Opportunist

The fourth category in the Duchin formula, a strategy from a 1991 speech teaching corporations how to dismantle activist organizations, which divides activists into radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists. Duchin described opportunists as those who follow the crowd from the front, and Marsh's translation into her own terms is exact. In Binding Chaos theory these are the endo-ideals. They are the creation of their reflectors, they almost never create a movement but are usually credited with it, and they can be trusted to act solely for personal gain. That last clause is offered as a practical reliability rather than as an insult, since an opportunist's behaviour is predictable in a way nobody else's is. The Duchin instruction ends with them, and the wording is worth attending to. Once the radicals are isolated, the idealists educated into realists and the realists co-opted, the credibility of the radicals is lost and the opportunists can be counted on to share in the final policy solution. Marsh describes how they are installed. Media, funding and position are offered to them, in the form of book advances, media awards, speaking circuits, academic and political positions, profiles, documentaries, consulting work and NGO funding, all of which promote people willing to stand in the position of change and do nothing. Her practical countermeasure is credit. Uncredited movements are irresistible to people who crave fame and influence, and allocating credit to an originator is what stops attempted coups by opportunists.

Social movement research studies co-optation and the professionalization of activism, with the non-profit industrial complex literature describing how funding reshapes movements and channelling theory describing how resources direct them into safer forms. Media research documents the manufacture of movement spokespeople who have no organizational mandate. The Duchin formula itself circulated widely after the Stratfor emails were released. Marsh's addition is the structural identification, since calling the opportunist an endo-ideal created by reflectors accounts for why the position exists at all rather than treating it as a personality that attaches itself to causes, and predicts that removing one will produce another unless the vacancy is filled.