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It is one of the enduring ironies of history that established systems of hierarchy rarely find it necessary to rely on sensible defenses as an essential means of maintaining power. Police or other modes of social authority are sometimes necessary, but logic rarely is. Indeed, throughout recorded history, the presence in all human societies of jerry-built modes of thought, behavior, and racial and religious memories have served to help protect traditional elites by strewing complicated psychological and emotional roadblocks in the path of those with unsanctioned but relatively thoughtful innovations. So perverse have been these habits of thought that established hierarchies have tended to be defended as venerable repositories of good sense when they are, in fact, merely powerful and orderly.
A complementary presumption is that insurgent movements are nonsensical. Indeed, the very thought that an insurgent movement, in its fundamental tenets, may be more than superficial calls into question the usefulness of the established order that resists the movement. Participants in the mainstream of most societies generally find such causal relationships difficult to accept because to do so would challenge their own individual modes of thought and behavior. The existence of a coherent protest movement is, therefore, an awkward fact for any society.
— Lawrence Goodwyn
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