Of course, there are self made men. If you have two people from similar background, education and access to infrastructure and wealth, and one successful and the second not, the first one is self-made.
The one who is "self-made" is not truly self made because they had rely on many more resources and intellectual data by the group to succeed. Therefore there is no such thing as a truly self-made man.
There is only: those who can leverage existing infrastructure to improve the status quo or innovate.
Yes, but for people claiming there's no self-made man, when you ask them, when they would define them ("What person would you accept as self-made man?"), they usually create absolutely artificial cutoff.
Like if there were no public education or infrastructure and you still suceeded (in whatever, science, business), you are self-made. But why? Still, such a person didn't have to invent their own DNA, so they aren't really self-made.
"Society matters, not DNA, not personal initiative, not discipline, not habits..." is a form of bias.
And I just refuse this bias. All this matters. You can be self-made as a seventh child of poor Burmese farmer. Then, you could be maybe as rich as an average developer in Facebook. It is self-made. Or you can be a child of someone rich, inherit $1B and decades later leave the world with 1/10 and it not self-made, even when you still will be way better off that the child of that Burmese farmer. Self-made is relative, not absolute.
Also, you can grow a lot just by luck. Winning a lottery ticket is luck. But picking a career in IT is not. Thirty years ago, everyone knew computers are going to be ultra important. So not every vertical mobility is self-made.
It's complex, but they exist. People who decide to grow in their field. People with right habits, posessing great decision making skills, problem solvers, energetic people.
This assumes all factors relevant to success can be observed and measured, at least to the extent that they might be deemed reasonably equivalent between two people. That doesn’t seem possible in the real world, whose complexity can hardly be accounted for by the broad sort of categories you mention.
