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Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising:

There’s a paradox here. If we want to make change, we need to go first, hanging over one edge or another. But often, that innovation reminds (some) people of a past event that went wrong. We begin by serving an audience that’s okay with that, because it’s the only audience that will give us a chance with our new thing. Send a signal that feels like

Cultural change requires that large numbers of individuals refuse the conventional perches…”23 Such perches represent the socially-acceptable views and perspectives that we are conditioned to believe, and the pressure to conform to acceptable representations and viewpoints of the majority is considerable.

This means, of course, that the most foundational change of all, the one from which all else issues, is hardest to track. It means that politics arises out of the spread of ideas and the shaping of imaginations. It means that symbolic and cultural acts have real political power. And it means that the changes that count take place not merely onstage

The idea of staying with things just as they are, without a plan, of suspending our model of how things work, puts us at a frontier of unknowing, which is to say at a place that is “dark” to our previous conception of things, to our plan for ourselves and our notion of how everything works. We avoid this dim frontier, and so we stay stuck.