Those that don't know history repeat it - True or False?

[JesusGirl1]

"Those that don't know history repeat it".

Would you agree that most people who don't want to know history end up repeating it because they "didn't want" change or didn't want to grow past what they were told as a child. If you were "told" you wern't allowed to do something for the first 10 years of your life, stifled, powers taken away because your "father" didn't want you knowing more than him and you didn't get over that do you think you would ever learn to do anything better than him or use his phrase for the rest of your life?

Pursuit of Happiness:
Will Smith says to his son "Don't ever let anyone tell you you can't (achieve) do something, not even me"...

When people have to give advice instead of "doing" something about the problem....the world becomes stagnant just like our government. Czechoslovakia just lost a great leader and playwrite.

 

[blackdot]

To some extent it's true. If you don't know what has gone wrong in the past, then you will in turn try those same things.
The problem is that sometimes, you see what went wrong and you get determined to make it work so you try the same thing over and over again just to be stubborn.

 

[RJLJD]

i agree with blackdot.

i think you're more predisposed to make the same mistakes if you don't know that they occurred in the past. you don't know to avoid them. at the same time, there are the stubborn people that will say "oh, i know better, that bad occurrence won't happen to me", and then they get in over their heads too and fail. a literal example of this that comes to mind is Hitler trying to invade Russia after Napoleon's efforts to do the same were a clear failure.

 

[Badjedidude]

A lot of people know history quite well and still repeat it.

 

[Bread]

A lot of people know history quite well and still repeat it.

I agree with the sith, here. And seems the trend is to take notes and see if they can outdo the last bastards what done it, too.

 

[Anonymous Rex]

I think if you know history you can see patterns develop better, maybe see how a process that's currently starting off parallels something historical.

It can be helpful, but I think only if you look at overall patterns, and similar patterns in modern life.

 

[mintymint]

Why wouldn't we repeat history? We're all the same human beings with the same urges, desires, tendencies, instinct as every generation before. Why would we act any differently? Sure, maybe we're more 'enlightened' a bit these days, but knowledge is such a poor match for the psychological makeup of your brain and your intrinsic human impulses. And besides, reading cautionary tales from the past in a book or watching a film about it is a poor substitute for first hand experience. In that way humans are pretty straight forward - or maybe stupid - but there is absolutely no substitute for experience, no matter how smart you think you are. So maybe it's just essential that history repeats itself, experiencing is the best way we learn. It seems as though scientific and practical knowledge accumulates reliably over generations, but the emotional lessons, the lessons in humanity - those are much harder, if not nearly impossible to impart academically.

 

[Callie]

I learn history by reading warning labels

Oh wait, that's just how I learn what dumb people have done in the past.

 

[Anonymous Rex]

Why wouldn't we repeat history? We're all the same human beings with the same urges, desires, tendencies, instinct as every generation before. Why would we act any differently? Sure, maybe we're more 'enlightened' a bit these days, but knowledge is such a poor match for the psychological makeup of your brain and your intrinsic human impulses.

But if we know precisely how bad and good things happened, the chain of events that allowed tyrants to rise or worthwhile institutions to be built,we can look out for those kinds of patterns in the future.

I've read stories of, during the cold war, in the Soviet nations people xeroxing copies of 1984 and passing them around between them, as a way of understanding the institutions that oppressed them. Understanding helped them to cope with their suffering.

And we know, from company records, that a large number of major corporations collaborated with the Nazis - IBM put together a punchcard system that helped them organise how to classify different people, where to send them.
Hopefully knowing this will help us look out for corporations making deals with current or future tyrants.

I don't think we are any more or less 'evolved', but the more patterns we can see in the past, the better equipped we are to draw parallels in the future.