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Extremists die in ditches. The strong, the canny and the lucky make history.
The number of extremists that have achieved success and changed the world are far outnumbered by those that achieve nothing and usually end up lining the inside of a mass grave. The Paris Commune did not fail due to a lack of extreme beliefs, it failed because extremists are by their very nature terrible at making the kind of compromises you need to make in order to advance your goals.
And yet of the people who have made significant and immediate changes to the world, extremists significantly outperform their percentage of the population, which is the correct way to assess the question. Strength, cunning and luck are of course of overwhelming importance as well, but all three together do not change the world if the person possessing them is quite comfortable with the way things are.
In other news, new research finds that people most likely to complete marathons are those that wish to run marathons. In all seriousness, this isn't an argument in favour of extremism. Of course extremists are the most likely to achieve extreme goals, the only alternative candidates are those whose hands are forced by circumstance and those who unintentionally stumble into it.
This is again true, but also not particularly useful. If you have all the virtures of someone capable of shaping the world around you to your liking and you happen to like things the way they are, then you're going to deploy your virtues in pursuit of that end rather than in direct opposition to it.
It seems to me that the point you're driving at, is the importance of strength of will, or of conviction to your goals. This is definitely a quality common among extremists and it is an important part of managing to stick with difficult goals like shaping the world to match your vision, but your odds of success are a lot better if you also happen to have those other virtues as well. The idea that strength of will alone is enough to achieve your goals seems historically fairly common among those who are at a severe disadvantage in other areas, but cannot accept their disadvantageous position. Imperial Japan springs to mind as an immediate example and look how well that worked out for them.
Loop it back to Anheuser-Busch.
The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war. The reason they got dragged into the culture war is that an infinitesimally-small fraction of the population adopted extreme values, and have dedicated significant portions of their lives pursuing what would have, five or six years ago, been seen as an absurdly quixotic quest to fundamentally rewrite significant portions of our social reality, based on a manifestly self-contradictory ideology that turns self-mutilation into a sacrament.
These people are winning. They have taken massive strides toward achieving a goal that was not within a million miles of realistic. They have achieved a level of social dominance such that people who disagree with their ideology in public do so at the risk of their friendships and jobs, a level that frequently gives them social cover on behavior others would be crucified for.
This ad happened because extremists persevered in their extremism. Had they set reasonable goals, none of this would be happening.
The boycott, likewise, is a product of extremism. Taking 10% off the valuation of one of the larger corporations in the world is not a reasonable response to offense over a social media stunt. There's a million reasonable arguments for why this is silliness, and people should move on with their own business, touch grass, get a life, stop being mad at people on the internet. They could do that, A-B's stock would recover, the sun would rise tomorrow... and the thing that enraged them would continue to spread. While they act reasonably, extremists on the other side do not.
The boycott has not worked as well as it has because the people engaging in it have a reasonable goal. It is working because they have an unreasonable goal, an extreme goal: to punish a multinational corporation for siding with their enemies, to hurt that corporation as bad as they possibly can. Peer-to-peer, headless, truly grassroots activism is very hard in the best of circumstances, which this is not; any attempt at a boycott has to overcome a myriad of truly fearsome obstacles, and it is the unreasonableness of the goal that provides much of the motive energy. No one is going to switch their beer order in order to secure a "reasonable" goal, like a meaningless PR-speak non-apology on twitter. They are going to change their beer order because they think it might make a difference, and that means the outcome needs to be significant. The goal is not to get AB to apologize for what they did, but to ensure that neither A-B nor their competitors ever do it again.
There is every incentive to adopt an extreme goal: It motivates the grassroots, makes their hopes plausible, gives them a clear goal, an unambiguous goal, a distant goal to strive for, rather than prematurely declaring victory and giving up. Making the goal reasonable achieves little to nothing; there's no organization to preserve here, no resources to allocate, no credibility to be lost. A-B will probably not go bankrupt, but failing to make that happen will not cause a drop in fervor to the grassroots, since no one is actually expecting that to happen. It's not a "reasonable" goal, is it? On the other hand, if it did happen, that would be a win for the record books, and it certainly won't happen if they try for anything less. So why not swing for the fences?
John Brown didn't, in the end, try to organize a sewing circle. What he did was to make a serious attempt at personally murdering half a country. In doing so, he probably had a greater influence on achieving unrivaled supremacy for his values and on shaping the next two centuries than any other single human, and by a wide margin.
They may switch their beer order because they are personally offended, with reducing the beer company's profits being a side effect rather than a goal. You didn't rule this out.
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