Life & Wisdom Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond’s line lands like a cold splash on the face of our self-image as rational moderns. It’s not just a jab at trend-chasing; it’s an argument about how cultures, like individuals, confuse social signaling with survival. The key word is “temporarily,” a reminder that even deeply maladaptive behavior can feel persuasive in the moment because the benefits aren’t practical, they’re social: belonging, status, the comfort of imitation.

The sentence is built as a neat little trap. “Fads” sounds frivolous, then Diamond widens the charge: societies don’t only add useless habits; they also “abandon practices of considerable use.” That second clause is the knife twist. It suggests decline doesn’t always come from external shocks or ignorance, but from prestige-driven self-sabotage. The subtext is evolutionary without being biological: selection happens in the arena of ideas and norms, and the winners aren’t always the most functional, just the most contagious.

Context matters. Diamond writes in the long shadow of Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he asks why societies succeed, fail, and misread their environments. This quote compresses a core theme: humans are pattern-copying machines in complex systems, and complexity makes feedback slow. If a practice’s usefulness is delayed, invisible, or distributed (soil conservation, public health, institutional checks), it becomes easy to drop it for something that pays off immediately in attention or cohesion.

The intent is bracingly anti-romantic: don’t assume cultural persistence equals wisdom. Survival, Diamond implies, often depends on resisting what feels fashionable.