💾 Archived View for thefringthing.smol.pub › 1637431211 captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:14:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Finvenkoismo ("final victoryism") represents the traditional programme of the Esperanto movement: to propagate the language until its official adoption as a universal lingua franca. This was seen as a way to promote internationalism and prevent war, especially in the early days of the movement.
A manifesto was circulated at the 1980 conference of Esperanto's youth organization in Rauma, Finland which challenged finvenkoismo. It asserted that since the officialization of Esperanto in the next decade was not probable (quite an understatement), the movement required alternative goals. The manifesto's authors conceived of Esperantists as a kind of linguistic diaspora with a distinct culture and proposed that they develop that culture so that they could "show the world that we can [...] say something [...] culturally original and internationally valuable." This programme became known as raŭmismo.
At first look, raŭmismo is more appealing than finvenkoismo. But no community can survive without new members, and one which becomes too inward-looking risks becoming incomprehensible to the outside world; no one will recognize your achievements if they cannot even tell what the point of the effort was in the first place. On the other hand, anyone who has been a part of any social space on the Internet is familiar with the tendency for a community to cater more and more to a "lowest common denominator" as it grows. So it's necessary to strike some balance between getting bigger and getting better.