Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay.
For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect (https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...), where he elaborates on the connection between risk and survival of ideas.