The normal man theory of history

There are no great men or women. Normal men drive history

“The founding fathers as dogs”. More great work from Midjourney.

If anyone has power, it's Elon Musk. But this does not make him a capital-G Great Man, some singular personality who exerts an outsize effect on history. He's a fungible man in a world-historic position.

Granted, he’s an unusual type: driven, energetic, self-described Asperger’s, risk-loving, true believer.¹ Most don’t have this mix of traits. But there are eight billion people alive today. The rare is routine. There are many thousands just like Elon.

The Normal Man Theory of history: "greatness" is a costume tailored by context; the man animating it is standard issue.

Still, it’s true that even among the small group of men cast in kindred roles — Bezos, Zuck, Gates — there are variations on a theme. They act somewhat differently given similar positions. But position trumps personality.²

Historians mock the Great Man theory of history, which would have world events be a kind of play or story, at the centre of which are wilful protagonists who stand out from the crowd of minor characters. (The modern metaphor would say real players vs NPCs.) This is Romantic nonsense.

Yet most people are entirely unknown beyond their circle, while others have biographies written about them. This alone suggests that some people exert more casual oomph on the world: some people are “greater” than others.

The Great Man theory errs, however, in attributing unusual agency or will to these world-movers. If minor events in history were slightly different, Napoleon, Churchill, Rockefeller, and Trump would have been paupers or dead before they turned one. Less dramatically, such figures, with their unusually “high agency” personalities, might have survived childhood disease and lived smaller-impact lives as outcasts from the tribe they tried to take over, or as local zealots or tough guys, or they might have been successful real estate agents. Some other “great” man, meanwhile, would fill their place at the top.

There are numberless small-G great men. They’re a minority of the total human population, certainly. Most people are women. Most men lack the endocrine system for restless manoeuvring. Even most candidate great men are born at the wrong time and place, or they slot in underneath an existing great man. But always, everywhere, there is a supply of great men to fill any power vacuum no matter how venial or pathetic. There is no great difference between the great man who rises to power at the church committee or during the French Revolution. Ancillary skills help. A talent for public speaking, a knack for numbers, or a memory for faces might give some advantage at a given time and place. Once again, these are precisely the qualities to be found in any sample of the human species larger than a few hundred. The great man is, above all, unexceptional.

Yet the Great Man Theory is more apt than most historians allow.

The man part is highly accurate. Other than a few glitches, where women inherited thrones, history has funnelled men, not women, into the keystone positions where their emotions flow out to other people’s actions. In the last eye-blink, women have become CEOs and presidents. They look normal.

The great part is semi-accurate. The idea that a small number of men have an increasingly large effect on the history and the lives of others is tragically and uncompromisingly true. The marxists, the structuralists, the feminists, and almost all modern branches of sociology and history have to do overtime to obfuscate this fact. A handful of particular men — Trump and Putin most obviously — can single-handedly determine our fate, and end an entire epoch in the history of human habitation of this planet, almost literally with the push of a button. I don’t say that Putin is in this position because he is a great man. But now, this man, who is like many other men from the KGB in the 1980s, is great indeed. By simply speaking some words or entering some commands into a computer — trivial actions almost any person can carry out — he can kill me and everyone I know. This greatness deserves a place in the history books.³

Greatness emanates from the infrastructure around that particular man. To be great in the sense used here — to be a hinge, a shot-caller, the top of a pyramid — is to be empowered by other men and women who thrust greatness upon you. Humans perceive status, as do many other mammals. They see the top dog and, like dogs, invest them with authority. In other words, the situation the great man is in — the surrounding conditions that mean he is at the top of some organisation or other — is projected onto him. We perceive status (an outer set of conditions) as an inner quality of the person.⁴

This feeling is inveterate. I doubt it can be turned off. People get angry when you suggest that someone powerful, famous, or “charismatic” is simply another Homo sapiens, with nothing more tangible than the airy beliefs of other Homo sapiens to grant them their status.⁵

The extraordinary thing is that the critics of the Great Man Theory should have had the last laugh. It should be that circumstances, structures, and conditions of all sorts (everything from microscopic viruses to economic incentives to climate change) over-determine human history. And yet we somehow ended up with systems where a few billionaires and dictators are cast as main characters. The centralisation of control has yielded a world where the theory is half true: a handful of men are empowered to determine the lives of everyone else.

AI may amplify this. A multinational corporation, a command and control infrastructure, and a state all represent vast machines of supra-personal agency. Atop them we place a single human male: CEO, general, president. AI will wrest control from those at the bottom or middle. Into the hands of a normal man, it will place the levers of unprecedented power.

1. I recently read his readable biography, whose coverage unfortunately stops just before his rightward veer.

2. Though I do think personality is important. There might be a return to types in psychology. Big Five stuff + research into neurodiversity = speculation on the evolutionary function of different types.

3. More sexism. Dozens of mediocre men have been handed nuclear footballs. The only women are Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Liz Truss, and, I presume, Golda Meir.

4. This sense can be turned up or down. Those whose sense is keener, are more likely to both desire and obey power. I usen’t to understand this paradox. If you’re a “strong man”, surely you’d be above what others think or say? Likewise, how can you look up to the strong and despise the weak — isn’t that self-loathing? Then I realised many men are like dogs: they want a status hierarchy regardless of their place in it; provided those below them respect their station. E.g. Lukashenko is a coherent character. In Belarus, he’s an alpha/strongman, others must show deference. When Putin enters the room he rolls over, exposing belly and loins, delighted to pay Putin the very obeisance he craves from others.

5. Status is a gossamer thread. Those who clutch its baseless fabric wisely rush at anyone who denies or ignores their prestige.