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Well, allow me to present the counter-factual. Yes, writing is essential. It is absolutely required to create a coherent system of belief. But before you put pen to paper, there is a natural human urge to bounce your ideas off another human. Maybe more than one. Possibly a small group, in some kind of social situation, where you can engage in vigorous discussion (dare I say debate?) where your ideas are winnowed down before you ever put them on a piece of paper. It might even be reasonable to give your group a name, something a little pretentious, because you are discussing Important Ideas, not merely commiserating over a
beercoffee.Something like the Society of Psychoanalysts, founded at Café Korb in 1908 by Sigmund Freud. Or there is the famous Café Central, patronized by Peter Altenberg, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler, Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos, Leo Perutz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, and Stalin. All of these men of course eventually put pen to paper. But they didn't keep coming to the same coffee house just because they really liked the barista's triple caf no fat skim milk four pump blended mochachino. They found value in arguing, debating, and discussing what would become some of the most influential theories in the world with other intelligent men.
Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in. But that is no reason to write off this kind of circle-jerk entirely. A circle-jerk it may be, but a circle-jerk can still result in ideas that will cause the world to tremble.
The vast majority of people at the Cafe Central were weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails and we've never heard of them. For every Freud and Herzl and Stalin and Hitler, there were fifty losers whose manifestos wound up lining a parrot cage. One of the important things you realize when you read the biographies of revolutionaries, is that it's really hard to tell the serious ones from the unserious ones until suddenly it is very obvious. The Bolsheviks embodied every stereotype of the LARPing coffee shop revolutionary, the thugs who use Socialism as a cover for robbing banks, the burnouts who just hate their parents, the grifters trying to avoid getting a real job, etc. Then suddenly they took over Russia. And I don't think it's something you can predict in advance, some people rise to the occasion and others turn out to be failures. Sam Adams was far more important than John before the Revolution, afterward Sam was an afterthought until he became a beer. Jesus may not even have been the most important Messiah running around Judea in 33, he turned out to be the most important man to ever live.
These kinds of environments are important because they support a huge petri dish of ideas and thinkers, and most of them will be unimportant but some will be earth shattering.
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