Free Time Observation: We can learn about history, but we can never learn from it.

Some have said that we must study history’s lessons in order to avoid repeating history’s mistakes. But personally, I think history’s harshest lesson of all is that we have never learned from history’s lessons, and we will never learn from history’s lessons.

After the First World War, we as a species collectively decided that there could never again be another war like it. After all, twenty million people had died and the world was utterly devastated. It simply couldn’t be allowed.

Twenty years later, the Second World War broke out. It would kill sixty million. But as Stalin said, one man dead is a tragedy, while a million dead is a statistic.

After the Holocaust, we said that something similar could never be allowed to happen again. Systematic genocide had produced immense horrors for tens of millions of people while the rest of the world stood still. But since the Holocaust, we have had several major genocides from Cambodia to Rwanda, and the world has stood still.

When George Washington left the presidential office in 1796, he inveighed against the trappings and dangers of political polarization and partisanship. If taken to extremes, he said, they would destroy the bonds that held the union together.

Over two centuries later, we have forgotten these lessons in a seemingly irrevocable way. Political deadlock between two parties is as solid as ever, and the future seems to hold nothing but further entrenchment and unstable upheavals. The new Civil War, fought between a house newly divided, has already begun.

When the Industrial Revolution choked London’s air with thick smog and the birds could no longer sing, people spoke against the dangers of devastating the environment in a blind pursuit for human advancement. A century later, we have only denial, pushback, and unfounded unwillingness to recognize our planet’s most pressing crisis: human-caused climate change. We will make a desert, and we will call it peace.

Through everything that we can look back upon, we always seem to miss the most important points for one reason or another. Humanity is a short-sighted species, acting for the moment and swiftly disregarding the hard-earned lessons learned through so much blood, toil, and destruction.

We can learn about history, but we can never learn from it.