Daily Inspiration Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Safety, in Galbraith's telling, is less about facts than about belonging. The line lands like a punchy office memo, but it’s really an indictment of how big institutions metabolize error: they don’t punish wrongness as such; they punish deviation. In a “great organization” (a phrase that drips with irony), the majority functions as insurance. If everyone is wrong together, blame dissolves into process, committees, and “reasonable assumptions.” If you’re right alone, you become the problem - not because you failed, but because your correctness exposes the group’s cowardice and the leadership’s inattentiveness.

Galbraith’s intent is to spotlight the perverse incentives that thrive in bureaucracies and corporate hierarchies: reputational risk outweighs empirical risk. The subtext is careerist and psychological. People in large systems learn to optimize for survivability: align with the consensus, speak in hedges, adopt the house vocabulary. Being right can be an act of aggression when it implies others were negligent, especially superiors. So the organization quietly trains dissent out of its talent, then celebrates “teamwork” as a virtue rather than an obedience mechanism.

Context matters: Galbraith spent a life orbiting government, academia, and policy-making, where decisions are rarely audited cleanly and outcomes can be blamed on “unforeseeable” forces. His point isn’t that majorities are always wrong; it’s that institutions often convert collective error into legitimacy. The quote works because it names a social truth people recognize instantly but rarely admit: consensus can be a shelter, not a compass.