The Uncomfortable Mirror, Part 1

Overcoming Self-Deception Through the Study of History

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This is part 1 of a 5-part article.

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I am Rome, and Rome is me. I am Greece, and Greece is me. I have in me the best of humanity, and the worst of humanity, as we all do.

I am Aurelius and Caligula. I am Socrates; I am also and the mob that murdered Socrates without legitimate cause. I am a Stoic and an Epicurean. I am the Enlightenment, and I am the Dark Ages.

I, like every human being, embody every aspect of human nature—for good or for evil—that has been displayed throughout history.

History is the study of human nature, the museum of human action that tells us less about the past than it tells us about ourselves.

Santayana once said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

This is so, not because we make mistakes through forgetfulness, but because humans have a predictable, homogenous nature. Our actions may be different from one another but we all act for the same reasons.

In other words, it’s not entirely accurate to say that the purpose of studying history is to teach us about the past, in order that we might better navigate the future.

More precisely, the purpose of studying history is to learn about ourselves as individual human beings.

As historian David McCullough stated, “History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”

The more conscious we are of ourselves and of our nature the more capable we are of guiding and controlling that nature.

History reveals that humans have a dual nature, and the struggle between our conflicting natures is the story of humanity.

Accept Your Potential for Depravity

It’s a dangerous mistake to read accounts of depraved individuals and societies and to be so shocked and disgusted by human depravity that the shock blinds us to our own depravity.

One of the most important lessons to be learned from studying humanity is that every individual has the simultaneous potential for nobility and depravity, for divinity and degeneracy.

With the ability to choose comes good and evil options to choose from, and history is the collective record of human choice, and the most potent instrument for introspection into our own choices, our own intentions, our own desires.

The adolescent, naive student of history will read about the Roman dictator Nero and, oblivious to the evil inside of himself, place a myopic label on Nero in an unconscious effort to separate himself from Nero.

When the student thinks, “How could anyone do such horrible things?” what he is in actuality trying to believe is that he could never be capable of such blatant evil; his thoughts are more about what he wants to believe about himself than they are about Nero.

Although few may admit it, our shock as we study Nero’s atrocities comes from a desperate need to deceive ourselves by denying that we could possibly have the same vicious tendencies, the same desire to find satisfaction through sadism and the desecration of all that is good and holy.

In other words, our shock is more feigned than real; no one is shocked by something that they understand and accept as reality.

Why study history then? Not simply because if we don’t we are doomed to repeat it, but to gain insight into what things humans choose, why they choose them, and to learn how to identify the things that lead to virtue, freedom, and prosperity and those things that lead to perversion, despotism, and poverty.

In short, it is to cultivate our ability to discern good from evil, truth from error, and to increase our resolution to choose those things that are good, true, and right.

It is to come face-to-face and soul-to-soul with ourselves and become cognizant of our own base desires.

It is to eliminate the naivety and self-deception that comes from not wanting to believe the worst about ourselves, and then to begin a deliberate, intricate, and lifelong process to extirpate the evil within us and to develop our intrinsic divinity.

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Stephen Palmer is a book writer for mission-driven leaders, a small business lead generation website design architect and persuasive website copywriter, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the author of Uncommon Sense: A Common Citizen’s Guide to Rebuilding America.

He co-authored the New York Times bestseller Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity, as well as Hub Mentality: Shifting from Business Transactions to Community Interaction.

He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate and faculty member of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.

Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela.

Subscribe to Stephen’s blog and contact him at stephen [at] leadershipwriter [dot] com.