What We Have Learned From the 20th Century

The List

Beware of metaphoric wars (e.g. War on Drugs, War on Poverty, Metaphorical War on Everything).
Don't get involved in a land war in Asia.
The power of the atom is infinitely more powerful than that of human conscience.
Free market leads to Libby, Montana and Bophal, India.
Labor must take some lumps from the Pinkertons to win the right to organize.
From space, our home looks like a tiny blue dot, inconsequential in the universe.
That of the billions of stars... some are actually galaxies with billions of stars within.

There is a universal desire and right for man to live freely and control one's own destiny.
Military might cannot defeat the collective desire of a nation to be free
Control of information = control of society
By Decade
- That sausage is gross (1900s)
- Poison gas is bad (1910s)
- The stock market can crash (1920s)
- The government has a duty to help the poor and elderly (1930s)
- Women can do men's work (1940s)
- Censorship sucks (1950s)
- Even democratically elected governments lie (1960s)
- Oil dependency is bad (1970s)
- Greed is bad (1980s)
- Sex scandals trump all(1990s)
Pure capitalism fails
Fascism fails.
Communism fails.
Everything is connected to everything else whether DDT in arctic birds or entangled subatomic particles half a universe apart
Everything is a lot more complicated and beautiful than we thought in 1900, whether an ecosystem, the workings of our own cells, or international relations.
Absolute certainty is impossible (Heisenberg).
Attention to details is critical (bulkheads in the Titanic, O-rings in the space shuttle, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, etc).
The universe is so vast and our whole world is so inconsequential, our clashing empires are like two dust mites fighting over a speck of dust.
The universe is not only stranger than we imagined, it is stranger than we can probably can imagine.
But that isn't an excuse to stop trying.
People everywhere have the same dreams and are haunted by the same demons
The ends don't justify the means