On the theme of the dangers of total resistance to change, my Tocqueville-reading-group-running boss, @jayshelt, highlighted the following passage from Democracy in America: I cannot prevent myself from fearing that men will arrive at the point of looking on every new theory as a peril, every innovation as a distressing trouble, every social progress as a first step toward a revolution, and that they will altogether refuse to move for fear that they will be carried away. I tremble, I confess, that they will finally allow themselves to be so much possessed by a relaxed love of present enjoyments that interest in their own future and that of their descendants will disappear, and they will rather follow the course of their destiny weakly than make a sudden and energetic effort when needed to redress it. People believe that the new societies are going to change face daily, and I am afraid that in the end they will be too unchangeably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same mores, so that the human race will stop and limit itself; that the mind will fold and refold itself around itself eternally without producing new ideas, that man will exhaust himself in small, solitary, sterile motions, and that, while constantly moving, humanity will no longer advance.

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