It started long before PG released Arc. My theory is that because most of those people are very intelligent yet utterly ineffectual, they act as a kind of supp

It started long before PG released Arc. My theory is that because most of those people are very intelligent yet utterly ineffectual, they act as a kind of support group for one another. They view Lisp as a monastic order where in order to keep the tradition alive, one is forced by the circumstances to give up all his worldly ambitions. PG didn't buy it, and succeeded. So to keep the ideology consistent, you need to introduce the assumption that PG is not a "true" Lisper.