Comment by lo_zamoyski

That's fascinating. I really do like that you found that you could get an explanation for everything.

It's a real problem for any culture when the explanations for why things are are either forgotten or actively suppressed. This is what tradition means. Sadly, in recent history, tradition has been attacked as thoughtless, if quaint convention, and discarded without prior investigation when it stands in the way of something someone wants. This view makes it easier to discard it in order to fill the void with something else; power becomes the rule. And sure, most people do follow convention without a deeper or thorough grasp of its reasons -- it is difficult to expect too much from the average person in this regard -- but part of what a cultural elite is for is to maintain tradition, to transmit it to the next generation along with its explanations, so that it can develop, so that it avoid both the calcification into mere empty convention as well as the loss of the wisdom that constitutes is. A cultural elite acts like a kind of referee to modulate cultural developments in light of prior knowledge.