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The real lesson from the first time globalization died

Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation.

Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event.

ERIC CLINE: I'm Eric Cline. I'm an archaeologist and an ancient historian. I'm also the author of 1177 BC, and it's sequel, After 1177 BC. The period that we're discussing today is incredibly important in the history of humankind. It's the late Bronze Age, in particular, which goes from about 1700 to 1200 BCE, or BC, if you prefer. This was a time where people were basically globalized around the Mediterranean in a way that is not frequently seen. And so what happened to them back then may have implications for us today. So it turns out to be a much more important period to study than one might expect, even though it's more than 3,000 years ago.

How to avoid civilizational collapse.

Even though I think we can rank these societies as to how well they each did, one of the difficulties is to try to figure out why they did. Like, why were the Cypriots and the Phoenicians able to be that much more successful than the Hittites, for example? So archaeologists and ancient historians are now starting to try and answer these questions to grapple with the concepts. And we're getting a couple of interesting things. For example, it's now been suggested that maybe some of the societies were more fragile than they appear, and that they might have been more vulnerable to the stresses than they appeared to outsiders. Like the Mycenaeans, they had been over exploiting the lower classes. And those lower classes might have been quite happy to see the palaces fall, and even cheered, and they may have been part of the internal rebellions. So it may be that something that looked very strong, like the Hittites, was actually weakened internally, and the first big gust of wind came and knocked that tree over, and boom, no more Hittites. But it also might have just been the luck of the draw. It might have been geographical luck. So I think that's where water comes into play, because the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my category, too, and they're right by the Tigris and Euphrates. And the Egyptians, of course, have the Nile. Now, those are three of the big four in the ancient world. I mean, my poor Mycenaeans and Minoans, they're not quite up there with the others. You know, the big two in the late Bronze Age are the Egyptians and the Hittites, but then Assyrians and Babylonians. So of those four Egyptians, Hittites, the Syrians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Babylonians have the Tigris and Euphrates. The Egyptians have the Nile. The Hittites are the only one of those four without a major water source. They're also the only one of those four that go down completely. I don't think that's a coincidence. And in fact, in talking to various people, I've heard time and time again that wars over water are going to be what are fought in the coming century. And we can already see that in California with water, with Colorado, with Mexico and all of that. So I think in some ways, the fact that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were able to maintain their government and their religion and their writing systems and all of that might have been just luck of the draw, that they were so far inland that the sea peoples didn't get to them and they were on the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, so that the drought didn't impact them as badly as it did others. But having said that, we have written texts from the Assyrians that do talk about period of drought. They are Hitt. It's not that long though. It's like less than a century and it came well after everyone else had been Hitt. So there is something there to be said for where you happen to be. So again, I think this is where we're going to be looking in the future, is how did these people manage to survive or why didn't they survive? Were they not aware that they were collapsing? And again, we have to keep in mind and actually say this at the beginning of the sequel. Most of our records are from the 1%. They're from the elite. We know how the kings did and the central authorities that were living high. We don't know as much about the 99% if you want to call them that, about the farmers and the peasants out in the fields in Messenia in Greece or the Hinterlands in Anatolia. We don't really know their story that well, but we're learning it because archaeologists are now moving out and excavating the little villages, the little towns that are inhabited across the divide, Bronze Age and Iron Age. And so we're going to get more evidence. We're going to get more answers. And again, that's what I love about archaeology. It's not cut and dried and if you will pardon the pun, it's not set in stone. It changes depending on the new discoveries. So everything you're reading in the books, not just my books, but the history books and all that, it's going to be different to a certain extent within five years, 10 years, 50 years. I've already come out with the revised version of my first book and I have a folder in Dropbox of new articles that have already come out since 2021 that I need to take into account if we're ever able to do a third edition. It just keeps coming. It doesn't stop. And that is what is absolutely wonderful about it. In addition to all the other factors, whether it was luck in the draw, where you were situated or anything like that, the other factor to bring into account is how good were your leaders? That is, were they able to lead you through this time of turbulence and catastrophe? Did you have the right people in the right place at the right time or not? I suspect that contributed a lot to this as well. So for example, when Egypt had three or even four people all saying that they were the Pharaoh at the same time in different parts of the country, that's not good leadership. That's not how you're going to get through this. Similarly, the Hittite royal family had a schism at exactly this time and parted the ways. That was exactly the wrong time to do that. You needed a strong leader in place at that time. Now, the one or the two societies that do seem to have had the right people at the right place at the right time are the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian rulers and the Neo-Babylonian rulers seem to have been the ones that got their societies through this. In fact, a couple of fairly well-known scholars, a seriologist, have said that that is why the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians held on for about 100 years before everybody else, before they were impacted to a certain extent by the collapse. They said it was because they had strong rulers in place that they were able to stave this off for a couple of decades or a century at most. So I do think that leadership is incredibly important because in part that leadership will determine how well you respond. Having studied all of this, what happens in the aftermath and all of that, I was again wondering what lessons could be learned from the late Bronze Age collapse and the aftermath. Was there anything that is of use to us today? And I did come up with seven things that I think are kind of common sense, if I may, that are things to remember, things to live by, things that will help us if we're ever going down that same path. So I think the first one is pretty obvious, that you need to have redundant systems in place. We talk about that all the time today, but I think it's incredibly important. You need to have a plan A, and if that somehow doesn't work, you need a plan B. And if that doesn't work, you need a plan C. It's kind of like having a generator in place in case your electricity goes out. But I would say not just a plan A, B, and C, you need a D, E, and F as well. You need multiple redundancies in place and plans that you can go to if all of your major ones fail. I think that is something that they needed to do back then, and that we would still need to do today. The next couple I would say are, again, common sense. Be strong enough to resist invasion if you can. Know who your friends are and who they aren't. And also be resilient enough to go with the flow as you need to be. Don't be rigid. Don't be just, you know, no, this is how we've always done it. But be prepared in case you're invaded. Be prepared to reach out to allies. And in that same tone, try and be as self-sufficient as you can, but not to the detriment of alienating your allies, I would say, because you're going to need each other. So if you're going to make it through this crisis, it's going to be because you're leaning on each other. The other lesson that I think has a major takeaway from the Iron Age, and I will deliberately call it the Iron Age rather than the Dark Age, is to be innovative and inventive, right? The fact that in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age, they were innovative and inventive with iron and the alphabet, I think is precisely what we would need to be again here today. So we're talking in part, this is what evolutionary biologists and others would talk about in terms of the adaptive cycle, that when you have a crash in one area, you then have an immediate era afterward where you are innovative and inventive. It's basically the rise and fall of empires, but here we've got a Mobius strip on its side, I would say. And I think that's where this would come into place. If you are crashing, if your society is coming down, one of the ways you can best be resilient is to be innovative, is to be inventive. So back in the Iron Age, what they did was turn to iron when they were having trouble making Bronze. That actually, Tin Back Then has been compared to oil today, petroleum gasoline, and their need for Tin Back Then is much like our oil today, but I actually think it's changing now. So just like in the Iron Age, they change to iron. So what we need to be more worried about, I think, in this day and age, are rare earths like lithium that are used in chips, in computers, and cars, and microwaves, and everything else. If something happens to the supply chain, and we are not able to get that, I mean, and remember what happened during the pandemic, during COVID, which wasn't that long ago, that we had such supply chain issues, and all of a sudden, there was problems getting everything from computers to cars, and we need to be innovative and inventive. We need to be looking already for substitutes that can take the place of lithium or whatever. This needs to be not another dark age. When we go down, if we go down, and I actually think it's going to be when we go down, we need to be prepared to turn on a dime and be innovative and see what we come up with next. If we're going to survive the collapse of our society, which I do think is coming. I don't know when, but I don't think it's, are we going to collapse? I think it's when are we going to collapse? And in this case, we're going to need to be innovative and inventive. The other thing we need to do, and again, I think this is very relevant to today, is to prepare for extreme weather conditions. Now back then in the late Bronze Age, I was talking about a megadrought that lasted 150 to 300 years. That, I believe, would qualify as an extreme weather event. Today, we are also having extreme weather events. We see it on almost on a daily basis now, and what I would say here, my rule of thumb is, look, prepare for extreme weather events, because then, if they come, like intense hurricanes, then you're prepared. And if they don't come, what have you lost? Right? Not much. So I would say one of the big lessons from antiquity is prepare for extreme weather conditions. And along those same lines, I would say one of the other lessons is to really be careful of your water resources. Right? Be very careful of where your water is going to come from, whether it's from a river or elsewhere, but we saw what happened in the late Bronze Age, and we're seeing what's happening today, where people are already fighting over water resources and especially rivers. So I would say that that's another takeaway from the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath. And then the last thing that I would add is keep the working class happy. I mean, any historian from any period of history will tell you that that's essential. Keep the working class happy, or there will be consequences to pay. And I think we see this in the late Bronze Age collapse, especially if internal rebellions are a greater factor than we have thought even till today. And even now, I would say we need to look around and ask, you know, are we keeping the working class happy? And if not, what's going to happen? Right? And if people point to all sorts of things like the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and all of that, we've seen what happens if the working class is not happy. So I think that that is, again, that would be my last of the common sense takeaways, but surely we can add to it. I mean, I think we could probably easily get up to a top 10, but for right now, I've got a top seven. One of the things we need to be worried about is the tipping point. When are we going to reach the point of no return for ourselves? Are there warning signs? I do think there were warning signs back in the late Bronze Age. We know that the Egyptians, for example, were trying to cross-breed their cattle, their normal cattle with Zebu or Zebu cattle who thrive better in arid conditions. Is there anything we can do today if we notice signs warning us that we may be approaching a societal collapse, that there might be a tipping point coming up soon? I think we've already got some of the signs out there. Not everybody believes them, but I do think they are there. I think the extreme climate, the weather conditions, is one of the signs that we're approaching, possibly a tipping point. But we've also got other things that some may or may not remember. Back during the pandemic, when we had all sorts of supply chain issues and had trouble getting toilet paper, that was a systemic problem. I think kind of a warning of what might come. The ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for five or six days, that I think was also a problem. It really drove home the fact that one ship stuck in one canal can affect people worldwide for a week or more. Imagine if you had that at the same time as some of the other problems. We might have been looking at a systems collapse very quickly. And in fact, one of the things I am now wondering about, back in 2008, we had the Wall Street financial crisis. What if that crisis had happened 10 years later, or a dozen years later? What if we had had the Wall Street financial problems at the same time that COVID was hitting or beginning to hit? What if they had both happened in about 2020? I'm not so sure that we would be sitting here today. I think we might be scrambling in the ruins of our globalized network. I think we might have come this close to our tipping point, and we're lucky that they were 10 or 12 years apart. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet, and I really do think that when people say to me, "Oh, we can't collapse. We're too big to collapse. We're too big to fail." And I answer it, "No, we're not. That's hubristic. Every society in the history of humankind has either collapsed eventually, completely, or has transformed so much that they're almost unrecognizable in their new form. And to say that that's not going to happen to us, I think is just foolish, hubristic for sure. So when people say to me, "Are we going to collapse?" I look at them and I say, "Yes, we are going to collapse. The question is when are we going to collapse?" And for that, I don't have an answer. It could be next week. It could be next year. It could be 10 years from now. It could be 50 years from now. But I am sure that at some point we are going to collapse or have to transform. I mean, maybe AI is going to create it and cause it right now. But who knows? My big question to those that are asking me is to ask them back when we collapse, how are we going to deal with it? Are we going to be fragile? Are we going to be vulnerable? Are we going to be anti-fragile? In the aftermath of our society collapse, are we going to be Phoenicians? Or are we going to be my cenaeans? And I personally am a bit worried. As an archaeologist, I look back. I tell my students that they are the next generation and they are going to be inheriting all of the problems we have created. We know that. I am not saying anything new. But this is where archaeology, I think, can be of use. And especially archaeology when it is applied to ancient history. Because if we are willing to listen and to learn from the past, then we can deal with what is happening in the present. And that will affect our future. Otherwise, we are just doomed to repeat the past again and again and again. And personally, I think we are smarter than that. But I may be wrong. Let's hope I am right.

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Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation.

Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event.

ERIC CLINE: I'm Eric Cline. I'm an archaeologist and an ancient historian. I'm also the author of 1177 BC, and it's sequel, After 1177 BC. The period that we're discussing today is incredibly important in the history of humankind. It's the late Bronze Age, in particular, which goes from about 1700 to 1200 BCE, or BC, if you prefer. This was a time where people were basically globalized around the Mediterranean in a way that is not frequently seen. And so what happened to them back then may have implications for us today. So it turns out to be a much more important period to study than one might expect, even though it's more than 3,000 years ago.

How to avoid civilizational collapse.

Even though I think we can rank these societies as to how well they each did, one of the difficulties is to try to figure out why they did. Like, why were the Cypriots and the Phoenicians able to be that much more successful than the Hittites, for example? So archaeologists and ancient historians are now starting to try and answer these questions to grapple with the concepts. And we're getting a couple of interesting things. For example, it's now been suggested that maybe some of the societies were more fragile than they appear, and that they might have been more vulnerable to the stresses than they appeared to outsiders. Like the Mycenaeans, they had been over exploiting the lower classes. And those lower classes might have been quite happy to see the palaces fall, and even cheered, and they may have been part of the internal rebellions. So it may be that something that looked very strong, like the Hittites, was actually weakened internally, and the first big gust of wind came and knocked that tree over, and boom, no more Hittites. But it also might have just been the luck of the draw. It might have been geographical luck. So I think that's where water comes into play, because the Assyrians and the Babylonians are in my category, too, and they're right by the Tigris and Euphrates. And the Egyptians, of course, have the Nile. Now, those are three of the big four in the ancient world. I mean, my poor Mycenaeans and Minoans, they're not quite up there with the others. You know, the big two in the late Bronze Age are the Egyptians and the Hittites, but then Assyrians and Babylonians. So of those four Egyptians, Hittites, the Syrians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Babylonians have the Tigris and Euphrates. The Egyptians have the Nile. The Hittites are the only one of those four without a major water source. They're also the only one of those four that go down completely. I don't think that's a coincidence. And in fact, in talking to various people, I've heard time and time again that wars over water are going to be what are fought in the coming century. And we can already see that in California with water, with Colorado, with Mexico and all of that. So I think in some ways, the fact that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were able to maintain their government and their religion and their writing systems and all of that might have been just luck of the draw, that they were so far inland that the sea peoples didn't get to them and they were on the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, so that the drought didn't impact them as badly as it did others. But having said that, we have written texts from the Assyrians that do talk about period of drought. They are Hitt. It's not that long though. It's like less than a century and it came well after everyone else had been Hitt. So there is something there to be said for where you happen to be. So again, I think this is where we're going to be looking in the future, is how did these people manage to survive or why didn't they survive? Were they not aware that they were collapsing? And again, we have to keep in mind and actually say this at the beginning of the sequel. Most of our records are from the 1%. They're from the elite. We know how the kings did and the central authorities that were living high. We don't know as much about the 99% if you want to call them that, about the farmers and the peasants out in the fields in Messenia in Greece or the Hinterlands in Anatolia. We don't really know their story that well, but we're learning it because archaeologists are now moving out and excavating the little villages, the little towns that are inhabited across the divide, Bronze Age and Iron Age. And so we're going to get more evidence. We're going to get more answers. And again, that's what I love about archaeology. It's not cut and dried and if you will pardon the pun, it's not set in stone. It changes depending on the new discoveries. So everything you're reading in the books, not just my books, but the history books and all that, it's going to be different to a certain extent within five years, 10 years, 50 years. I've already come out with the revised version of my first book and I have a folder in Dropbox of new articles that have already come out since 2021 that I need to take into account if we're ever able to do a third edition. It just keeps coming. It doesn't stop. And that is what is absolutely wonderful about it. In addition to all the other factors, whether it was luck in the draw, where you were situated or anything like that, the other factor to bring into account is how good were your leaders? That is, were they able to lead you through this time of turbulence and catastrophe? Did you have the right people in the right place at the right time or not? I suspect that contributed a lot to this as well. So for example, when Egypt had three or even four people all saying that they were the Pharaoh at the same time in different parts of the country, that's not good leadership. That's not how you're going to get through this. Similarly, the Hittite royal family had a schism at exactly this time and parted the ways. That was exactly the wrong time to do that. You needed a strong leader in place at that time. Now, the one or the two societies that do seem to have had the right people at the right place at the right time are the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Neo-Assyrian rulers and the Neo-Babylonian rulers seem to have been the ones that got their societies through this. In fact, a couple of fairly well-known scholars, a seriologist, have said that that is why the Neo-Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians held on for about 100 years before everybody else, before they were impacted to a certain extent by the collapse. They said it was because they had strong rulers in place that they were able to stave this off for a couple of decades or a century at most. So I do think that leadership is incredibly important because in part that leadership will determine how well you respond. Having studied all of this, what happens in the aftermath and all of that, I was again wondering what lessons could be learned from the late Bronze Age collapse and the aftermath. Was there anything that is of use to us today? And I did come up with seven things that I think are kind of common sense, if I may, that are things to remember, things to live by, things that will help us if we're ever going down that same path. So I think the first one is pretty obvious, that you need to have redundant systems in place. We talk about that all the time today, but I think it's incredibly important. You need to have a plan A, and if that somehow doesn't work, you need a plan B. And if that doesn't work, you need a plan C. It's kind of like having a generator in place in case your electricity goes out. But I would say not just a plan A, B, and C, you need a D, E, and F as well. You need multiple redundancies in place and plans that you can go to if all of your major ones fail. I think that is something that they needed to do back then, and that we would still need to do today. The next couple I would say are, again, common sense. Be strong enough to resist invasion if you can. Know who your friends are and who they aren't. And also be resilient enough to go with the flow as you need to be. Don't be rigid. Don't be just, you know, no, this is how we've always done it. But be prepared in case you're invaded. Be prepared to reach out to allies. And in that same tone, try and be as self-sufficient as you can, but not to the detriment of alienating your allies, I would say, because you're going to need each other. So if you're going to make it through this crisis, it's going to be because you're leaning on each other. The other lesson that I think has a major takeaway from the Iron Age, and I will deliberately call it the Iron Age rather than the Dark Age, is to be innovative and inventive, right? The fact that in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age, they were innovative and inventive with iron and the alphabet, I think is precisely what we would need to be again here today. So we're talking in part, this is what evolutionary biologists and others would talk about in terms of the adaptive cycle, that when you have a crash in one area, you then have an immediate era afterward where you are innovative and inventive. It's basically the rise and fall of empires, but here we've got a Mobius strip on its side, I would say. And I think that's where this would come into place. If you are crashing, if your society is coming down, one of the ways you can best be resilient is to be innovative, is to be inventive. So back in the Iron Age, what they did was turn to iron when they were having trouble making Bronze. That actually, Tin Back Then has been compared to oil today, petroleum gasoline, and their need for Tin Back Then is much like our oil today, but I actually think it's changing now. So just like in the Iron Age, they change to iron. So what we need to be more worried about, I think, in this day and age, are rare earths like lithium that are used in chips, in computers, and cars, and microwaves, and everything else. If something happens to the supply chain, and we are not able to get that, I mean, and remember what happened during the pandemic, during COVID, which wasn't that long ago, that we had such supply chain issues, and all of a sudden, there was problems getting everything from computers to cars, and we need to be innovative and inventive. We need to be looking already for substitutes that can take the place of lithium or whatever. This needs to be not another dark age. When we go down, if we go down, and I actually think it's going to be when we go down, we need to be prepared to turn on a dime and be innovative and see what we come up with next. If we're going to survive the collapse of our society, which I do think is coming. I don't know when, but I don't think it's, are we going to collapse? I think it's when are we going to collapse? And in this case, we're going to need to be innovative and inventive. The other thing we need to do, and again, I think this is very relevant to today, is to prepare for extreme weather conditions. Now back then in the late Bronze Age, I was talking about a megadrought that lasted 150 to 300 years. That, I believe, would qualify as an extreme weather event. Today, we are also having extreme weather events. We see it on almost on a daily basis now, and what I would say here, my rule of thumb is, look, prepare for extreme weather events, because then, if they come, like intense hurricanes, then you're prepared. And if they don't come, what have you lost? Right? Not much. So I would say one of the big lessons from antiquity is prepare for extreme weather conditions. And along those same lines, I would say one of the other lessons is to really be careful of your water resources. Right? Be very careful of where your water is going to come from, whether it's from a river or elsewhere, but we saw what happened in the late Bronze Age, and we're seeing what's happening today, where people are already fighting over water resources and especially rivers. So I would say that that's another takeaway from the late Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath. And then the last thing that I would add is keep the working class happy. I mean, any historian from any period of history will tell you that that's essential. Keep the working class happy, or there will be consequences to pay. And I think we see this in the late Bronze Age collapse, especially if internal rebellions are a greater factor than we have thought even till today. And even now, I would say we need to look around and ask, you know, are we keeping the working class happy? And if not, what's going to happen? Right? And if people point to all sorts of things like the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution and all of that, we've seen what happens if the working class is not happy. So I think that that is, again, that would be my last of the common sense takeaways, but surely we can add to it. I mean, I think we could probably easily get up to a top 10, but for right now, I've got a top seven. One of the things we need to be worried about is the tipping point. When are we going to reach the point of no return for ourselves? Are there warning signs? I do think there were warning signs back in the late Bronze Age. We know that the Egyptians, for example, were trying to cross-breed their cattle, their normal cattle with Zebu or Zebu cattle who thrive better in arid conditions. Is there anything we can do today if we notice signs warning us that we may be approaching a societal collapse, that there might be a tipping point coming up soon? I think we've already got some of the signs out there. Not everybody believes them, but I do think they are there. I think the extreme climate, the weather conditions, is one of the signs that we're approaching, possibly a tipping point. But we've also got other things that some may or may not remember. Back during the pandemic, when we had all sorts of supply chain issues and had trouble getting toilet paper, that was a systemic problem. I think kind of a warning of what might come. The ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for five or six days, that I think was also a problem. It really drove home the fact that one ship stuck in one canal can affect people worldwide for a week or more. Imagine if you had that at the same time as some of the other problems. We might have been looking at a systems collapse very quickly. And in fact, one of the things I am now wondering about, back in 2008, we had the Wall Street financial crisis. What if that crisis had happened 10 years later, or a dozen years later? What if we had had the Wall Street financial problems at the same time that COVID was hitting or beginning to hit? What if they had both happened in about 2020? I'm not so sure that we would be sitting here today. I think we might be scrambling in the ruins of our globalized network. I think we might have come this close to our tipping point, and we're lucky that they were 10 or 12 years apart. So I don't think we're out of the woods yet, and I really do think that when people say to me, "Oh, we can't collapse. We're too big to collapse. We're too big to fail." And I answer it, "No, we're not. That's hubristic. Every society in the history of humankind has either collapsed eventually, completely, or has transformed so much that they're almost unrecognizable in their new form. And to say that that's not going to happen to us, I think is just foolish, hubristic for sure. So when people say to me, "Are we going to collapse?" I look at them and I say, "Yes, we are going to collapse. The question is when are we going to collapse?" And for that, I don't have an answer. It could be next week. It could be next year. It could be 10 years from now. It could be 50 years from now. But I am sure that at some point we are going to collapse or have to transform. I mean, maybe AI is going to create it and cause it right now. But who knows? My big question to those that are asking me is to ask them back when we collapse, how are we going to deal with it? Are we going to be fragile? Are we going to be vulnerable? Are we going to be anti-fragile? In the aftermath of our society collapse, are we going to be Phoenicians? Or are we going to be my cenaeans? And I personally am a bit worried. As an archaeologist, I look back. I tell my students that they are the next generation and they are going to be inheriting all of the problems we have created. We know that. I am not saying anything new. But this is where archaeology, I think, can be of use. And especially archaeology when it is applied to ancient history. Because if we are willing to listen and to learn from the past, then we can deal with what is happening in the present. And that will affect our future. Otherwise, we are just doomed to repeat the past again and again and again. And personally, I think we are smarter than that. But I may be wrong. Let's hope I am right.

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