So say politicians. If all are so, one is no worse off than the rest, whereas solitary wisdom passes for folly. So important is it to sail with the stream... Better be wise with the many than a fool all alone.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Written in a century where standing alone against a crowd could cost a career, a patron, or a life, this counsel of camouflage was survival advice. Read today, it is the reasoning behind every compliance scandal of the modern era: the balance sheet everyone signed, the safety report everyone approved, the price nobody questioned because nobody else did. The defensible half, choosing your battles and not contradicting a room merely to prove a point, is fully covered by maxim 43 (think with the few, speak with the many), which manages distribution without surrendering the judgment itself. What this entry offers instead is the warning: when you notice that your only argument for a decision is that everyone else is doing it, you have found the exact sentence that precedes most institutional disasters. The full period logic we leave in its century.