Remembering an unfortunate past actually allows us to repeat our mistakes, unless we make special efforts to recall our original impressions.
Endings cast their image over an entire event and can obscure provocative beginnings and troublesome middles. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"—a message first conveyed by philosopher George Santayana and then restated over the years by teachers, historians, political figures, and world leaders.
prevent us from repeating it. In fact, we need to go beyond normal remembering to avoid repeating our mistakes. This goes for personal experiences as well as historical events.The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self feels events in the present, whereas the remembering self looks back and feels the memory of these events. Notably, weevents in terms of how they ended. And when an extended event is over, it is our remembering self that tells us what happened. So the ending of an event strongly shapes the memory of the entire event.Endings disproportionately influence our memory because they often bestow meaning on an entire event. Suppose we undergo a series of medical examinations and tests for a suspicious growth. On our final visit to the doctor, we receive a diagnosis of a benign cyst. This favorable diagnosis then gives meaning to the entire experience, defining it as the normal process of checking on our health. The remembering self may even recall the favorable ending asof the earlier examinations and emphasizing our good health. Nonetheless, the memory is a skewed representation of what was actually experienced and could lead to misjudgment in the future. Similarly, most political elections acquire meaning from the final vote count, even though a variety of joys and disappointments were experienced along the way. Last impressions last. And we don’t naturally remember our experiencing self. But we can make efforts to recall the experiencing self—to understand events more fully and to prevent mistakes we made along the way.With consequential events, we take in and vividly represent information in primary memory in the form of visual images, sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, and bodily sensations. We then synthesize these primary memories into integrated memory, providing structure to our elemental primary memories, sometimes in basic narrative form.for personally experienced events. When we recall events in our lives, we usually draw on integrated memory, recalling and telling the remembered events more coherently than if we tapped into unstructured primary memories. But primary memories can still be accessed by focusing on perceptual details or specific emotional and physiological experiences at the time of the events. When I recall the birth of our daughter more than 40 years ago, I can call upon integrated memory, relating the events of that night as a story, without accessing the vibrant images and strong emotions of primary memory. But if I concentrate on the perceptual details of our daughter’s birth, the images and emotions represented in primary memory stream into consciousness, and I experience the memory as if the birth happened last night. Primary memory is still selective, but it’s closer to the experiencing self than integrated memory, and we can make use of this.For those old enough to remember, consider your memory of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. After the Twin Towers fell, all commercial flights were cancelled, schools were closed, and some of our relatives and friends were unaccounted for. If we focus on sensory and emotional details, we can revive the uncertainty and dread of that first day, recovering some of our experiencing self.Similarly, to recover our experiencing self during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, we can focus on retrieving images from our primary memory as the attack unfolded. In general, if we tap into the emotions, the sights, the feelings, and the thoughts of primary memory, we go a long way toward accessing the experiencing self. Going further, we can awaken the experiencing self for historical events by reading accounts of other people’s experiencing selves in the form of contemporaneous journals, letters, and diaries. In the case of January 6, 2021, we can access officialAfter a catastrophic event comes to an end, we look back and view the outcome as inevitable. While a catastrophe is unfolding, however, we have no certainty about how it will end. Most of us do what we can to get through destructive times, and what is seen later as inevitable was not known then.sent to Adolf Hitler at the time he was in power, letters that convey a sense of immediate experience, including the positive attitudes and emotions of many people regarding their belovedIn fact, unsettling and seemingly indefensible sentiments can be expressed decades after they’ve been discredited because the experiencing selves of the past are not well known and because the ending of a catastrophe does not remove from the human repertoire the underlying motivations that gave rise to these sentiments.As with other historical events, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is not remembered in the same detail as it was experienced. But in this case, there is a powerful influence in addition to normal forgetting—a concerted campaign to rewrite the story with a different, more favorable ending.With the attack on the Capitol, order was restored in less than a day, so the ending could be more easily reworked than with other catastrophic events, such as 9/11. And defining memory for the end of an event means defining memory for the entire event. Personal memory effectively represents the gist of consequential events, along with our personal location, our ongoing activities, our emotions as well as the emotions of those around us, the immediate aftermath, and several vivid details. However, if relentless, consistent, and coercive statements are made that contradict our original experience, some of us may accept and assimilate these erroneous statements into our integrated memory.All’s well that ends well, but a favorable ending can obscure memory for a provocative beginning and distressing middles.Our tendency to repeat personal or historical mistakes isn’t necessarily due to an ignorance of what is remembered so much as a failure to access our experiencing self at the time. It is when we ignore the past experiencing self that we can repeat an unfortunate history. And we do not usually remember our experiencing self unless we make a devoted effort.https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/foia/2022-01-06/capitol-riot-chronology Note 1. Philosopher George Santayana first published this in 1905, although it was attributed to Winston Churchill years later during World War II. Edmund Burke offered a related sentiment in 1790 in: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” But Burke’s phrasing is different enough to give credit to Santayana. And then there’s the final fetching line of a poem by Gertrude Stein : “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” Note 2. The events as they unfolded are documented on video and fully investigated and reported by a bipartisan committee in Congress.The Friend EffectSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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