Smart work here, as always.

When my field first encountered Kuhn, everyone was desperate to recast what they were doing in terms of “paradigm shifts,” and it took me a while to understand the weird reversal that I think you’re describing here: we see these heroic/abnormal thinkers as disruptive, and figure that if we want to achieve what they did, then we need to find something to disrupt. Because heroes can be disruptive, we mistake disruptionism as somehow intrinsically heroic.

And that’s patently false — if anything, I lean towards believing the exact opposite. Because the people whose lives are most susceptible to disruption are precisely those who haven’t been able to manipulate that structural inertia on their own behalf, the ones who are most vulnerable, the ones whose lives real heroes commit to protecting and improving.

I could go on, but instead I’ll just thank you for sparking my brain this morning. Thanks! -cgb