Don’t Fall for the “Great Men” Theory
“We can change the world and make it a better place. It is in your hands to make a difference” (Nelson Mandela). “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do” (Steve Jobs). These are powerful words. Words that spark our imaginations. Words that communicate a sense of meaning, vitality and hope.
But can we really change the world? Despite the doomsday tenor that newspapers love to evoke (or perhaps precisely because of it), today such messages are repeated mantra-style. Never before has such optimism about the influence of the individual been so widespread. To people in the Middle Ages, Classical Antiquity or the Stone Age, the two quotations above would probably have been incomprehensible. For them, the world was as it had always been. When there were upheavals, it was because kings were waging war or sullen gods were exacting revenge by making the earth tremble. That an individual citizen, an individual farmer, an individual slave might change the world—such an absurd notion never entered their heads.
Not so with Earth’s contemporary inhabitants. We see ourselves not merely as citizens of the world but as its engineers. We’re obsessed with the idea that we can reshape it through start-ups, crowdfunding and charity projects, just as the fabulously successful entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley or the inventive geniuses of world history have done before us. It’s no longer enough to change our lives; we want to change the world. We work for organizations committed to this goal, and—grateful for a sense of “purpose”—we’re even willing to do it for half the salary.
The notion that an individual can change the world is one of the greatest ideologies of our century—and one of its grandest illusions. In it, two cognitive biases are intertwined. One is the focusing illusion, which we saw Daniel Kahneman explain in Chapter 11: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” When you peer at a map through a magnifying glass, the areas you’re looking at are enlarged. Our attention functions in much the same way: when we’re engrossed in our campaign to change the world, its significance appears much greater than it actually is. We systematically overestimate the importance of our projects.
The second cognitive bias is known as the intentional stance, a term coined by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. Under the intentional stance we assume an intention behind every change—regardless of whether or not it was actually intentional. So when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, it was because somebody had deliberately brought about its collapse. The end of apartheid in South Africa would not have been possible without a campaigner like Nelson Mandela. India needed Gandhi to gain independence. Smartphones needed Steve Jobs. Without Oppenheimer, no atomic bomb. Without Einstein, no relativity theory. Without Benz, no cars. Without Tim Berners-Lee, no World Wide Web. Behind every global development we posit a human being willing it into existence.
This supposition of intent is rooted in our evolutionary past. Better to assume too much than too little. Better, if you hear a rustle in the bushes, to imagine the source is a hungry saber-toothed tiger or an enemy warrior than the wind. There must have been a few people who regularly assumed it was the wind, saving themselves the energy of running away—but sooner or later they would have been abruptly and messily removed from the gene pool. Human beings today are the biological descendants of the hominids with a hyperactive intentional stance. It’s hardwired into our brains. That’s why we see intention and active agents even where there are none. Yet how could something like the dissolution of apartheid have happened without Nelson Mandela? How could someone other than the visionary Steve Jobs have come up with something like the iPhone?
The intentional stance leads us to interpret the history of the world as the history of “great men” (sadly, they were predominantly men). In his excellent book The Evolution of Everything, the brilliant British polymath Matt Ridley proposes a radical rejection of the “great men” theory: “We tend to give too much credit to whichever clever person is standing nearby at the right moment.” Enlightenment philosophers had come to the same conclusion long before. Montesquieu wrote: “Martin Luther has been credited with the Reformation… But it had to happen. If it had not been Luther, it would have been someone else.”
In the years around 1500, a handful of Portuguese and Spanish conquerors subdued the whole of Central and South America. The empires of the Aztecs, Maya and Incas crumbled with remarkable speed. Why? Not because “great men” like Cortés were especially cunning or talented, but because the foolhardy adventurers had unknowingly brought with them illnesses from Europe—illnesses to which they were immune but which proved deadly to the indigenous population. These viruses and bacteria are the reason why today half the continent speaks Spanish or Portuguese, and why they pray to a Catholic God.
But if it wasn’t “great men” who wrote the story of the world, then who was it? The answer: nobody. Events are the accidental by-product of an infinite number of trends and influences. It works like traffic, not like cars. There’s nobody directing it. World history is fundamentally disorderly, fortuitous and unpredictable. If you study historical documents for long enough, you’ll come to see that all major developments have a touch of the coincidental about them, and that even the most prominent figures in world history were simply puppets of their age. Key to the good life is not idolizing “great men”—and not clinging to the illusion that you can be one yourself.