When I was young and I heard the quote about those doomed to repeat history, I thought I understood it. It was sort of poetic license that there would be similar mistakes made if we didnt take a good look at contributing causes. I thought it was history teachers trying to emphasize their own importance in modern politics. No, its even simpler than that. We will make the EXACT SAME mistakes. We will make them again. And we will make them because we have no sense of what the world looked like before we unmade them. Everywhere you look, you can see society forgetting how BAD things were. (Vaccines, unions, a strong middle class, a democracy, secularized governments.) We as a society are not struggling harder against the erosion of these gains because most people have no real sense of how bad things can (and will) get without them.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 05:51:50 +0000