A pillar of society is looking dangerously cracked. To be sure, its symmetric perfection had been frustrated from nearly the beginning by all too familiar blemishes, eventually developing outright cracks here and there... but never quite so severely as it had by now. In fact, onlookers now found themselves at something of a loss as to whether or not this object could really have been a pillar of anything at all--surely, something now so badly degraded could never actually have been an essential part of the foundation for anything so mighty as the edifice which seems now to stand alone beside it, in defiant autonomy.
Overnight, sentiment that the pillar must go was crystallized into an unspoken Zeitgeist, rescuing as well sundry other misgivings that had before been all but damned to vainly ferment in apparent perpetuity.
Nevertheless, a cadre of rather suspicious looking pillar apologists would also emerge from the confusion, and before long, their intransigence would become all too evident. In earnest unison, they would clamour together, claiming not only that they alone possessed the unique ability to fill the cracks of the now precarious pillar, but moreover, that the necessity of the pillar itself was in fact indisputable, by their own logic, and therefore their own authority.
It would be at this precise moment in which a daring champion could reify the unspoken Zeitgeist, explicating it directly to the people, altogether shedding the timidity characteristic of leaders in older times. Now, our champion had only to speak forbidden truth of society's unsoundness categorically, plainly, and undeniably. This would serve to once and for all drive off the snakes, who would unpatriotically stand in the way of its fundamental restructuring (and who would instead have us focus instead on their precious but ultimately false pillar, all the while the rest of it crumbles completely).
In fact, our champion would be so effective, that what had previously been subdued into tame resentment, is suddenly whipped into a frenzy, fomenting society into a great transformation.
Now, suppose we are to take this man's words as truly speaking to some unacknowledged Zeitgeist, which would propel us into a new golden age, for want only of being spoken by somebody so brave or independently-minded as him. My question is this: given the unprecedented ease with which he sheds customs of propriety, logic, and fact for purely opportunistic rhetorical whims, exactly why shouldn't we also consider the possibility that the transformation he will bring will also be tainted by the same level of opportunism? Or that the very narrative in this post is also the result of opportunism? And have we been here before?
