“Why do we need to learn about this stuff?”, the child whines. “It happened two thousand years ago! It’s not relevant any more…”
“History is so boring”, the young parent declares. “It’s just a bunch of kings and queens and dates!”
Have you ever noticed that people seem to be, by and large, incapable of inserting their lives in a historical context? Their lives chug on, their hair turns greyer, and they reminisce about their younger days, when things were either better or worse than they are now. But the moment you ask them to include days prior to their fondest childhood memories into their accounts, things turn academic. Abstract. A footnote in an anthropological tome of non-repute rather than events that actually occurred. History is demoted to just plain stories.
“This new shift in politics, it completely up-ends everything that’s right”, the amateur pundit orates. “It didn’t used to be this way! Democracy is decaying! The sky is falling! Bwaaah!”
… “Time is flat circle”, a deranged Matthew McConaughey mutters to himself in an interrogation cabinet. And though commentators love to make fun of the quasi-metaphysical drivel that spews forth from his gob, it is none-the-less true. Events repeat. Time, as far as humanity is concerned, is cyclical.
Example: The 90’s came by, after the roaring excess of the 80’s, and hit a bit of a bump. But at the end of the decade, the western world kept enjoying it’s consumeristic surplus. Then the housing bubble shattered, and the world came crashing down into an ever deeper economic hole. The growth-centric economy just wasn’t sustainable. The centre couldn’t hold. And in these leaner times, with discontent populations in the western hemisphere who have been promised excess and freedom from commercials and political promises, begin to see through the lies. And up comes populism. Catering to the dumbest common denominators among the population. Demagogues catering to racism and nationalism, fear and frustration. Nowadays you can’t throw a rock through a political ensemble without hitting a racist or isolationist. And with one authoritarian faking an election to win himself a life-time-term in office, another authoritarian clenching his iron fist across south-eastern Asia, and another would-be-authoritarian bungling up his American nation into a civil war, we can begrudgingly conclude that the world is fucked. Again.
For it is nothing new. You can switch some names around and I could just as well have described Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Economic growth, fuelled by decades of exploiting foreign territory, finally bursts. Overindulged people find that their stolen privilege has run its course. Discontent, chaos, war, sickness, and the rise of populism and nationalism.
Or why not go back further? To the founding of western civilization, the backbone from which every western authoritarian has since found their inspiration; Rome. A deified political framework, progressively hollowed out by corruption, populism, authoritarianism, and with an economic framework that just wasn’t sustainable. And a collapse, like few others, that still sends geopolitical ripples through the world to this day. Or why not skip back another 2000 years, to the late bronze age collapse, which from what we can tell, shares with us many of the same old trademarks associated with a collapse of the dignity of society.
Time is a flat circle. This is how it always has been. Hard times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create hard times. The cyclical nature of man, ever repeating. The travesty of the Orange House is nothing new. Authoritarianism in Russia is nothing new. Imperial domination in China is nothing new. Not in essence. It is just the wheel ever turning.
But is this inevitable? Is this wheel just simply the way of things? Well, I like to think that it isn’t. There are key factors that bind us to this wheel. Factors that we have power over. For if we, as a species, were able to recognize our place on the wheel, recognize the repetition of history, then we could know. We could see the path ahead of us. And we, in our unbridled power and new-found wisdom, would have all the tools and precognition available to us to divert our path. To break the wheel. To deliver ourselves from these ravages of history.
But will we though? Seems highly unlikely that we’re going to this time around. We’ve already fallen into many of the same old pitfalls that history tries its fucking hardest to teach us to avoid. For as long as young and old alike do not see the inherent lessons to be harnessed from ages past, for as long as “history is boring” or “irrelevant”, we shan’t escape the wheel.
But there’s always next time! I just hope that there’ll be a next time…
/Sebastian Lindberg 7/7-2020
WastedWords 