The lessons of history learned by the smart

October 6, 2025

A really interesting and thoughtful article that gives meaning to George Santayana’s aphorism that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

China, largely due to its 4000-year civilisational history, is not doing what the West is doing. It is learning from the past and creating a culture that is not repeating the mistakes of the past, at least for the last 40 years. Mind you it has also been extraordinarily successful over thousands of years in avoiding foreign military and colonial involvements and that is serving them extraordinarily well.

The vast and continuing expenditures by the West on military hardware and expeditions have consumed the wealth of their countries. This has prevented them from undertaking the extraordinary infrastructure expenditures of China, both at home and abroad, that have dragged more than a billion people around the world out of poverty. At the same time, the West has hollowed out their middle classes and driven substantial proportions of their populations back into poverty.

The West is a clear lesson to the rest of humanity that Santayana was right. The West are doomed to repeat their failures of the past by convenient losses of memory!!