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Notes -
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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