culture

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?