It’s Not A Good Idea, Just Great Marketing

The world revolves around ideas.  Political and economic ideologies are what drive the modern world and direct the course of humanity in one direction or another.  Knowledge is the currency of the modern job market, not physical ability or nobility as it was in the Medieval era.  If you are a businessperson, you won’t last long with redundant ideas, unless of course you work for bank or some other government-backed industry.
But most ideas are terrible.  Usually in a free market, they are discarded like a candy wrapper, never to be heard from again.  Yes, there is the occasional story about how some low-level flunky had a really good idea, got rejected because it was perceived as a bad idea, and then went on to become a success in life on his or her own.  But those incidents are rare and few.
In reality, you can have the best idea in the world, but without good marketing, then you are simply out of luck and won’t see any kind of success from your idea.  You could be smartest person in the world, be able to solve complex problems in seconds, and have solutions for the world’s biggest problems but it will amount to nothing if nobody hears about it.
Karl Marx, for example, developed nothing new.  As far as Leftist ideology, he was beaten by the Anabaptists, many Puritans, and Robert Owen, who himself coined the term “Socialist” and was extremely anti-religious.  But Karl Marx was a pretty good marketer.  He distanced himself from other Leftists by naming “his” ideology communism, which was really just Socialism that was to be forced on people through the government.  Before Marx, the Left was content to continually experiment with different forms of communes and hope that they would one day perfect it.  Marx founded a revolutionary movement that sought to overthrow the status quo and replace it with communism.
Or take, for example, John Maynard Keynes.  While I don’t know too much about his economic theory, other than his encouragement of spending to break the recessions and depression, I do know that by and large they have been proven to be spectacular failures.  Keynes himself never really had a concrete theory as he adjusted it to suit his own views at the time.
But Keynes was a masterful marketer when it came to his ideas.  He was apparently a very charming man who drew in a lot of followers.  He was also able to gain high positions in Britain’s higher learning institutions and corner the market in the realm of economic ideas.  As such, he was able to prevent the ideas of Ludwig Von Mises from becoming translated into English because of his criticisms.
So we have two major ideologies, one that is largely political and one that is largely economic and yet both have been proven to be really bad ideas.  Recent history has demonstrated as much.  And yet, these ideas are continually held aloft as some holy grail of their particular field.  The Western democracies still follow the misguided theories of Keynes and the communist movement is still strong to some degree in many places around the world.  Humanity has proven that you don’t need a good, practical, and workable idea to get ahead and become a god among men.  You just need good marketing.