I think we are too busy lying to ourselves about the past to learn from it. History itself is bad enough, what with it being so full of "victor's tales", but then take the just plain myths and legends - hell, look at the number of Westerners who think there is some factual truth in the Jesus myth. 30-40%, maybe? And worse in the US, especially the rabid depths to which they let perversion of it ruin their brains. We're supposed to learn from the past surrounded by a "zeitgeist" like that? Add in the number who think "karma" is akin to some moronic "slave morality" version of justice - and we have issues. And then there are the neo-pagans. What a bunch of fucking empty idiots. Soul sucking mindless trash desperate for a non-reality to fill their gaping voids of consciousness. No, really. We do learn a tiny bit, hopefully not just passing laws to prevent letting horses out of open barn doors (we do a lot of that), but actually engineering solutions to our shared social and human conditions and how they can be improved. You know that clock or calendar or whatever that shows all of humanity existing in the last 3 minutes or whatever? Well, progressive, somewhat enlightened humanity occupies well under 3 seconds of that. Call it a thousandth - 250 years at best out of vaguely 250,000 years of 'sapiens' et al. - a thousandth of that couple of minutes. A fifth of a second. We might be doing ok, considering. But we just have so far, so long to go. Imagine what we could, and might, do in ten thousand years on top of a couple hundred? And right now, for a lot of us in the West, life is an amazing panoply of luxuries. For instance, the time and space to be miserable. We have that ultimate luxury - to ponder our lives and find them wanting. 9/3/23 
© Huw Powell
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