The Prophet founds new games, which yield new delicious byproducts. The creative frontier starts large and uncrowded until everyone’s squeezed. The Royal Society, just twelve geeks meeting on Wednesdays, compare notes toward novel method. More parallel hierarchies means more paths for status advancement, plus a diversity of goods at market. Every tourney’s a pyramid scheme for early-mover reasons; recruiting new members to beef out the team’s just second nature. Every freeway needs an onramp. Sheer numbers lend their own legitimacy; scale and force their own formidable logic.1 Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged.2 The faster you recruit, the faster the game crowds, cargocults, collapses. Running a marathon is all about pacing. Have you ever watched an Olympic mile, or the way thoroughbreds jockey for position? “They came from behind” makes killer TV but sometimes behind is pure advantage, drafting off the slipstream. “Our particular form of scenius runs a Belgian tourniquet.”
“It took a while before the movement gave them a legitimacy that they didn't have individually” (Tom Surgal, Fire Music on Coleman, Taylor, Ayler, Coltrane, & Sun Ra).
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.