The Most Famous Person

In a recent episode of The WOW Report on WOWPresents, the presenters James St. James, Fenton Bailey, and Blake Jacobs discussed an article on Deadspin that briefly discussed the question of who is the most famous person ever?  This is a topic I have written about before but this particular angle interested me because of something James St. James questioned and that was whether or not you should determine it by raw figures or by percentages. 

The world is an ever growing place, and at present the population stands around 7 billion people give or take a few million.  By mere virtue of the fact that this is the most populated the world has ever been and by virtue of the fact that estimates for the total number of people who have ever lived put the figure in the region of 100 billion people, it's easy to see how you can make the argument that anyone who is known by even a few people alive today would be more famous than some of the most well-known people throughout history.  This argument is based on the idea that if you are known by even say 10% of the world's population today then you would be known by 700 million people - a figure which after you go back just over a century no populace throughout history would match in comparison.  The world's population in 1900 looked very different than it does today.

On the counter point of this argument you can say that being known by 10% of the population whilst impressive would be less famous in relative terms than someone who was known by 90% of the population even if that population at the time was only 100 million people for the sake of argument.  Here the question arises as to whether being known by 90 million people as 90% of the population of the time is more or less famous than being known by 700 million people as 10% of the population of that time.

I can see both sides of the argument here but I think it might be easier to dismiss both and ask which people throughout history have been known by the most people alive and dead.  Here the longer someone has been dead the more you might assume they are advantaged in the competition but I would actually argue that very few people have their importance in a historical context preserved over time.  As an example one of the most infamous people in history is undoubtedly Adolf Hitler who was both known by a vast populace when he was alive and still known by a vast populace now in death.  The trouble with using him as the answer to the question however is that as time has progressed, the emphasis placed on the importance of remembering the historical context is lost.  The more time passes since an event that was unbelievable at the time, the less believable that event becomes - which explains why there are many people that deny the holocaust, enough time has passed for doubt to be insidious and enough focus has been lost and enough significance attached to the events have been lost for those events to be discarded. 

20 years ago when I was in school I would have found it incredibly hard to believe there were countries where the events of World War II were not part of their national curriculum.  However there is a fascinating article on The Conversation which looks at the way the second world war and the holocaust are covered in various curricula.  The article even details which countries do not cover the second world war, and those which do cover it but make no mention of the holocaust at all which is disturbing.  What this points to however is the reality that even the events that we deem to be the most significant in our history can be completely disregarded by others, and what we take to be things that are known the world over in reality might be less well known as we think.  That's not the most eloquent way of putting that but then again this isn't the most fruitious topic when it comes to eloquence so I think I can be forgiven.

It is for these reasons that I do not have an answer to this question; to know who the most famous person is or was, I would have to know what other people know, and it's more apparent than ever, that this question in itself is impossible to answer never mind using your answer to make an informed guess.