In “the 5000 year leap” by Cleon W. Skousen, he points out a common flaw among civilizations, our tendency to progress in reverse.  To describe this, I pull a passage from the book:

Unfortunately, every new generation of human beings seems to feel the instinctive and passionate necessity to reinvent the sociological wheel.  The physical sciences capitalize on the lessons of the past, but the social sciences seldom do.

In Political and social relations, a single generation will sometimes duplicate the same error half-a-dozen times.  Too many humans beings are doing it today.

They are muddling their lives with drugs, riots, revolutions, and terrorism; predatory wars; unnatural  sexual practices; merry-go-round marriages; organized crime; neglected and sometimes brutalized children; plateau intoxication ; debt-ridden prosperity; and all the other ingredients of insanity which have shattered twenty mighty civilizations in the past.

These elements of social decay can have a devastating impact on the highly technical and delicately interdependent civilizations which freedom and prosperity have brought to mankind.

I despise the use of the term “progressive” as it tends to be just the opposite in practice.  Those utilizing this label typically make efforts to somehow revive past ideas that have never worked, hoping this time they will.  Often, they act as if these are “new” ideas and “new” direction on where we need to go as a society. But why? Why don’t we simply progress utilizing the proven principles and concepts that have brought us this far instead of hoping that our current stature may finally support false concepts of digressed societies.

Its time we think about this:

The physical sciences capitalize on the lessons of the past, but the social sciences seldom do.

Tags: Cleon Skousen, history, Liberty