Here's a question for people who read books about history. What do you do, mentally, to prevent yourself from accidentally seeing parallels between past events and the current day?
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Allow me to tell you how the Battle of Agincort relates to Fed actions since 2008 because I could do it if pressed...
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Who’s holding the longbows?
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It just proves as humans we're not as dynamic as we think. We repeat the same shit day in day out without even thinking about it. History applies to the present along those lines.
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Thats why when you read and your brain makes those connections you go “hmm” and move on, like you would with any other irrelevant observation. You can acknowledge apparent parallels without giving in to the perception.
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I think you start by thinking like an historian. That means, mainly, recognizing the people you are reading about as products of their time & place, with values and beliefs often very different from ours. That doesn’t mean you accept their beliefs as true. 1/2
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2/2 It does mean you recognize they did. Why they did is a great question, the answer to which may or may not bear on a current political controversy.
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It’s not that drawing parallels is a problem, but you need to have an understanding of other large scale social changes in order to do it. History can give you an idea of how things played out under different circumstances, but it ain’t a crystal ball.
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Maybe it is because that is what history is for?
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Although there are lots of unprecedented aspects to 2019, the ancient elements of human experience (heartbreak, joy, feast, famine) are all around us still.
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Typically the reason there are parallels are because human nature never changes - greed, fear, hate, love. Understand that, & you can do a pretty good job of distinguishing specious from not specious, or perhaps more accurately, discounting the degrees of potential speciousness.
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Another reason we see parallels is we're hard wired to see patterns. It's a naturally selected survival skill. The brain skips analysis & leaps to "I've seen this before, I know what happens next." Some are so good at pattern recognition, they see them when they're not there.pic.twitter.com/EReAmiyBlA
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