CeleryKills

A Narrative Essay in Minor Keys

I have always been suspicious of great men. Not because they do not exist, but because the stories about them are too clean, too self-satisfied. The “Great Man Theory” of history; Carlyle’s tidy assertion that world events are shaped by heroic individuals, reads like something written by someone who has never sat through a budget meeting (Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, 1841). I have. Twice. That is more than enough data.

What I am suggesting instead is the Little Man Theory. It is not elegant, and it will not look good on a plaque. It holds that history is driven by men of limited vision, poor judgment, and disproportionate influence. Men whose inner lives are often less “great” than they are merely busy; sustained by ambition, insecurity, and the occasional need to prove something to someone who stopped caring decades ago (Freud, On Narcissism, 1914).

Before anyone objects that this is too cynical, I would like to remind the reader that cynicism is often just realism that has been forced to sit through too many strategic planning sessions. The record is not especially kind to the idea that greatness reliably produces good outcomes. Consider Woodrow Wilson, a man of high ideals and striking moral certainty, whose insistence on a punitive postwar settlement helped destabilize Europe for decades (Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919). Wilson’s Fourteen Points read like a man convinced history would behave itself if only it were given clear instructions, which is a charming belief until you realize history does not read memos.

Or consider Herbert Hoover, a man who was not incompetent so much as ideologically overfit to a problem that required flexibility rather than principle. His faith in voluntarism and decentralized response looked reasonable on paper, and catastrophically insufficient in practice during the early Great Depression (Fausold, The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover, 1985). The Little Man Theory does not require these figures to be malicious; it only requires that their vision be narrow enough to mistake preference for reality. I have seen that same error, less consequentially, in meetings where confident men assumed that complexity would politely resolve itself if ignored long enough. It does not. It simply waits.

I should say, up front, I am not exempt from this theory. I have been, at times, a participant rather than an observer. There is a particular humility that comes from realizing you are not a protagonist in a grand narrative, but a minor character in a very clumsy one.

The Little Man Theory begins with a simple observation: systems tend to elevate the wrong people. Or, more precisely, systems tend to elevate people who are particularly good at being elevated. This is not the same thing as competence. Max Weber called this the “iron cage” of rationalized authority, where bureaucracy selects for compliance and self-justification rather than wisdom (Weber, Economy and Society, 1922). I call it “the guy who talks the most in the room wins,” which is less precise but more accurate.

This is not a passive accident of structure; it is an emergent property of how institutions define success. When evaluation criteria prioritize visibility, decisiveness, and rhetorical confidence, the resulting leadership profile will inevitably skew toward men who excel at those traits, regardless of whether those traits correlate with good outcomes. McCarthyism offers an instructive example: a political environment in which aggressive certainty and performative accusation became more valuable than evidentiary rigor, allowing figures with limited factual grounding but strong public presence to dominate discourse (Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 1998). I have noticed that the same dynamic, scaled down, appears in organizations where certainty is mistaken for clarity and volume is mistaken for insight. The system does not merely permit these men; it selects for them because they are legible, predictable, and easy to reward.

Take the man with more money than brains. I have encountered a few of these in the Pacific Northwest, usually in settings where “innovation” is discussed at length but never quite implemented. This man believes that complexity is a failure of imagination. He is fond of phrases like “low-hanging fruit,” which he uses to justify decisions that remove essential limbs from an already fragile tree. His influence is measurable: projects become simpler, which is to say, worse.

Enron provides a more contemporary and structurally explicit illustration. The organization rewarded performance metrics, financial engineering, and the appearance of success over substantive stability, creating an environment in which those most capable of presenting confidence in abstract numbers rose to prominence, even as the underlying reality deteriorated (McLean & Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room, 2003). The Little Man Theory is not suggesting that these individuals were uniquely malicious; rather, they were uniquely compatible with a system that mistook complexity for inefficiency and rewarded the illusion of mastery. Institutions do not merely tolerate small men; they sometimes prefer them, since they are easier to manage until they are not.

The Little Man Theory is especially fond of Silicon Valley, where the gap between confidence and competence is often mistaken for disruptiveness. Consider Theranos, where extraordinary capital and elite boardroom validation coexisted with a fundamentally nonexistent product. Elizabeth Holmes did not merely misjudge technical constraints; she constructed an entire institutional reality in which belief substituted for verification (Carreyrou, Bad Blood, 2018). The result was not innovation but a prolonged demonstration of how easily large systems can be steered by small minds with large narratives. Likewise, WeWork’s Adam Neumann infused real estate with a rhetoric of “community” and “revolution,” while the underlying business model depended on increasingly elaborate financial storytelling rather than coherent fundamentals (Field & Coke, The We Company, 2021). The pattern is not accidental. It is structural: when capital is abundant and scrutiny is diffuse, the influence of limited vision scales upward without needing to become accurate.

Then there are the men of poor judgment. These are not villains. Villains require intention. These men are more like weather systems; unpredictable, repetitive, and strangely confident in their own patterns. I have watched one of them approve a plan with the phrase “this seems fine,” which is history’s least reassuring sentence. In fairness, “this seems fine” is also how many institutions operate, which suggests the problem is structural, not personal.

What makes this pattern so persistent is not individual stupidity, but the way systems reward decisiveness over correctness. The literature on organizational decision-making is almost annoyingly consistent on this point: under uncertainty, groups tend to converge on whatever option feels least disruptive, even when evidence points elsewhere (Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972). I have seen versions of this dynamic play out in smaller settings, where disagreement is treated less as input and more as a kind of social inconvenience. In those rooms, the man of poor judgment is not isolated; he is surrounded by people who have learned that saying “yes” is often the safest form of participation. The result is a kind of distributed responsibility, where no single decision is catastrophic in itself, but the accumulation of small errors becomes the catastrophe.

The Little Man Theory is indebted here to Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality, which argues that human decision-making is constrained by limited information and cognitive capacity (Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1947). The small man is not unusual because he is irrational, but because he is predictably irrational in ways that scale poorly under authority.

Bay of Pigs is a particularly clean illustration of this logic. The 1961 invasion was not the product of one great misjudgment, but of many small ones: intelligence filtered through optimism, dissent softened into ambiguity, and planning shaped by the desire for a clean political outcome rather than a messy operational reality (Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, 1962). Each step, considered alone, looks defensible enough. The problem is that history does not evaluate steps in isolation. It evaluates outcomes. I have often wondered, reading accounts of Bay of Pigs, how many people in that chain of decisions privately registered discomfort but lacked the institutional permission to make it consequential.

The Challenger disaster in 1986 is even more unsettling, because the evidence was not absent—it was merely inconvenient. Engineers had raised concerns about O-ring performance in low temperatures, concerns that were ultimately overridden by management’s emphasis on schedule and external pressure (Dalal, Fowlkes, & Hoadley, Risk Analysis, 1989). What stands out, in retrospect, is not a single moment of malice, but a series of small concessions to the idea that delay was more damaging than risk. The Challenger launch was not the result of one catastrophic decision, but of a series of small men agreeing that discomfort was not a sufficient reason to stop. I find that sentence harder to read each time, because it does not require extraordinary failure to be true… only ordinary compliance.

And then, of course, there are the men with psychological problems who find themselves in positions of power. I use the term “psychological problems” in the broadest, least clinical sense possible, which includes but is not limited to: chronic insecurity, compulsive self-regard, and the inability to distinguish criticism from existential threat. Nietzsche would have called this a form of resentment, a reactive posture that turns weakness into a strategy (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887).

I have seen this type of man reorient entire organizational cultures around his own internal volatility. One week it is “collaboration,” the next it is “accountability,” and by the third week it is “urgent recalibration,” which usually means that someone has annoyed him. The impact is real, even if the cause is trivial.

This is not merely anecdotal. There is a long record of leadership behavior in which personal insecurity translates into institutional instability, often in ways that are retrospectively obvious but contemporaneously normalized. Richard Nixon is a particularly useful case, not because he was uniquely unstable, but because his instability was unusually well-documented. The Watergate transcripts reveal a man whose decision-making was shaped less by policy considerations than by paranoia and a persistent need to control perception (Kissinger, White House Years, 1979; Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, 1990). The result was not simply a political scandal, but a feedback loop in which fear produced overreach, and overreach produced more fear. I have sometimes wondered whether Nixon understood, even dimly, that his own strategies were amplifying the very anxieties they were meant to contain. The evidence suggests he did not. Or, more precisely, that he could not afford to.

Robert Moses offers a different but complementary example. He was not characterized by obvious emotional volatility, but by an implacable certainty that his vision was not only correct but necessary. His large-scale urban projects reshaped New York City, often at the expense of communities that lacked the power to resist (Caro, The Power Broker, 1974). The “emotional weather system” in his case was not storm-like but arid: a persistent dryness of empathy that made displacement and disruption feel like acceptable costs. Power did not merely amplify his preferences; it insulated them from correction. And that, I think, is the most dangerous form of distortion; the kind that does not fluctuate, because it never acknowledges the conditions that would require it to change.

We must also consider the men with small dried-up souls. This is a moral rather than psychological category. These are not men who lack feeling; they are men who have trained themselves to consider feeling inefficient. Hannah Arendt’s analysis of bureaucratic evil is relevant here, particularly her observation that harm can be perpetrated by ordinary individuals who suspend judgment in favor of procedure (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963). The small man, in this sense, is not dramatic. He is procedural. He is the kind of person who will enforce a rule with such devotion that he forgets why the rule existed in the first place.

This is not a hypothetical disposition. Adolf Eichmann himself is instructive precisely because he was so unremarkable in his affect. Arendt’s point, which is often misunderstood as exculpatory but is in fact diagnostic, is that the absence of reflective thought can become a mechanism of participation in harm (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963). Eichmann did not need to be especially cruel; he needed only to be organized, compliant, and willing to treat human consequences as administrative details. The Little Man Theory extends this logic: when systems reward procedural fidelity over moral attention, they do not require extraordinary villains. They require men who are willing to do their jobs without asking whether the job itself is worth doing. I have seen versions of this in smaller, less catastrophic settings, where the enforcement of policy becomes a substitute for judgment, and where the question “should we?” is quietly replaced with “are we allowed to?”

The bureaucratic dimension of this is not incidental. In the Soviet Union, for example, the enforcement of quotas and directives during the Stalin era depended on a vast apparatus of administrators who were not uniquely malevolent, but who were incentivized to prioritize compliance over accuracy. The result was a system in which reporting reality truthfully could be dangerous, while reporting it correctly, according to the plan, was rewarded regardless of its correspondence to facts (Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 1999). What emerges is a form of harm that does not announce itself as harm. It presents as procedure, discipline, and order. The small man does not need to be cruel; he only needs to be consistent.

And yes, there are the men with compensatory tendencies; what popular culture might call “penis envy,” though Freud used the term in a more specific way than contemporary sarcasm allows (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905). In the Little Man Theory, this manifests as overreliance on dominance, assertion, and visible markers of success. These men are not content to be effective. They must be seen to be effective. The result is often scale without substance: large systems, loud declarations, and an uneasy relationship with nuance.

This is where the theory becomes almost embarrassingly easy to observe, because performative authority leaves traces everywhere. It is visible in the manner in which certain leaders conflate visibility with legitimacy, as though being observed were itself a form of proof. Napoleon’s later imperial campaign into Russia is often remembered as a story of ambition exceeding logistics, but it is equally a story of a man who had begun to mistake symbolic dominance for practical reality (Schom, Napoleon Bonaparte, 1997). The decision was not merely strategic overreach; it was theatrical. The scale of the endeavor communicated power, even as its execution revealed its limits. I have sometimes wondered whether the problem was not that Napoleon miscalculated, but that he had become too invested in the appearance of calculation itself.

I have, on occasion, admired the sheer persistence of these men. There is something almost athletic about their refusal to self-correct. They move through institutions like a minor but persistent malfunction; never catastrophic enough to stop everything, but sufficient to degrade performance over time.

This pattern repeats in more modern, and frankly more banal, contexts. Ferdinand Marcos offers a particularly clear example of performative authority detached from substantive governance. His regime was marked by extensive public-facing projects, monumental architecture, and a sustained effort to project modernity and control, all while political power concentrated and critique was suppressed (Karnow, In Our Image, 1989). The image did not simply reflect authority; it became a substitute for it. The Little Man Theory does not require Freud to be correct in every detail; it only requires that insecurity occasionally dresses itself as empire. Once that happens, the distinction between performance and governance collapses, and what remains is a system more concerned with being perceived as coherent than with actually being coherent.

At this point, I should acknowledge the obvious critique: this theory is cynical. It reduces historical agency to the failures of mediocre men. That is partially correct. It is also, I think, more honest than the alternative. Thomas Carlyle’s heroic individualism tends to ignore the cumulative effect of ordinary decisions made under ordinary constraints (Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, 1841). The Little Man Theory does not deny agency; it redistributes it downward, where it is more frequently exercised and less frequently examined.

Let me be direct: I have been in rooms where decisions were made that would later be described as “strategic.” In those rooms, I have watched as men with limited vision and disproportionate confidence shaped outcomes with the solemnity of statesmen. I have contributed to this process. I have nodded when I should have questioned. I have deferred when I should have resisted. I suspect you have too.

The point is not that great men do not exist. It is that they are rare, and often less responsible for outcomes than the systems that amplify them. History, in this view, is less a monument than a mess—assembled incrementally by people who are mostly trying to get through the day without looking incompetent.

So yes, let us continue to admire greatness. But let us also, occasionally, examine the machinery behind it. Because more often than not, what appears to be the work of giants is actually the accumulated effect of small men—men with limited vision, poor judgment, fragile ego structures, and a remarkable capacity for convincing themselves that they are, in fact, the exception.

They are not. And that, in the end, is the theory.

References

• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.
• Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Knopf, 1974.
• Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History. James Fraser, 1841.
• Carreyrou, John. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Knopf, 2018.
• Dalal, Siddhartha R., John E. Fowlkes, and Barbara H. Hoadley. “Risk Analysis of the Space Shuttle: Pre-Challenger Predictions and Post-Challenger Experience.” Risk Analysis, vol. 9, no. 2, 1989.
• Fausold, Martin L. The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover. University Press of Kansas, 1985.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905.
• Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction. 1914.
• Janis, Irving L. Victims of Groupthink. Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
• Karnow, Stanley. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. Random House, 1989.
• Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919.
• Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Little, Brown and Company, 1979.
• Kutler, Stanley I. The Wars of Watergate. W.W. Norton, 1990.
• McLean, Bethany, and Peter Elkind. The Smartest Guys in the Room. Portfolio, 2003.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. 1887.
• Schom, Alan. Napoleon Bonaparte. HarperCollins, 1997.
• Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton University Press, 1998.
• Simon, Herbert A. Administrative Behavior. Macmillan, 1947.
• Weber, Max. Economy and Society. 1922.
• Wohlstetter, Roberta. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Stanford University Press, 1962.