[api]

In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.”

Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.

At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.

I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.

I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.

[danparsonson]

It's just a restatement of 'nature vs nurture' isn't it? And as you say, both of those things are necessary. Broadly, greatness without circumstances likely leads to obscurity; circumstances without greatness likely leads to indolence. The latter being what often seems to happen in families with generational wealth - some family member makes the fortune, and some later generation, lacking the earlier drive, squanders it.

[Atlas667]

Yes, facts make it necessarily both.

But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?

The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.

If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.

The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.

[thaumasiotes]

> Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land

That depends on the society. The king in Achaemenid Persia owned all the land. His successors the Seleucid Greek kings didn't. A medieval European king didn't even come close.

I read something to the effect that (in one very early Mesopotamian city) the king owned about 1/3 of the land, another ~1/3 was owned by large landholders who numbered maybe a couple dozen (this group included the queen), and the final ~1/3 was owned by a very large number of small landholders.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Consider the alternatives to this.

The first is that great works are being accomplished without anyone being in charge of them. People invent alternating current and land on the moon in a completely decentralized manner with no one leading the effort and no one making a larger contribution than anyone else. Not the thing where everyone gets to try but only one out of a million succeeds but rather some other thing where everyone is a fungible cog and you can't identify anyone as being the lynchpin or anyone else as not pulling their weight, and yet the great works still happen.

The second is that great works are not being accomplished.

The first one seems implausible. The second one seems bad.

[Atlas667]

What are you talking about?

I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).

Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor? Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?

Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.

Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.

[AnthonyMouse]

Hierarchy is someone being at the top. Who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or all the people who elected him and then fought as solders to win the ensuing war?

> Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions, which is to say competitive markets rather than oligopolies or government central planning. And that is going to result in large companies and big personalities -- it's only a problem when they become so large that they no longer have adequate competition, which is something that happens well after the point that they have leaders whose names people know.

[Atlas667]

Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.

> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.

There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.

> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...

Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy.

This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.

The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

> Both of them freed the slaves.

But only one of them ever gets credit for it.

> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?

There are two ways to frame this.

The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.

The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.

> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?

Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.

We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?

[anon291]

Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny.

Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.

To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism

[watwut]

> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?

Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.

[anon291]

There is no country which matches your requirements for good king. This is not a serious question. Yes there have been many just kings throughout history.

[Atlas667]

You know, I am not a historian. And I'm not gonna talk as if I know anything about how kings were viewed by the people.

But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.

[samdoesnothing]

Why not compare them to their modern equivalents? They seem mostly the same as politicians today, except some actually cared about the people the ruled.

[Atlas667]

Nah, I think the rich are the kings, politicians are their court.

We have a bunch of little kings with a public court that theyre all trying to use for themselves.

IDK you but I think you cant get rich by being a good person. You actively have to ignore others' needs to focus on growth, to use people.

[cyberax]

The only "good kings" are:

1. The ones that are long dead.

2. The ones that have their head chopped off.

3. The ones that don't actually have a lot of power.

> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

"Good kings" did not "provide protection". The army did. They also did not provide "protection" to everybody, regular peasants usually couldn't care less about their current king.

[card_zero]

Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.

[cyberax]

> which it couldn't be.

And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?

If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.

Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:

> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.

> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.

Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?

[anonymous908213]

> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.

If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.

[card_zero]

Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.

I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.

[paulryanrogers]

Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?

If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?

[Atlas667]

> Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?

It isn't, though I may be tangentially speaking about Great Man Theory, I wasn't focusing on it.

> If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?

I thought using "great men" gives space for virtue and a spiritual/intellectual worth, not just a morally ambiguous "power".

[godelski]

  > Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.

It is why we have societies. Coalitions.

In game theory a coalition is a group where the group's utility is greater than the sum of each member's utility. In other words: "we're stronger together".

The problem with the self-made man myth is that it frames things as if it is shameful to have help. Having had help does not diminish your accomplishments. Having had help just means you're human.

The same goes for luck. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you didn't work hard nor deserve the rewards. There's a saying I like

  The harder I work, the luckier I get.

The way I read that is "by working hard you are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities as they come by." We all require luck in this world. Some are luckier than others. But you have to "strike while the iron is hot" and if you don't work hard then you won't be able to strike in the right moment. Like the having had help part there is no shame in having had luck.

Being able to recognize these things helps us do better and help more people do better. But if we pretend we just did it all on our own then we can't actually recognize how things came to be. Which means we're going to have a hard time replicating that success. By pretending that everything is all on us and nothing else then we'll fail while trying to repeat the successful strategy, we'll fail when offering advice to others, and we'll just be blind to the world around us. We'll never recognize that we have to make the iron hot! Even the best blacksmith in the world can't hammer frozen iron into shape.

Again, having had luck or help doesn't mean you didn't work hard or that you don't deserve what you have. Things aren't binary. There's not a single causal factor to any complex phenomena. The problem is seeing things in black and white. There's a million things that go into success and while most of that will be on you, you can't ignore things like the environment and those that helped you along the way. After all, we're all in this together.

[samdoesnothing]

> The problem with the self-made man myth

Is that it's a complete straw man. It's not about not having help - every great achiever has had a figurative (sometimes literal) army of supporters behind them. Including those in history.

What the "theory" actually posits seems trivially true - that the people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves. Whether it's talent, hard work, both, insanity, etc. The idea that these people are just normal and very lucky or whatever is absurd.

[godelski]

  > people who do super extraordinary things are extraordinary themselves

Nothing I said contradicts this. I even agree.

The problem is the inverse. You imply that people who do not do extraordinary things are not themselves extraordinary.

You can be extraordinary but shit out of luck. You can't rise to the top by just being the best, you also need and the right support. Take for example any startup. Good luck getting to scale without that. Eventually someone needs to take a chance on you.

This is something VCs even know. They invest broadly because a small percentage will be big hits. It's because things fall along a power distribution rather than a normal. The upside is unbounded. Most will lose, for many reasons, including just bad luck.

Or I'll let Picard say it

  > It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life

Its because random elements exist in life. It is not deterministic. If it was then VCs would exclusively invest in unicorns and take no losses.

Hindsight is useful but it's also easy to ignore subtle but critical variables

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TCX90yALsI

[gsf_emergency_6]

Blurb points to the author's other book

Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin

Suggesting that she indeed thinks of the self-made myth itself as a product of many cooks.

I'm more skeptical of her framing this mythmaking as an early but enduring model for populist strategy that was (initially) opposed by the elites of the time.

For context, a review of hers of antitax historiography asks:

How do the privileged rule a democracy without triggering a populist revolt? Scholars Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstle, and their colleagues in Ruling America (2005) see historical continuity in the exercise of the founts of riches and power at elites' disposal. The Power to Destroy astutely addresses this question without asking it directly. Even so, a longer historical perspective would have enriched Graetz's approach to analyzing a populist revolt and its destructiveness. The revolt he tracks was not triggered against the rich and powerful, but on their behalf against the progressive state. His analysis provides an invaluable and distressing new twist on the long-standing question of how the privileged rule in a democracy

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/955278

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691225562/th...

My own derived question is whether there are historical examples of directed-myth-making (fully adopting your balanced perspective on "individual VS communal values") servicing political goals _orthogonal_ to the populism/elitism axis

[anon291]

> The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats

I feel this take says more about the person saying it then it does about the great men theorists.

Believing that revolutions often happen due to a few individuals does not mean that you believe most people are there to serve anyone. That's a non sequitur

[eszed]

I think you missed OP's point. "Leads to" is the key phrase, and they're talking about how both ("Great Man" and "Inevitable Forces") theories end up being used as propaganda to support political purposes. Both (as you point out) have some truth to them, and (as you do) can be addressed objectively, but both can be transmuted into ideology,