The Use, Abuse, Importance and Manipulation of our History

Many people think that science is more important than history in today’s modern world. Looking at it from a money-making perspective, it does seem that science is more important than history. People who find history tedious think it is a complete waste of time to go into the details of the past when the future calls on the current man to rise to its taxing difficulties. They contend that thinking about what needs to be done rather than what has already been done would be more beneficial. In this manner, we might solve both our current and future difficulties. But what if I told you that the solution to our modern world was hidden in the stories of the past all along? 

          History means to study the past, to learn from and avoid the mistakes that people before us have perpetrated. But if I am being honest here, I will tell you that we human beings do not learn from the past. We would search for situations in the past when we had committed the same blunder as each mistake, where "Mistake B" emerged preceding "Mistake A," and so forth. It should come as hardly surprising that it turns out that for every error we made recently, there is an example from the past when the identical blunder was committed. Why does this happen? The thing is, people don’t understand History in the way that it should be understood. You need in-depth learning to be cognizant of History. To quote the philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Because there are thousands of years to draw from, learning from personal experience should come second to learning from the experience of others.

           History also helps people reach self-awareness. To follow this up with an example, in the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the Party, as in the government, had completely erased the people’s History:

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten,  every picture has been repainted. Every statue, street, and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

By doing this, the people’s memories will gradually be replaced by whatever the Party says, and they will be unable to think independently. This way, the mere idea of a revolt will vanish because they will not know how things were before the Party took over. This book clearly highlights that denying and erasing people’s grasp of their own history is the most effective way to destroy them. The real lesson, however, comes from History’s negative value-that is what to avoid. To end with the words of Robert Heinlein: “A generation that ignores History has no past and no future.”