just thinking thru an idea

• we can only understand the world through our own constructed narratives.
• narratives have a downside: coherence ≠ completeness, and thus, as it is impossible for effective, concise, narratives to include every relevant detail, our understanding of anything is always going to be flawed. (is it even possible to reach a conclusion on anything??)
• in a classic narrative, antagonists (whether environmental or personified) set the preconditions that necessitate/justify a protagonist's existence. in other words, villains act, and heroes react.
• cyclic trope applies to almost all things; public opinion/perception swings like a pendulum. as heroes of our individual stories, its in our nature to aim to have the last word, the counterargument, the reaction.
• the pendulum metaphor may be flawed: it suggests that the movement is symmetric and that there exists a center of gravity (a golden mean, perhaps) which I'm kinda doubtful of.
• the effect of reacting in the opposite direction of the current popular momentum, is that a perceived villain is created out of the mass of people that are following/fueling that momentum, which leads to unproductive divisiveness.
• what's interesting about (social/political/cultural) movements is that, their existence is justified only by the fact that they are reacting to a larger evil (harmful preconditions), but the more successful they become, the less compelling their narrative becomes. as the preconditions which necessitate the movement weaken, the movement's credibility weakens as well.
• another driving force of the cyclic trope is a constant search for novelty and a desire to distinguish oneself from the crowd. we always love an underdog.