'The fact that we've suffered doesn't mean that we've learned'

Dr. Timothy Snyder:

So I, too, am hopeful that Americans and others have learned some things in the last few years and the last few months and that 2021 can be better than 2020, but it's not automatically going to be so. The fact that we've suffered doesn't mean that we've learned. We actually have to do learning from the suffering. There's an automaticity about it. And that's where we get to Hegel and the notion that history is dialectical, and that history is a slaughterhouse, and that first you have the suffering, and then you have the higher stage of history. That, of course, is all nonsense. There are no stages in history, there's no automaticity, there's no mechanism, and there's no world spirit. None of that's right. We can learn from suffering, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't. And that's the part which is up to us.

Dr. Timothy Snyder in coversation with Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, hosts of the Gaslit Nation podcast.





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.