History does not repeat itself because we lack information. It recurs because we prefer comfort to truth. From ancient Greece to present-day Russia and the United States, the same mechanism is evident. It is as if we never learn.
In my previous essay, I wrote that nothing guarantees that the good will prevail, that hope itself may be a form of self-deception. Yet I also argued that resistance, conscious, deliberate resistance, is the only force that can stand against it. The question for me is why so few choose that path, and why this question remains so urgently relevant.
More than 2,400 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides described what happens when people abandon truth and seek refuge in collective lies.
During the civil war on Corcyra, he observed that words changed their meaning. Recklessness was called courage. Fanaticism was called loyalty. Moderation was seen as a weakness. In times of crisis, he wrote, party loyalty becomes more important than justice and what is right.
What he described was not an ideology. It was a reflex.
When people feel threatened, they choose security over truth.
Look at Russia.
The war in Ukraine has imposed enormous human costs. Yet significant portions of the Russian population have accepted and supported it. Not because everyone believes everything that comes from the Kremlin, but because the war has been wrapped in a narrative of national survival. Within such a framework, doubt becomes betrayal. Truth is subordinated to unity. Loyalty becomes morality.
Look at the United States.
The MAGA movement has mobilized millions around claims that have repeatedly been examined and disproven. Yet they persist, not because the evidence is compelling, but because the narrative provides identity, direction, and a sense of struggle. When politics becomes identity, facts become a threat to belonging.
This is not a question about a single nation or a single movement. It is a question about us.
As I wrote in my earlier article about Karl Kraus, he pointed to this very dynamic in interwar Europe. He saw how language was corrupted before society collapsed. When words lose precision, thought loses clarity. When language is used for mobilization rather than truth, lies become normalized.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt went even further. She argued that totalitarian movements do not require everyone to believe every lie. It is enough that people lose faith in the very possibility of truth. When everything can be dismissed as propaganda, loyalty becomes the only stable reference point.
This is the mechanism.
It repeats itself because it offers something we urgently need: security.
I wrote that resistance to self-deception is our only real force. But it is lonely. It earns no applause. It does not strengthen group belonging. It may even cost us the community itself.
That is why so many choose otherwise.
We like to believe we stand on the side of truth. But when our own group is pressured, when our identity is challenged, when our nation feels threatened, how quickly are we willing to sacrifice nuance? How quickly do we accept exaggerations? How quickly do we defend what we would otherwise criticize?
Thucydides did not merely describe ancient Greece. He described a constant in human nature.
The question is not why Russians or Americans are swept along.
The question is: why do we believe we ourselves are immune?
Technology has made the mechanism faster and more efficient. Social media rewards outrage. Algorithms amplify belonging. Complexity loses to slogans. Doubt loses to certainty.
But it is not the algorithms that choose for us.
It is we who choose the narrative that feels safe.
There is no historical guarantee that truth will prevail. No automatic safeguard against self-deception. The universe remains silent, as I wrote before.
The only thing that stands against it is the will to hold on to what is true, even when it weakens our own side. Even when it isolates us. Even when it costs.
Kipling wrote about holding on when there is nothing left in us but the will to never surrender.
That applies not only to personal endurance. It applies to intellectual integrity.
Choosing truth over a comforting lie is not comfortable. It does not necessarily strengthen the community. It may leave us more alone than we would like.
But the alternative is what Thucydides described: a society in which words are transformed, loyalty overrides justice, and we eventually no longer know what we are defending.
We like to believe we would have resisted, that we would have seen through the propaganda, that we would have chosen truth.
Perhaps.
But that is not decided in the great moments. It is decided in the small ones, in the stories we share, the exaggerations we accept, the falsehoods we allow to pass because they benefit our side.
History does not repeat itself because we lack information.
It repeats itself because we choose comfort.
The question is not what others do.
The question is what you and I are willing to endure if the truth does not give us the security we would prefer.
Featured image © Eldar Einarson
