Can we learn from the past?

We can—if we read widely and reflect on the lessons history teaches us. Some insights from history include the following:

1. Most people don’t care about their impact on the commons—the commonly used air, water, and soil and parks and parking places and forests, flora and fauna, oceans, space, etc.. Homo sapiens writ large tend to trash their living environments. Very few leave their campsite cleaner than they found it.
2. Religion (all religion) is a mountain of mythological rubbish developed by people who saw things they didn’t understand and passed their erroneous interpretations on to the next generation. Most generations, most people don’t challenge what they were taught as children.
3. Most people operate from deductive logic, settling on conclusions they were taught regardless of data and evidence. A few use inductive logic and draw their conclusions from evidence, science, and data. See #2 above. See Kahneman and Tversky and others.
4. However much people have, they will want more. History is replete with conquerors who tried to conquer the whole world. See my book A Song of Humanity: a science-based alternative to the world’s scriptures under pen name Only One Man, and the Book of Conquerors therein. See also Driven by Lawrence and Nohria (Harvard). Generals, politicians, war lords, cartels, crime families, business people, on and on. Therefore, communities must learn to protect themselves from those who want to conquer them—physically, financially, emotionally, politically or otherwise.
5. Most people don’t care about the underprivileged, homeless, handicapped, mentally ill, etc.
6. Despite the reality that we are all homo sapiens, people continue to carry bitter prejudices against other people who have a different skin color or some other distinguishing feature. It’s madness.
7. Most people will lie, cheat and steal if they can. Therefore, trust only if you verify. Advertising, deals, promises, data, etc.
8. Some people work hard, some people are lazy. Some are smart, some not so much. Some people care about others, most don’t. World-wide.
9. People trapped in yesterday will generally fight new insights based on data, evidence and scientific studies. People make decisions based on their beliefs over data and evidence. Few people can rise above their childhood beliefs and rely on inductive logic.
10. Power, money, and sex are very powerful drives in human behavior.
11. When one gets beyond appearance, language, superficial customs (dress, cuisine, etc.) we homo sapiens are much more alike that we are different. When we focus on differences (tribalism, politics, etc.) bad things happen. When we focus on our human similarities and our individual differences, things go much better.

In truth we should trust.