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A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
The Vision of the Anointed
Thomas Sowell
Experts have their place and can be extremely valuable in those places, this no doubt being one reason for the old expression, “Experts should be on tap, not on top.” For broader social decision-making, however, experts are no substitute for systemic processes which engage innumerable factors on which no given individual can possibly be expert, and engage the 99 percent of consequential knowledge scattered in fragments among the population at large and coordinated systemically during the process of their mutual accommodations to one another’s demand and supply.
Intellectuals and Society
Thomas Sowell
So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether to remain a conscious servant of falsehood (of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one’s family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies). Or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one’s children and contemporaries.
Live Not by Lies
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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