It’s common here to criticize Great Man Theory, in that it’s not just one person that caused changes, it’s many. However, where I’m lost is where they further imply that things happening have absolutely nothing to do with individual choice, and material conditions are the only thing that matters. This really just sounds like predestination with extra steps, as in, your material conditions will choose whatever actions you take, which completely loses me.
The logical conclusion to this mindset is that organization and trying to do political action is pointless, after all, material conditions will either make it happen or not make it happen, which I don’t think anyone is trying to say.
Nature vs nurture. Material conditions restrict how fast/far we can steer things, but we can still steer.
Check out Hinge Points that Matt does, it’ll give you a good framework for thinking of historical materialism
I believe in Great woman theory :hillgasm:
A famous physicist dies and wakes up in front of the pearly gates. St Peter is there to greet him.
“So good to see you” he says to the physicist. “We’ve been expecting your arrival. I know dying can be a shock, but you should know that the discoveries you made will contribute greatly to easing human misery and suffering long after your brief time on earth.”
“Oh, well I suppose that’s a nice thought” replied the physicist. “But St. Peter, if you don’t mind, I’ve always had this one burning question in the back of my mind. Does humanity actually have free will?”
With a slight chuckle the saint responds “Well no, but did you miss it?”
Free will might not exist but you’ve lived plenty of your life without it already and you didn’t even notice. Just keep trucking and keep up the good fight comrade. The material conditions you’ve experienced in your life up to this moment will determine whether you’re the type of person who learns this sort of truth and descends into nihilism or whether you’re the type of person that embraces that knowledge and continues to act anyway. In either instance though you as an individual are incapable of grasping those conditions clearly enough to know that answer until it’s behind you. That critical lack of knowledge, a lack of omnipotence, is what you experience as free will in that you can’t know what all the possible outcomes are so you as the individual have to choose as if you are truly free
https://allpoetry.com/Questions-From-A-Worker-Who-Reads
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Year’s War. Who
Else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
The individual choice only existed so far as the possibilities enabled by the subordinates of the great men and conditions of their times. Take away the army and any king is just a fancylad who had to have a servant to wipe their own ass. Take away the cook or the firewood chopper and great men starve in the forest. If Einstein is born a few centuries earlier and literacy is restricted by price and political structure, he doesn’t have his great ideas and they still just exist within the aether of observable phenomenon where someone else will inevitably classify them once material conditions culminate in a university lab.
