A civilisation needs error correction

Civilisations advance when they create ways to discover and correct mistakes.

Science does this through criticism and experiment. Markets do it imperfectly through failure and reallocation. Democracies attempt it through opposition, elections, and distributed authority.

None of these systems guarantees truth. Their strength is that error does not have to remain permanent.

The most dangerous institutions are not those that make mistakes. Every institution will. They are those that turn disagreement into disloyalty and make correction more costly than persistence.