Historic transformations are set in motion by people unaware of them

Evidence

I remember once hearing you explain why you so admired the ancient ironsmiths: because they had no concept of the Iron Age they were ushering in. Instead, they were driven by something within them, an impulse to experiment until they had freed steel from lumps of pig iron, like Michelangelo liberating his David from a block of marble. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 306

Categorization

• FICTION: The ironsmith-as-Michelangelo image — craft without self-awareness of the epoch — is a rich character-building device for a story set at a technological pivot.
• APHORISMS: A durable bit of wisdom: the people who shape an era rarely know they are shaping it, and we should be suspicious of anyone claiming to.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 306
• XREF: connects to: Knowing a historical transition differs vitally from living through it — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 104; People’s lived sense of their era may be wholly unrelated to its structural reality — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 615; A fully conscious model of historical action fails to capture history’s impersonality — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 455 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Major social change is witnessed with unclear understanding by its actors. #corroborates (1.00)
• Invention of narrative is how people claim responsibility for unintended history #corroborates (1.00) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 537
• Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them #corroborates (0.95)
• People’s lived sense of their era may be wholly unrelated to its structural reality #complicates (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 615
• A fully conscious model of historical action fails to capture history’s impersonality #complicates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 455
• Humans are blind to their own lack of an original fixed nature #corroborates (0.85)