We learn nothing, we’re fools following fools

History repeats itself over and over.

The rhythms of time never stop beating.

And yet, humans have notoriously short memories. Our brains are liars. We easily and rapidly reimagine experiences to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately recording what happened.

I read a popular study from a psychology journal showing that our brains generate false memories of events mere seconds after they have occurred. We paraphrase, distort and misremember almost immediately.

Hegel famously said that the only thing we learn from history, is that we learn nothing from history. And he was right. Those who suffer most are eager to suffer more. It’s our native inclination for traumatic reenactment, or repetition compulsion.

If you’re not familiar with this term, it’s the unconscious tendency to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances. Sometimes symbolically and sometimes literally.

Maybe your ex cheated on you repeatedly during high school or college. That experience is an awful form of emotional abuse, but despite consciously wanting healthy and loving relationships, you grow up and keep attracting partners who exhibit similar patterns of behavior.

Since you never processed and resolved your trauma, everyone you date as an adult is living in side piece heaven. Woops.

Or what about a business example? Like banks who get greedy make dumb investments in fraudulent businesses and nothingburger fads. These decisions ultimately trigger an international financial crisis. Wrongdoers get fired and some even go to prison.

But then a decade later, the same thing happens again. Because people’s unconscious biases dismiss the past trauma.

They learn nothing, and let the cycle of instability begin again. Short memories, indeed.

What’s crazy about traumatic reenactment and repetition compulsion is, they’re typically applied to individuals and groups. Never entire cultures or societies.

But the long arc of history suggests that there’s a link.

I read one study about the development of coronaphobia, which is not a joke. It’s the clinical term for the excessive triggered response of fear of contracting the virus. Coronaphobia generates excessive concern over physiological symptoms, significant stress about personal and occupational loss, increased reassurance and safety seeking behaviors, and avoidance of public places and situations, causing marked impairment in daily life functioning.

Makes sense. Hell, I had the virus twice, but I’m sure I had coronaphobia dozens of times. Who among us didn’t?

But this is where the opportunity for real reflection comes into play. Three years after the initial shutdown, the president announced the end of the national state of emergency and the federal public health emergency declarations. Our nation was officially no longer in a pandemic. Y

ay. Right around that time, I started reflecting seriously about what happened. To me and to the world. Because I knew history was going to repeat itself, and my brain was probably going to lie to me about it.

There was going to be another pandemic before we knew it, and I wanted to overcorrect. To achieve real growth. I didn’t want to be the guy who suffered most and was eager to suffer more. I wasn’t interested in the traumatic reenactment of my own fear. The time had come for assimilation. To think about whether my fears were legitimate, or if I had just inherited them from the media.

I needed to update my mental models to reflect the new information learned from my lived experience. God damn it, I was going to be conscious of my own cognitive processes and develop the ability to control them when the next disaster strikes.

That’s step one. Intention and attention. Giving ourselves permission to figure ourselves out. Deciding that we are not going to learn nothing. Overcoming all of the psychological obstacles related to any admission of mistakes. Admitting that we screwed up, and accepting people are going to look down on us for being incompetent.

It’s funny, most of us never learn how to learn from failure, only how to become defensive. It’s not because we lack the ability to learn, but because we tie up our sense of worthiness with effective performance.