@RealCynicalFox
I remember reading this from Heinlein as a young man and it took experience for me to fully understand it. People and institutions will persist in demonstrably wrong or incorrect thinking/activity long after it has been proven to be so by clever insiders. Moreover they will work to professionally and/or socially pillory any who challenge their institutional or intellectual inertia before the conclusion becomes so overwhelmingly and inescapably self-evident that the institutionalists themselves are forced to change under (usually) external pressure. The institutionalists will then usually demand that no accountability attach to their own intransigence, regardless of the costs it may have imposed in the interim. General Billy Mitchel would be a classic case of this phenomenon.