Extremists move the middle.
Compromise is everywhere. Most of us can't possibly be pure extremists or true fundamentalists, so we draw the line somewhere in the middle.
And so it's left to the zealots.
The people at either end have little hope of moving the masses all the way to their end of the argument. Instead, what they do is make it feel safer to change the boundaries, safer to recalibrate the compromise.
Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so.
- Seth Godin, from the blog post Moving the Line (the power of a zealot)
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