The company I work for, for many years, has been a vendor of a specific type of machine. We have become very adept at maintaining and servicing those machines, and their specific idiosyncrasies.

About two years ago that changed. Due to some troubles with that vendor, we took on a (formerly) competing line. And started the process of making it our own.

See, like the line we gave up, which we knew well, there is tribal knowledge. There are untold tricks and shortcuts you can take- if you know them. A job which would take even an experienced mechanic two hours to do, might take a member of the tribe ten minutes. because he has the knowledge of his tribe. SO starting from scratch, we are trying to gain that tribal knowledge by ourselves, a little bit at a time, and it’s hard won knowledge at best.

The tribe that used to have that knowledge cannot impart it, because the knowledge occurs to you only when you need it.

FOr example. The Exploder has an alternator on the passenger side. It makes it very difficult to get to the spark plugs on that side of the engine. Almost impossible, in fact. So it’s a common trick to lose the serpentine belt, take off the alternator, and reach in the hole just created to change plugs.

Or you can just reach in under the fender. All four passenger side plugs are easily acessible from under the passenger side wheel well, and it takes minutes to do the job- rather than hours. Knowledge that is learned, and can only be passed person to person, often only when you’re doing the job. Tribal knowledge.

Conservatives have a huge wealth of tribal knowledge. And we are not very damned good at passing it on. Part of that is the pain. A lot of the knowledge we have is born of pain, because a lot of lessons are painful. Sometimes we’re jealous of the knowledge. “Let them learn for themselves”

You know fire burns, and you know it hurts, and you will tell your child to get away, but as Pete once said “No one respects the flame quite like the fool who’s badly burned” We all know that the lesson of communism is that it doesn’t work, and can never work. And for many, that lesson was hard learned indeed. And we can tell our next generation the truths of this, but they most often need to learn the lessons themselves. We CAN impart this tribal knowledge if we can allow the next generation to experiment in non destructive ways so they can learn the lessons in a small scale, before they attempt to apply perpetually failed policies to the real world, in the false hope they will work.