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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.
It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
> 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?
I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.
So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.
This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.
This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.
> Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.
The reason direct democracy doesn't work at national scale is that once you've diluted someone's vote by enough (i.e. there are 100 million voters instead of 100 voters), everyone knows their vote has a negligible effect on the outcome and therefore lacks the incentive to spend time researching every individual issue. And at the same time, a larger government is in charge of a wider jurisdiction, and then people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
The attempt to paper over this is to get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite afflicted with the principal-agent problem and you get a corrupt/captured government.
> It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.
None of that is going to fix the problem that most people don't have time to read about all the details of fisheries rules or the economics of operating a power grid, and then the people who show up are the people with the goal of corrupting the process for their own interests.
Notice that this has nothing to do with capitalism. If the head of the computer science division -- a government department -- wants to do AI stuff, and the most expedient way to generate the power to do it right away is to bring decommissioned coal power plants back online, whether that happens depends on whether the bureau in charge of that has more political power than the one in charge of protecting the environment. There is no magic that makes the trade off go away or requires the alternative you would have preferred to be chosen when people who are better at political games want something else.
> I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government.
That isn't a thing.
Suppose you have a piece of property, like a house or a phone. If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's. You come home and there is a stranger sleeping in your daughter's bed and you can't even object to it. If you have naked pictures of you and your spouse on your phone, those belong to everybody. Obviously this isn't the thing that anybody wants.
But as soon as you put anyone in charge of deciding who gets to use what, those people are the privileged elite. They go gerrymander the districts so they can stay in office even after doing things you don't like, or use their existing control over media outlets to convince people to vote for their continued control over media outlets etc.
"Socialism" does nothing against that. It makes it worse; it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
For markets to work you need them to be competitive, which requires you to limit government corruption, and the best way we know how to do that is limited government so that the government doesn't have the power to do the things most strongly associated with corruption, like imposing fixed mandatory fees/costs or onerous regulatory barriers to entry. And that mostly works when you actually do it.
For a command economy to work you need some way to limit government corruption even while the government is fully enmeshed in every aspect of the economy, which no one has ever managed to pull off and there is not even any apparent means to do it.
> ...people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.
You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making. You're presenting your absurd ideas and saying their mine. There are many, many ways of going around this. Mind you, states are somewhat independent within a federal system.
> ...get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite...
Political parties are actually the BEST way to achieve this. A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.
> If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's.
This is the most childish take of socialism I have seen in a while, I'll still address it. Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property. Productive property being property that serves others. A house is personal property, even a mansion or a castle is personal property but a retail company that feeds 180 million people should not be personal property. But it is.
Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.
My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.
Production is limited by the profits of a few and ONLY socialism can unleash productions best side. With everyone employed we can satisfy most material human needs. Right now.
> it's why the USSR was a dystopia.
This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires. And there's plenty of them. It's propaganda made for you as an American citizen. The CIA themselves claim the USSR wasn't a dictatorship in analysis they made in the late 60s. They then lied to the American people, such as yourself, because of the threat their ideology presented to the megacorps who rule america.
I do not believe the USSR was rainbows and sunshine tho. Do not misinterpret me. My point is not that I want to imitate a USSR, not even in the very slightest. It had flaws that caused its take over by capitalists. The USSR was a real country like any other with real flaws.
My point is that production can only be accelerated by socialism to go past the confines of capitalist ownership and into a realm of self satisfying production.
You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.
These are, really, gestures towards socialism that I'm giving you. I'm just one guy, I don't represent much past me. But I know this, with the current technology that we have there should be much less needs in the world than there are now. And i know some people make money off others' needs.
> You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making.
If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.
If you elect representatives, the rules of the elections process and thereby the seats become the target of capture efforts. And the more having a seat gives you the power to do, the stronger the capture efforts will be.
> A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.
The premise here being that if the party becomes successful, its leaders would somehow be immune from the principal-agent problem. But what stops them from using the fact that most people don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to all the details to stuff their own pockets the same as Democrats and Republicans?
> Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property.
That isn't a discernible category. If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it. And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.
> Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.
I mean, there is no law against this right now. You can literally get your friends together, pool your resources and open your own retail store. The biggest existing barrier to this is raising the money for the real estate, which is the thing kept artificially scarce by government zoning restrictions.
> My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.
So how are you envisioning this working? You and your friends get together and open a retail store. You all work there and collectively control the company. Do you all get an equal share of the proceeds, even if one of you is the janitor and another is an engineer? If the store is successful and you could use more staff, by what means do you determine who is allowed to join and what they get in exchange for signing on? If the store is successful but you don't need more staff, e.g. because you're good at automating things, does that mean everybody who works there gets a bigger share and no one new is allowed to join? What if someone is already a member and they turn out to be a schmuck who refuses to do their part?
> This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires.
The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.
> You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.
Money is a proxy. To produce you need labor and materials. But where do they come from? What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?
For this to work it requires a culture of active democracy, not just, often rich, representatives estimating what we need from their detached lives.
It may answer your logistical questions, though i suspect it won't ease your power-dynamic worries.
> If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it.
You're right as well. In many cases the type is defined by its use. In many socialist practices local councils barred individuals or group of individuals from employing others for production. This settled that distinction. While at the same time using your own property to produce yourself (or your family) is fine. The point of socialism is recognizing that capitalist production becomes a social illness, not individual production.
Another way of putting it is that socialized production for private profits creates a power imbalance.
If you are an employee at MY food farm, helping produce the same food you consume, then I have leverage. This is a very very simplified view of capitalism.
> And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.
True, this is what lead to the fall of the USSR. There was a conspiracy to destroy it from within. When it fell what happened next is national assets worth billions were bought by individuals for literally next to nothing.
And this same thing you point out is also what is causing so much corruption and de-regulation in all capitalist economies.
> So how are you envisioning this working?...........
These are things that would be worked out by the people in that job. The point is to keep the place running and everyone satisfied. Generally, people are paid according to how much they work. You don't work you don't get paid. If the place is running efficiently the people keeping it operational reap more benefits.
Look at it this way. In capitalism efficiency is kind of terrible for workers because they get laid off. In socialism efficiency means less work for more benefit. And if you automated it, great, the world is a better place, go find another thing to do. There's always shit to be done, no need to limit work to profit-generation.
It's self sustaining, actual social benefit.
> The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.
Many people who lived through it remember it fondly. Especially when they're comparing it to their now capitalist countries. The CIA actually recognizes that at one point the USSR had similar or greater avg caloric intake per person than the US. Sure, there were downturns, sure there was Stasi (Stasi is a CIA/FBI). But a lot of it is bogey man propaganda.
People are people, you can't run a country with absolute abject repression anywhere in the world. Sure, there are always periods of repression in any country. The US has had its periods as well: the great depression, the red scare, the extreme racism, the deep classism, the defense of megacorp theft, the war-mongering at the cost of its youth, the US also has the most people in jail, more than any country on earth (this gets spun as tough-on-crime).
I'm sure the USSR was a tough place during the civil war and during WW2. The US benefited from not having a civil war in the 1910s, and it benefited from not having a world war fought on its soil. The Germans were literally trying to annihilate the USSR, where more than 2 times more Slavs than Jews died during WW2. These things objectively made the USSR rougher to live in.
Even then, socialism, to me, is only tangentially related to the USSR. I am not a fanatic or anything like that. The USSR was a country who tried to do it and failed, plain and simple. They made terrible mistakes leading to massive loss of life AND also had terrible conditions to work with. In my mind it is similar to how the US has lead to terrible loss of life inside its own borders and through out the world due to policies and wars that have only made a few people rich.
What I'm saying is that for socialists the USSR, in and of itself, is never the point.
> What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?
The satisfaction of their own needs. A council of workers can abstract resource distribution in an even better way than money ever could. Money is like the lamest proxy for work with too many exploitable flaws.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.
A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.
As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.
How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?
> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.
The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.
Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.
Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth". So it's a valid defense to say that they didn't know any better. What purpose does considering them tainted serve? They're bad by modern standards, yes, and good by historical standards, and we ourselves are bad by future standards.
So what is this even about, something to do with level of respect? Throwing the statue of Big Charlie into the Seine, maybe, because he belongs to the past when everybody's morality was, in the light of our present wisdom, rotten?
I rather think it's good to praise the most enlightened assholes of the past. Sort of like sticking terrible toddler paintings to the fridge.
Re-reading: you might be questioning how much credit is due to the king himself, and to what extent he's a figurehead. But if the good ideas are due to the culture really, it's still the figurehead who represents the culture, and "the culture" would make a very abstract and confusing statue.
Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.
Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.
But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...
Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.
OK, but what does advancing society on purpose look like, in the 800s? This is before the invention of the concept of progress. People could only aspire to be good in a way that equated loosely to "holy", which for Charlemagne seems to have included "scholastic", and I think that's as reasonably close to intentionally advancing society as you're going to get, at that time. You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.
I suggest reading the blog article about Beccaria. This is a great example.
> You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
You're not making a good argument about why we should venerate mass murderers. It basically boils down to "sometimes it results in good things".
I'm on the side of "some kings deserve credit", but I think:
>Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth".
is a rather weak argument. Moral advances actually are "made from whole cloth". Morality is objective[1] and can be reasoned from first principles. For example, murder. Murder is not wrong because Yahweh says so. Murder is wrong because the murderer stands to gain virtually nothing, while the murdered loses everything. This discrepancy in gain vs. loss results in a massively net negative impact to society and is therefore objectively bad. However, there are other scenarios where killing someone results in a net positive (or at least less negative than the alternative) to society, for example self-defense against a criminal would-be murderer, and these cases we understand to not be murder.
People have been capable of complex reasoning for as long as we have history. Our predecessors had less information than us available to them, but they still had the same capacity for intelligence and there are plenty of examples of impressive reasoning performed by people thousands of years ago.
So talking about, say, slavery, particularly the exceptionally vile race-based slavery practiced by Americans... it did not take a zeitgeist to understand it was bad. Plenty of people were capable of reasoning about the absolute hypocrisy of the slave-owning founding fathers proclaiming all men born equal from the day America proclaimed its independence. The zeitgeist that ended slavery in America was enough people feeling compelled to take action rather than let the status quo be; even if you understand slavery is bad, it's easier to simply selfishly benefit from it, or even if you don't benefit from it, doing nothing is yet still awfully more appealing than fighting and dying in a civil war over it.
Under that lens, I will absolutely judge historical figures. The slave-owning founding fathers, for instance, are scum who should not be revered. They especially had the education and the experience of perceived tyranny, yet maintained and benefitted from a system they were perfectly capable of reasoning to be worse than the one they revolted against. In fact, they manufactured their own zeitgeist from scratch. If they had wanted to, they certainly could have made the abolition of slavery part of it.
[1] Stating "morality is objective" can come across as arrogant (it may be read as "my moral perspective is the objectively correct one"), so I want to elaborate a bit in a digression. Morality is objective, but not necessarily easy. There are many complex situations, reasoning is actually often quite challenging, and lack of information can confound attempts at reasoning. There are many cases where if you asked me if something was moral, my answer would be "I don't know" rather than baselessly asserting one way as objectively correct. However, many cases like the morality of race-based slavery are trivially easy to reason about, and we have a rich historical record of writing produced by people hundreds of years ago preserved showing they were capable of conducting this reasoning with the information available to them long before the zeitgeist that compelled action to end it.
I'm totally down with the arrogant "morality is objective" viewpoint. However, I don't think it can be reasoned from first principles: I think "from first principles" gives a bad smell to almost any reasoning. I see knowledge as web-like in structure, not hierarchical, and I see moral ideas as belonging to a separate realm where they're supported by other moral ideas. (Consider that "gain" entails values, which are moral.) Some of these ideas are basal urges, but that doesn't make them superior. So, I can't agree with making historical figures at fault for their failure to arrive at a present-day state of morality by figuring everything out from first principles, because I do think it's something the culture does, gradually, as a group effort, with individuals considered "bad" only for failing to be up to speed by the standard of the time.
Incidentally, if they are to be blamed for failing to arrive at future morality by using the first-principle building blocks you suppose it to be made from, then so are we, and so are all future people, since morality is open-ended and there's always more to learn. We're all terribly guilty for not belonging to the infinitely far future, apparently.
Well, I suppose you can say "that whole society, in that place at that time, went down a morally wrong-headed path". I'm not very knowledgeable about Aztecs, for instance, but I believe they had some nasty traditions, as well as a cyclic world-view. Yet there must have been good Aztecs. (Even objectively, we have to consider things in context.)
If we were to leap 300 years into the future, I don't think it'd be very surprising what they look down on us for, presuming they've advanced in a logic-oriented direction and not, say, a relapse into purely religious doctrine, which is by no means a given to occur. We will certainly be condemned, at minimum, for our utterly inhumane treatment of animals, for our relentless exhaustion and destruction of natural resources, for our abuse of the scientific method to proclaim things as factual with studies that can't actually be replicated, and for much more.
Perhaps it would be surprising to some people who haven't thought much about it that we will likely be viewed poorly for wasting non-replenishable helium, necessary for advanced medical technology, on party balloons. But I don't think there is anything we do that we can't currently reason about being considered immoral for. I have absolutely zero doubt that George Washington would not be surprised to leap to 2025 and see someone condemning him for his slave ownership. There is nothing about living in the 1700s that would prevent him from reasoning that what he did was immoral, and indeed, many people in the 1700s did reason that.
Cultural adoption of morality moves significantly slower than reason about morality. This is because cultural adoption requires action. Humans will behave immorally even if they know their actions are immoral, for their own benefit. To counteract this requires coordinated group effort, which is an extremely slow process because, for example, convincing people that it's worth them risking death in a bloody war to stop other people from owning slaves, when they are not themselves ever at risk of being treated as a slave, is a very challenging task. That one participates in selfish, immoral actions for one's own benefit because one's society does not yet coerce one through collective threat of violence to behave morally does not absolve one of one's actions, which can already be reasoned through even if the collective will to enforce it does not yet exist.
Cultural adoption can also diverge from reason about morality completely, of course. This is because selfish people with power can use their power to enforce immoral values like absolute service to themselves, for their own benefit. If a society does not collectively overcome powerful individuals acting selfishly, then the culture's apparent morality will be warped in the service of what benefits a specific individual at the greater expense of society. However, even in such a state, people can and do reason about morality. Human history is a long, long tale of people defying immoral abuse of authority.
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.