Oh, this is human nature and you will find it impossible to avoid this framing of cult figures, because they are indeed cult figures - albeit positively perceived ones, since they appear to not just be doing it for themselves, but altruistically every wonder they produce is for their users - and thus their works have effectively and productively impacted the lives of millions of other people, at economies of scale most of us here on HN aspire to.
And it is that aspiration you’re degrading with the rush to de-mythologize, as if it weren’t inevitable, under the crushing rush of time, that we in the hacker world had heroes.
Humanity has some 300.000 years of existing, and we can only trace back the prevalence of cult figures a few thousand years back.
For all we know, it could be a temporary fluke and we'll snap back to something else. We could be beings with no default to snap back to, ever changing, destined to dissolve the prevalence of cult figures into something else in the following eras.
In a few thousand years we could totally see this practice as some distant-past thing like making clay pots or carrying Roman dodecahedrons.
The new cultural trend could become jumping off cliffs, and someone would be arguing that it's inevitable human nature.
By the way, no rush to de-mythologize. I'm not fighting any dragon here, you do you.
> a few thousand years back
I beg to differ, but okay. I don’t disagree to your allusions that there is a banality to mob idolatry, but that’s a discussion for other forums, ironically.
Idolatry is not the same as mythologizing. And I never said there is a banality to it, just that there could be. We don't have enough to know.
We only have writing and, consequently, people who's names we know a few thousand years back.
A cult figure before writing would have more limited reach, and be forgotten because their name wasn't written down. But they'd still have been a cult figure.
The Buddha lived before writing in India. We have plenty of other stories that were passed by oral tradition before they were written down.
It's an interesting hypothesis we can never prove. We don't even know how old names are.