Unrelated to your example (tl;dr): most people find it exhausting to use their brain for actual thinking. They use it for excercising simple prejudice.
People are willing to spend or sacrifice for specific goals with good chances of actually reaching them. Otherwise they would turn away, unimpressed.
Also, the measure of how good the chances must be, and how specific the goal needs to be, is very diverse between the cultures and societies.
So, less is more: limit your scope to 1 country and culture, restrain your goals to specific and realistic ones, and you can achieve a lot with many followers.
Since Einstein’s papers from 1905, we know that every being lives in it’s own time and also every place and every thing in the whole universe has it’s own time. So, which time do you want to stop?