Who in history (either present or in the past) do you think has had the biggest positive impact on humanity?
Who in history (either present or in the past) do you think has had the biggest positive impact on humanity?
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Nobody, I think this is an insane question.
So many different people had small impacts on humanity, most of it somewhat regional. Most of the heroes I could think of in Western countries will have had a very limited impact on Eastern history, and vice versa. Also, I am very sure nobody had only positive impact.
Another problem: not everybody will rate a certain impact equally as positive.
I'd suggest to remove focus and attention from god- or hero-like figures and shift it towards improvements won by community action.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is a very valid and interesting point. Durable improvements are systemic, not individual, and the drive to look for heroes leads to nasty places.
from god- or hero-like figures
The fact that that was what you thought the question was about is quite telling
It would be a reasonable segue in any case. Myths and heroes are big in every society, and sometimes we don't realise ours count.
Edgy.
How? I think it's pretty accurate for OP to say it takes a team.
Dude it's a fun question from the sorts of who is stronger Superman or Goku. But even outside of that - it's hard to deny that some individuals had more impact on the course of our society than others.
Yeah, there's some variance, but I'd argue it's actually pretty small. I'm trying to figure out who I'd choose, but it's hard, because usually there's a lot of redundancy even when it comes to kings and generals, and nothings lasts more than a couple centuries or so on pure momentum. When archeologists excavate a place like Rome, without writing it's hard to even distinguish leaders. Rather, you can see trends smoothly changing over time, usually in response to something obvious like supply chain issues.
You can also see this if you look at the stories of today's great successes, and then compare them to the stories of people they would have started alongside. There was a lot of online stores in 2000, and one was bound to become Amazon. Amazon itself apparently was the first to allow negative book reviews on it's storefront, and that helped it through the lean years. That meeting could easily have gone a different way, and then it would have been someone else.
I gave you a good example in another reply. But we can also go deeper - Mohamed, with his freestyle jam on bible, to this day has rather big influence on society. It's a rather strange and honestly depressing perspective to deny individuals any role in history.
Uh, so administrative question, do we really want to split this across seperate threads? I'm going to suggest you add Mohamed and the futility of existing without individual influence in your response over there (non-federated link, AFAIK Lemmy can't do comments any other way).
Sure, you can add your response to Mohamed and why do you think that a perspective denying individual influence on human history is useful over there.