Polling the Man-In-The-Street: what names of individuals or persons known as heads of groups, besides Osama bin Laden and Gavrilo Princip, would you think of off the top of your head as having:
* profoundly influenced or diverted the course of history;
* in a way that history has largely regarded as undesirable;
* by acting out of sincerely professed convictions?
Note that I'm trying to screen out names that only hit on two of those, such as Jack the Ripper, Hitler, or Lee Harvey Oswald (state of mind not well attested or demonstrably not right in the head overall), Buddha or Jesus (change not currently regarded as broadly negative), or Timothy McVeigh or any number of people in recent administrations (change not disruptive enough or too soon to assess). An example of a "maybe" might be John Wilkes Booth, but are there others I'm missing out here? It would be particularly interesting to see if anyone can come up with someone who isn't an assassin or a terrorist, but did something ridiculously unhelpful to humanity out of the belief that it was a good thing...
* profoundly influenced or diverted the course of history;
* in a way that history has largely regarded as undesirable;
* by acting out of sincerely professed convictions?
Note that I'm trying to screen out names that only hit on two of those, such as Jack the Ripper, Hitler, or Lee Harvey Oswald (state of mind not well attested or demonstrably not right in the head overall), Buddha or Jesus (change not currently regarded as broadly negative), or Timothy McVeigh or any number of people in recent administrations (change not disruptive enough or too soon to assess). An example of a "maybe" might be John Wilkes Booth, but are there others I'm missing out here? It would be particularly interesting to see if anyone can come up with someone who isn't an assassin or a terrorist, but did something ridiculously unhelpful to humanity out of the belief that it was a good thing...