The Mystic Ranger

Q. Prompt:

“His­tory repeats itself. This is a tes­ti­mony to the stu­pid­ity of man.”

–Adapted from Edith Hamilton

“His­tory does not repeat. It rhymes.”

–Mark Twain

Assign­ment: Does his­tory repeat itself? […] Write an essay.

A. Does His­tory Repeat Itself?

No — in my view, His­tory does not repeat itself. I would con­cur with Mark Twain — ‘It [his­tory] rhymes’.

It has been rec­og­nized since time immemo­r­ial, that there are cer­tain pat­terns in nearly all our lives. These have also been exten­sively explored and researched in numer­ous fields. But we can see through numer­ous exam­ples, the rep­e­ti­tion of his­tory — that ‘deja vu’, but just not quite.

Since the start of the Earth, it has under­gone cli­matic changes of alter­nat­ing heat and cold. Every few thou­sand years, an ice age sets in. The inten­sity is known to vary — but still — that’s quite a long-term rhyme, isn’t it?

We can see how we our­selves are cur­rently suf­fer­ing from a swine flu pan­demic — ninety years later, once again. Per­haps even the dis­ease evolved along­side human tech­nol­ogy, and changed, but peri­od­i­cally it hap­pened once again. Another rhyme, eh?

We are also suf­fer­ing from a depres­sion in the world­wide stock mar­kets. Its com­ing was not entirely unex­pected, though per­haps its inten­sity was. Stock mar­ket cor­rec­tions hap­pen approx­i­mately every five years, with some vari­ance, and this depres­sion is sev­enty years after the last one. The Great Depres­sion of the 1930s was because of over­pro­duc­tion, and this time — the sub-prime cri­sis. Next time, the cause may be dif­fer­ent, but stock mar­ket falls are bound to rhyme, and come again and again. 

This rep­e­ti­tion — under­ly­ing pat­tern in the events of the world — have also been sci­en­tif­i­cally explained. Math­e­mati­cians believe in the Chaos The­ory, which pos­sesses tech­niques to spot pat­terns in the seem­ingly chaotic world, and even pre­dict the future! Of course, it’s nowhere close to telling us when we’ll die; but it’s ade­quate to con­firm how his­tory does not exactly repeat itself, but it def­i­nitely rhymes with itself.

x-:-:-x

How’dcha like it? Do tell me. You might’ve spot­ted it, but if you haven’t, there is a rea­son as to why I wrote this…