An institution is, among other things, a memory device. The rules and procedures it enforces are not arbitrary bureaucratic friction; they are the crystallised lessons of previous failures. The regulation that seems pointless until you learn the accident that caused it. The procedure that seems excessive until you understand the fraud it was designed to prevent. Strip away the history and the rule looks absurd; restore the history and it looks like hard-won wisdom.

This is why institutional reform is genuinely difficult, not merely politically contested. When you dismantle an institution, you lose not just its current functions but its accumulated memory — all the lessons encoded in procedures whose origins have been forgotten. The reformers who come next inherit an institutional blank slate and must relearn, sometimes at great cost, what the previous generation had encoded and then discarded as obsolete.

The parallel with individual memory is close enough to be useful. A person who loses long-term memory does not simply lose access to facts; they lose the ability to predict consequences, to recognise patterns, to know which situations are safe and which are dangerous. Institutions with degraded memory make similar errors: they repeat mistakes their predecessors made and solved, reinventing wheels that were invented for reasons that were then forgotten.

None of this is an argument for conservatism in the sense of preserving all existing institutions unchanged. Some institutions encode the wrong lessons — lessons drawn from a context so different from the present that their application is harmful rather than helpful. The task is discrimination: understanding which constraints encode genuine wisdom and which are merely the residue of power arrangements that no longer serve. This requires exactly the kind of institutional memory that makes the task possible — and which institutional decay tends to destroy first.