The Human Tragedy Is Not Forgetting: It Is Believing That This Time We Will Be..
….. Able to Control the Forces We Unleash
Veni, vidi… and understood!?
There is an idea that emerges almost naturally every time history stumbles over the same stones again: that humanity’s real problem is forgetting.
That if we could preserve all our experiences intact — wars, crises, catastrophes, collective mistakes — we would finally learn. As if what we lacked were some mechanism capable of preventing us from repeating what we already know ends badly.
It is a powerful fantasy. To imagine a humanity in which each generation inherited not only physical traits, but memories as well. Not studying history, but feeling it. Carrying within ourselves the fear of a bombed city, the hunger of an economic collapse, the anguish of entire societies walking toward disaster without being able to stop.
But perhaps the problem was never the lack of memory.
Theory of Evolution does not transmit historical experiences. There is no archive of the past stored within our genes. We do not inherit the memory of the Second World War nor the emotional weight of the crises that destroyed economies and entire societies.
At most, epigenetics suggests that certain traumas may leave traces in the way we react to the world. But that is far from transmitting understanding. It is not learning. It is merely predisposition.
And yet, we know.
We know how wars begin. We know how conflicts escalate when pride, fear, or ambition take control. We know that crises rarely arrive suddenly; they are almost always preceded by warnings that nobody fully wanted to hear.
The information exists. Historical experience exists as well.
And still, history turns back onto itself.
That is where something deeply uncomfortable appears: perhaps human beings do not fail because they forget, but because they believe they can control what once destroyed others.
There is always a new explanation that allows one more step beyond the limit that once seemed untouchable. There is always someone convinced that this time the context has changed, that the calculation is more precise, that the risk is manageable, that the outcome will somehow be different.
And that conviction is often stronger than memory itself.
Because human beings are not merely creatures that learn. They are also creatures that interpret, rationalize, and convince themselves of whatever they need to believe in order to move forward.
Even if perfect memory existed — if every person carried within themselves the full emotional weight of all past mistakes — the same forces capable of pushing history toward the same abysses would still remain: fear, the desire for power, pride, the need to impose oneself, the illusion that the potential reward justifies taking the risk once again.
That is why the idea of a “genetic memory” capable of saving us contains something almost childlike. The hope that some automatic brake exists, capable of preventing us from crossing certain lines.
But that mechanism probably does not exist.
And perhaps it cannot exist.
Because forgetting is not humanity’s only problem. Sometimes, even fully aware of what is at stake, we continue moving forward anyway.
Perhaps that is the real tragedy of history: not that humanity fails to remember, but that even while remembering, it continues believing that this time it will be able to control the forces it unleashes.
