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 this video, follow me on the social media
things, support us on Patreon if you can, and subscribe to learn something new every
Sunday.