The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

by Tamim Ansary

A paradigmatic social change is always going to seem sudden because a paradigm is invisible until it isn’t. When a whole society goes through a pervasive change, it may feel like everyone is changing their mind at once, but it’s actually a social version of the paradigm shift described by Kuhn. We’ve seen it happen many times in history. All the great religions represented paradigm shifts. A discrete set of events took place. They dropped into a pool of incoherence, and suddenly, for a great many people, everything made sense again. Stark social and political examples of social paradigm shifts abound in the last century alone. Consider the sudden metamorphosis of 1930s Germany into a Nazi world. Afterward, horrified Germans tried to represent the momentary triumph of Nazism as a coup: a small clique took power and forced everyone else to behave badly. At the time, however, it certainly looked like a great many Germans simply and rather suddenly bought into the Nazi paradigm—they became Nazis.