Agile is like any other development process, past and future: one set of people making sure that some other set of people do things the way the first set has had some perceived success with, according to some definition of perceived and success.

Not really. I've had some form of so-called "Agile" processes thrust upon me by people who didn't have any prior experience with it. All they did was read and article or a book or attended some 1-day course on it.