Learning From History?

For John, BLUF:  We need to teach our children, and ourselves, more about history.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Learning from Experience, Not

From Chicago Boyz, by Blogger David Foster, 21 November 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

A high-school friend had a father who worked in a factory.  He had a story…it seems there was this guy who got his left arm caught in one of the machines and horribly mangled.  He was out for months, and when he came back, the other workers crowded around him, asking “How did it happen?”

“Like this,” he said, demonstrating with the other arm.

Maybe just a made-up story…but I’m reminded of it a lot, these days.

We have a century of evidence of what happens to a society when it falls into the traps of centralized economic planning, suppression of free speech, and the categorization of people–especially ethic categorization.  But an awful lot of people, including powerful and influential people, seem to want to go in these directions.

I can have some sympathy for people who became Communists and/or advocates of world government back in the 1920s.  The theory of centralized economic planning is very seductive (see this, for the actual practice), and the slaughter of the First World War led people to grasp at any possible way of avoiding such horrors in the future.

We I have a lot less sympathy for people who have refused to learn from a century of experience.

Ten or so years ago, sitting in a Rayrheon Parking Lot in Sudbury, Massachusetts, listening to NPR, I heard a woman say, unchallenged, about Communist China and the Great Leap Forward, if you are going to make an omlet you have to break a few eggs.  A few?  Easily 100 million eggs humans.

Are we, as human beings, incapable of learning.  Yes, I have heard people talk about "last century."  The problem is, a lot of stupid and perhaps avoidable mistakes were made in the last century.  For example there was a war, the Great War, in which almost 20 million died, and it was capped by a Pandemic, which killed somewhere between 17 and 100 million people.  The peace for that war wasn't all that good, laying the groundwork for a new war.  And people were so disgusted by the war that they did things like swear to never again fight for "King and Country."  Oh, and we had a Great Depression.  The US didn't pull out of the Depressionn until it mobilized for a newer and more horrific war, WWII (some 73 million dead).  Some five years later we had the Korean War and were lucky enough to have a self-taught historian as US President, who kept the war limited (none the less, a couple of million killed).  We dodged a couple of nuclear confrontations and ened up with Communism losing the Cold War, or so we thought.  The desire for centralized control and safety from freedom is strong in the human species.

we should try and avoid such mistakes in the future.

Regards  —  Cliff