There's no "merely" social consensus, quite on the contrary, the social consensus has always dominated all the things that matter; being exiled from the tribe was effectively a death sentence even if the tribe did not directly kill you, and a dominant position in the tribe gains larger benefits than dominating against the real world, both in a hunter-gatherer environment and in modern society.
But everything in your second paragraph is incorrect. Even before the industrial revolution, it was commonplace for banished people to find a new place to live, either as hermits or as part of a new tribe; the outlawing and persecution of individual refugees and "stateless persons" is a Late Modern aberration. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, a subordinate position in a tribe like Japan that is very "dominant against the real world" gains larger benefits than a dominant position in a tribe like the Wola that is much less "dominant against the real world". For example, as a Japanese person, you live twice as long, you probably won't get raped, you are at no risk of being executed for witchcraft if you fall from favor, and if at some point the two tribes come into armed conflict, the Wola will be entirely at the mercy of the Japanese.
Even in the first paragraph, though, there is a significant error. You say, "Starving or not starving... procreation... [and] changing the world in various ways [mostly] depend on how many other people you can motivate to go along with your plans." But in fact they do not. These things depend jointly on whether you get teamwork on plans, a social question, and on whether the plans are any good in the first place, a rational question. This is what sunk the Great Leap Forward: Mao was suffering from the delusion that you so clearly expressed here. He evidently motivated people to go along with his plans to an almost unprecedented degree, but many objective, non-social aspects of the plans (notably backyard smelting, the Four Pests campaign, deep plowing, and close planting) were destined to produce catastrophe, especially if they were executed thoroughly. The greatest famine in human history was the predictable consequence, killing some 40 million people.
The industrial revolution was a consequence of Galileo's rebellion against this subjectivist view: he dared to look through his telescope at the real world and believe what he saw, despite its incompatibility with the socially constructed virtual reality of his time. It took some time, but Italy paid for its rejection of Galileo with centuries of penury and destitution. Ultimately Galileo influenced the external world, as you say, far more than the crabbed Inquisitors who persecuted him.
I stand with Galileo and against Mao. Will you join me?
Using your example of Galileo, his effectiveness in propagating his science was severely limited by a scientifically irrelevant feud with church officials. Had he been more politically savvy, he would have been able to avoid tying the scientific issues with the personal conflict, and would not have provoked the church into this conflict - IMHO what we have in historical evidence indicates that it was perfectly plausible for him to get the church to support his position, which would have supported both his personal interests and the general progress of science, but he failed at that due to his personal qualities w.r.t. social aspects.
If you try to walk across the desert without drinking water you will be dead in two days. That's not "the long run."
If you carry water and salt with you, you can make it a week or more, but not if you strategize poorly: walking during the day instead of at night will deplete your water much more rapidly, and if you treat your canteen carelessly you will lose the water. If you have the knowledge to navigate to places with drinkable water along the way, or the knowledge and materials to distill water from crushed plants, you can make it for months, longer if you brought food or can find it. (Me, I caught and ate raw grasshoppers.) You cannot emotionally manipulate the desert; you cannot trick it; it will not treat you more gently because you beg it for mercy. Rationality (knowledge, skill, heedfulness, and above all epistemic humility) is your only hope. It's no guarantee, because a rattlesnake or a hailstone may strike you at random, but it's your only hope.
It's not just the desert. The same is true of the ocean, of mushroom hunting, of wasp's nests, and of the frozen North with its alpine sweetvetch. Nature's ways are subtle and merciless, but they are amenable to understanding, and rationality permits you to order your life in harmony with them and thus survive and prosper a little while; though not, as you say, in the long run.
The whole world is like this, all except for tiny special contexts humans have created where the ruthless laws of Nature are suspended a little bit, where mercy and humanity and fellow-feeling hold sway.
