History is full of things that go wrong, but the human being is the only creature that does not learn from it. The human ability to generate (and manage) memories is clearly overrated from the point of view of good civilization.
Despite all the historical evidence, we always end up making the mistakes of the past—and talking about them and anticipating and relating them, in the exact same way, from generation to generation. With the same childish gravity, the same silly surprise, the same insane contemplation.
Perhaps this is, after all, our main hallmark as a species — the only characteristic that does not change over time — regardless of the stage of technological evolution of each particular civilization. It doesn’t matter the size of the pistons, the resistance of the tubes or how many processors the transistor has; we always put our foot in the jackfruit.
Jackfruit when Neville Chamberlain thought you could talk to Adolf Hitler and Europe went to war; when Churchill went to Yalta to talk to Stalin about the determination of peoples and an Iron Curtain erected in Berlin tore the world in half for almost half a century. Jackfruit in Ukraine, when we thought there would be no more war just because there hadn’t been a war for many years.
By some inexplicable phenomenon of collective psychology, we always prefer to believe in the existence of an eternal and universal peace when, in the past, all eternal and universal truces proved to be ephemeral and conjunctural.
Since we escaped orality and learned to keep memories, the examples that prove this “jackfruit theory” are abundant, public and notorious. From the point of view of improving decision-making about the future of humanity, memories are useless and counterproductive.
Not even stored in writing, preserved in statues and paintings, printed in photographs, starred in movies or, now, spewed live on social media, can any memory fulfill any other function that is not entirely devoted to hedonism.
So it’s pleasure instead of danger, what people feel when Sergio Moro shares the stage with Jair Bolsonaro again; pleasure, instead of perplexity, when Alckmin and Lula come together under the same plate, after what they said about each other. Pleasure when it paints a mood, pleasure when there is a shooting, pleasure when a number becomes a swastika.
Pleasure instead of nausea when no one wants to know what is true or what is a lie anymore. Pleasure to watch a lie as if it were the truth. Real pleasure. A danger!
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
