Newton’s First Law of Motion famously implies that things have inertia—on their own, they don’t want to change what they’re doing and only do so if something acts on them from outside. A car needs its wheels to turn, a ship needs thrust. It turns out that the zeitgeist is subject to the very same law. Outside of something big and catastrophic happening, it takes a lot for a whole population to change the way it starts believing about something. And our modern, always-on, permanently connected society is even more like that. Distrust of authorities and the media, the growing sense that things
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