History Only Repeats Itself When We Don’t Learn From It
Philosophical Free Verse
History repeats itself, as the saying goes, implying the influence of fate in the process of progress. Or perhaps not progress; for repetition cannot produce. A disguise, it would seem, cloaks the true nature of the world; what we’d call free will.
History, then, must be a rule, a scientific law. And we must be the particles, bound by forces to act when acted upon.
Do quarks know of their fate even as they fulfill it? Is it different to act than to believe?
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Sight is power. Even not knowing what’s to the left, one can choose to turn right. The king does not restore sight to his subjects; consequently, power is concentrated. A single independent variable. Predictable.
Predictability can look like repetition to the blind.
Would we not expect a thousand kings to stumble and a thousand more to leap if ten thousand kings all turned right at once?
Knowledge comes from a turning of the soul away from the shadows and towards the light. It is understanding rather than repeating. The way forward is up; fate is just ignorance. Cave dwellers can’t help but hunt and hide; the totality of their agency is consumed by necessity. Now look on our works ye psyche and compare; the human empire is vast and beyond despair.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Can those who learn the past then create it?
First quote by Desiderius Erasmus
Second quote by George Santayana
