history will never repeat itself
the happy past will never be restored
Donald Trump has been elected President again. He will build the wall again. He will cut taxes for the rich again. He will ban Muslims from traveling into America again. He will meet with Kim Jong Un again. The pandemic will happen again. Trump will not only bring back monarchism, he will reinstate the Code of Hammurabi. Just as Rome fell, so will America. And then it will rise again, as The Holy American Empire, which too will fall... Until American society eventually resembles the Early Dynasties of Sumer. Then we will all die. Our corpses will melt into the Earth and the planets will crumble and be forced into the great crunch. All stars, asteroids, and rubble will come into the same, singular point. A heaving mass of gravity will eat itself before re-exploding outwards, stretching its wings across the nothingness. The Garden of Eden and the beginning of Rome lie in our future, not our past. And so is the meeting of Kanye West and Donald Trump on October 11, 2018. Everything will happen all over again, just as it was. Every day is the same. Every cycle of the universe is the same. Donald Trump will be the President elect an infinite number of times, and we must simply accept the eternal return. At least, that’s what the press has been saying.
Trump has campaigned on the promise to “Make America Great Again”— an apparently backward-looking model for politics. But Kamala campaigned on the counter-promise that “We Are Not Going Back”. This slogan was a terrible idea—and not because it didn’t resonate with voters. It did. It represented the collective dread bubbling under the surface of Never Trumpism: that history would somehow repeat itself. That the past is not really the past, but lurks within the future. But this is not true. As the old phrase goes, the present is pregnant with the future. Rather than offer a vision of the future, of what could be, Harris only offered a negation of the past. Her motto would have been functionally similar if it simply said: the past was bad. Meanwhile Trump’s politics promises history can repeat, that you can have the baby boom twice, that you can have Reagenomics twice, that we can have the industrial revolution twice, and so on.
It is not only Kamala Harris’ campaign team that has a flawed conception of how time works, however. Everywhere we go these days we hear “history repeats itself” or “every day it’s the same thing”. These ideas are as delusional as the idea that the past can be reclaimed. In reality, nothing is inevitable.
The truth is that the Donald Trump that has been elected to president in the year 2024 is not even really the same person. Not just on a cellular level, but policy-wise, too. Trump will enact things he did not enact before. His policies are different this time. I’m personally not happy about them, but the years 2025-2029 will not contain the past; they will contain the future. Even if the future attempts to imitate the past, it is not capable of such a task.
History has never repeated itself. How could it?
We delude ourselves so often into a faulty idea of time's passage. We think to ourselves that we will go to work today, do our activities, go to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again the next day. But there are no days, there are no years— there is only an endless, stretching yawn of infinity which extends forwards. Never backwards. All of space moves forwards (forwards being a nonsensical word here— the direction is without an object) and we move along with it.
The idea that everyday the same things happen is not only an inaccurate one, but a dangerous one. If you hang on to it, this delusion of everydayness will drive you insane. You tell yourself that you do the same things over and over. But you have never done anything twice. Anything you do is made up by its circumstances. Say you drank a cup of tea this morning in your kitchen. You put the kettle on, poured the hot water into a teacup with a teabag in it. You wait for it to cool just long enough to take a drink. Tomorrow morning, you do the same thing. You put the kettle on. You pour the water in a teacup. But this time, as the water cools, you decide to take the teacup with you outside. It is nearing winter and the autumnal bite of cold enhances your enjoyment of the warm tea as you drink it outside.
Linguistically speaking, we can construct a statement that could refer to the activity you participated in on both days. We could say "you drank tea in the morning". Just because this statement can refer to both activities does not mean you did the same thing on both days. Language is a funny thing after all, we can construct kingdoms out of teacups; we could write a description of the way you drank that tea today and the way you drank it tomorrow. We could articulate a wealth of differences so great that we could construct an epic poem about this tea drinking you did this morning. The tea you drank this morning could be The Odyssey, while the tea you drank the next day could be The Iliad. But while the sensory-referent details could be articulated by the heap, the temporal difference between the teacup Odyssey and the teacup Iliad is just as great. Between the time you drank that tea today and the time you drank it tomorrow, the universe has shed its skin, the ground has shifted its weight, light and heat have been reinvented.
I am using poetic words, but I could just as easily be using technical ones. It as if the world is an animal, and every time it sheds its remnants we call it yesterday. We chose arbitrarily the point at which we say one shell has been removed from the world's surface, the point at which we say one day has passed. It could have just as well been that we say 17,000 days pass every time the sun flits across the sky. After all, those living near the arctic have little use for the passage of the day corresponding to the sun's visibility. Just as we had a collective realization when we saw the "blue marble" photograph that we were on something like a gigantic spaceship, "Spaceship Earth" to use the hippie parlance, so too must we realize that the universe itself is a ship, sailing through time. Doing the same thing in a different place is not really doing the same thing at all. Doing the same thing at a different time is not really doing the same thing at all. The universe is cruising down a one way street. Even heaven will be something new. People will not be reunited. They will be reinvented.
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.1
We should not worry about history repeating itself. It will not. The things that were wonderful and great will never happen again. All that awaits us in the future are new sensations based on new sensory inputs. Reality is ever-renewing and ever-suffering, just like the cells in your body. Time isn't time— it is space, the space which lies outside of space. It is the space that space moves through.
We will never make anything great ever again, because nothing will happen again. It will only happen for the first time.
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed
MAGA, for me, was an absolutely horrific campaign, this however, was a great post! Also, I went more into Yeat's theory of history which seemed pretty cool. Great work!
"It's like poetry; it rhymes."
History does not literally repeat itself, but the study of history shows us general patterns that lead to general "repetitions" or, perhaps, echoes. Consider a simple physical experiment about rolling a ballbearing down a sloped channel and measuring how far it goes. Each time you roll one down, the events take the same shape. The ballbearing has the same motion, and, as long as the ball was generally the same weight and composition, it goes the same distance. Yes, there are infinite variations: the air currents, the quantum state of the particles in the ballbearing, friction wearing down the slope, slightly different placements to start. But, within a measure of definable error, the ball will roll the same distance.
Now, the "laws" of physics are far more defined and strict than the "laws" of history. It is a soft science after all. But to suggest that history never repeats because nothing ever repeats misses the forest for the trees. You even mention that the industrial revolution could happen again. Which one will happen again? The first or second industrial revolution?
Your final line implies that greatness only has one definition. Rome was once the greatest military force in the world, it can never be great again, even if it becomes the greatest religious site in the world?
Things will never be the way they were before, but that doesn't not mean they can't be like the way they were before. To use a mathematics term, things could be homomorphic.