How to change the course of history.
Imagine you’re driving down a road.
You’re not going anywhere in particular. You don’t have a plan. You’re just driving.
Where do you go? Well, for the most part, you can’t leave the road. You have to go where it takes you.
Every now and then, though, you have a chance to turn and go in a different direction.
Human history is kinda like driving down that road. For the most part, things follow one course. Once we’re headed down a certain trajectory, there’s not much you can do to change it.
For example, after George W. Bush got elected president and 9/11 happened, it was pretty much inevitable that we’d start a war in Iraq, the PATRIOT Act would get passed, and the Department of Homeland Security would get founded. Can you think of a way we could’ve avoided all that?
But every now and then, we come to a fork in the road. And when you come to a fork, you have to decide which way to go.
How History Works
There are 2 schools of thought about how human history works.
One is the “great man” theory of history, which says that incredible people do things that change the way the course of history goes. According to the “great man” theory, the Allies won World War II because of Churchill and FDR, and Russia became Communist because of Lenin and Stalin.
There’s also the “trends and forces” theory, which says that big-picture stuff beyond human control decides the course of history. Stuff like climate, geography, the economy, and the wants and desires of large numbers of people matter way more than the actions of a few individuals. In other words, history is mostly deterministic.
Most historians today think that reality is somewhere in the middle. The world is mostly governed by trends and forces, but there are points on the road where a great man can steer everything in a different direction.
This article is about the different ways a “great man” can steer the world in a new direction. There are probably more, but I identified 3 big ones. Enjoy.
Religion
Imagine if Jesus hadn’t told people to turn the other cheek. Instead, imagine he said, “When the Romans come to persecute you, beat the shit out of them.”
How different do you think the world would be today?
Christianity is the bedrock of Western morality. Even if you’re not religious, if you grew up in Europe or the Americas, you probably believe in things like equality, self-determination, science, charity, and forgiveness.
Most Westerners think that those are universal moral truths, but they actually come from Christianity. Most major world religions don’t give a crap about Western values. For example, Confucianism tells people to play their own role in society — which explicitly goes against equality.
If Jesus had said something else — anything else — the Christian moral code might not exist as we know it. Europeans would probably believe something totally different. And if Europeans believed something totally different, the Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration, and the Industrial Revolution might never have happened.
Religion is powerful because it allows you to change people’s behavior. Most important movements can’t be done by just a few people, so to really do anything important, you first need to get a whole bunch of people on your side.
Normally it’s tough to get thousands of people to rally behind you, because people will usually just do whatever is in their economic best interests. But if you can tell them some sort of compelling story, you can sometimes change their core values. And if you change their core values, you can guide their behavior in a new direction.
(Keep in mind that by “religion” I mean anything that people fervently believe. There doesn’t have to be a God, there just has to be some sort of worldview that changes the way people think and act.)
How do you start a religion? Step 1 is to be as empathetic as possible. The first step in getting someone to trust you is to show them you understand them. Tell them that they have a good reason to be frustrated, and then you have their ear.
Step 2 is to tell them how to solve their problem. Here, you can get creative, because people don’t know what the solution is yet. That’s why they’re turning to you: they’re hoping you have an idea. So you can say the solution is whatever you want it to be.
By getting people to buy into your solution, you can change their behavior. And when you change enough people’s behavior, you change the course of history.
For example: in the 1930’s, Germans were pissed off because they had lost World War I, and because the Weimar Republic was in bad shape. That made it pretty much inevitable that they’d turn to a strong right-wing leader who promised to return Germany to its former glory.
But that doesn’t mean they were destined to turn to a genocidal maniac like Adolf Hitler. Plenty of other fascists rose to power in Europe around that time, but only Hitler had the idea to send people to concentration camps and commit mass genocide.
Instead, Germany could have turned to a leader who said all the right stuff to gain power, then did nothing once he actually gained that power. This is essentially what happened in the United States in 2016, where a bunch of pissed-off coal miners elected Donald Trump to shake things up, and Donald Trump spent the next 4 years playing golf.
Today, there are a whole bunch of frustrated people. If you can get some of those people to follow you, and then sell them on your ideas, you can change the world.
Technology
In the 15th Century, the Catholic Church was the most powerful organization in all of Europe. All the various kings and warlords and merchants were no match for the Pope, who controlled people’s hearts and minds through religion.
How come the Pope was so powerful? Well, only the Catholic Church could widely distribute literature. That meant all widely distributed literature said only good things about the Catholic Church.
But then a guy called Johannes Gutenberg built this thing called the printing press. That changed everything.
A little after Gutenberg’s invention, a guy called Martin Luther wrote a bunch of theses, printed them, and then nailed them to the walls of churches. People read Martin Luther’s theses, agreed with him that the church was full of shit, and converted to Protestantism. Then, Europe broke out into a bunch of holy wars over the next few centuries, which resulted in the Peace of Westphalia and the birth of the modern nation-state.
The same thing is happening today with the internet. 30 years ago, you had to have a newspaper or a TV station to get your message out to the public. But today, basically anybody can publish whatever they want to for free.
That’s broken up the corporate press’s monopoly on the truth. Today, people can get their news from social media, meaning they’re starting to realize the corporate press doesn’t give them the full story. As a result, people are trusting the corporate press less and less.
If you want proof that the internet is changing how information spreads, just look at the 2016 election. Once upon a time, to get elected President, you had to make the corporate journalists like you. “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel,” said Bill Clinton.
But Donald Trump picked a fight with corporate journalists, calling them “fake news”. He chose to get his message out to people via Twitter instead of kissing up to journalists to be his middlemen. His base loved it, and he rode that horse all the way to the White House.
New technologies change what’s possible. This creates a new equilibrium for society. And that new equilibrium is usually good.
The cool thing about technology is, you don’t need to start a political movement to invent something. Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs both changed the world. But Martin Luther King needed to build huge following before he could change the world, whereas Steve Jobs just needed to tinker with computers in his basement.
If you invent something that gives people more access to information, makes food cheaper, helps people defend themselves against tyranny, incentivizes people to do good things, or just makes people’s lives easier, you can make the world a better place.
War
For years, all the best chess players in the world came from the Soviet Union.
Chess was a big part of Russian culture. And the Soviets put tons of effort into developing and training great chess players.
They viewed chess as their chance to shine. It was how they showed the world that Communism was great. So they trained boys from early ages to play chess.
However, as the result of a total fluke, Bobby Fischer happened to be born in America. For years he was far and away the best chess players on Earth. And he was a real embarrassment to the Russians, because he was kicking their ass — and he was from capitalist America.
Statistically speaking, the odds were that the best chess player in the world would be Russian, because they had the best training. But Bobby Fischer beat those odds, because he was a “wonder boy”.
“Wonder boys” in chess don’t really change history. They just play chess.
But what if you get a “wonder boy” military conqueror?
This has happened a few times in history, and it changed everything.
For example: once upon a time, the Persian Empire controlled most of what we today call the Middle East. Everything from Greece to India was under their domain.
Then this kid called Alexander was born. He got a huge army together, conquered the Persians, and took over a large chunk of the modern world — just on the back of his military genius.
The exact same thing happened in 12th century Mongolia. This brilliant military conqueror called Genghis Khan was born. And Genghis Khan realized that he could conquer a bunch of neighboring lands, because the Mongols were kickass cavalrymen. The Mongols ended up taking over more territory than anyone ever has since, from Moscow all the way to Beijing.
Of course, both Alexander and Genghis Khan were born at the right time. Persia was already collapsing, and Mongolians on horseback were pretty formidable warriors. But their military genius changed the world for years to come. If either man had been born female, or had died as an infant, the world would be very different today.
This is also how China became Communist. The pro-Western Republic of China ruled the country from 1912 to 1949. But Mao Zedong happened to be a brilliant military strategist, so he defeated the ROC and drove them to the island of Taiwan. The world would look quite different today if Mao Zedong had been defeated.
This one isn’t super relevant to the modern world, because it’s kinda hard to conquer huge territories today, because some foreign power will stop you.
However, if another Dark Ages comes while you’re still alive, keep this in mind. If you can get really, really good at conquering territory and seizing land, you can change the world.
Hey! Thanks for reading.
My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article like this one, about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually about social sciences.
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Happy trails!
