Most of history is just the whims of a few very large egos

Historians, and the rest of us, love to attribute events to great, impersonal forces. We speak of economic pressures, technological shifts, and social dynamics as if they were weather systems, moving with a will of their own.

This is a comforting illusion. It lends a sense of order and inevitability to the past, suggesting that things could not have happened any other way. But if you look past the academic frameworks, you find a simpler, more unsettling truth.

Most of history is just the whims of a few very large egos.

Wars, borders, currencies, and even religions can so often be traced back to a single individual who could not be told no. The great forces are merely the weather in which these individuals operate. A ship is subject to the wind and the current, but its destination is set by the captain. To pretend the ship has no captain is an abdication of analysis.

Take any state, any institution. Trace its founding documents back to their source. Keep asking who was in the room, and who held the pen. Eventually, you will stop discovering committees and start discovering a single person with an unshakeable, often irrational, conviction.

What we call a ‘system’ is frequently one man’s tantrum with institutional scaffolding built around it. A decision is made in a fit of pique, ambition, or paranoia. An entire bureaucracy then emerges to administer, justify, and perpetuate that decision, long after the originator is gone. The reasoning is post-hoc; the institution is the artefact.

Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church is not a story about the inevitable rise of English national consciousness. It’s a story about a king’s obsessive desire for a male heir and his fury at being denied an annulment. The Church of England, an institution that has shaped centuries of history, was born from a single, monarch-sized ego refusing to be thwarted. The theology followed the tantrum, not the other way around.

Consider the borders of post-colonial nations, drawn up in European capitals by men with little knowledge of the ethnic and tribal realities on the ground. These lines on a map, born of arrogance and expediency, have caused generations of conflict. They are not the product of deep systemic forces, but of a few men in a room making choices with consequences they would never have to face.

This pattern isn’t confined to the distant past. Look at the tech companies that shape our modern world. They are not the product of an inevitable technological trajectory. They are the product of founders, individuals whose unique vision, persistence, and often, sheer bloody-mindedness, bent reality to their will. The systems we now live inside—the social networks, the digital marketplaces—are reflections of their creators’ personalities.

To see history as the work of individuals is not to celebrate the ‘great man’ theory. It is to hold people accountable. It is to recognise that choices made by the powerful few have outsized, lasting impact. It forces us to be deeply sceptical of anyone who claims their hands are tied by the system.

More often than not, they are the system.

The most powerful force in history is a human ego that cannot be told no.