A Lesson About History

George Santayana was an influential 20th century American thinker whose philosophy connected a rich diversity of historical perspectives, culminating in a unique and unrivaled form of materialism, one recommending a bold reconciliation of spirit and nature. [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

He didn’t say that “History Repeats itself…” He said the following: 

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness (read: remembering).  When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and then experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.  In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction.  This is the plane of manhood and true progress.  Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vein, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled, immortality in such a case must have secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus, old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.”  [Santayana, George; A Life of Reason, pages 82-83 (Scribner’s Sons:1934) Emphasis mine]

So, there are three (3) stages to the material collapse of a linear event flow sometimes referred to as “History.”  In the first stage humans are easily distracted and miss the chance to promote progress because of their nature.  They clamor for instant gratification and bully (barbarism) those who are more pensive (think of what a Nerd is and how such a person is treated with irrational contempt).  In the second stage of their intellectual degeneration, they permit themselves to be divested of their responsibility and accountability as members of their species. This is where the psychopaths among us are able to dominate the intellectual landscape and seize control of humanity’s Weltanschauung or world view.  Men (and women) adopt the mental nature of sheep and are easily indoctrinated into whatever hair-brained notion of existence is forced upon them because it is too much work to push back against the dominant minority controlling the articles of our common reality.  In the process, consecutive expansion of acquired experience is lost as is the persistence required to achieve such wisdom and the general population gives up building the tedious and detailed architecture of community.   Finally, in the third phase all retentiveness is cast aside as the impractical application of traditional values in lieu of a secular modernism into which humanity is gathered to become a part of their “influencer’s” distorted reality and thus become lab animals in a great experiment—their masters not really grasping the catastrophic consequences associated with the loss of fertile adaptation (read: thinking outside of the box).  Thus, existence becomes repetitive and rote. The mistakes of the past, having been forgotten, are repeated.  The horrific consequences of such irresponsibility plague all mankind for generations until someone stops the pernicious cycle by thinking things through and, ultimately, wins the approval of “the other” because their suggestion flatly ends the human suffering.

History doesn’t really repeat itself.  Humans fall into an intellectual vacuity that permits the insane among us to seize control of the social machinery and the architecture of our Civilization promoting chaos and savagery instead of adaptation, improvisation, and the willingness of all to work together to overcome calamity.  We are dumbed down purposefully so that our ruthless masters can maintain their control over our lives but in doing so the general population, collectively, engage in programmed human action that does not permit individual retentiveness.  Thinking outside to box; questioning social programming posed as governing policy; and self-instruction, through understanding and adaptation, are discouraged. Our memories, especially those passed on to us by our ancestors are exhausted and forgotten.  Indoctrination replaces experience and fertile adaptation (the product of retentiveness) and repetition replaces the malleable effect of experience or wisdom—the knowledge of a thing coupled with the experience of using it.

We are condemned to repeating the same mistakes over and over and over perpetuating the distortion of being enveloped in an unnatural order of hierarchical governance that does us no practical good.  And, as I said before, the catastrophic consequences of abstraction, mindlessness, and vacuity engineered by stupidity combine to perpetuate the allusion of consciousness until someone changes the paradigm by thinking things through.