In May 1840, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle gave a series of lectures in London. Known as “the Sage of Chelsea,” he attracted an array of literary figures eager to hear his insights, among them William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, and Harriet Martineau. According to Julian Symons, his biographer, “the success of the lectures was due in part to the nervousness of the lecturer, the battle he so plainly fought to ejaculate the thoughts within him.”²¹ Carlyle used a different bodily image in a letter to his mother, describing how he’d shivered through one lecture, vomiting forth words “like wild Annandale grapeshot.”²²

Whatever the eccentricities of his public persona, Carlyle had latched onto a latent mood. Great Men wanted to hear about other Great Men and, more than that, they wanted to believe in a vision of the whole of history as “at bottom the History of Great Men.”²³ Where the past was dark and chaotic, he showed it to them illuminated by pinpricks of light—Odin and Muhammed some way off, with Luther and Rousseau closer by. Carlyle was their guide, able to navigate the stars. Later, Nietzsche would read and take inspiration from the published version—all six lectures bound together and released under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.

Turning his lectern into a pulpit, Carlyle denounced those who had reduced “this God’s-world to a dead brute Steam-engine.”²⁴ Where was the wonder in a steam engine? It made active humans into passive cargo; it sapped the will. History, for him, was “the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done; the infinite conjugation of the verb To do.”²⁵

Carlyle blamed the popularity of utilitarianism for much of what was wrong with Victorian society. Utilitarianism wasn’t cosmic or historical; it was about weights and measures. Jeremy Bentham—and, more recently, John Stuart Mill—had argued that people should make choices which maximize pleasure and avoid harm. It was a kind of bureaucratic ethics, concerned more with quantifying than understanding goodness. Carlyle likened its grinding out of pleasure to the workings of a mill—he liked puns—and said that it left no space for heroes or “strong men,” those people who knew “what is doing” and actively pushed humanity forward. He compared utilitarianism’s pencil-pushing with Muhammed’s final judgment. At this point, Mill, who was in the audience, finally stood up and shouted “No!”²⁶

Carlyle thought that men like Thomas Cromwell and Napoleon were “the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain.”²⁷ They didn’t stoop to avoid harm, nor did they emerge from the general pattern. They wove the patterns others followed.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo flies off after a fight scene and a character called Link says, “He’s doing his Superman thing.” Like Carlyle’s hero, he is consumed by a mission only he can fulfill. Everyone else is superfluous because his power comes from within, burning on the fuel of ego alone. What makes the strongman strong is his rejection of others. He does, while they watch.