Granted, there are certainly individuals who learn from their mistakes—and, just as importantly, from the mistakes of others—and occasionally organizations that do; but if you take human beings as a whole, if you look at the national level and the world level, the record just isn’t good. The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana is famous for teaching us that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it; the great British historian Arnold Toynbee is famous for his insight that history is essentially cyclical, the same patterns repeating over and over. What does this tell you? Nothing you didn’t already know, that’s what. To take one example, appeasement worked so well with Hitler in the 1930s that we tried it again with the Soviet Union—for a while—and then we tried it with Iran . . . and we kept trying it with Iran . . . and now we’re trying it even harder with Iran, apparently on the theory that we just haven’t groveled enough to make them play nice. Meanwhile, the government of Iran just keeps getting crazier and crazier, so you do the math on that one. But do we learn anything from this? On the evidence, no.This is not, of course, a new phenomenon—not even close. The disinclination to learn lessons we really don’t want to learn is very, very human, and we can always find some way to rationalize that disinclination, some sort of excuse to justify it. The thing is, though, when rationalizations meet reality, what happens? You ever dropped an egg on a hard floor? If you went up to the top of the courthouse building and threw that egg at the road, do you think the extra momentum would help it break through the pavement? No—you’d just get a bigger explosion. When we refuse to learn from what went wrong the last time—when we convince ourselves that this time, it will be different—that’s what we get. Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
