Thinking about the dialectic - if the synthesis is inevitable, then it is inextricably bound up in the thesis, thus the thesis makes the synthesis possible.
So the "fact" that, e.g. "all movies are good movies," makes possible the "fact" that Titanic was a bad movie. If it was not "true" that all films were good films, then it would not be "true" that Titanic is a bad film (see intro on Zizek).
Approaching it from another angle. Loose bellbottom pants became popular in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the reaction to this pants style was to wear tighter fitting jeans. We enter the early 1990s with Nirvana wearing tight fitting jeans. Nirvana was a 1980s style reaction to the 1970s and the 1980s. But because they came of the 1980s, they were still bound to the tight-fitting, 80s style reaction to the 1970s (had they worn loose fitting pants, they would be too complicit in the fashion style of the 1970s, which was part of what they were reacting against). Loose fitting jeans again emerged in the mid 1990s as a 1990s style reaction to the 1980s, distant enough from the 1970s so as to safely take some of their fashion sense. This style was embodied both by skater punks reacting to the pop hits of the 80s and by hip hop/gangsta rap groups, the pinnacles of popularity in the mid 90s. However, bound up closely to this jnco rebellion was the seeds of the skinny jeans reaction we see today. This was an ironic 1980s style reaction to the 1980s. Even in 1997 I saw 80s style tight jeans, 80s style faded shirts, etc. when it was supposed to be unpopular to emulate the 1980s. This is interesting, because when the 90s reaction to the 80s went full-blown, it became popular, so for those who reacted against the popular, the only option is to emulate it. And it indeed did remain unpopular until sometime in like 2003-4, when people like Ashton Kutcher brought it into the mainstream - they again made it popular to emulate the 1980s. So, since I'm so isolated from today's students I don't know, but I am suspecting a grassroots loose-jean reaction building, which should be coming out sometime in the mid 20-teens. This doesn't have to go by a strict decade schedule, as some waves may be for some reason bigger or more durable than others, but I suspect the pendulum will swing back to the other side. It will then of course be carrying with it an incipient tight-pants rebellion of some sort.
The point is, the succeeding rebellion (synthesis) is tied so closely to the antithesis and of course develops out of the seeds of the thesis. 1990s folks would not have taken up the jnco reaction had it not been for the bellbottoms of the 70s and the tight-fitting reaction of the 1980s.
