Indeed. Tolstoy does a deep exploration of this in War and Peace, using the example of Napoleon.

Of course, this gets to the heart of the free will debate (to be settled in a future post ;)). Both are true at the same time - organized people and dictators and other factors simultaneously wrestle for influence in complex ways in which causation is impossible to measure.

My own two cents, though, is that the Categorical Imperative is a tremendously important and underappreciated tool for raising the self-consciousness of groups.

A practical implementation of it is linked at the bottom of the blog post.