History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Sure Does Rhyme

We often think of progress as a straight line, forever moving forward. But what if the fundamental pattern of our society isn't linear at all, but cyclical?

Pandemics and scapegoating

Throughout history, large-scale disease outbreaks have triggered not just a medical crisis, but a social one, characterized by the search for a person or explanation to “blame” it on.

In the late 1340’s and early 1350’s there was the Black Death. As the plague overtook Europe - killing a huge portion of the population - people desperately sought an explanation. In the absence of scientific understanding, they turned to superstition and blame. Jewish communities were falsely accused of poisoning wells, leading to massacres across the continent.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic. The rapid spread was accompanied by an equally fast spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Certain ethnic groups, Asians, were blamed for creating and spreading the virus, this led to a surge in racist attacks and xenophobia.

The pattern is driven by fear of the unknown and the human need to assign blame for an uncontrollable situation. While the science and technology are different, the social reaction is familiar. From blaming marginalized groups to the spread of false narratives that provide a simple, one dimensional explanation for a complex crisis.

Imperial Overreach

The Roman Empire found itself in a state of perpetual military overstretch. To protect its borders and project its power, it maintained an enormous and incredibly expensive military. This required high taxes, which caused internal resentment. Eventually, the cost of maintaining the empire like fighting wars on multiple fronts, dealing with invasions by what they called “barbarians”, began to drain the empire itself. 

Following its victory in the cold war, the United States emerged as the world's only superpower. It held a massive global military presence, with hundreds of bases abroad and “projects” in multiple middle eastern states. The huge financial cost of holding on to power is often a factor in draining resources and gaining national debt. 

In the end, both Rome and the US learned the same hard lesson, that stretching your military too far for too long weakens you at home and that the pressure to stay in power overtakes the actual goal of a nation, to stay alive.

History is not a simple cycle, destined to replay the same events. Instead, patterns, themes, and human behaviors recur in new contexts, creating familiar - yet distinctly different - situations. By looking for these rhymes, we can better understand the present without being trapped by the idea that "it's all happened before". It doesn’t mean that we are destined to repeat our same mistakes, the very reason we learn history in school is to show children what happened and how it was handled. However, we as humans think of ourselves as deeply rational. We think, we judge and we make our own decisions, don't we? Or have we just gotten better at rationalising what our primal instincts want: answers, power…

Rationalisation of the Absurd

We are wired to seek patterns and reason in a world that is often chaotic, random, and sometimes absurd. When faced with a situation that defies logic or contradicts our beliefs or worse, threatens our sense of order, we unconsciously build a logic around whatever nonsense it is to make it seem stable. So we can stay sane.

It is a psychological defence mechanism. It protects our ego, keeps our worldview, and allows us to continue functioning. We rationalise the irrational. If an irrational event doesn't fit the way we believe the world works, we create a new story.

Take a sudden accident. The sheer unpredictability of it is terrifying. To cope, we might search for a sequence of events that led to it like: "If only they had left five minutes later" or "They shouldn't have been driving in that weather", etc… These “if only” statements are our way of inserting causality into randomness. 

We often rationalise not to find the truth, but to protect a pre-existing belief or desire. We select evidence, reread facts, and use convoluted logic to make the irrational situation align with what we want to be true.

An example is the Fox and the Grapes fable. The fox, unable to reach the grapes, decides they are probably sour anyway. He rationalises his failure by devaluing the desired object. We are not responding to the event itself, but to our emotional need to mitigate disappointment and maintain a positive self-image.

It helps us preserve relationships, maintain self-esteem, and find the strength to move forward. However, when we rationalise too effectively, we risk losing touch with reality. We can become trapped in self-justification, refusing to acknowledge our mistakes or learn from them.