Every day, in almost every field, someone experiences what can only really be described as a wake-up call. They have gotten things terribly wrong. Somehow, they have ended up on the wrong side. The “second brain” in their gut—that ten-billion-nerve knot—tells them that life can’t go on this way. It just can’t. And so, on moral, or at least deeply personal, grounds, they jump the gap.
The apprehension that you are in some profound sense “living the wrong life” can seem so sudden as to be literally breath-taking—and then so apt as to have been inevitable. When a novelist or short story writer pulls off this effect, what James Joyce called “a revelation of the whatness of a thing” lands hard on readers, and they understand the world in a new way now. When these kinds of epiphanies interrupt the daily routines of real people, their lives can change on the spot. It’s a compelling thing to see. Computer hackers, having served their time and mulled their crimes, go to work for the FBI to hunt hackers. Christian rockers recant their earlier statements of faith. Archconservatives carve out new professional identities as vocal liberals.
from TIME MAGAZINE (US edition)
April 5, 2007
It’s easy to get the sense these days that you’ve stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren’t. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They’ve changed into something like their own opposite.
There’s Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away–and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There’s historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation’s poor.
From modest recants–Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming–to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.
