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Kuhn argued that revolutions in human thought progress through five stages. It’s no accident that the word Kuhn used for the inconclusive-muddle stage—a stage that can last for decades, even centuries—was “crisis.”* To change how we talk is to change who we are. More and more every day, how we talk is a function of how we talk on the internet. The bigoted propagandists of the alt-right are wrong about almost everything, but they are correct about this much: the United States of America was founded by white men, for white men. The problem with the bigots is not that they acknowledge this aspect of the country’s history; the problem is that they cling to it, doing their utmost to revive the horrors of the past, instead of taking up the more difficult task of piecing together the future. The bigots are not destined to win. Nor are they destined to lose. The ending is not yet written. The blithely optimistic view—the view that still infuses far too many op-eds and Silicon Valley pitch meetings and political stump speeches—is that the basic good sense of the American people will prevail, that the good stuff will spread, that if we just hold fast we will surely end up in the right place. But the vehicle doesn’t drive itself. Getting to the right place takes work. Copernicus was not the first astronomer to suggest that the Earth revolved around the sun. Aristarchus of Samos proposed the same idea in the third century B.C., but Aristotle convinced everyone that the idea was wrong. Overcoming Aristotle’s mistake took almost two thousand years, and even then it required a struggle.
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Andrew Marantz (Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation)