It's a nice essay, but the fact is that PG is no philosopher or historian. He treats "mean" as a known and monolithic entity that can be attached to individual

It's a nice essay, but the fact is that PG is no philosopher or historian. He treats "mean" as a known and monolithic entity that can be attached to individuals. "Mean" is a vague term that people might be sometimes, and not others. Sometimes being "mean" works to make you more successful. Was Bill Clinton mean? Richard Feynman? Dan Quayle? Gerard Depardieu? Baudrillard? Did they fail? Succeed? Reducing people to binaries of mean / not mean and successful / failures is absurdly reductive. Newton was a pretty mean thinker (in at least two senses) and is a good counter-example to some of these arguments.