One means of enforcement is the preference these days for thinkers who remind winners of their victorious selves, Giussani said. A critic in the traditional mold is often a loser figure—a thorn, an outside agitator, a rumpled cynic. The rising thought leaders, even though their product is ideas, are less like that and more like sidekicks of the powerful—buying parkas in the same Aspen stores, traveling the same conference circuit, reading the same Yuval Noah Harari books, getting paid from the same corporate coffers, accepting the same basic consensus, observing the same intellectual taboos.
