The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

The saying sketches three typical responses to historical change. The “great person” anticipates transformations before they become legible to most people; greatness here is a kind of temporal displacement—seeing the logic of an era before it arrives. The “smart” are adaptive opportunists: they may not foresee change, but they can exploit it once it is underway. The “blockhead” represents reactive conservatism, defining themselves by resistance and thereby being shaped by what they oppose. Read in a Baudrillardian key, it can also be taken as a comment on how individuals relate to shifting systems of signs and power: vision, adaptation, or futile negation.