“Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to reconfigure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new understanding of everything that matters and of how to act. The chances are strongly against this, however. There are always powerful conservative forces in the culture that tend to destroy the new understanding or to take it over and mobilize it for the current order. If the new world fails, therefore, it is necessarily measured by the current understanding, and against this norm it can look ridiculous.”