Wednesday, September 04, 2019

It's More Complicated Than That

That seems to be my standard reaction these days to a lot of current books, articles, and posts which discuss times I've lived through and portions of history I'm reasonably familiar with.  Thinking about the reasons:

  • everyone knows, if they look at themselves, they aren't the same person from year to year, nor the same person in different contexts.  
  • applying tags to people, organizations, and events, which are at best incomplete, at worst erroneous. 
  • treating categories of people as unitary, sharing all characteristics.
All the problems result from our need to tell a story which explains what we experience, a story with little room for luck or variation. 



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