Look at any history textbook and you’ll notice a pattern: we tell history through names. Alexander conquered. Caesar fell. Napoleon marched. It’s tempting to believe that these individuals steered civilization — that a sufficiently powerful person can grab the wheel and point humanity in whatever direction they choose.

But can they, really?

The more I think about it, the more I believe the answer is no — and the reason why reveals something fundamental about how human societies actually work.

What Would It Take?

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine you wanted to truly control the direction of a society — not just influence it, not just lead it, but dictate its course the way a driver controls a car.

What would that require?

You’d need what I’ll call supreme power: a kind of power so asymmetric that no one else could meaningfully resist it. Not political authority, not wealth, not charisma — those can all be challenged by others who have comparable amounts. Supreme power means a gap so vast that resistance becomes physically impossible.

Think Superman. One being who can do what no other being can. In that scenario, yes — one will could dominate all others. But that’s fiction, and for good reason.

In reality, humans are remarkably balanced. No individual is so strong, so fast, or so intelligent that others cannot collectively match or exceed them. A king is still a human surrounded by other humans. A general still needs soldiers who choose to follow orders. The gap between the most powerful person and the average person has never been wide enough to constitute true supreme power.

Which means control is never absolute. It only works as long as others accept it.

The Atomic Bomb: A Brief Glimpse of Supreme Power

History offers one instructive near-exception.

When the first nation developed the atomic bomb, it momentarily possessed something approaching supreme power. Other societies hadn’t yet grasped the underlying science. There was no countermeasure, no equivalent response. For a brief window, one state held a capability that could reshape the world unilaterally.

And the world panicked — precisely because everyone intuitively understood what supreme power would mean.

But it didn’t last. Within years, other nations developed the same technology. The asymmetry collapsed. Power became distributed again, and with distribution came the return of negotiation, deterrence, and balance.

This pattern repeats throughout history: gunpowder, naval fleets, industrial manufacturing, nuclear energy. Whenever a new capability emerges, it briefly concentrates power — and then it spreads. The moment multiple actors share the same level of capability, no single actor’s will can dominate.

Supreme power, it turns out, is inherently unstable. It exists only in the gap between one party’s discovery and everyone else’s.

Power Is a Scale, Not a Switch

We tend to talk about power in binary terms — democracy or dictatorship, freedom or oppression — but reality is more like a spectrum.

The real question is never “does this person have power?” but rather: to what degree does one person’s will actually shape society?

Even in highly centralized systems, a leader’s influence is filtered through layers of interpretation. Officials carry out orders — but they also reinterpret them. Citizens comply — but they also adapt, resist quietly, and pursue their own goals within the constraints. Messages get distorted as they travel downward through bureaucracy, culture, and individual self-interest.

This is why the same decree can produce wildly different outcomes in different regions of the same country. Power weakens as it travels. It’s less like a laser and more like a flashlight — bright at the center, diffuse at the edges.

The Ocean

Here’s the metaphor that ties it all together.

Think of human society as an ocean. Each individual’s influence is like water — most of us are drops in a vast body. Some areas of the surface are calm. Others have towering waves. Occasionally, a storm surges and it looks like the entire ocean is being reshaped by a single force.

But beneath all of this — beneath the waves, beneath the storms — there is a sea level.

The sea level is the collective will of ordinary people. It’s the average of what billions of individuals believe, tolerate, hope for, and accept as normal. It moves slowly, often imperceptibly. But it is the sea level, not the waves, that determines where the water actually rests.

Leaders are waves. Ideologies are storms. They rise dramatically, they command attention, they can cause tremendous damage or change in the short term. But over time, they subside. What remains is the sea level — and the sea level is set by the collective.

This is what the Marxist tradition gets right, whatever else one might critique about it: history is ultimately pushed forward by ordinary people. Not by heroes. Not by villains. By the slow, aggregate movement of what most humans come to believe serves their lives.

Hidden Currents

If the sea level is what matters, then what happens in societies where the surface looks perfectly still?

In highly controlled societies, compliance is often performance. People act loyal because they must — not because they believe. They repeat the right words, display the right symbols, show up to the right events. But internally, they maintain their own judgments.

This creates something like stored energy. Outwardly, the system looks stable. Inwardly, pressure accumulates.

When conditions shift — an economic crisis, a leadership transition, an external shock — this hidden energy surfaces all at once. People who appeared perfectly loyal suddenly speak differently, act differently, organize differently. What looks like sudden revolution is really delayed expression. The disagreement was always there. It was just expensive to express.

The system didn’t collapse because people suddenly changed their minds. It collapsed because they finally could show what they’d always thought.

This is why no leader, no matter how powerful, can fully override human nature. People still want safety, dignity, agency, and meaning. These desires act like gravity — invisible, constant, and ultimately irresistible. You can build structures that resist gravity for a while, but you can’t abolish it.

Communication: The Tide That Raises the Sea Level

So if the sea level is what matters, what changes it?

Communication.

Consider why caste systems could last for millennia in the ancient world. The lowest castes never saw the emperor. They had no access to information beyond what was handed down through official channels — myths, religious narratives, stories told by people who served the hierarchy. When information is expensive and slow, it’s easy to convince people that the social order is natural, eternal, even divine.

An emperor who is never seen can be a god. A noble who is only encountered through intermediaries can seem like a different species. The distance between classes wasn’t just social — it was informational. And that informational distance made supreme power more achievable, because it allowed a small group to control the narrative almost completely.

Now consider the modern world.

Cameras are everywhere. Information travels at the speed of light. A person on one continent can watch, in real time, what a leader on another continent is doing. End-to-end encryption allows private communication that even states struggle to monitor.

The cost of communication has plummeted, and with it, the ability to maintain the kind of informational asymmetry that supreme power requires.

This is why the modern version of “caste” — wealth-based hierarchy — must justify itself so differently. Today’s most powerful individuals don’t claim divine appointment. They claim merit: hard work, intelligence, entrepreneurial vision. They must frame their position as earned rather than inherent, because the informational distance between them and everyone else has shrunk to nearly zero. Everyone can see that a billionaire is still a human who eats, sleeps, makes mistakes, and sometimes says foolish things on camera.

The narrative of inherent superiority simply cannot survive cheap communication.

Information Control and Its Limits

Even the most sophisticated attempts to control information in the modern era illustrate how difficult supreme power has become.

Throughout history and into the present, states have invested enormous resources in controlling what their citizens can access — building infrastructure to filter, monitor, and shape the flow of information. These systems can be impressive in scale and can significantly limit what most people encounter day to day.

But “most” is not “all.”

Some individuals still access outside information. Some use technical tools to bypass restrictions. Some encounter alternative perspectives through travel, trade, or personal relationships. And once even a small number of people hold different information, the uniformity that supreme power requires is broken.

More importantly, the people who hold alternative views may exist at any level of society — including within the institutions responsible for maintaining control. Hidden disagreement doesn’t respect organizational charts.

Complete informational control would require something approaching the fictional “Big Brother” — total surveillance of every channel, every conversation, every thought. In theory, this is conceivable. In practice, the technical and human complexity makes it virtually impossible. Every new encryption protocol, every private conversation, every unmonitored moment is a crack in the wall.

And cracks accumulate.

The Pragmatic Sea Level

Here’s the part that ties everything together — and it’s the part I find most reassuring.

The sea level doesn’t settle at whatever ideology shouts the loudest. It settles at whatever actually makes collective life better.

This is a pragmatic claim, not a moral one. If a highly centralized system genuinely improved most people’s lives — made them safer, healthier, more prosperous, more free in the ways that matter to them — then people would not resist it. They’d accept it willingly. That would be the sea level, because the sea level is defined by lived experience, not by theory.

Conversely, if a more distributed system delivers better outcomes, then that becomes the sea level. People gravitate toward what works, given enough time and enough information.

This is why propaganda alone cannot determine the direction of society. Propaganda can create waves — sometimes enormous ones. But if the underlying reality doesn’t match the story, the sea level eventually corrects. People compare their lived experience to the narrative, and when the gap grows too large, belief erodes — quietly at first, then suddenly.

The direction of history is not decided by which system has the best marketing. It’s decided by which system most people, through lived experience, come to believe makes their lives genuinely better.

No Final System, Only Water Finding Its Level

If this framework is right, then a few things follow.

There is no permanent supreme power. The conditions required for it — total asymmetry, total informational control — are too unstable to maintain. Every technology that concentrates power eventually spreads. Every wall around information eventually leaks.

There is no final system. Human society is not converging toward one permanent arrangement. It’s adjusting continuously, like water in a basin that keeps getting tilted. The sea level shifts as conditions change, as communication evolves, as people’s understanding of their own lives deepens.

And there is no absolute evil or absolute good — only shifting balances. Whenever one extreme dominates too long, counter-forces emerge: moral movements, new technologies, cultural shifts, economic pressures. The system corrects not because the universe is just, but because human beings are numerous, diverse, and stubbornly committed to their own well-being.

Leaders rise like waves. Ideologies surge like storms. But the sea level — the quiet, collective will of billions of ordinary people — is what reshapes the shore.

And the cheaper communication becomes, the harder it is for any wave to pretend it’s the ocean.

Disclaimer: Written by Human, improved using AI where applicable.