Civilizational Level Pride and the Road to Amnesia
I was born with congenital rebelliousness. For as long as I can remember, I had a strong aversion to doing anything an authority figure told me unless I understood the exact purpose behind it. This attitude made me good at thinking for myself, but God, did I make a lot of mistakes.
The problem with this attitude is that much of the advice adults pass down is directionally correct, even if they can’t explain why. They either learned the lesson long ago or were told to do something a certain way and never questioned it.
A lot of this wisdom is crystallized in sayings we repeat, like “The early bird catches the worm.”
As a teenage night owl, I found this saying insulting to my intellect.
Why would it matter if I woke up early or late? I had the same number of hours in a day either way.
What I had failed to account for was the quality of those hours.
It doesn’t matter how many hours you have if you don’t have any energy and attention to spend during those hours. Anyone who’s been sick knows this. You may have plenty of time on your hands, but you cannot do anything with it.
If you wake up right before work or school, your best attention is captured by other people’s agendas. You are forced to react to the demands of others the moment you wake up. By the time the day is yours again, your best attention is already spent, and you’re left with the scraps of low quality attention to spend on yourself.
The deeper meaning behind the saying “The early bird catches the worm” is not about the hour you wake up, but rather about being proactive and intentional. You want to take charge of your attention and time and not allow it to be spent by others.
In my childish arrogance, I assumed I understood the saying at face value and missed its deeper meaning.
Rather than looking at any flaws in my reasoning or my character, I assumed the statement was flawed.
This is what pride looks like in practice.
Pride shortcuts effort. Spending attention is costly, so we take the path of least resistance. Pride gives us permission to stop looking, to rest on our conclusions, to confuse familiarity with understanding.
Why investigate further if I already know what this means?
The same pattern does not stop at the individual level.
Scale this attitude up to an entire society and you get civilizational pride. Cultures begin to undervalue their own inheritance. Religion, history, philosophy, and tradition are treated as primitive artifacts rather than compressed knowledge.
Modern worldviews often assume contemporary civilization represents the peak of human understanding. Even if this were true, which I am not convinced it is, the belief itself has consequences. It encourages us to rest on our laurels.
Ancient history and religion are frequently framed as unsophisticated or superstitious. Myths are treated as childish stories. Philosophical traditions are reduced to naive attempts to explain the world before the scientific method existed.
From this perspective, ancient people acted for irrational reasons. Ancient structures are assumed to be temples. Religious teachings are dismissed as blind faith. Mythology is treated as fiction. Therefore none of it carries a deeper meaning worth examining.
This mirrors the same mistake I made as a teenager. We believe we already understand what these traditions are, so we never ask what they were actually for.
Being wrong is one thing. Using certainty as an excuse to stop paying attention is another. That is how a civilization loses its ability to learn from its own past.
And those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.