I've replaced the title with the subtitle in the hope that this may help.
Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.
At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.
I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.
I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.
But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?
The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.
If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.
Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.
The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.
That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.
I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.
If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?
It isn't, though I may be tangentially speaking about Great Man Theory, I wasn't focusing on it.
> If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?
I thought using "great men" gives space for virtue and a spiritual/intellectual worth, not just a morally ambiguous "power".
Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.
Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.
To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism
But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.
Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?
Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.
I feel this take says more about the person saying it then it does about the great men theorists.
Believing that revolutions often happen due to a few individuals does not mean that you believe most people are there to serve anyone. That's a non sequitur
Few myths in our society are as dangerous and as anti-social as the “self made man”. No one is self made and all achievements are the result of groups of people working together.
If it merely improves my odds, then I owe it something, but there must have been at least one other factor at play, and that factor is also owed credit. I presume you would call that factor something like "luck". No doubt that that plays a role, but credit for luck belongs neither to the society nor the individual. All that is left, then, is individual choice, and so the rest of the credit belongs to the individual.
Indeed.
> The claim that everyone owes their successes to the group ignores this.
This doesn't follow. Can you elaborate?
No one who uses the term "self-made" literally believes that Howard Schultz never hired any employees at Starbucks, they mean to say that for someone who was born in the projects, he did very well for himself. Pointing out he hired employees adds no value to the discussion, so it's not why people point it out.
The "failing upwards" is an actual thing and who is around you massively influences whether you are failing upwards or downwards.
You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it"
Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key?
Why, then, do you draw the line at an incomplete analysis? Maybe because it is convenient? Maybe because we'd rather not destroy our illusions of ourselves? Maybe its convenient not to understand others?
What is real in regards to ones self and others? There shouldn't be a loss of pride with understanding.
Let's take a person who made it rich betting big on bitcoin early on. Were they a savvy investor who made their own fortune, did they merely think it sounded cool and thought why not while bitcoin prices were so low that snatching them up was super cheap, did they rely on a tip or tips from friends/family, or was it some other reason?
If you come back and ask them years later after they've become worth 10^7 or better, how likely is the person who merely got lucky to admit it was dumb luck in an environment that lionizes the wealthy as self-made superhumans?
I would think the correct level of analysis for this conversation is the lowest one that still allows people to be accountable for their own actions. Lower than that, and the central question of this thread is irrelevant.
Even if we could do that it would not "reduce" any personal value. I think these are biases you may have. Accountability can be defined, even in that total view.
And right now, even in the incomplete view that we have, it is defined socially and politically. And that's what my real take is:
That the ideas that most people have of self, person-hood, achievement, merit and value, are political ideas.They are not necessarily true/accurate ideas. They serve a political purpose.
> What level of analysis would you consider "complete"?
We can go further than what we have now. In fact I think we MUST go further in order to make the world a better place.
Our current analysis is really just a cheap political tool that serves to preserve a sort of caste-system, most employed for classism and racism. That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
So we don't need a scientific model describing of a persons thoughts in real, chemical, atomic detail, we need a world that can take peoples individual circumstance into real political consideration and action.
This could be what a real science of people is.
Indeed.
> That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.
As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.
> If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.
I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
Agreed. That's why I don't believe in that. And actually that's kind of what I'm criticizing: the fake science used to judge peoples behavior.
But I do know we're way WAY more similar than our cultures would have us believe.
> I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".
I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible. Just like we generate mathematical proofs that underpin technologies which handle our worlds economy. But the creation of an incorruptible democracy can ONLY be done by the people who benefit from it. As in, the rich would never help us do it, only the poor. In fact, the rich would probably view us as enemies if we seriously tried.
Please show your work. All human history says this can't be done.
The correct answer to that question is "they don't".
Read the list and try to find a single non-WASP family: https://www.forbes.com/families/list/
Show me where it says his wealth was built on your “WASP slavery money?”
That is most of the territory was not under any tribe’s permanent control, nor was land in the west under control of Spain or Mexico before the Americans colonized it. Also lots of tribes were sworn enemies with each other and more than happy to collaborate with Europeans to drive out their enemy tribes with fewer losses to themselves.
Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?
Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. Stalin ended up wealthy too. Hitler same deal. There is not much difference in there.
It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.
What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.
Or was it the Freemasons?
I can’t even keep track anymore.
I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though - maybe that’s the mind control at work?
Gates, Buffett, Musk ... all spring to mind.
White certainly. Anglo-Saxon doesn't mean much more than "of western/northern european ancestry" any more. Protestant as much as any other non-Catholic Christian sect.
But WASP doesn't mean literally what it means any more, so maybe I'm missing the reason you overlooked the most famous modern American-citizen billionaires?
Hahahaha
If your point is that people have colloquialized "WASP", and that I fell into your trap, then OK you got me. :)
My last few comments on this site have been precisely about these ideas. These ideas, in my view, are inherent flaws of philosophical liberalism, of which modern liberalism and conservatism stem. This ideology places itself at the forefront of morality, but can't even seriously analyze the conditions of the individual.
A rich heir is self made, but a poor man is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This is how far this modern ideology goes. Totally unscientific and is also the birthplace of modern racism.
This is how far the equality goes, that is, not very far at all. The liberal revolutions of the last ~400 years must be called the aristocratic revolutions. One where the organized aristocracy came into power, and so did their morals.
In reality, hardly anyone thinks a poor man is 'spiritually bankrupt'. The main religion of the Western world says the poor man is in fact inherently better.
So there's circularity.
But I actually meant it as a sort of drive (spirit), not wholly about belief (spiritual).
But also, you must take into consideration all the ill effects of poverty. Such as crime, lack of education, lack of opportunities, the emotional faults of poverty, unchecked mental health problems, anger, frustration, ills with socialization, etc. All of the effects derived from poverty. All of these get bunched up into a single shallow view of the poor: "they're just like that" - kinda tone.
While the rich get the material wealth and the status-privilege of their families, the rich are assumed to be valuable.
This is literally what the article is talking about, albeit within a more aristocratic context.