Quote of the day

This quote doesn't come from one of those massive quotation database site, but from another blogger, Matthew at Like Cooking a Small Fish. The quote comes from his post that explains the name of the blog.

The story of the 20th century might well be that despite our self-conception as rational beings, most “rational” plans for ordering society produced undesirable results, whereas stable political and economic outcomes were generally obtained naturally and democratically, without constant top-down control.

The quote originally caught my attention because it uses the word "rational", but I really think he makes an excellent point about the importance of democracy and the limitations of rational action. Maybe in a democracy, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

h/t: Poliblog