It’s funny—we all grow up on a diet of stories about the lone voice of reason trying to warn everyone about some imminent calamity, from Noah to Jor-El, and instinctively side with this hero and despise the ignorant ovine masses who jeer him or try to silence him. And yet whenever such a person appears in real life, our reflex is to join in with the mobs of scoffers and call them alarmists, hysterics, conspiracy freaks, and doomsayers. Nietzsche wrote, “One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”8 Or, as The Dude put
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