I'm in Facebook jail, so I guess it's time to finally post here.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
With everything going on these days, from anti-vaxxers to anti-maskers to the resurgence of fascism in modern society, I've been thinking about this quote a lot. Specifically, the verbage. People frequently misquote the line ever so slightly, variances such as "those who don't remember the past," or "those that fail to remember the past," or "those who fail to learn from the past." Very subtle variations, but each also has a slightly different meaning. I believe that George's wording is very deliberate, and far more accurate to the spirit of the idea.
Those who cannot remember the past. Not ignore. Not fail to learn the lessons from. Cannot remember. The people that don't retain memories from the past. The people that didn't live through the past, and therefore have no memories, no experiences to recall from it. Society is doomed to repeat certain follies simply because the frame of reference is lost to time. Ideas that made crystal clear sense decades, centuries before, no longer retain their meaning because people no longer remember what it was like to live under the requisite conditions. Anti-vaxxers are swayed that way because they have no experience of a world ravaged by disease, and then watching those diseases evaporate away with the advent of large-scale vaccination. Anti-maskers view mandatory masks as their rights being stripped away by tyrannical overreach because they don't remember the time when masks were mandatory to combat widespread pandemic, and that the requirement went away when the pandemic did. People cheering for fascist rule are convinced that it isn't fascism and that those that oppose them are because they weren't alive to experience the rise and prominence of full-on fascism before. These concepts aren't truly real, because they've never experienced them.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" isn't a rallying call to diligence, it's a warning to preparedness. It's a reminder that the hardships of the past will come again, it is inevitable. All the diligence in the world won't change human nature, and our nature is to reject that which we cannot grasp as real. We should be diligent in honoring and studying the past, most definitely. This is absolutely mandatory. We must remain vigilant at all times and not descend into complacency. But almost more importantly, we must be prepared for problems to recur. We must study what leads to the recurrence, we must study what happens when these problems recur, and we must prepare plans for how to deal with the inevitable damage that occurs as a result.
People will not remember. We need to learn how to be ready for that, rather than sit complacently, expecting the bad times to be long gone behind us.