What We Have Learned From the 20th Century

From dKosopedia

Category: History

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

Sources

• Diary Poses the Question