Last week I asked a bunch of you on Twitter
(follow me by the way, @KhAnubis) to suggest
who you thought was the most influential person
in world history, suggestions which included
Johannes Gutenberg, Christopher Columbus,
Herodotus, Socrates, so many people suggesting
Jesus, Abraham, Muhammad, Guy Fieri (though
that might have been a joke), Genghis Khan,
Gavrilo Princip, Ferdinand Magellan, Muhammad
ibn Musa’ al-Khwarizmi, Siddhartha Gautama,
Karl Marx and several others.
Obviously there are a lot of people on this
list, so with these suggestions in mind I’ll
go through a brief overview of some of the
people who I personally think should be considered
the most influential individuals in history,
people who redefined their societies (if not
the world as a whole), and without whom the
world would be a very different place.
Before we get into my personal nominations,
let’s set up a few ground rules.
First, we are only going to talk about individuals
who we actually know about as individuals,
and not as “the person who discovered fire”
or “the person who invented agriculture”
since we don’t know who exactly they were,
and things like these were often developed
independently multiple times over thousands
of years and kilometers, and we’re not counting
all the people responsible for the Industrial
Revolution or the Internet, as those also
came about from the combined actions of multiple
people.
I’ll give some leeway for semi-mythical
figures as well, since even mythical figures
can have huge influence, though we’ll be
preferring people who at least most likely
existed.
We’re not necessarily looking for people
who had a big impact within their own lives,
but changed the world for thousands of years,
so in a sense we’re not looking for the
people who got the ball rolling the fastest,
we’re looking for the people who created
the ball in the first place, even if they
didn’t live to see the ball rolling.
I’ll do my best, but no matter how I structure
the list I am 100% certain I’ll miss someone
you thought was an extremely obvious choice.
Probably the person who came up the most in
the replies was Jesus Christ, a religious
leader from the 1st century AD.
And seriously a lot of people mentioned him,
like…
Jesus.
Although sources tend to disagree on his life,
Jesus of Nazareth is generally agreed to have
existed, having set forth a new religion which,
although it would grow somewhat slowly at
first, would grow to become the religion of
the Roman Empire, and then of most of Europe
in general, later expanding through European
colonization to now become also dominant over
the Americas, Southern Africa, Oceania, and
much of Asia, with currently 2.3 billion adherents,
about 31% of the world population.
Now Jesus himself of course didn’t have
all that much to do with the subsequent spread
of Christianity around the world, with his
words mainly spread by his apostles, namely
Paul, who helped spread the Gospel around
the ancient Mediterranean.
As the faith continued to spread throughout
the Roman Empire however, it would spend its
first few centuries persecuted, until Constantine
I, Rome’s first Christian emperor, his actions
allowing Christianity to later become the
state religion of the empire under Theodosius
I, spreading throughout Europe as a whole
from there.
Of course Christianity is part of the family
of monothetistic religions known as the Abrahamic
religions, coming from a man named Abraham.
Abraham was born in Ur Kaśdim and came to
the land of Canaan, having been promised by
God that his descendants would live and prosper
there, starting a faith still known today
as Judaism, which would itself become the
ancestor of the other Abrahamic religions,
namely Christianity and Islam, together the
religions of 55% of the world population.
It’s at this point we should also acknowledge
the Prophet Muhammad, seeing as he was the
founder of the second largest religion in
the world, which can also not be understated
in its influence everywhere from Senegal to
Kazakhstan to Brunei— I mean theoretically
it is physically possible to understate them,
but you get what I mean.
I’m going to have to interrupt you there,
me, see the thing is that…
Hey!
I’m talking here!
What the hell is wrong with you…
As I was saying, the thing is, while I was
editing this video, I decided I wasn’t very
proud of where it was headed.
You could kind of see the path I was going
down, but basically the people I picked to
talk about in detail were Jesus for creating
the largest religion in the world, Romulus
for founding a city that would put forth possibly
the most influential civilization in history,
Abraham for introducing the concept of monotheistic
religions, and Christopher Columbus for making
the former three influential in world history
and not just European history.
I really wasn’t satisfied with this list
though, for many different reasons.
First: they’re all people who (almost by
definition) most people already know about,
second: it seemed way too Eurocentric, which
certainly wasn’t helped by my upbringings,
and third: no matter who I picked, I felt
like I would be pissing off at least someone,
even though I was planning to not give a single
answer and leave it up for (hopefully) friendly
debate.
I was going to mention a bunch of different
names afterward as a remedy to this, mentioning
other names like Genghis Khan, Gavrilo Princip,
Confucius, Edward Jenner, but the more and
more I delved into this topic, the more and
more I felt this topic was kind of broken
at the core.
After a while it just became, “oh wait what
about this person?
What about this person?
Oh wait I really should have mentioned this
person!”
So I was thinking of just straight up canceling
this video and just moving onto next week’s
video, which is not something I like to do,
and you all seemed very adamant about this
video, so instead of going forward with this
as originally intended and tiptoeing around
an inevitable flame war, I thought we’d
talk more about what it even means to have
a large historical influence, because I think
that’s the better thing we could talk about.
Now of course, who decides who is influential
and who is not?
I mean Rome (and therefore Romulus) shaped,
nay defined Europe in its image, but the only
reason Romulus-- or really any Roman-- would
have had any real influence outside of Europe
and the Mediterranean world is because most
of the world would later be colonized by many
of the countries influenced by Rome, and that’s
a fun memory to bring up!
Another example would be Siddartha Gautama
(better known as the Buddha) who started Buddhism,
which had virtually the same impact on East
and Southeast Asia as Christianity in Europe
or Islam in the Middle East, but his influence--
although strong-- is kind of limited to the
eastern half of Asia.
The thing is, we’re at a point in history
where we have only even known about the whole
world for a couple hundred years, so for anyone
to have truly affected the whole world they
would have had to have lived recently enough
to actually affect… the whole world.
On the flipside, the kind of influence I wanted
to measure for was the kind of influence that
would last for thousands of years, so to answer
this question fully we would have to either
look for someone who lived too far back to
have truly influenced the whole world, or
too recently for the impact and longevity
of their influence to be properly measured.
Thomas Midgely Jr. was dubbed as having had
the most influence on the Earth’s atmosphere
of any individual organism-- responsible both
for the amount of lead in the air around the
late 20th century, and that giant hole in
the ozone layer, having invented both leaded
gas and chlorfluorocarbons-- but CFCs and
leaded gas were both thankfully phased out,
meaning his impact on the atmosphere is already
starting to wane, which puts him in the category
of having a large, worldwide influence that
nonetheless won’t stand the test of time.
On the other hand though, what about Genghis
Khan’s influence?
His empire only really lasted about 162 years,
but his empire had multiple impacts on Eurasia,
including bringing back the Silk Road, significantly
disrupting the geopolitical order of the area,
and spreading the Black Death into Europe,
where it would kill almost a third of the
European population.
The Black Death had numerous impacts in its
own right, even long after it passed, like
making European serfs fewer in number, and
thus their labor more valuable, leading to
everything from peasants’ rights to better
machinery, like perhaps the Gutenberg printing
press.
But would Johannes Gutenberg have made his
printing press were it not for pressures caused
by a deadly disease accidentally spread into
his homeland by some Mongolian guys 100 years
earlier?
This question, and all the others like it
this video brings up, are kind of impossible
to answer.
So who was the most influential person in
history?
Well as past experiences have taught me, I’m
not going to pick an answer, because if I
did, no matter who I picked, you would all
kill me in my sleep, and I really think there
is no way to answer this, especially if we’re
talking about all of human history, and that’s
taking into account things like, if they hadn’t
existed could someone else have had a similar
impact on history in their place?
Or, did they really impact the entire world,
or just a section of the world?
And would they have been so influential were
it not for actions of another person who came
before them or long after?
Overall it’s kind of impossible to determine
who the most influential person in human history
was, since… how would you even measure that?
Thanks for watching.
This was a really hard video to put together,
but you all seemed to be really excited about
it, so hopefully I could do it justice.
If you liked it, be sure to like and share
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