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Notes -
Here's a simple alternative hypothesis.
Almost no one actually saw that debate live. Anyone who didn't see it live can't update their thinking and behavior unless the information contained in the debate was transferred to them. In 1983, a large supermajority of the people in a position to transfer that information to the public at large either directly agreed with or were at a minimum ideologically allied with the supervillain, understood that the ideas expressed in the debate would disadvantage their interests if they were clearly understood and widely disseminated, and so declined to disseminate them to the broad public in such an unvarnished form. Either they kept the ideas from getting a public hearing, or they made sure they were spun sufficiently to actually sound attractive to enough of the populace to not be a strategic own-goal.
I have a simpler alternative: people expect a certain level of gnostic contrarianism from artists. The starving artist is a stock trope. So is the passionate, unstable genius a la Van Gogh.
When this describes a painter or a musician, the effects are contained. When applied to an architect, though, there are actual externalities. That’s Alexander’s attack on Deconstructivism:
Eisenman responds that such feelings enforce a status quo. The need to feel comfortable is a psychological dead end, making the audience shy away from—he calls it “cosmology,” but I think it’s something more like “truth”? He argues that we won’t deal with our real anxieties by papering them over with neo-Greek facades. Cliché at this point, perhaps, but much more in line with the popular conception of a gnostic artist. I can see why people, especially those who are way down the postmodern rabbit hole, find him convincing.
Transcript here.
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I agree about the actual debate at the time in which it happened. I mean to use the debate to raise the larger point that the debate is typical of socialists and socialist communication. And then ask the question of why do people not respond to clearly professed evil.
edit: I also agree that many were aligned.
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