But their lives are always tragic in a sense; for these people who are the embodiment of everything great about our species are always looked down upon by the people who are afraid of change and progress.

That's probably the reason most people prefer to coform, to follow, to avoid trouble. It feels more confortable to be in the majority. Nobody wants to be the weirdo who sees the impossible.
Some societies are more conducive to form dreamers. There is something paralizing about unisonous negation of the possibility of changing even the most inisgnificant things.
Imagine you are a teacher and come a classroom and find it dirty. desks, floor, tables scratched, wrappers spread all over, and the board encripted with the previous class's material. And you tell your students, let's do some cleaning before we start. And they say, no, because they did not dirty the classroom. And they think it is impossible to think that you can convince faculty and students that having a clean campus is possible. And you have seen it done somewhere else, and you know it's easy, and you just can't understand how come the rest of the people around you can't see it that way.
So, of course you can either teach in the filth, turn around and cancell the class or do the cleaning yourself.
I did that several times and I was always mesmerized at how easily that action can trigger a change of mind in more than one person around. Once the first one starts picking papers up the floor, one or two more follows, precisely because nobody wants to be in the minority and all of a sudden, doing the wrong thing isolates you.
We can keep dreaming, but it takes some risks, actions and persistence.