I don't think I made any unreasonable claims. "Great men" are made by their circumstances. That doesn't mean they don't make a difference. But they don't have that opportunity to make a difference because of some intrinsic virtue, and the kinds of differences they can make can't change the broad geographic, demographic, and technological conditions that shape society on a macroscale.
Ennnh. I mean, I don't believe that "Great Men" can do what they do completely independent of background. But like, I would very much hesitate to say that being a Swiss patent office clerk with an amateur's interest in physics counts as being handed an opportunity -- or a self-taught random teenager from India at a time when colonialism was at its peak, for that matter.
More importantly, they totally can change the world. Einstein is probably the best example -- because sorry, as a physicist I will just shut down the idea that we would have anywhere
near as good an understanding of relativity without him. GR is a shining, amazing example of terrifying insight, of a dedicated reductionist taking two anomalous data points and one-and-a-half axioms and just pulling the
single most robust theory ever created to date out of his arse. That's not to say that GR wouldn't have been discovered without him -- it would've, we were getting there -- but that without him, we wouldn't have the... the
clarity that comes with a theory being invented and described by a single person who understands it at its fundamental level. We would be in the same boat we were -- and still are -- in with quantum mechanics, chasing our own tails over "wave function collapse" because nobody could parse entanglement into parallel universes and haphazardly throwing modern physics at undergrads in some vague historical order. In a hundred years or two, all that will come out in the wash --
-- but the first hundred years after Einstein? Yeah I pretty much guarantee you that our ability to do things like make GPS and pull off space missions would have had severe dents put into them, because even if we can do the math, if we don't really understand what the math
means we have to stumble into inventions and applications one at a time. GR now features into huge amounts of our daily lives -- and of course, there's the coincidence with WWII, the opportunity and the capability to make and use a nuclear bomb.
In the negative direction (and rather ironically considering who I was talking about first), would anyone other than Hitler really have pushed anti-Semitism as far as the
Holocaust? Even by historical standards, the Holocaust is a horror of unprecedented scale. There was a lot of anti-Semitic sentiment -- a lot of
institutionalized anti-Semitism, too, and only getting worse running up to WWII -- but if there hadn't been a single
radical anti-Semitic leader, then even if you ascribe to the theory that the Holocaust was a case of runaway signaling between Hitler's subordinates, there wouldn't have been the strong drive down that slippery slope. WWII would've happened, but the Holocaust might not've -- and a post-WWII without the Holocaust is incredibly, spectacularly different on almost every level.
So like... yes, absolutely, people can't just invent entire cultural movements (at least not intentionally), nor complete technological revolutions -- but they totally can have literally revolutionary world-shaking effects, that are dependent on
uniquely them. To use a metaphor, the famous names may just be the tip of a spear, reliant on the momentum of its thrust -- but man, if you screw with the tip even a little, both you and the guy you're trying to stab will notice
.