A thread running through many posts here and at Crumb Trail has been the stupidity of activists, especially environmental activists but not exclusively. A recent crumb, Club Sierra, discussed the fact that more and more people decline to identify themselves as environmentalists though they remain supportive of the environment. The problem is that stupid and mean spirited activists are stinking up the place. This isn't unique to environmentalism - the same thing happened with unionism, feminism and civil rights. It's a natural progression that results from movement dynamics. Ideas ossify into ideology and sincere, good hearted initiators drift away while less savory types come to dominate.

Another recent crumb, Brain Death, discussed how pseudo-environmentalists had allowed aspects of their ideology to become diametrically opposed to the environment, so that the things they were advocating were environmentally harmful as well as repellent to a large segment of society.

In Slow Learners this was the focus.

Environmentalism is pan-ideological, not left wing ideology. It is quite literally insane to think that you can govern a nation in environmentally beneficial ways while demonizing a major segment of that nation. . . What is needed now is to purge the rabid ideologues and adopt a more mature and sane approach that recognizes that all of society must be served and included. All citizens must have a place at the table and an ownership interest in the processes.

All of the movements of the 20th century share this dynamic and fate. They are hijacked by nutters and driven into the ground, turned into parodies of their initial forms and widely seen as repellent by society. But why is this so? You can wade through psychological explanations and find some answers but nothing that is satisfying and convincing except for a few obviously damaged characters, and the quirks and mis-wiring that each of us bear. We all have warts and blemishes when looked at through the magnifying lenses of the examining room.

Besides, psychological explanations lead nowhere and psychology is one of those tainted movements in any event. More useful understandings come from the most pedestrian of explanations rather than the arcane. It's intellectual, ethical and aesthetic failure. Which is good because these are things we can do something about, things that can be improved by better information and debate about that information. They are ignorant and stupid but not unintelligent. Lots of stupid people are very intelligent, quite capable of better work. Yes, they have emotional problems which sometimes rule them, but who doesn't? There are sufficient lucid times for them to grasp reality.

The hustlers and grifters that have hijacked the various movements resist of course. They have something to lose, not least their livelihoods but also their status. Give them that much credit, they diligently work for their inimical agendas. They don't lack ambition and are often hard workers. Consider this confused article by Joel Makower.

I sat in on a meeting last year of a group of environmental activists looking at taking on Wal-Mart as part of a bigger campaign. At the table were environmental groups focusing on mining (Wal-Mart is one of the world's biggest jewelers, so it buys lots of gold, platinum, silver, and diamonds); trout fishers (run-off from Wal-Mart's parking lots foul local creeks, streams, and rivers for outdoors types); and forests (how else to target the world's biggest seller of Pampers and Charmin?).

Labor, for their part, has another whole batch of activists under the name Wal-Mart Watch -- a multimillion dollar campaign funded in large part by the service employees union. (Earlier this year, the union launched PurpleOcean.org, "the world's first Internet-based union membership program.")

But much like Nike before it, Wal-Mart's overseas supply-chain challenges have raised the most heat among activists. The issue is both labor and the environment -- the low wages and poor working conditions of workers in Asian factories, and the environmental legacy they comes from practices to cut costs such as clear-cutting of forests and industrial factory farming of seafood.

In recent weeks, the heat has been turned up, as activists have prepared for release on November 13, of WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price, a documentary by Robert Greenwald, director/producer of last year's "Outfoxed: Robert Murdoch's War on Journalism." The week of November 13-19 has been dubbed "Wal-Mart Week," in which "3000+ screenings in 19 countries and all 50 states are already in the works for the largest grassroots mobilization in movie history," according to the movie's official Web site.

So, Lee Scott's recent pronouncement is significant.

But is it real? That's the $285.2 billion (fiscal 2005 sales - PDF) question.

Do these various failing activist groups have an impact? No. They are like lice. They can make you itch and scratch but not affect your direction. They are, after all, failing, becoming ever less significant, losing membership and social support, becoming pariahs in society. They are trying to bolster their own fortunes by pretending that they have done something when all they have done is to jump in front of a passing parade.

So what's the parade about and who is actually leading it? This interview by Emily Gertz of Allen Hammond, Vice President for Innovation and Special Projects at the World Resources Institute, given at the Clinton Global Initiative, gives a far more credible explanation.

AH: We're not at the tipping point yet, but many companies now taking this very seriously -- major companies have realized that emerging markets are going to create the biggest growth opportunities, and that they have to figure out how to do it.

So it's a business reason: They need to grow, and they'll do it by going down market. More and more companies are taking seriously the fact that next big untapped market is low income consumers. And while some come at it with a social metric in mind, ultimately business drivers are what are most important.

And if you're going to serve low income customers in ways that meet their needs, you're going to learn to be very efficient and have lower priced products. And then, what stops you from selling for low prices in the other markets as well?

EG: So it's kind of like leapfrogging business models from the poor to the middle class.

AH: Look at Wal-Mart as an example. Whatever other problems people have with that company, they got really efficient supplying to rural America, and now it's the largest company in the world. If you innovate for the bottom of the pyramid, you get the whole world.

If you ask, what is the market, well, the market is the 4 to 5 billion people who are the world's poorest, and that's only going to get bigger. In China, 67 percent of the GDP is in the low income communities; in India, 75 percent.

So if you're only selling to middle class, you're missing three-quarters of the market.

And official poverty statistics understate income, because they don't take into account the informal economies in low income communities. The ability to pay for goods and services in low income communities is much bigger than realized. .

Wal-Mart is leading its own parade, and the other dignitaries and talents in the parade are other businesses that get it. Activists are irrelevant or a hindrance to the very things they claim to support.

We saw this same dynamic during the development of the now developed western nations. Some entrepreneurs saw vast business opportunities in making down market products, the bottom of the pyramid as it is now called. It was in their interests to help those at the bottom rise, so that they would be better customers. Henry Ford for example developed manufacturing methods that made automobiles very much more affordable, and paid his own workers higher wages both to enlist their loyalty and hard work as well as turning them into customers for the products. They were also great viral marketing agents, boosters for both the products and the company.

The rise in material fortunes enables people to pursue other social goals. They can now afford to care for the environment, their children's health and education, the needs of the unfortunate, elderly and disabled. By raising up the bottom of the pyramid you create a vast army of supporters for the more advanced social and environmental objectives you originally wished to pursue.

The important idea here is that if you truly care about people and the environment you don't work at cross purposes to the most constructive efforts to advance those issues. Wal-Mart is leading the way, showing the way, so if we wish to help we can use similar methods for markets Wal-Mart does not address. Attacking Wal-Mart is just stupid, does not change their course or do any good thing. It can make them itch and scratch, but it's stupid to spend your energies being a louse. Better you should be useful. Better you should do your small part to fill gaps that the giants miss, things that fall between the cracks. If nothing else you can help by telling the story straight so that others can grasp what is currently happening and why. This increases the chance that others will do good, or at least avoid doing bad, and can have broad ripple effects in the ideosphere. There's no telling what some clever someone with accurate and useful information will dream up and do.

It is in all of our interests for the developing world to prosper. Our relative position will change - we will no longer be royalty of sorts living the good life while others suffer - but our absolute position will not fall. We will profit from their development too. Besides, the alternatives are ugly. Their populations will grow. Their problems will come to us. We can't ignore them because they won't go away, they'll get worse. We share a planet and so have common interests even if you don't feel a tug of common humanity.

Update:

This is a bit round-a-bout but you may profit from following the links, connections and inferences.

Jon points to a new web site celebrating the life and works of Bernard DeVoto, someone Jon holds in high esteem. One of the DeVoto articles available at that site, The Ex-Communists, is a meditation on what went wrong for those "intellectuals" who first embraced communism and then later rejected it. Several passages are apt for the current discussion and I'll pick one or two but do read the rest.

A stanza from a currently unfashionable poet ends, "The way is all so very plain / That we may lose the way." Several stanzas farther along the phrasing changes a little: "So very simple is the road / That we may stray from it." The poem happens to have a religious theme but what it says holds true for some crucial acts of the intelligence.

A number of intellectuals who were communists have lately been explaining why they no longer are: discussing the reasons that led to their conversion and those that have produced their apostasy. The theological terms apply, for it is apparent, and indeed was apparent all along, that the phenomena are primarily religious. The typical ex-communist American intellectual in fact has experienced two conversions; whereas evangelical doctrine holds that to be saved you must be born a second time, salvation has required him to be born a third time. Such an experience puts the greatest possible strain on the personality. There can be only compassion for the agony he has felt, the double disillusionment, the necessity of twice rebuilding his shattered personal world. And his careful analysis of his experience can be valuable and useful.

Embracing communism, like religious conversion, is an act of the total personality. It is packed with private and even unconscious as well as rational and objective reasons, with emotion as well as intelligence. What the apostates have been saying shows that frequently intelligence played only a small part in it. Yet it played some part and they are eager to show that it was decisive in their apostasy, their repudiation of communism. I propose to discuss only their intelligence. We will agree that the American intellectual who became a Communist was, typically, a generous, warmhearted man, an idealist deeply disturbed by the catastrophe of the modern world and deeply concerned for the betterment of mankind. But how good was his thinking? . . .

Communism made its American converts not as a system of thought but as an eschatology, a millennial faith. . .

The communist formula said that reform was impossible: the non-communist pronounced the formula defective.

What followed was the most fundamental, the most widespread, and the most thoroughgoing reform in American history. To call it the New Deal obscures the fact that it was a sweeping revolution which had already begun to gather momentum when Roosevelt took office and some fundamental parts of which were unrelated to the movement he headed. All that need be said of it here is that it worked. It demonstrated that the generality of our intellectuals had correctly analyzed the situation, and the generality of them had some part of it.

It's a similar pattern. Some who are not thinking very clearly but are emoting just fine have had religious conversions of sorts - an eschatology, a millennial faith - one that rejects progress claiming that it is impossible and advocating revolution in the small or large sense, or radical change that sweeps old institutions and ways off the board, or at least profoundly alters them. Though the analysis has some merit - things are in need of improvement - the change is already in progress that will make both their analyses and prescriptions just seem dumb when the dust settles.

Step back from the confusing detail and emotionally charged defects of human society and try to grasp a bigger picture both of the state of things and the dynamics that cause state changes. Rather than rejecting those who have different analyses and prescriptions seek to grasp what they see and think since it can't help but enlarge your view and enable you to see even more. You may still disagree but will do so with insight. That's progress.

Update:

Several paragraphs above I said:

All of the movements of the 20th century share this dynamic and fate. They are hijacked by nutters and driven into the ground, turned into parodies of their initial forms and widely seen as repellent by society. But why is this so?

Camille Paglia says it another way:

. . . the accusatory, victim-obsessed, male-bashing style of feminist writing that began with "Daddy" never got beyond Plath's great poem. The reason for it is that Plath was schooled on canonical writers of both genders and brilliantly drew from them all. Feminist literature got off track when it became ghettoized. I feel very fortunate that my own independent feminism began in the early 1960s, before the current women's movement started, so there were no impediments or discouragement to my studying and admiring great male authors and artists.

Perhaps it isn't that nutters hijack movements so much as that later entrants lack the broad foundations of the original members. It's the curse of the echo chamber. Movements cut themselves off from their sources. A farmer might understand this as being like hybrids. They are vigorous, heterozygotic, but they don't breed true. It is the heterodox origins of movement founders that gives them their vigor, something which is lacking in their intellectual offspring. To have a continual supply of vigorous hybrids you must also have a continual supply of the diverse parent stocks, and mechanisms for crossing them.

It's just an analogy, don't get too caught up in quibbling with the hypothetical since we know ways to get around the breeding problems in biology. But do we know how to do that with socio-political movements?