Before leaving this question behind, I want to say that I’m personally very unenlightened and not a dropped-out Taoist blockhead master by a long shot. In fact, I despise being perceived by people with money, power, and influence as “marginal.” I think it harms me – it assumes that I can’t have as much agency in this world as they have. I think there’s some kind of dynamic at work there where those with a certain lingering market-consensus mentality assert their dominance by taming people and ideas that might otherwise be challenging. They do this by “loving” outsiders qua outsiders, and defining them within the marketspace as having there own little place of acceptance – a place on the far end of the “long tail.”

Full Story: Reality Sandwich.