Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

We may follow a practice or a tradition not because we like it or even think it defensible, but merely because we think that most other people like

Surowiecki’s argument is that we need dissenting voices, people who challenge the conventional wisdom, resist the fashionable consensus, and disturb the intellectual peace. “Follow the person in front of you” is as dangerous to humans as it is to army ants.

“Tradition” is nothing else than the codified thinking of human beings who lived at times when ignorance was even greater than ours.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the