historicism and the world identity

our minds love stories and patterns. historicism gives you both.

the idea is simple: if social and cultural phenomena are shaped by history, understanding the past gives you leverage over the future. it sounds right. it feels induitive, which makes it so much more seductive, which makes it powerful tool used by people across the world, across history. except it is a strong fallacy.

in the 1890s, Max Planck’s professors told him that physics was almost complete and it waas worthless to put time and effort into it, it was the prevalent sentiment among most scietists of that time. it was a reasonable sentiment when u saw how progress in physics worked each decade for the 4 centuries leading up to the 1900s. it was like looking at a exponential decay curve where the number of questions humans asked and didnt have the answer to just halfed very few decades. it was a good story of humanity’s scientific progress post-reniessance (with the synthesis of knowledge across disciples and of knowledge across cultures from the world caused by the flow of trade and information from the invention of the steam engine, fitting with a narrative of modern civilsations). there were good and consistent patterns to relate the development of the scientific establishment from the previous year to the present year. certain theories and ideas were so established that no one would actively recognise them as assumptions at all.

what came later was a paradigm-shift, with quantum mechanics and relativity, everything discovered before was in question to be challenged.

in the 1800s, the idea of democracy was seen as absurd and especially the idea that all people having an equal vote, since most people were ill-informed and uneducated, and good education was not even expected to reach till them in any future. So even mass education seemed like a fairy tale idea.

in the 1950s, the existence of india as a unified state was popularly debated on in the anglosphere because they recognised its diversity to be a cause of divide and predicted balkanisation.

realists [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE6kJoSc8j0]

all of these stories follow with the belief that history follows a deterministic path and one can counter the above examples by saying that if people accounted for other important factors then they too could have predicted what came forth.

this i will say i cherry-picking data retrospectively to fit a narrative u have designed.

in his philosophy of history, Hegel says “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” . here Hegel did not mean that history is pointless or that humans are doomed to repeat identical errors; actually, he argued that every historical era is strictly unique, and the past cannot be used as a simple, copy-paste template for solving modern problems.

ultimately it is the idea of determinism here that bothers me. it is a very wannabe idea of laplace’s demon

which different from the determinism in physics since even the butterfly effect and chaos theory

there is also a level of reinforcement of realities by believing them to be fundamentally true from history,

default mode network of the world

the poverty of histroicism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poverty_of_Historicism]

false intuition

power using

economics and funding to projects

good statistics for the capitalist engine but not for research

the madecci family and bell labs , reniesance