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🧠 The Core Principle

Before Removing, Understand

Fences, rules, traditions, and code don't appear by accident. Someone had a reason for creating them. Until you understand that reason, you cannot judge whether it's still valid.

Reform vs Deform

Reforming is slow, respectful improvement. Deforming is hasty destruction. The distinction matters: hasty removal often causes more harm than the original problem.

💥 Real-World Disasters

  • China's Four Pests Campaign (1958) Mao ordered sparrows killed (they ate grain). Without sparrows, locusts swarmed. 15-55 million died in the resulting famine.
  • Netscape's Browser Rewrite (1998) Threw away 5 years of code. Took 3 years to rebuild. Microsoft's IE captured the market. Netscape died.
  • Twitter Verification (2022) Replaced identity verification with $8/month purchase. Impersonation chaos followed immediately.
  • The Sleep() Call A developer removed a mysterious Sleep(). Turns out it let another module initialize. Everything broke.
Source: Chesterton, G.K. (1929). "The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic." Chapter 4: "The Drift from Domesticity."