You're trying to harness the power of art for your politics. If you forget politics, you've lost your purpose. If you forget art, you've lost your purpose.
No!
In the sentence "You're trying to harness the power of art for your politics." the purpose is defined in the clause 'for your politics'. The subgoal, subservient to the actual goal, is 'harness the power of art'.
You lose your purpose if you think that your purpose is to "harness the power of art for your politics" instead of actually furthering said politics.
If you forget art, you've lost your purpose.
Only if your purpose was artistic instead of political, in which case the phrase "harness the power of art for your politics" was a misrepresentation of the motivations in question.
Today's post, Politics and Awful Art was originally published on 20 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Litany Against Gurus, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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