One example of our many fundamental human flaws is the over-repetition of platitudes such as 'learn from your mistakes'—taught from the moment we take our first ever steps into kindergarten classrooms, repeated, repeated, and repeated in excess throughout our lives.

And yet, why is it that we seem to absorb this one piece of advice, thrown around in conversation amongst ourselves, only just enough to apply it to ourselves and let go of it? We can acknowledge and reflect upon mistakes made in our personal lives; our academic lives; our work lives, reframing them into catalysts for our growth and improvement as people.

Why do we, then, continuously seem to fail to learn from human error made in our history? What should have been a collective societal responsibility, turned trite and banal. Almost meaningless.

'Learn from your mistakes'.

Almost like semantic satiation—the phenomenon in which a word is verbally repeated over and over in rapid succession until it loses its meaning. Except, semantic satiation is a temporary neurological effect, whereas our inability to stop the repetition of human error in our history spans across time.

Ask anyone you know what they believe the study of history is really for. Chances are, you'll get an answer somewhere along the lines of understanding perspectives and the ways in which the past shaped our current societies and identities; getting insight into present-day occurrences; or, maybe, avoiding the repetition of mistakes due to poor human decision-making or poor judgment.

The last statement is difficult to disagree with. And so, I wouldn't disagree.

It's instinctive, it aligns with common sense, it's based in genuine truth on paper—but, judging from our timeline of events thus far, just hasn't seemed to reflect consistently in practice. Practice suggests that our progress is always an aspiration, fragile and reversible. Never certainty that it won't fall back into the same mistakes. Never really taking away growth from history.

This makes it seem as though, even those who've 'learned' history, are nonetheless condemned to make mistakes.

Why is this? Is there some innate irrationality; some hardwired responses we are given to that lead us down similar paths, time and time again? Or, are we just cherry-picking the wrong parts of history; finding the not-quite-right takeaways in order to improve upon ourselves? Are we taking the path of least change and effort?

Each rings true, to a certain extent or another, at least.

'History repeats itself', as the figure of speech goes. The problem is that the saying directs our focus to the wrong direction from which to learn from history.

Because, individual historical events, on their own, don't repeat themselves; it's our own unchanging psychological patterns of behavior throughout history that are responsible for what we can, now, acknowledge as mistakes. Our ways of thoughts and acting upon said thoughts create repetition in the paths we tend to go down.

So, by picking out parts of our human psychology—the nature of conflicts, motive and rationale, decision-making and reasoning, judgements made, interrelationships—we can then draw out trends from history. And come to understand that history itself cannot repeat, but the cycles of human behaviors do not stop.

Let's look at this statement with the addition of another perspective. What if the cycle only seems undeterring and unchanging because changes are gradual across time; too slow for the naked eye?

A lot of the human species seems to, as a collective, favor the path of least resistance and least change—making the expectation of moving entire societies in a timeframe of less than multiple generations an unrealistic one. From an evolutionary approach, especially.

So, to grow from our history would push humankind into a spiral of evolution in the ways we organize ourselves on a societal, structural level; the ways in which we operate; our psychological structure; our psychological responses.

This process of collective change occurs only across generations, and is often invisible.

Just like a plant seed growing, stare at it to see no change. Walk away and come back once the threshold of 'too late' has long passed to see its sprouting, burgeoning leaves.

It may seem, for a very long time, that we might never grow as efficiently as we do in our personal, academic, or work lives. To 'learn from mistakes' in human history would be to look inwards at ourselves and our behaviors; at those aspects of human nature that seem to remain a constant. Only with time, however, can we apply them as catalysts to our own development.

Only as long as we look from the right lens can the past, still, be a pathway towards growth into both our present and our future.