Episode 23: Did we Forget History

David: Okay, welcome to classy as hell, where accuracy is guaranteed down to the planet we're on.
Shawn: Love it. I'm Shawn
David: I'm David and thanks for joining in. Shawn last week you left us with a teaser. You are going to your favorite place on earth. Fill us in in.
Shawn: Well it's no longer my favorite place on earth.
David: That's so sad.
Shawn: Yeah. I I had a great time. So Labor Day I went to Cedar Point which is an amusement park in Ohio with lots of big roller coasters and thrill rides, which I love.
David: America's Coaster Park, isn't it?
Shawn: Yeah, I think it's that was their slogan for a long time was America's Roller Coast. I don't know if that's still their slogan. Anywho had a good time. I don't want to make it sound like it was crap. It just has degraded and it's not as good as it used to be. So I'll give you some specifics. Okay. About half the rides weren't even operating. So I didn't even get to ride all the big thrill rides.
David: Labor Day is usually the last big Harah
Shawn: Yeah, that's the cutoff. And then after that they, start switching into their Halloweens. Well, they were already setting up their Halloweens, and so that was the excuse they gave for why about half the park wasn't running. The truth of the matter is they don't have enough staff to run everything. And
David: Of course the tickets were half priced.
Shawn: if no, tickets were not half price. Additionally, now I don't eat meat, which is my dietary choice. I don't expect other people to accommodate me. But in the past I've been able to eat pretty well at Cedar Point. Not eating meat. They used to serve a meatless burger there at the park. I used to be able to get plenty of food. it was not a problem for me to avoid meat. So I spent the money to get the premium all-day food and drink pass.
David: Which looks like a great deal.
Shawn: Looks like a great deal. You put your wristband on and you're supposed to be able to every ninety minutes get beverages and food or get you know like a treat like if you want to get like an ice cream or or something like that. Yeah. Well It doesn't apply to everything. So when it's time for lunch and everybody wants to eat, and they're all going to the place that sells walking tacos, which is basically just taco stuff on a pile of Doritos. I'm not a snob. I like Doritos and taco stuff. Great. They don't have black beans or or a vegetarian option. It's it's chicken or Ground beef are your two options. So okay, I'm not gonna eat here. I'm gonna walk over here to this place next door. I'll meet you guys. Walk over to the place next door. They have sandwich board signs standing right out front that says they have pierogis. So I wait in line ten minutes, however long it takes for me to get to the front of the line. I get to the front of the line. Right as I walk up to the counter, the guy behind the counter smiles at me, we make eye contact, I open my mouth to speak, and he turns around and walks away.
David: good time.
Shawn: Okay, you gotta go talk to your manager about whatever the hell. Fine. So he comes back. I'd like pierogis, please. We don't have pierogis. Well your sign out front says you have pierogis. Yeah, but we don't have pierogis. Okay, fine. And it's a basically a glorified French fry stand. You can get French fries with cheese on them or chili or you know, stuff like that. And they have chili fries and they have fries with chili. I presume that the chili fries are just regular French fries, but they have like chili seasoning on them. And fries with chili have meat. That's my guess. So I asked the guy, what's the difference between the chili fries and the fries with chili? You can't get those with that. Meaning my my all day premium food and drink pass. W what
David: So it's not so premium after all.
Shawn: do you mean? Well you have to order one of the baskets. You can't just get like one of these specialty fries. okay, but I don't eat meat. The baskets were had, you know, like chicken tenders or you know what meat stuff. Right.
David: Yeah.
Shawn: Well you can't just get those with that. Can you make me a basket of chicken tenders and fries and just take the chicken tender? I mean, come on, dude. Why do you make you can eat I don't care. Okay, thank you very much. So now I'm walking farther away from my group. I go over to the pizza place. and I'm not vegan, so I I do eat cheese. I got the worst, most doughy, flavorless
David: Yeah.
Shawn: slice of cheese pizza I think I've ever had in my life, and a bowl of fruit. Which was mostly grapes and it had a few strawberries on top. But I didn't care. I was getting some fresh fruit. Yay, awesome. So I sat there and I ate my crappy cheese pizza. And this thing happened all throughout the day when I would go to different food stands. We went to this one place, it was called I want to say it was the French Quarter, but it was a place that sold beignets and funnel cakes and elephant ears. Yeah, fried dough coated in sugar. That was their thing. I go through the line and I grab, you know, one of the boxes of beignets. And they don't have a sign up front that says you can't buy these things with your all day meal pass. This isn't advertised anywhere. So you're waiting in line at every one of these food vendors just to get to the cashier to have them say you can't pay for that with that.
David: That's crazy.
Shawn: you remember going there. Remember
David: Yeah, it used to be very customer friendly
Shawn: the people that were walking around all the time with their little sweepers and their little dustpans? yeah, yeah, yeah. Constantly s it's filthy. That park is filthy now. Trash cans overflowing with food and cups and gunk. It is hideous. So I got to ride some great roller coasters and that was fun and I was happy about that. I got to ride my my favorite, the Millennium. It's my favorite roller coaster. It's still my favorite. It's gotten older, so you know, roller coasters they loosen up over the years. They get a little rattly. So it's more rattly than it used to be, but still I love it. It's my favorite coaster. I'm one of those hands in the air. Wave them like I just don't care, kind of people. So I had a great time riding the roller coasters that were open. I was very, very, very, very, very infinite veries, disappointed that all the rides weren't open,
David: Yeah.
Shawn: and that I couldn't just buy food with my all-day premium food and drink pass that I had purchased. Nor did they have a sign out front of these food establishments that say, we don't accept your food pass. Why wouldn't you put that sign out front? Save me some time.
David: should put it where they're selling the thing, saying these places and not these.
Shawn: Yeah. And that and that wasn't the case before. It was usable for wherever. every ninety minutes you could get your food, your beverage. I think Or a treat Yeah, think it was like a main plus a side. So you get like a burger and fries
David: And the drink
Shawn: and your beverage. That was ever you didn't have to get them together. Or you could get a a treat, like one of the ice cream shops or like the beignet place that I described or any place like that. Like if you wanted to get, something not good for you. Well, not like burgers and fries are nutrients. Anyhow, used to be you could just get whatever. every ninety minutes, you could get something.
David: So thumbs up on the rides, thumbs down on the
Shawn: Well, thumbs up on the rides that I could get on, half of weren't running.
David: All right, well that's a bummer. I'm sorry it wasn't the return home that you had anticipated.
Shawn: That's okay, that's okay. I got to ride my favorite.
David: There was a highlight that I do want to point out
Shawn: Ooh.
David: that you did get to see something that you wanted to see early in the season that was canceled and that was fireworks.
Shawn: Yes, that was fantastic. Because not yeah, no, not at Cedar Point, but here in Richmond it was so blazing hot that City of Richmond and the surrounding counties, Chesterfield and Henrico, everybody canceled their Fourth of July. Fireworks displays or their laser light show or their drone displays whatever anybody was doing got canceled because they were concerned about public health. You know, they didn't want people, you know, dropping from heat stroke, which is a very valid concern and I think they were right to do it. But I was disappointed because I didn't get to see any fireworks this year. But I did get to see fireworks in little old Elmore, Ohio. Labor Day weekend Sunday night. They set off a bunch of fireworks right over their Woodmore High School athletic grounds. It was nice, so I got to see a whole fireworks display. So I was super happy about that. I love fireworks,
David: I bet, because you love fireworks.
Shawn: they're the best. You don't ever see people pissed off or sad at a fireworks display. Everybody loves them.
David: So before we even say what the show is today, everybody knows the quote. And that's those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Shawn: Yes. I always heard those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That's just a wordier version, but yeah, same concept.
David: the most famous quote, the one we a lot of people hear is the one that I did, which is those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, which I believe was said by Churchill. a great quote. Churchill was actually misquoting George Santanania, and his wording originally was those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So closer to your verse.
Shawn: Same concept, yeah.
David: But basically they're the same.
Shawn: The idea is the same. We don't learn from what's happened before and we just keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
David: So yeah, it sounds like it's basically the same, but there's differences, right? Because forgetting makes it sound like a problem is simply that somebody failed to remember a fact.
Shawn: Alright.
David: so After World War One, the League of Nations formed then.
Shawn: Yes.
David: which later became the UN for those who
Shawn: For those who have failed to learn from history.
David: That's right. But yeah, it's not like they were sitting around saying, you know, World War One was bad. And so yeah, no shit. And they all decided, Well, let's not do that again.
Shawn: Dulce it decorumest.
David: And then twenty years later, we forgot and started World War Two.
Shawn: Sure. For kicks, for giggles.
David: Yeah, that not how it happened.
Shawn: No.
David: Sounds good though. Santinyana's point was more interesting than that He was talking about retenativeness. The idea that progress depends upon experience being retained. Not necessarily the memory of the experience. If experience doesn't accumulate, you're basically starting over every time. He's making a philosophical argument about development, not hey government, maybe read a book.
Shawn: Makes sense.
David: So we've been quoting him just narrowly. The popular version turns an argument about accumulated experience into a bumper sticker about remembering historical events. But the basic idea still works. but here's where I kinda wanna complicate it.
Shawn: Why do you always gotta complicate things, man?
David: I know, I know, I know. It's what if you remember? What if you know the history perfectly and still repeat the mistake?
Shawn: right, because think the broader concept of that that adage, that philosophy, that way of looking at history is that It's not enough to just look at notes about past events and be like, yeah, that happened, but the important part is not just knowing that something happened, but to use that to consciously do something different now.
David: Very good. And I agree with you, it's a problem that we've been misunderstanding. Because some of history's most spectacular failures happened among people who knew the history extremely well.
Shawn: But didn't learn from it
David: Didn't learn from it. A a great example? Maginal a line.
Shawn: Familiar that? Yes, I'm familiar Yes.
David: France during World War Two, right? Built the Maginal Line in response to basically a slaughter from Germany during World War One. They built up this as a defense against Germany. and of course the misconception is that Germany just went around it and that those defenses were aimed the wrong way, and that's not the case. They did exactly what the Majinal Wall was supposed to do, which was defend those areas very strongly. What they failed to predict they thought Germany was going to go in through Belgium.
Shawn: Reasonable assumption.
David: like they did during World War One.
Shawn: Right, easier territory to cover. Topographically.
David: So they built this wall and they were running low on resources near the end. And their plan was they built this Maginal line, a line of stations. And they would move troops to Belgium along with Belgian forces to combat the Germans there. Well, the Germans went further north and around through this forest that the French thought would be impassable for the German tanks and the German military, and it wasn't.
Shawn: There's a reason why people talk about German engineering and not French engineering.
David: True that, true that. Germany ended up actually attaching through the Arden forest and Arden and they attacked through Belgium, which was exploiting a weakness of the broader French operational plan. So the marginal line itself did exactly what it was supposed to do. For areas where Germany attacked it head on. It was very effective.
Shawn: But that never occurred to them that they might go a different direction.
David: I'll touch down on that here in a minute. because I also want to touch on this other incident that occurred that's similar. So yeah, Keep the marginal line in your memory here for a minute. Because sort of affects what we're going to talk about throughout the this episode. Because we don't just inherit historical facts. We inherit assumptions about what those facts mean.
Shawn: Yeah.
David: In a similar type of Munich 1938 with Hitler. For those who aren't familiar, that was where US and some other governments decided that letting Germany take part of Czechoslovakia and keep it. because Hitler said if I can't keep this or you're gonna make an issue of it, we're gonna go to war.
Shawn: anybody that says that means it, you should take at their word.
David: appeased Hitler and like six months later Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and of course we saw how that goes, it just became a domino effect. that's a another thing that people try to say as a lesson. Anytime governments make promises trying to to keep captured land or invade under a specific reason, you'll hear people say it's just another Munic And we've recently have seen this with Putin invading Crimea and then Ukraine and then wanting to claim those parts of Ukraine to give him legitimacy and that that's all he wanted. He'd be happy with those. And of course, smart people are saying, if we don't challenge him on this, then what's to keep him from going after the rest of Ukraine? Then reclaiming everything that Russia has lost over The last fifty years. one of the arguments I heard about well it's not really a a good argument because Ukraine is in a different position. Czechoslovakia was never involved in the discussions about giving part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
Shawn: Of course.
David: But then people forget Trump tried to negotiate the parts of Ukraine without Ukraine being there. So again, it's one of those things that history kinda looks like it's repeating itself. And it's not because we're ignorant of the history.
Shawn: Are you sure? 'Cause it sounds like a bunch of ignorant people.
David: Well, I'm not gonna say that any of those mentioned were geniuses, but there are people around them that definitely knew the history. So actually the problem isn't that we forget history. Sometimes we just make mistakes about it.
Shawn: That's just semantics.
David: yeah, we we misremember. Remember accurately but interpret it badly.
Shawn: I mean, that was Brian Williams' quote. He misremembered.
David: We find an analogy that feels right and mistake resemblance for causation. We learn a lesson that works in one situation and turn it into a universal rule or truth. We create an institution to preserve the lesson, and eventually the institution forgets why the lesson existed anyhow.
Shawn: Yes.
David: So it should probably be more of we should remember the past. remembering is good, but it's also complicated. Now the question I actually want to answer is how does society work? Because an individual remembers, but an institution
Shawn: Not so much.
David: a government, which is also an institution, an entire civilization
Shawn: Not so much Not so much.
David: How does it remember and more importantly, how does it turn memory into behavior?
Shawn: So as to not repeat.
David: So as not to repeat.
Shawn: That's a brilliant question.
David: We're gonna look at it through five different lenses, okay? The first lens is the individual. We can all relate to that because we're all individuals, right?
Shawn: I try not to be.
David: We repeat mistakes all the time. Relationships, money, jobs, diet, whatever. You'll meet somebody who says almost every day, I always do this, and then they immediately do it again.
Shawn: Or yeah, out of frustration. my god, why do I always do this?
David: Yeah, don't don't do it while explaining to you that they're doing it again.
Shawn: Why do I always date the same type of asshole? Why do I never learn my lesson?
David: We are spectacularly good at that.
Shawn: I know I am.
David: it's actually a little bit more complicated. Take something psychologists call the availability heuristic. We don't necessarily make decisions by retrieving the most relevant historical example. We often give more weight to the example that's easiest to recall. The vivid one, the recent one, the emotional one, the one that comes immediately to mind. So your brain isn't saying, let's be careful, search the archives, not at all. And that gives us our first distinction. This is the difference between remembering the past and using the past well. Which is why I'm not arguing that memory is useless. I'm arguing that memory doesn't automatically become wisdom.
Shawn: And that's the kicker. I try, sometimes in my life I've been successful at applying wisdom by learning something that I you know, looking at something and the result that I achieved in the past and making a conscious decision to go a different route this time. Right. Right.
David: Everyone has, I'm sure.
Shawn: those instances are few and far between.
David: Aren't they though? an example that a lot of people are probably familiar with. The financial bubbles. Imagine somebody who lived through the dot-com crash. They know what a bubble is.
Shawn: Yeah.
David: They watched people lose money.
Shawn: They may have lost money themselves.
David: They may have lost money themselves. They understand the phrase irrational exuberance. people take it all the way back to the tulip bulb explosion in the Netherlands.
Shawn: Yes. There have been economic bubbles for hundreds of years. Probably thousands. We don't maybe necessarily have record of all of them.
David: But what happens is another speculative boom comes along and they think, I know what a bubble looked like. This isn't that. It's different this time. And now the historical knowledge is doing something weird. Instead of making them cautious, it may make them more confident. Because they think they're sophisticated enough to recognize the warning signs, right?
Shawn: I want to be sophisticated.
David: They're not saying, I don't know history. They're saying, I know history better than the people who are going to get burned.
Shawn: Ooh the arrogance.
David: Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. And that's important because otherwise we're committing another mistake. We're assuming that if somebody knows history and still loses, the knowledge must have been useless. And that's not logically valid. Maybe they were better off having the knowledge. Maybe the knowledge reduced the probability of failure without eliminating it. this is where I want to be careful with whole episode. We're not trying to prove history doesn't help. We're asking, under what conditions does historical knowledge actually help?
Shawn: Alright, that that's intriguing.
David: I thought you'd find that interesting
Shawn: You know, I've I've heard that old adage all my life and I've just took it as gospel like it was valid, like, okay, yeah, we're all just you know, stupid people who just keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again.
David: I was of that opinion too. I started to drift away from it a little bit then when I got into this and started really thinking and researching it and it became more and more clear. Now some people might say that to defend the the proverb that if you don't remember what happened, you don't even get the chance to do any of the other stuff. I can agree with that.
Shawn: Yeah.
David: And that's important. And although it appears that that may have weakened my general argument, it it actually improves it. The first version was memory prevents repetition. The new, better version is memory creates the possibility of learning.
Shawn: I like that.
David: and that's different, right? But still there's another problem. The word repeat itself can mislead us. History almost never repeats itself literally.
Shawn: No, of course not.
David: World War II wasn't World War One the sequel.
Shawn: No.
David: Korea wasn't Munich with different uniforms. Vietnam wasn't World War II in Southeast Asia. The circumstances are different. Sometimes what occurs is a pattern or a mechanism such as overconfidence, misreading an opponent, escalation, institutional inertia, great power competition, assuming yesterday's solution still works today, those things can reoccur even when the historical events themselves are completely different. So we're not looking for an identical history, we're looking for recurring mechanisms.
Shawn: Can you elaborate on that? What's a reoccurring mechanism?
David: maybe the better question is what keeps recurring and why?
Shawn: alright. Let's start there.
David: So we'll look at that. We're we'll we'll explore that here as we go along. But what it does take us to is from the individual to the institution. 'Cause an individual can remember something But we as we mentioned before, how does society or an institution remember, right?
Shawn: Right. And so we try to set up ways of recording history and we set up ways to communicate and collaborate with the intention of applying lessons learned from history.
David: Right. And the real question though is when societies remember and still get the lessons wrong, what's going on? Yeah, 'cause governments, like you said, we just have systems in place to remember. We have historians, military academies have historians, intelligence agencies have analysts, universities have archives, corporations have records. We got entire buildings full of people whose job is basically remember what happened.
Shawn: I think the forgetting happens when Private interests become more powerful than public memory.
David: I can see that. we brought up the Maginol line before and now we're gonna re introduce that here because it helps describe some of this. France, as I said, experienced an extraordinary destruction during World War One. French planners planned a genuine demographic problem relative to Germany. They had to think about how to defend a long frontier while preserving manpower, because they had fewer people than Germany. fortifications offered one way of doing that. And the Maginal system was part of a broader defense concept, right? We already discussed part of that. And the buildings weren't irrational by any stretch. In fact, it's exactly why they're a good example. The fornications weren't simply a mistake. The mistake, and more accurately, the failure of the Maginal Line was the assumption surrounding the larger strategy where the Germans would attack. Like I said, they didn't attack like they did in World War One. They went north through Belgium. and into the forest regions. The Ardon The French expected German movement through Belgium to be a major possibility, so therefore they planned to move forces north to Belgium, or near Belgium at least. And they underestimated the speed and effectiveness of the Germans' thrust through the Ardon.
Shawn: Because in any system If you don't have the resources to implement defenses, absolute in this t in this case we're talking about military defenses. Right. But this can apply to other systems as well. If you don't have the resources to implement every possible defense, you have to pick and choose. It's a game of chess.
David: That's right. And that's what they did here. They studied it. It's not that they didn't remember. They studied it and thought this was the best of way to spend lots of money responding to it. And yet they still lost. So memory wasn't the problem here. Interpretation was. Or maybe the adaptation. And that gives us another important distinction. The problem isn't necessarily remembering the wrong event. It can be remembering the right event and drawing the wrong transferable lesson. Because if we say France forgot the past, we're describing the opposite of what happened. They remembered, they studied, they planned, they built, they simply couldn't know which parts of their historical experience would remain relevant. So historical memory is not the same thing as historical understanding. And then again, we I brought up Munich earlier, and we're going to revisit that. And that was Hitler Chamberlain Appeasement. Whatever you think of the Munich settlement itself, the memory of Munich became enormously powerful. After World War II, Munich became shorthand for the danger of appeasing aggression. Which is a valuable lesson. But once a historic episode becomes shorthand, it becomes very easy to use it without actually examining it.
Shawn: That makes sense.
David: Imagine you're a policymaker and you have a crisis. Someone says, this is another Munich. That sentence feels like an analysis. And it may not be. It's an analogy. An analogy only tells you these two things resemble each other in some way. It doesn't tell you they have the same cause. And that's an important distinction.
Shawn: Correlation does not equal causation. That's right. We say it all the time.
David: And essentially that's what Richard Nursot and Ernest May were getting at in the book Thinking in Time. They weren't saying don't use history. They were saying don't let historical resemblance do your thinking for you. before acting on an analogy, identify what's actually similar. Then identify what's different. Then ask which differences matter.
Shawn: And time is a factor here. absolutely. What you just described takes a lot of time to make that kind of analysis. And it's based on the presumption that you have all the data.
David: That's right.
Shawn: You might not have all the data, so you gotta make the best guess you can with the data you have. And that requires a lot a great deal of time and in some circumstances you don't have that time.
David: my favorite example is you operate under the best use of the information that you have.
Shawn: Right.
David: Which may or may not be actually the best
Shawn: Might not be complete.
David: or it might not lead to the best outcome.
Shawn: Right.
David: I I think probably the the last one I want to visit in this section is Truman in Korea. When North Korea invaded South Korea in June of 1950, American policy makers weren't sitting there with an empty historical database. They had a whole collection of historical experience in their heads. Manchuria, Ethiopia, the failures of appeasement, all the above, Figuring was that if aggression succeeded without meaningful resistance, it could encourage further aggression.
Shawn: Logical?
David: at least initially yes. And that's important. I don't want to turn Truman into one of those historical characters who looks stupid because we know the ending.
Shawn: Yeah, it's easy for us to armchair quarterback.
David: Yeah, the analogy to Munich wasn't crazy. There really was an armed invasion across an international border. There really was a question about whether failing to respond would encourage additional aggression. And Truman was making the decision under uncertainty. Didn't have all the facts.
Shawn: Didn't have all the facts.
David: When it starts answering questions it wasn't designed to answer, is when the analogy becomes dangerous. Initially the question was, do we resist the invasion? But after the Incheon landing and the collapse of much of the North Korean army, the question changed. It became do we cross the 38th parallel and try to destroy the North Korean regime? And that's a different question.
Shawn: Absolutely.
David: And Munich doesn't answer that.
Shawn: No it does not.
David: Because Korea wasn't Czechoslovakia. Kim Song wasn't Hitler. the strategic situation had changed. And the original lesson don't allow aggression to succeed could still be valid. a historical analogy can be partly right. It can illuminate one dimension of a situation and still mislead you about another. Truman may have remembered Munich, and that memory wasn't necessarily wrong, but it couldn't tell him how far to go. And when Chinese forces entered the war, the situation changed again.
Shawn: Yes.
David: So the analogy had a shelf life. History gave Truman a warning, it didn't give him an instruction menu. And that's probably one of the most important e ideas in this episode. History is evidence, not instructions.
Shawn: Have you ever studied something from every possible angle you can think of and implemented a plan and some other circumstance changed the outcome and you were like, I didn't I didn't even think about that. We
David: me how long I do that every fucking day.
Shawn: all do. So imagine that happening on
David: On a worldwide scale.
Shawn: a world scale. Yeah. On a geopolitical scale.
David: Well and here and here's the trap.
Shawn: It's a Trap
David: And it's one historians have to be especially careful about, and that's hindsight bias. We know how these stories end. That's incredibly powerful. We know Hitler loses. We know the Korean War ends in a stalemate. Still going on today. We know Vietnam becomes disastrous for the United States. We know the Maginal Lions doesn't save France. But the people making decisions at the time didn't have our version of the Wikipedia page. They couldn't just look it up and see what actually happened.
Shawn: And that's the thing. We can only make the best decision we can with the information we have at the time we're making the decision. That's right. And we can't know that we don't know everything. I mean it's safe to assume that you don't know everything because nobody can. And yeah, there's time sensitivity And it happens to all of us on a daily basis. But when it gets expanded to a geopolitical scale, that's when we as individuals want to look at it and be like, why don't we ever learn from our mistakes?
David: And and that's why they should have known better is also often a terrible historical
Shawn: argument Yeah. Were you there?
David: The more interesting question is, given what they knew at the time, what did they think they were seeing and why? What information did they actually have? What were they predicting and why were they predicting that? sorta makes history less like judging people and more like reconstructing a decision.
Shawn: when you read historical records, historians are just people. They have bias
David: And of course the one thing that's true is who writes the history?
Shawn: Victor.
David: Victors usually.
Shawn: Or it can even be people looking at historical events from the outside. There's any number of history from respected historians, records where historians are doing analysis, they're looking at events that have happened, they're evaluating something that of course they were not a part of, could not possibly have been a part of. Maybe they weren't even part of that culture and they're interpreting it from their point of view now. Right. Historians are people. People have bias.
David: And we constantly see people r trying to rewrite history to match what their current belief systems are.
Shawn: Course.
David: But hindsight sometimes makes the decision look worse. Sometimes it makes it look somewhat more reasonable. Either way it it makes better history if we look at the question as what information did they actually have, what were they seeing and why. Now the third lens Is that history isn't a user manual? And people love historical lessons. You know why? They're clean. They don't appease dictators, don't invade Russia in winter, don't repeat the mistakes of the past.
Shawn: They don't take into account limited resources available to you right now. There's no time pressure
David: You know, they don't split your party. Problem is that history isn't actually that clean. Because every event has context. And context means competing causes, unintended consequences, different actors, incomplete information, that's a big
Shawn: Yes.
David: and the annoying fact that the same action can produce different results under different conditions.
Shawn: Not just that it can, it will.
David: Yeah, which makes it very difficult to turn history into rules. take the Marshall Plan. It's tempting to tell a beautiful story. World War One produced the Versailles Treaty, which punished Germany.
Shawn: Severely.
David: Now it seemed justified at the time because Germany were assholes and started World War One for the most part. but the Versailles Treaty set them up for the post war to be unstable, especially in Germany. Rampant inflation, it just horrible, things. And when it came to the Marshall Plan, United States learned that lesson.
Shawn: Did we though?
David: we set the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe instead of punishing it. And Germany has been actually quite successful.
Shawn: Mm-hmm.
David: Japan came out being quite successful. Now there are large swaths of people who say that we left some of our allies struggling.
Shawn: Yep.
David: England did not have the same growth and resurgence as Germany did. but it also hasn't led to a World War Three based off of reparations and the conditions we imposed on any of those countries.
Shawn: Why have we not learned the lesson about the backlash from empirical expansion.
David: That's a good question.
Shawn: Why did we set about colonizing the world? Why did we set about setting up puppet governments where we wanted to control resources? Oil, let's just say it, we're talking about oil. why didn't we learn any of those lessons?
David: look at the Robber Barons It wasn't just about oil. They monopolized a lot of stuff. Bananas.
Shawn: yeah, resources all over the world, but I think I wanna say probably the most aggressive colonization and establishment of puppet governments has been related to oil.
David: We did do a lot of that, yes. I I think the obvious answer it at least from my standpoint is money talks. for wealth, especially
Shawn: That's the thing. We weren't willing to make sacrifices. We were willing to stab other people in the back and take what they had.
David: Yeah.
Shawn: We didn't sacrifice anything.
David: We were willing to tolerate Vicious barbarianism. for dollars. And of course, you know, those dollars I'm sure seed in many of pockets in government.
Shawn: We weren't just tolerating it, we were doing it. We actively murdered and slaughtered steal other people's resources.
David: You did.
Shawn: And then we wanna act all shocked when they wanna bomb our buildings.
David: Yeah, when you putting your nose in countries' business affairs, you shouldn't be shocked when they fight back or bite back.
Shawn: Right. But yet we see our own revolution against England two hundred and fifty years ago as some noble endeavor.
David: Yeah. But again, That's not a matter of forgetting. Again, we remember all of it.
Shawn: Right. But we think the people that you know we're trying to keep under our thumb and we think they're horrible evil monsters for biting our thumb. That's crushing them.
David: the original Iran incident would that have happened had we not put the Shah in place and kept him in power.
Shawn: No absolutely not.
David: if you look at a lot of the countries in Central and South America, their economies and their politics would be totally different had we not implanted people friendly to our regimes and our billionaires.
Shawn: and I hope anyone listening to this understands that I recognize people's suffering in any war or any act of terrorism or any violence. I have all the sympathy. For those victims. But that doesn't mean I can't see the suffering we inflicted that directly led to it. Right.
David: my thing is in terms of our topic today, that's not a matter of forgetting that's actually a matter of turning immoral behavior into a playbook.
Shawn: that's what I was alluding to earlier when I said think many times it's not a matter of forgetting, it's we allow private ambition and greed to just ignore it and be like, Okay, yeah, we know there's gonna be this huge price to pay down the road and I'm just gonna ignore that so we can get this oil.
David: Right, yeah. that's like I said, that's voluntarily repeating, that's knowing what the consequences is potentially going to be and deciding to go with it anyhow because right now it's expedident
Shawn: 'Cause we're greedy bastards. Yeah. and I say that again, not like I'm against the United States. I am not. That's all of humanity. But because I live in the United States, these are the subjects that I'm familiar with. Right. This sort of thing happens all around the world, under many, many, many governments. It's happened all throughout history, under many, many different types of leadership. I'm not bashing the United States like we invented this playbook. We didn't
David: Anytime you have
Shawn: use exactly I'm using examples from the United States because I live in the United States, so these are the examples I'm familiar with. These are
David: The ones that are taught to us in our school.
Shawn: Yes, these are the these are the ones I'm familiar with. There these things happen all around the world, all throughout history. not a USA bashing here. I'm using these examples because these are the ones I'm familiar with. That's all.
David: So an important distinction is that historical influence isn't the same thing as a simple casual chain. the post-war world was shaped by perceptions of the interwar experience. But what we shouldn't turn that into, precise happened, therefore martial plan.
Shawn: Exactly.
David: History doesn't necessarily produce policy, it changes the environment in which people think about policy. And that's much safer and actually more interesting. History can change which questions seem important, it can make certain dangers visible, it can give policymakers example, and it can eliminate uncertainty. So suppose you believe appeasement always encourages aggression. History can give you examples that support that.
Shawn: Sure.
David: But it can also give you examples where concessions worked or worked temporarily.
Shawn: Of course. And sometimes buying time has value. yeah. If if if you need to buy time to build a better response, sometimes you need to buy time.
David: Yep. And sometimes the concessions that we made were made because the alternative was actually worse.
Shawn: Exactly.
David: So yeah, history is partly useful because it makes simplistic explanations uncomfortable.
Shawn: Yeah, anything that can force us to examine our motivations and our goals is always valuable.
David: Right. And that's something we haven't talked about yet. Historical learning isn't necessarily I found the correct answer. Sometimes historical learning is I am now less confident in the answer I thought was obvious. But you know, if you're making history sound almost impossibly complicated, if every case is unique, then nobody can learn anything. That's the opposite extreme. History isn't useless because every event is unique. Events can share mechanics or That's where comparisons become valuable. I can give you an example.
Shawn: Please do.
David: It's called the Boeing Checklist. Boeing.
Shawn: The what checklist?
David: The airplane company.
Shawn: Well I think it's been demonstrated their checklists are not reliable. Should we come up with a better name?
David: Well, now they're not, but history tells a different story.
Shawn: Okay.
David: And so we're looking at an airplane. And it's a beautiful example. Back in nineteen thirty five, the Boeing Model two ninety nine was being tested. It's hard to believe it. That far ago if we're thinking the planes. It's not too far long after the Wright brothers got off the ground, what was that, nineteen
Shawn: god. Don't ask me facts.
David: Don't ask you history in an episode about history.
Shawn: that sounds shameful, doesn't it?
David: Anyhow, the Boeing Model two hundred ninety nine was an advanced aircraft, the crew was experienced. They've been flying. But the plane crashed shortly after takeoff. One important problem involved a control lock that had not been released. And what happened was the accident became part of a development of checklist-based procedures. The important insight isn't simply checklists are good. It is. The point is that A famous example of a complex task exceeding what people could reliably hold in working memory. Instead of saying pilots just need to remember the accident, you need to say before takeoff, verify these specific things. And the lesson's been compressed into a procedure. And the pilot doesn't need to know anything about the original accident. He just needs to go through the checklist every time. And we've seen that on TV shows, the pilot going through a checklist to make sure that everything's right. But he doesn't need to know about that original accident that created the problem.
Shawn: Like why am I doing this checklist? Yeah. I've had my requisite three martinis. Let's let's fly. Let's get this bitch off the ground.
David: Yeah, the pilot doesn't need to remember the accident. Before takeoff, they just need to verify very specific things.
Shawn: And that procedure is now in place to prevent that specific thing that had happened in the past.
David: regardless of your knowledge of any accident ever. Right. These are what you do. You don't need to know why. This is just what you do. one of the problems with this is that I was sort of treating memory and structure as if they were competing explanations. They're not. Somebody had to remember the crash. Somebody had to investigate it. Somebody had to decide what mattered. Somebody had to create the procedure. What wasn't necessary was for the person who the procedures were designed for to actually remember the accident themselves. So they're not competing, they're sort of complimentary. So maybe institutional learning isn't the opposite of memory. It's just memory that's been processed.
Shawn: Processed by whom? By individuals?
David: individuals by a group. There's an event. The event itself is investigated and the procedure that comes out of that is the memory and not the memory of the accident or event itself. so instead of holding on to individual memories, institutions and systems set up procedures So you don't need to remember that incident.
Shawn: But is there a danger in what you're describing? So we create this procedure to solve this problem, or to avoid this problem happening again, for example. And time goes on, and everyone who matters forgets. why the procedure was put in place. And then at some point somebody questions, why are we even doing this? It doesn't accomplish anything.
David: So you're asking what happens when the institution remembers the rule but forgets why the rule exists.
Shawn: Yes. Thank you for saying that in a succinct manner.
David: Well first we need to look at people who thought history itself might contain recurring cycles. So we're gonna look at the next cycle first and then we're gonna get back to it.
Shawn: Okay, I can wait.
David: Alright, that brings us to the next lens, which is the cyclic theorist, which brings us to Ibn Khaldun. And this is where the episode gets really interesting in my opinion,
Shawn: Don't sell yourself short. I think it's been interesting all along.
David: because Ibn Kowdoon isn't primarily saying people just forget. He's describing a structural process. His famous concept, which is often translated as group solidarity or social cohesion, or group feeling, is the basic idea that groups with strong solidarity can build political power.
Shawn: That has been demonstrated, yes.
David: That makes lot of sense, doesn't it? And the success can produce a lot of wealth.
Shawn: Sounds good.
David: Wealth can produce comfort.
Shawn: Also sounds good?
David: Comfort can then weaken some of the hardships and bonds that produce the original solidarity.
Shawn: no! So this is just... We're just gonna do this all the time.
David: Well according to Caldoon The group that conquered becomes settled. The next generation inherits that success.
Shawn: Yeah.
David: The next generation experiences less of a struggle, and eventually the political structure becomes vulnerable to another group with stronger solidarity.
Shawn: Makes sense.
David: And that's not we forgot, that's the conditions changed. Caldoon does describe a roughly generational process. We have to be kind of careful here. This isn't a universal stopwatch for all human societies. He's developing a theory of dynastic rise and decline. So when people turn it into every civilization lasts exactly X number of years, they're doing exactly what we've been criticizing. They're turning a historical model into a slogan, which is basically This entire episode.
Shawn: I love a slogan. It makes my life so much easier.
David: Especially if it comes with a catchy tune.
Shawn: my god.
David: And we know that song lyrics l live in your head. Jingles live in your head. I mean
Shawn: Yes they do. Yes they do.
David: doesn't remember plop, plop, fizz, fizz?
Shawn: what a relief it is fast, fast, fast.
David: I remember once watching different television personalities did it. One started singing the theme song to the Brady bunch and the whole audience just jumped right in. And the other one was Will Smith doing the fresh prince And everyone just jumped everyone knows those.
Shawn: Everybody knows, yeah. It's like, I'm a pepper, he's a pepper, she's a pepper, we're not a sponsor, PS.
David: See, th this is what we live with all the time. Anyhow, we we digress. And we get into modern versions of this with Strauss and Howe and in generational cycles, Peter Turchen and Cyolodyanimcs And here we need to distinguish between different levels of claim. Some reachers try to identify a recurring structural pattern in historical data. That's pretty much legitimate research. But identifying a pattern is not the same thing as proving inevitability.
Shawn: Correlation does not equal causation.
David: Isn't that the truth? Yeah, just because it happened before doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna happen again. Or or worse, it has to happen because the cycle says it has to happen. That's even a worse takeoff on that. If a theory is flexible enough, almost any outcome can be interpreted as a confirmation. Caldoon's insight is still useful if we keep it at the level at which it's strongest. How does political power change the social conditions that produce that power? That's a real question. And it connects back to institutional memory.
Shawn: It's too legit to quit.
David: too legit to quit. We just cannot stop these lyrics. and it's because institutionals institutions don't just preserve lessons
Shawn: Did you just say institutional institutions? That's brilliant. I love it. What did I say? Did you just say institutional institutions? Leave that in. I love it.
David: because institutional institutions don't preserve lessons, they also change behavior. And eventually the people inside the institution may behave differently because the institution exists.
Shawn: So because
David: We build an institution because of the way we're behaving. the institution then gives us structure
Shawn: and our behavior changes because of the new structure that we created. tracking with you so far.
David: Which means both that the lessons change the environment and then the environment changes the lessons. So it goes sort of both ways.
Shawn: Alright, so here's where this is building to in my brain and you can cut me off if I'm leaping too far ahead.
David: Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. I dare you.
Shawn: you're in trouble now. So. if we implement systems or institutions based on some lesson we've learned.
David: Uh-huh.
Shawn: But we can't rely on them because everything is always changing. So are you saying it is impossible for us to learn enough from history to prevent bad things from happening again?
David: timing is so bloody impeccable.
Shawn: See? You throw down that gauntlet, I'm gonna pick that bitch up!
David: Because the section that we are just now entering answers when learning actually works.
Shawn: Okay, now we're getting down to it.
David: Let's start with the Boeing checklist, which we've talked about already. And we've already seen the basic mechanism. An accident happens, the cause is investigated, a useful lesson is identified, the lesson becomes a procedure, the procedure becomes part of training. The procedure can survive the people who experience the original event. That's institutional learning.
Shawn: Right?
David: then we have the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Shawn: Fun times!
David: The United States and the Soviet Union come terrifyingly close to a nuclear war.
Shawn: Yes.
David: I think it's a lot closer than most people really actually understand.
Shawn: read, watched videos and documentaries so much about this and it kind of boiled down to one person making
David: Yeah, a radical call at the
Shawn: radical call on their own just
David: Yeah, it it's
Shawn: in the nick of time
David: So communication during a crisis cannot depend on slow, unreliable channels, is one of the things that we learned. So in nineteen sixty three, Washington Moscow established the famous direct communications link, mostly known as The red phone. That's what everyone s thinks of when they hear the the link between Russia and Washington D C is the president picks up the red phone and gets Putin or
Shawn: And it's probably not red, like the black box isn't black.
David: You're right. It's not actually a red phone.
Shawn: my god, is it a bat phone? That would be even better. Wouldn't it? Or one those hamburger flip phones?
David: That would be a hilarious
Shawn: Yes!
David: no, it's not actually a red phone. In fact, the original system didn't even use a phone, it was written electronic communication rather than a magical red telephone sitting on Kennedy's desk. So it was so
Shawn: It's like tickertape yeah!
David: But it was a direct communication between
Shawn: Absolutely, well ticker tape was, it was in real time.
David: So yeah, sorry it's disappointing about the red phone.
Shawn: Hmm
David: That's okay. History is disappointing in very specific ways.
Shawn: It makes me cry.
David: But the point stands, and notice what the hotline did not do. It didn't solve the Cold War. It didn't make the United States and the Soviet Union trust each other more. It didn't eliminate the possibility of another missile crisis. It addressed something narrower. The next crisis might be just as dangerous and communication might determine whether it gets worse. So that's why that line is so critically important and it's a lesson that we learned, even though it didn't solve any of the other stuff that triggered it. It was a lesson that we learned and a lesson that we've implemented. So you don't necessarily have to solve the entire problem It can solve parts of the problem because, like you said, the rest of it's moving targets a lot of times. So if we have good communication built in as a lesson, the variations of the issue itself can change a bit without actually interfering with the belief that We've learned something. And that's pretty much an important form of learning. You don't always have to prevent every future failure. Sometimes you just make the next failure less likely or less catastrophic.
Shawn: Well yeah, mean from what you're describing it's that's just not even possible. Yeah. Because things are always changing so no matter what systems we put in place it's just going to be something different next time so...
David: Yeah, the red line became a lesson that became part of the infrastructure. It didn't simply tell future presidents, remember October nineteen sixty two. Right. Remember the missile crisis. It didn't do that. It changed the communication system. Again, much like the Boeing checklist, the people who utilize that list have far outlasted the people who experienced the initial
Shawn: Visual failure that led to it. Right. That makes sense.
David: And that's pretty much what's I'm sure's happened with the hotline. Nineteen sixty two I'm sure a lot of the people who got together and came up with that on both sides have long since gone. And yet everyone knows if you're talking about the president being on the hotline to Russia, people know what you're talking about. Even though it's not red.
Shawn: Nuclear football, not a football. Mars
David: Not a football thats right
Shawn: bars made right here on Earth.
David: Right here on earth we can also look at the Montreal protocol. And this one's sorta relevant today, actually.
Shawn: I'm not familiar with the Montreal Protocol.
David: Okay. let me explain. the Montreal protocol came about because greenhouse gases CFCs were dangerous.
Shawn: Chlorofluorocarbons?
David: The international community created a treaty with concrete control measures. Countries reported data, there were meetings, the agreement could be amended, scientific knowledge could change the rules. So the Montreal Protocol basically is what set a lot of the phase down of greenhouse gases it's stuff that depletes the ozone layer in the s in the sky, which can lead to increasing cancers and all sorts of bad nasty things.
Shawn: Right. And the world came together to solve that issue.
David: The came together to solve of
Shawn: Right. together to solve that issue.
David: The came together to solve that because just the knowledge of greenhouse gases and all these aerosols being dangerous, we knew it, but no one was acting. So we came together pretty much on a world stage and a lot of countries all signed on. And it was adopted in nineteen eighty-seven to phase out ozone depleting substances and the ozone is much stronger and much better as a result.
Shawn: Yes.
David: So it really wasn't here's a lesson. It was here's a system that can keep learning because it's a amendable as we've learned more stuff, we could amend this document or this treaty and have it be sort of a living thing. It sort of could learn and grow a as we did. So the most sophisticated form of institutional memory isn't necessarily a rule that never changes. That's the power of the Montreal Protocol. Like I said, it could change. So it's we've had talked about things where we put institutional rules in place and then they just go and if the situation changes, the rules sort of fall apart. This sort of built in, you know, as things are changing, we can change with it and they have mechanisms to do that.
Shawn: again, provided that we continue to pay attention to it. We tend to do this thing where, okay, we're done, doot doot, let's forget all about it. We never have to touch it again.
David: We do do that a lot. And it's also not really a story about one historic disaster producing one institutional rule. it wasn't just that the Montreal Protocol was addressing one single crisis. It was lots of little things dealing with ozone depleting materials. So it wasn't like one actual crisis. It it doesn't have to be one major crisis. It could be a combination of a lot of little things building to one resolution.
Shawn: Alright.
David: Now and know this one will get your interest because I know your interest in smallpox. Smallpox is another interesting example, although it's slightly different. It's not really a story about one historical disaster producing one institutional rule. It's a story about accumulated knowledge being coordinated action. Vaccination technology, surveillance, case finding, contact tracing. vaccination, international cooperation, local health workers, the World Health Organization intensified eradication program began in nineteen sixty seven. The last naturally occurring case was recorded in nineteen seventy seven.
Shawn: A decade. It took us a decade.
David: And we eliminated that son of a bitch So yeah, it was the last naturally occurring case was recorded in nineteen seventy seven, like I said. And then in nineteen eighty and I remember this, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated. I'm not even sure if they even have any in cold storage anymore. I know for a while they were keeping some in
Shawn: You know it's in cold storage. You know it's in cold storage. My older siblings all had smallpox vaccine vaccines. I was never vaccinated. It bothers me to this day.
David: So all of that doesn't sound like necessarily learning from history, and it's not in the narrow sense. And I guess that's probably the important distinction here. Nobody needed a historical analogy to figure out that smallpox was terrible.
Shawn: Well apparently they did because we forgot that measles is terrible.
David: It demonstrates actually something deeper. Humanity didn't have to rediscover everything from scratch every generation. Knowledge accumulated, technology accumulated, methods accumulated, institutions accumulated. And then people coordinated those things into a system capable of solving a problem. So it's not remember this as a famous event, but don't throw away all what previous generations learned.
Shawn: which is what we seem to do.
David: Which is it's kinda what we do. But yeah, measles I I think if you had to look at two paths that we took where we did really good and really bad, I would have to say measles and smallpox are good examples of those. With smallpox, man, we just nailed that. We could have done it with measles. But the will wasn't just there.
Shawn: We that with number of viruses that don't have zoonotic hosts. But we just don't.
David: measles was so close too. I mean, we got rid of it. polio's another one. Polio was pretty much eradicated. You're making a comeback.
Shawn: mortality of infants and women. those numbers steadily were going down down down down down down down because medical procedures and sterile facilities for childbirth were increasing in first world countries somehow people got this idea that well childbirth is the most natural thing and you know you can just do that anywhere and it's and it's perfectly fine. and it's perfectly fine and and if that worked for you and you were lucky great congratulations for your health and your baby's health but somehow it took about a generation or two maybe for us to forget that That's the number one cause of women dying. infant mortality rates have gone up. Yes, this, yeah.
David: In the United States. In other first world countries, you don't see that. And that's an easy one to understand. it's a lesson that we're not learning. And that's universal health. Countries that have universal health where you don't run the risk of bankruptcy, they get prenatal care,
Shawn: They get all the best care during childbirth and yeah.
David: Here we got people who can't afford prenatal vitamins. they don't stick to a routine of going to the doctor while they're pregnant. You only go when they think they have an issue. So yeah, the United States is one of the only countries where the mortality risk
Shawn: and maternal mortality are going up.
David: going up. Everywhere else is going down. So at the beginning of this we were sort of defending the basic version, remember history and you won't repeat it. Now we're sorta saying no people remember and repeat anyway. And I think both of those are a little too simple. Because there are several different ways historical learning can fail. First, we forget which legit and we do that one a lot in in our personal lives I believe, not only institutional.
Shawn: Absolutely.
David: we remember the wrong thing, and I know a lot of people that are guilty of that, including me.
Shawn: Me.
David: We remember the right thing, but apply it to the wrong situation. I'm gonna act because this is something that worked in the past, but you know what? Doesn't
Shawn: apply in this situation,
David: so a historical analogy i is one of the problems. We c correctly institutionalize the lesson, but the institution becomes rigid or circumstances change again. Change is a bitch, isn't it?
Shawn: It's the one thing you can count on.
David: And the fifth would have to be we preserve the rule but forget the lesson. We know what the rule is, but we don't forget why. So when that cause changes, not ready for it. Sort of like institutional amnesia. So what it came down to there's actually two kinds of institutional memory. Memory of the rule, is what we do, and the memory of the reason, this is why we do it. And if you don't remember both of those, you can be hosed.
Shawn: because they have to work together. Yeah.
David: and they're not the same thing. So yeah, they sort of have to work together. An institution can become very good at preserving behavior while becoming very bad at remembering the problem that the behavior was designed to solve. Which means the institution can eventually become the new historical mistake.
Shawn: Well, we're going to rely on this thing because we set this up to tell us what to do and it's telling us to do this thing.
David: If we only look at that if we don't look at what has changed We're in trouble.
Shawn: So this brings me back to my statement earlier of we really can't create institutions that are gonna help us decide what to do because.
David: Well,
Shawn: We can't predict everything. It's not an option.
David: Right, only you can do is be adaptive. So like the Boeing list. I'm sure the Boeing list that came out in what was I think nineteen thirty nine? has been modified over the years because we're not flying the same type of planes but we still have the checklist. And I'm guessing that each time we've modified that checklist is because something either bad has happened or potentially bad has happened. You know, I I came into this wanting to say structure, not memory, is what prevents repetition. And that's really too strong. Because the structure comes from memory.
Shawn: But if it's too rigid or we don't interpret it exactly right the next time it's now useless
David: Right. The checklist exists because somebody remembered an accident. The hotline exists because somebody remembered a crisis. The treaty exists because somebody understood a problem. The eradication system for smallpox exists because generations accumulated knowledge. So memory is the raw material. But it's not a finished building.
Shawn: And we only ever remember things that happened within our lifetime. generationally, people just forget. They can. I don't see how we ever get out of this. I don't think there's a way out of it. I don't think there is. I think if there had been a way out of it, we would have found it by now.
David: like I said, we're successful at times. And when we're not successful it's because we fail to look at the differences in the situation.
Shawn: But we can only ever be as smart as we are.
David: That's true.
Shawn: We're never going to exceed that capacity.
David: Well we do have a sequence though that w that helps if nothing else. And that's memory. And we're great record keepers we have knowledge of stuff hundreds and thousands of years back. We just need to remember it. And then interpretation, making sure that we understand what we remember. Comparison, making sure that we compare new situations to the old situations to make sure that they are the indeed close enough or the same. And we're not comparing apples to oranges. And that requires judgment. And that's where we probably fall down the greatest. institutionalization is setting up those procedures for big things. Adaption, being able to adapt those, because if we lock into not being able to change those is just as bad as not having them. And if any of those fail, when we can end up repeating a pattern. So it's not quite those who forget history are destined to repeat it. 'Cause we can remember it and still repeat it. We can forget it and not repeat it. Depending on so many different variables. So I wanna leave you with one small problem.
Shawn: Just one? Wow!
David: we spent the entire episode talking about institutional memory, checklists, treaties, hotlines, rules, procedures, and they worked because they preserved lessons. But eventually somebody follows a checklist without remembering why it's there, and that's dangerous too, because now the institution is preserving the behavior But not the reasoning. Which means the lessons has become detached from the problem. And that's when institutional memory can become institutional rigidity. Like I said, it's gotta be adaptive. The institution was created because circumstances demanded a a response, but circumstances don't promise to remain the same. So the best institution isn't one that says, we solved this forever. the one that says, We learned something important, and we built a way to notice when this lesson needs to change. And that's a much harder job. Which I guess is probably why it's so rare. And that's why we can have both things going on at the same time. We can remember and forget, remember and not repeat. We can remember and repeat. But it's never quite as simple as what that statement from Churchill originally stated. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I think we started the episode assuming that. That that meant remember what happened, don't do it again. But maybe that's way too small. Satanyana was talking about experiencing accumulating, about progress depending on retaining what came before. And that leaves us with something more complicated than a slogan. You need memory, but memory isn't knowledge. Knowledge isn't understanding. understanding isn't judgment. Judgment doesn't automatically become institutional learning, and even institutional learning isn't permanent, and that's one of you the problems that you keep hammering. Because circumstances change, people change, institutions change, and eventually somebody has to ask, does this rule still solve the problem it was created to solve? Which means maybe the goal isn't to remember the past perfectly. but is to remain capable of learning from it. And maybe that's the real opposite of repeating history is learning. It's annoyingly simple, but the process of for it isn't. We don't avoid historical repetition by remembering harder. We learn by remembering accurately, by asking what actually happened, by questioning our analogies, by distinguishing remembrance from cause, by taking uncertainty seriously, by refusing to judge people entirely by what we know happened afterwards, especially 'cause like we said, the winners often write the history, so although if you dig deep enough you can usually find it. By turning hard won lessons into institutions when they should be institutionalized. And by making sure those institutions can learn again when the world changes. 'Cause as you said before, change is inevitable. Always happening. So I guess our concluding thought would be those who forget the past may repeat it, those who misunderstand it may repeat it differently, and those who remember it perfectly may still repeat it as they never learn.
Shawn: so many ifs that it just makes the whole thing useless. I think that's my larger point that I'm coming to.
David: Fair enough.
Shawn: We cannot exceed our human capability. Therefore, we will always do this thing, regardless of what we set up.
David: Well there you have it. We've talked forever.
Shawn: We always do.
David: Never came up with a a definitive an answer, except that the initial premise isn't accurate at all, but there's no way to end the end result which is We repeat shit whether we remember it or not. And the longer we don't remember, the more likely things are to repeat. for me the big part was Even when we know the history, we can still repeat it. It's not a matter of just forgetting it. Like you said, sometimes that occurs because of greed. Sometimes we just misunderstand what the true problem is. I think it's an oversimplification to say we just forget and repeat. if you want to contact us, you can reach us at classy as hell at outlook dot com.
Shawn: Thank you so much for listening to us today. Please go to wherever you listened to us and rate us, review us, and follow us. It helps us out greatly.
David: It does, it does. And plus we love knowing that we're talking to at least a person.
Shawn: That's wonderful. We love you and until next time don't keep it classy
David: Keep it real. I got a lot of editing on this one.
Shawn: You did a great job with lots of research.
David: My problem is some of it I I