Given the True Death of Nathaniel Branden earlier this month, and how American libertarianism originated as a kind of Baby Boomer phenomenon in the 1960's and 1970's which elevated Branden into one of its preceptors, I wonder how this political subculture will look in the coming years as its Boomer adherents continue to die off, along with their enthusiasm for fringe writers and intellectuals like Branden, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, etc. I doubt that these writers will have much name recognition in 50 years, or that they will receive acknowledgement for having insights into the human condition that we can't live without.

We've seen this happen to trendy intellectuals before, where one generation's heavy thinker becomes the next generation's obscure crank your grandfather might have told you about. Like the philosopher Hegel in the 19th Century, for example; or the Polish aristocrat Alfred Korzybski, who invented the General Semantics idea which made a huge impression on science fiction writers in the middle of the 20th Century; or Buckminster Fuller, for yet another example.

Of course, this can work both ways, where someone stumbles upon an important insight that few others recognized at the time, only for the appreciation to come long after his death. This has happened to the Reverend Bayes.

I get the impression that transhumanist intellectuals have a short shelf-life as well, unless something really breaks loose and we start to see transhuman weirdness in our daily lives. Otherwise, we'll enter into the era of "FM who?" "Robert Anton who?" "R.U. who?" and some other people I could name.