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I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument. There are so many ideas, or larger schemas, that are alluring in abstract. See: every teenager's politics. But far fewer paradigms are actually effective in practice. (Granted, which ones work does vary somewhat based on the local circumstances / environment.)
Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person. The philosophy makes sense once you fit yourself inside of it, but the incentive to attempt that in the first place, despite the context of a secular overculture, is that religious people are more likely to thrive.
Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.
Edit: Apologies for not responding individually, this ended up getting more responses than I expected. But I appreciate you all and am pondering your points!
Living a ”model” life does not do anything toward solving complex problems, at all, and its influence on the behavior of other people is slim. For instance, let’s say I wanted to be the best model mathematician. I wear math shirts every day and I talk to everyone I meet about the beauty of mathematics. My influence on the lives of others would be less than had I spent my time working toward getting better math classes in school. We live in an organization-centric world, and in a sense it has always been like that. Opting out of any care beyond “being a good person to others and being joyful” is not enough in a world where your life is dictated by political ideas downstream from culture. Even the most joyful and caring parent may have children who get their behavior from bad peers or Tik Tok. Francis of Assisi lived a model life, but more importantly he created organizations and produced culture. Organization and culture are the only ways to make the world better which underlies your ideas about “living a good life”.
As an example of the concerns here, there are many Afrikaners in South Africa who are living a good life, and maybe they are even Saints. But as a people they are doomed because of political and cultural reasons. Unless they develop a form of sovereignty, they will be overrun in every city and town that they founded. Hence the importance of organization and culture. Another example: Afghans were able to resist American imperialism not because any individual was “good” or “skilled”, but because they had intense cultural practices and organization that gave them the ability to defend their homeland.
There are no shortage of Christian communities today that practice insane levels of self-sacrificial charity, truly loving the moral life, but all it takes is a biased news report and propaganda in media to make the average person instinctively hate Christians. And indeed, the early Christians did not focus on living a moral life. They focused on creating organization (centered around the eucharist) and culture (art, stories).
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