carrying humanity forward have always belonged to people whose names never made it into the history books.

My grandmother could neither read nor write. She was illiterate. As a teenager, she made her way to Tehran alone — without money, without contacts, without education. She raised four children as a single mother.

Two generations later, my brother Saeid became the youngest Associate Proffessor in Swedish history.

My father was orphaned at seven. He was put to work as a child labourer in the worst slums of Tehran. But the boy from the slums became an engineer. The first academic in our entire family.

In 1675, Isaac Newton wrote: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

But what we have all missed is who the giants are.

The giants no one writes about

For me, they are not only Galileo, Kepler, or Copernicus. They are my grandmother, who fought for her children's survival. They are my father, who refused the fate life had assigned him. They are my mother, who demonstrated against the mullahs with an infant in her arms.

The giants every person stands on are usually not the ones written about in history books. They are women who were never allowed to attend school. Men who died too early in wars they never caused. People whose entire lives were spent making yours possible.

You, too, are standing on someone's shoulders. On people who sacrificed things you never learned about. Who took risks you never had to take. Who died earlier than they should have so that you could have more time.

The most privileged human who has ever lived

Consider this: two hundred years ago, half of all children did not survive to the age of five. Half. Of those who survived, nine out of ten lived in extreme poverty. And of those who survived, only one in ten had the opportunity to attend school. The rest remained illiterate.

Ninety-four percent of the Earth's population lived in extreme poverty. Today, the figure is under ten percent.

You, reading this, live a more luxurious life than the Sun King Louis XIV himself. He certainly had more mistresses than you will ever have. But they had to endure the stench of urine in his palace because he lacked toilets with a flush — something you take for granted today. You are the most privileged human being who has ever existed in the history of our species.

Why does it not feel that way? Because your outdated brain places ten times more weight on threats than on opportunities. That was brilliant on the savannah. Today, it is an operating defect.

Progress is not automatic

And perhaps you believe the world has improved more or less on its own. It has not. The world has moved forward because of people — courageous women and men — who dared to go against the current. Innovators and entrepreneurs. Those who refused to accept the world as it was given to them.

My grandmother did not accept her illiteracy. She could not change it for herself, but she made certain her children would never carry it. My father did not accept the slums. He studied his way out — not only for himself, but for a family that did not yet exist. My mother did not accept the mullahs. She marched, knowing the cost, choosing it anyway.

They did not have platforms. They did not have followers. They did not have the luxury of theorising about change from the safety of a comfortable life. They simply acted. And the accumulated weight of their actions — invisible, unrecorded, uncelebrated — is the foundation on which everything I have built rests.

Newton was right that we stand on the shoulders of giants. He was wrong about which ones matter most.

The question is not whether the world is better. It is.

The question is what you build on top of it.

— Mouna