Past performance is no indicator of future performance. It's entirely possible that the Zapatistas cause the collapse of the Mexican government just as it's possible that they fade away into oblivion.
The luddites were annihilated and their philosophy has never been as prevalent or popular as it was in their uprising. While there's still a chance of a popular resurgence they still missed their best opportunity and were crushed by the state.
History has hundreds of suppressed revolts to every success.
That's not to say it's hopeless: just that it isn't inevitable. We'd like to believe that with enough tries you can succeed but that is a fallacy.
Definitely a useful tool and one you should've learned in a college algorithms course. Binary search backs a lot of high performance data structures