Accepting other's information - part one

I find that an unfortunate amount of people today are afraid to learn from the mistakes of others. We feel that we must learn for ourselves. Why is it that history is not looked on as an essential subject? It is an important subject because it can teach us valuable lessons about life. For instance, if we were to look back on all the problems that war has caused over the years and how it has accomplished practically nothing, wouldn’t we be more willing to avoid a war? This is not to say that I am a pacifist. There are sometimes reasons for war, namely self defense, but the majority of wars in this world’s history could have been avoided if people had of realized what the outcome would be-nothing. You see that’s what history is. It’s a looking into the future by means of the past. In essence, history is just repeated over and over again because we are unwilling to learn and move on.

Now if a scientist were to try to come up with a theory that someone else had already come up with, say how to make a light bulb, he would be foolish. He would be wise to study the research already done on light bulbs. He could question the theory itself, test it, and see if he can come up with a better way of doing it, but to spend time “discovering” something someone else has already discovered, is utterly pointless. It’s reliving history. When we are presented with evidence, but say we think that we must try everything out for ourselves, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we our discovering something new.