I always get nervous when Muse needs the 'Ask The Audience' lifeline...

[robling_t]

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...

Comments

Cecil Rhodes

[heliopausa]

:(

I think he was genuine in his belief in 'Imperial Duty' as expounded by John Ruskin: "will you, youths of England, make your country... for all the world a source of light, a centre for peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts?", and I think he truly believed that as a colonist (and later politician) he was bringing the wonders of civilisation to Southern Africa, (and wanted to expand to the whole world) but his influence was disastrous in all sorts of directions, and I think continues disastrous today.

Re: Cecil Rhodes

[robling_t]

That would be a very, very near miss; the one thing that gives me pause is that he wasn't exactly "wrong" within his context -- he could act relatively freely without expecting to have to justify his actions to anybody he gave a damn about (IE other white Englishmen of the proper class). I'm more interested in people who expressed awareness of a conflict between their actions and a broader conception of what was "right", and then made a rational and reasoned moral choice that left even some of the people they might have expected to rally to them going, "Dude, you asshole".