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.
You’re not really missing anything: free will does not exist. However to get the outcomes we want we have to pretend that it does. just vibe
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Material conditions set the limits of the possible for what we can achieve and how we can think about what to achieve, but that doesn’t mean everything is predestined.
Material conditions narrow the field of possible outcomes, but there’s still some variation in the outcomes that are left. In some situations, that variation can have a big difference in the quality of life of people who have to live with the result, and people doing more than expected to organize can make a serious difference.
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
