Right-wing dipshits are pushing the Great Man theory again, and honestly, I'm exhausted. Not because it's new—this intellectual dumpster fire has been smouldering since Thomas Carlyle decided history needed more daddy issues and fewer inconvenient facts. What's tiring is watching people keep falling for historical fan fiction written by and for guys who think democracy is too messy for their refined sensibilities.

Back in the 1840s, this historian named Thomas Carlyle, a man with the social awareness of a goldfish and about as much nuance as a brick through a window, decides that extraordinary individuals shape history. Napoleon bent Europe to his will through pure genius! Lincoln saved the Union because his beard had magical powers! Churchill growled Britain through the Blitz because he possessed that special sauce regular people obviously lack!

It's a compelling story, which is precisely why it's so damn dangerous.

The Simplification Hustle

Here's the thing about history: it's messier than a toddler's birthday party and about twice as chaotic. It's systems grinding against each other like tectonic plates having a nasty divorce, millions of people making countless small decisions that somehow add up to massive changes, and economic forces that would make your economics professor weep into his yellowing tenure papers.

The Great Man theory takes all that beautiful, chaotic complexity and turns it into a Marvel movie, complete with a clear protagonist, satisfying three-act structure, and zero need for anyone to think about boring shit like collective action or why the economy keeps screwing everyone over.

"Churchill saved Britain" goes down easier than the true story, which was a years-long meat grinder involving thousands of people, shifting alliances, industrial capacity stretched past its breaking point, and the inconvenient fact that Britain would've been speaking German if not for American supplies and Soviet blood. But nuance doesn't sell books or get you elected. Simple stories do.

Complex historical analysis makes people ask uncomfortable questions about why everything's so screwed up. Great Man narratives make you ask, "When's our hero gonna show up?" One threatens the people in charge; the other keeps them on top while everyone else sits around waiting for salvation that's never coming.

The Authority Manufacturing Plant

You wanna know who benefits from this Great Man bullshit? Leaders who desperately need you to believe they're cosmic-level special. The myth doesn't just flatter power, it manufactures it out of thin air, like some political alchemy for people too lazy to earn authority the hard way.

Putin cultivates a personal mythology that makes him sound like historical inevitability rather than a KGB thug who happened to grab power when the Soviet Union collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane. Erdoğan frames himself as the second coming of Atatürk instead of what he is: a guy who figured out how to exploit religious sentiment for political gain. Xi Jinping presents himself as the chosen vessel of Chinese destiny rather than a politician who climbed the Communist Party ladder by being really, really good at not making waves until he got to the top.

And Trump? Jesus, Trump's entire brand is "I alone can fix it," which is the Great Man theory for people who think reading is suspicious and complexity makes their brains hurt.

When you've convinced people only exceptional men make history, you're telling them they're not remarkable enough to make it themselves. Democracy becomes a spectator sport where the citizens sit quietly, clap when told, and never think to ask why they're not allowed on the field.

The Protagonist Addiction

Here's the psychological hook that gets everyone: humans are hardwired for stories, and stories need protagonists. The Great Man theory exploits this weakness like those predatory casinos that put ATMs right next to the slot machines. It turns history into a series of superhero movies where we get clear heroes and villains, moral clarity, and the emotional satisfaction of having someone to worship or blame.

After 9/11, the entire media apparatus framed Bush as a decisive hero, a cowboy president who'd hunt down the bad guys and restore order with good old-fashioned American grit. Meanwhile, the intelligence agencies that completely screwed up their one job got conveniently swept under the rug like embarrassing relatives at Thanksgiving. Much easier to worship the guy in the flight suit than to examine how surveillance states work or why decades of American foreign policy created the perfect breeding ground for this exact kind of blowback.

This hero worship isn't just intellectually lazy, it's politically useful as hell. Bad things happen? Blame individuals rather than systems. Good things happen? Credit leaders rather than movements. Either way, the people who did the work get erased from the story, and power structures stay conveniently invisible.

The Elite Echo Chamber

For centuries, most historians were educated men from elite backgrounds who identified way more with kings and generals than with peasants or workers. The Great Man theory mirrors their worldview perfectly; it's like confirmation bias got drunk, put on a tuxedo, and decided to write history books.

This is how we ended up with textbooks that framed colonialism as the triumph of "great explorers" instead of what it was: genocide, conquest, and resistance. Columbus "discovered" America the same way a burglar "discovers" your jewelry box, but the Great Man narrative made it sound like some heroic adventure rather than the opening act of a continental holocaust.

For every Washington or Lincoln elevated to mythical status, there are countless slave revolts, Indigenous resistance movements, and popular uprisings that got footnoted or ignored entirely. Can't have people getting ideas about collective power. Might give them the wrong impression about who's running this show.

Why We Keep Buying the Fantasy

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we fall for Great Man narratives because they solve a very real psychological problem. Modern life leaves most of us feeling powerless and insignificant. We work jobs where our individual contribution feels invisible, live in communities where we barely know our neighbours, and watch problems so massive they make our personal efforts seem laughable. The Great Man theory offers an escape from that helplessness, if change comes from exceptional individuals, then at least someone out there has their shit together, even if we don't.

Hollywood figured this out decades ago and turned it into a billion-dollar emotional manipulation machine. Every historical drama becomes a superhero movie where one tortured genius saves civilization through dramatic breakthrough moments. The Imitation Game makes it look like Alan Turing single-handedly won WWII by brooding in perfectly staged lighting, completely erasing the massive team effort at Bletchley Park and the Polish mathematicians who did the groundwork. But "international collaborative effort involving hundreds of people working night shifts for years" doesn't exactly scream "Oscar bait."

These movies aren't just entertainment; they're training us to be democratic spectators. When your understanding of change comes from Hollywood, you learn to wait for heroes instead of recognizing that you might be one of the people who could make things happen. It's the difference between asking "When will someone fix this?" and "What can we fix together?"

The Tech Messiah Pipeline

The most insidious part? Tech billionaires have figured out how to weaponize our Great Man addiction for the internet age. Musk, Bezos, and every crypto grifter with a podcast aren't just selling products, they're selling themselves as the protagonists in humanity's next chapter. And we're buying it because the alternative is admitting that maybe the people who broke the economy aren't the same ones who should be trusted to fix climate change.

Here's what drives me up the wall: these guys aren't even pretending to be democratically accountable anymore. They tweet their way into policy discussions like they're sharing shower thoughts, and somehow, we've collectively agreed that being good at accumulating capital makes you qualified to redesign society. When Musk bought Twitter, he didn't just acquire a platform; he bought the ability to shape how millions of people communicate, and his main qualification was... having enough money.

This is how democracy dies in the digital age, not through coups or invasions, but through the slow acceptance that the people with the most power should also get to make the biggest decisions. We're training ourselves to look up for solutions instead of around for solidarity, and that's exactly how wannabe oligarchs like it.

But here's the thing that gives me hope: most of the innovation still comes from teams of people whose names we'll never know. Those rockets Musk takes credit for? Built by aerospace engineers who've been working on this stuff since before he knew what a rocket was. The algorithms that power our favourite apps? Written by developers who just want to solve interesting problems, not rule the world.

The mythology only works if we keep believing it. The moment we start asking "Who built this?" instead of "Which genius thought of it?", the whole house of cards starts wobbling.

Democratic Decay Through Hero Worship

Here's where it gets genuinely dangerous: elevating one person above all others doesn't just flatter power, it poisons democracy at the cellular level. The Great Man theory sends a clear message: "Only the special few can lead or change history. You? You're just background noise in someone else's symphony, so sit down and shut up."

When citizens become spectators rather than participants, democracy doesn't die in a dramatic coup with tanks rolling through the capital. It dies with a whimper of "someone else will handle it," while people scroll through social media waiting for their problems to solve themselves magically.

The theory doesn't just undermine democratic participation; it makes authoritarianism seem perfectly reasonable. If history turns on great individuals, then maybe it's totally fine to bypass institutions, crush dissent, and concentrate power for the "greater good." Those "presidential immunity" arguments we keep hearing? That's Great Man theory with a law degree.

Fascist regimes love this shit because cults of personality are easier to manage than real democracy. Why debate policy when you can point to the leader and say, "Trust him, he's special"?

The System Blindness Epidemic

The obsession with individual personalities creates a massive blind spot for systemic forces like capitalism, racism, imperialism, and patriarchy. When everything gets reduced to personalities, nothing gets blamed on systems. You can't fix what you pretend doesn't exist, which is precisely the point.

This distorts both our understanding of the past and our ability to plan for the future in ways that would be hilarious if they weren't so goddamn dangerous. Suppose we think MLK single-handedly won civil rights through the power of having a dream. In that case, we'll miss the strategic work of local organizers, legal activists, and thousands of protesters who got their asses kicked so that one guy could give a famous speech.

The Great Man approach to climate change is particularly maddening. It's got people sitting around waiting for some genius inventor or benevolent billionaire to save us instead of doing the work required. Climate solutions need massive, coordinated efforts, policy changes, and social movements, not a single saviour with magic technology. Greta Thunberg figured this out at 16, but adults are still waiting for Tony Stark to build an arc reactor while the planet burns around them.

The Historical Erasure Project

The Great Man theory doesn't just marginalize regular people; it systematically erases the contributions of women, Indigenous peoples, labourers, enslaved persons, and everyday citizens who did the work. It reduces history to elite biography, which is the ultimate participation trophy for dead white guys who were good at taking credit for other people's work.

Whole communities get written out of their own histories like they never existed. The people who bled and died for change get footnoted while the guy who happened to be standing there when the cameras rolled gets immortalized in bronze.

If only Great Men matter, then everyone else should be grateful for whatever scraps of freedom and prosperity get tossed their way by their benevolent overlords. It's the historical equivalent of telling people they're too stupid to understand money while systematically picking their pockets.

When Heroes Become Kings

Here's where the Great Man theory stops being an intellectual curiosity and becomes a genuine threat to the idea that laws should apply to everyone: if someone is "destined for greatness," why should they be constrained by rules written by mere mortals who were just too stupid to recognize their historical importance?

We're watching this play out in real time, and it's terrifying how normal it's started to feel. Presidential immunity arguments that would have been laughed out of court twenty years ago are now serious legal theories. Executive overreach gets reframed as "decisive leadership." When someone with power breaks the rules, their supporters don't defend the behaviour; they defend the person's right to be above the rules.

I keep thinking about that moment during the 2016 campaign when Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. Everyone treated it like a joke about his political durability, but it was a pretty accurate description of Great Man logic: if you're convinced someone is historically significant, then normal moral and legal constraints start to seem petty and small-minded.

This isn't just about one guy or one party. It's about a deeper cultural shift toward believing that exceptional people deserve exceptional treatment. When we lionize rule breaking as "disruption" and treat institutional constraints as obstacles to genius rather than protections for everyone else, we're building the intellectual infrastructure for authoritarianism.

The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's based on the radical idea that power should be distributed and constrained rather than concentrated in whoever can convince people they're special. The Great Man theory is fundamentally incompatible with that vision, as it says some people are too important for checks and balances.

This is how republics die, not through dramatic coups with tanks in the streets, but through the gradual normalization of the idea that rules are for little people. First, you make exceptions for the "great leaders," then you find out that anyone with enough power and ego can convince themselves they're great.

Stop Waiting for Superman

So, what do we do with all this? Because pointing out that Great Man thinking is toxic doesn't magically make it easier to resist when you're exhausted and the news is terrible, and part of your brain is desperately searching for someone to fix everything.

First, we can start noticing when we slip into hero-shopping mode. I catch myself doing it all the time. Some political crisis happens, and my brain immediately starts casting around for the perfect candidate to save us all. The antidote isn't to stop caring about leadership; it's to start asking different questions. Instead of "Who can fix this?", try "What would need to happen for this to get better?" Instead of "Why isn't someone doing something?", ask "What are people already doing that I could support or join?"

Second, we can get curious about the infrastructure behind the things we admire. That cool social program everyone loves? Someone had to figure out the funding, navigate the bureaucracy, and coordinate with dozens of other organizations. That inspiring speech that went viral? There were speechwriters, event organizers, and a whole media strategy behind it. The more you look behind the curtain, the more you see how much of what we call "individual achievement" is collective effort with good branding.

Third, we can start practicing what I think of as "systems thinking" in our daily lives. When something goes wrong at work, instead of immediately blaming the manager or waiting for leadership to fix it, try mapping out what structural factors might be contributing. Is this a resource problem? A communication problem? A policy problem? Sometimes individual leadership really is the issue, but more often it's systems that need adjustment.

This isn't about becoming a policy wonk or losing appreciation for genuinely impressive people. It's about developing what you might call "collective intelligence", the ability to see how individual talents combine with social structures, historical contexts, and shared resources to create the changes we want to see.

The most radical thing you can do in a culture obsessed with individual greatness is to take collective action seriously. Join something. Organize something. Show up to the boring meetings where decisions get made. Vote in local elections where your individual vote matters. Support institutions that distribute power rather than concentrate it.

And here's the weird thing: when you start participating in collective efforts, you often discover that the skills and insights you thought were unremarkable are exactly what the group needed. That thing you're good at that doesn't seem special? It probably is special, just not in the "chosen one" way we've been trained to recognize.

You know what actually makes history? It's not the guy with the best jawline giving speeches from marble steps. It's more like that group project in college where somehow, despite everyone's individual neuroses and conflicting schedules, you actually pulled together something remarkable. Except instead of a presentation on medieval agriculture, it's the entire trajectory of human civilization.

Real change happens through this beautiful, chaotic mess of ordinary people who wake up one day and decide they're tired of putting up with bullshit. It's economic trends that play out over decades while everyone's too busy arguing about celebrity divorces to notice. It's cultural shifts that start in a million kitchen table conversations and somehow add up to society deciding that treating people like garbage isn't inevitable. It's technological breakthroughs that happen because some team of engineers stayed up too late solving problems most people didn't even know existed.

Take the civil rights movement—and I mean really take it, not the sanitized version we learned in school. Sure, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, and it was a powerful one. But you know what moved the needle? Rosa Parks sitting down on that bus, and an entire community saying, "You know what? We'll walk." For a year. In Alabama. Do you have any idea how stubborn and organized you have to be to pull that off?

There was Fannie Lou Hamer, who got beaten half to death for trying to register to vote and then had the audacity to keep organizing anyway. Bayard Rustin spent months coordinating the logistics for the March on Washington—figuring out portable toilets and sound systems and transportation for a quarter million people—while being quietly pushed to the margins because his sexuality made the movement's respectable leaders uncomfortable. Thousands of Freedom Riders climbed onto buses knowing they might get the shit kicked out of them, and they did it anyway.

And here's the thing that breaks my heart: we know some of their names, but most of them? The people who made phone calls and printed flyers, and showed up to meetings after working double shifts? They're just... anonymous. They did the work and went home to their families and never expected statues or documentaries. They just knew something was wrong and decided to fix it, one stubborn act at a time.

Same with abolition. Lincoln gets the credit because he signed the papers, but slavery was already dying from a thousand cuts. Slave revolts that kept plantation owners awake at night, wondering if today was the day their entire world would collapse. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth travelled the country, telling stories that made it impossible for decent people to pretend slavery was anything other than barbaric. The Underground Railroad was basically a covert military operation run by people who could have lived comfortable lives but chose to risk everything instead.

Here's what I've noticed about people: when they understand that change happens through sustained collective action—not by waiting for some perfect leader to emerge from the political wilderness—they start showing up differently. Instead of doom-scrolling and waiting for salvation, they start asking, "What can I do?" And that shift from consumer to participant? That's where democracy gets its strength back.

The Power Grab Revealed

The Great Man theory isn't just intellectually bankrupt—it's a control mechanism designed to keep you passive, powerless, and waiting for someone else to save you from problems they created in the first place. It's the political equivalent of a prosperity gospel that promises salvation if you worship hard enough and wait patiently for someone special to notice your suffering.

Every wannabe dictator, tech messiah, and corporate overlord needs you to believe in Great Men because it means you won't believe in yourself. They want you looking up for salvation instead of around for solidarity. They want you convinced that history happens to you rather than through you—that you're a consumer of change rather than a producer of it.

Here's the truth they don't want you to know: History isn't made by great men. It's made by ordinary people who understand that collective power beats individual genius every single time, even when the textbooks and movies try to convince you otherwise. It's made by coalitions, movements, and networks of people who refuse to wait for permission to change the world.

The Great Man theory is a lie told by people who want power to those who feel powerless. It's designed to make you a spectator in your own life, a supporting character in someone else's story, permanently stuck in the audience while others make history.

Don't buy it. Don't spread it. And for the love of all that's holy, don't vote for it.

The only thing more dangerous than a Great Man is a population convinced they need one. We've got way too many people shopping for saviours when what we desperately need is each other.