I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, generally, people accept the forms of government and institutions that they’ve grown up with without question.

A simple example of this would be a given nation’s scholastic system. These systems have been refined over and over again, and continue to be by people. This leads to the question, who decides what “educated” means? It is widely recognized that an educated person is someone who completes high school and college or university, and moves on to have a successful career in whatever field they have studied for. But, what about the person who drops out of middle school and begins playing music or creating art full time? It could be debated that these types of people are in fact more educated than those previously described. They have learned the basics to be successful and have been successful in their careers long before most finish their formal education. This theory shatters most people’s perception of social structures (which I’ll discuss more below).

The main thing I’ve been thinking about, however, relates to government. People, which are fallible, create a hierarchy system in which a given person or group of persons control the majority of the population. The population thus accepts, often blindly, the power system. People seem to find power, strength, and confidence in this system, but ultimately every system has its flaws and will eventually die out, only to be replaced by another one. This new system fixes the problems with the previous governmental structure, but it also will inevitably create new issues which will lead to its downfall, continuing the cycle.

I’ve also considered the social class mentality. People are placed into social groups based on their mental capacity and monetary income. Personally, I believe that every person (save for mental handicaps) has the capacity to be just as successful as their neighbor. People choose not to further their education by telling themselves they can’t, when in fact they could if they really applied themselves. I see this all the time at school, at my old job, and even within myself. A person starts strong, determined, and strong-willed, only to get comfortable. When comfortability sets in, work slackens and insecurity mounts. A person in this situation has three choices: remain stagnant, fall, or rise.
Most people choose stagnancy and continue at the same pace with the same mentality for their entire lives once they’ve reached a certain point in their social career. The second group tires of the daily routine and turns to other forms of entertainment or pleasure to make up for its loss of success and continues to fall until its life ends. The final group of people also tires of the normalcy of daily life, but instead of turning to their own pleasure and want, they turn to their ability to learn, grow, and succeed.

As mentioned by others and will be mentioned because of this fact, history continues to repeat itself. Human nature cries of repetition, and while one generation learns from the mistakes of their priors, the next will forget their seniors’ lessons and repeat the mistakes made long before them without even realizing it. This is the very reason people say that history repeats itself.