I said: I was talking, obviously about our knowledge and how it is derived, not about "rules" in society, which are very different things.
You said: Not at all. The so-called "knowledge" of society and the individuals within it is used primarily for decision-making purposes, including rules, laws, and social institutions. You cannot separate ways of knowing from the decisions made in their name.
You evidently entertain the allusion that those who rule and make "rules" for societies actually use "knowledge" and "reason" in their choices and actions. You must live in heaven.
It accumulates regardless of whether the individual chooses to participate in society, chooses to be rational or irrational, or even understands the consequences of his/her actions. Those traditions which are useful survive.
Bunk. Most of the, "traditions," that survive in most of the world do so because most people are terrified of anything new and of thinking for themselves. All that is good about Western Civilization is due to those few brave and fully rational individuals who defied, "tradition," to discover truth and freedom. If not all, than most traditions (and most are older than anything in the West, the Muslim traditions for example) keep those who succumb to them in perpetual poverty and oppression and only survive because they haven't managed to quite kill them all off, and because the West steps in to save them every time one of the disasters their traditions produce, like famine, strikes.
Talk about conceit. You said, But at the same time, you (or Ayn Rand) must be able to explain to me how the rational observation of the individual should always trump the accumulated wisdom of the ages as is incorporated in tradition. I have a surprise for you. We don't have to explain anything to anyone. If everyone who has ever made anything of their lives (by defying tradition and superstition) had to explain it to anyone else before they did it, there would be no Western Civilization.
If you want to follow tradition or allow some authority to speak for you and make your decisions and dictate what you will believe, do so. You do not need to explain it to anyone else. Of course your free to explain it to anyone who wants to listen. You are not free to demand others explain to you why they disagree with you.
Hank
And most of the traditions you malign are the reason for the things you value most: freedom, rationality, and the concept of natural law. As F. A. Hayek famously put it, morality is not the product of our reason; it is the other way around. Our systems of though grew out of the traditions we followed.
Ironic, isn't it, that your world-view comes closest to to that of the leftists: that reason is king, that the rationally ordered and explained is much superior to the product of tradition and the uncontrolled product of mass decision-making (socialism over capitalism), and society and tradition is devalued compared to one person's inferior "knowledge." That's the end product of your intellectual path, you know. What arrogance, that you would claim to know better than the millions that have lived and died to establish our Western traditions. You really should read some Hayek, specifically The Fatal Conceit, but I guess that might actually require you to examine your belief system, and a rational person like you couldn't possible examine his own premises, could he...