"You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot"
About this Quote
Every utopian impulse comes with a built-in clown car. Kim Stanley Robinson’s line is funny because it refuses the romantic fantasy that “the people” are a coherent, wise organism. The profanity-lite “flippin” lands like an exasperated sigh: not righteous condemnation, just the weary realism of someone who’s watched committees calcify, message boards combust, and organizing meetings get hijacked by one loud guy with a pet theory.
The specific intent is deflationary. Robinson isn’t attacking movements as such; he’s puncturing the purist belief that collective action can be kept ideologically hygienic. The “larger than five people” threshold is the joke’s sharpest blade: it’s small enough to feel absurd, yet painfully accurate as a rule of human aggregation. Past a certain size, you’re not just coordinating goals; you’re managing noise, ego, and misinformation.
The subtext is a warning about moral accounting. If every movement will contain at least one idiot, then judging the entire project by its most embarrassing member becomes intellectually lazy and politically convenient. This is how opponents discredit labor, climate action, civil rights, fandoms, even science: find the weak link, circulate it, pretend it’s the chain. Robinson flips that logic. Idiocy isn’t evidence of illegitimacy; it’s evidence of scale.
Context matters because Robinson’s fiction lives in the trenches of big collective systems - revolutions, terraforming projects, climate governance. He knows that progress is rarely a clean march of the enlightened. It’s a messy coalition that has to build structures sturdy enough to survive its own inevitable “flippin idiot” without letting that idiot steer.
The specific intent is deflationary. Robinson isn’t attacking movements as such; he’s puncturing the purist belief that collective action can be kept ideologically hygienic. The “larger than five people” threshold is the joke’s sharpest blade: it’s small enough to feel absurd, yet painfully accurate as a rule of human aggregation. Past a certain size, you’re not just coordinating goals; you’re managing noise, ego, and misinformation.
The subtext is a warning about moral accounting. If every movement will contain at least one idiot, then judging the entire project by its most embarrassing member becomes intellectually lazy and politically convenient. This is how opponents discredit labor, climate action, civil rights, fandoms, even science: find the weak link, circulate it, pretend it’s the chain. Robinson flips that logic. Idiocy isn’t evidence of illegitimacy; it’s evidence of scale.
Context matters because Robinson’s fiction lives in the trenches of big collective systems - revolutions, terraforming projects, climate governance. He knows that progress is rarely a clean march of the enlightened. It’s a messy coalition that has to build structures sturdy enough to survive its own inevitable “flippin idiot” without letting that idiot steer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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