True but I doubt you’re as immune to persuasion and logical fallacies as your comment suggests. The point remains that we’re all human and will make many mistakes in our lifetime. Our circumstances are a huge part of that.
> Some choices are far too complex for most people to grasp. Some choices require a sense of civic duty and common will.
The results show that humans do a pretty good job and do advance, and do have civic duty (I don't know what "common will" means). IME, the problem is the people who make choices like refusing vaccines and then say humanity is fundamentally incompentent. They have an easy solution!
> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
That doesn't really assert anything. Many aspects will change dramatically, and often they are aspects that nobody previously imagined possible. The people who believe in change and possibility are the ones who do good things. The question is, what can we change and how much?
When people don't want change, they pull out that parent argument and apply it, through some general claim, and not actually address the issue at hand.
They are both. Theoretically they can make their own choice, but the are also heavily influenced by systems. So people who build, maintain and execute the systems have a large responsibility too.