Comment by paulorlando

That story is very Chesterton Fence. If Chesterton was working in a canal instead of walking on a country path. There's a balance between preserving memory and maintaining and benefitting from that knowledge and choosing what not to remember.

When Kurt Cobain shot and killed himself in 1994, his widow went on TV to say that what he did was wrong. Cobain’s death then did not result in others’ killing themselves (known as the “Werther effect”). Robin William’s suicide 20 years later, however, did result in more deaths as the story spread widely.

But otherwise, I do agree that we should preserve institutional memory and that putting processes over people can lead to forgetting.