Finding Dory

This movie is an allegory for the way the public mind is working - but we may not get the same happy ending.

Inspiration comes to me from the strangest places.

Poppy (my granddaughter) loves watching Disney’s “Finding Dory”, the 2016 follow on to “Finding Nemo”. Dory is a regal blue tang with a short-term memory retention issue. It was on our den TV this weekend and after walking past it to my office, I switched on my TV and heard Hasan Piker spouting history to a crowd of college Democrats, the problem being that his version of history never happened.

And then the wheels started turning.

Even without anyone actively trying to erase it, the public mind seems to have a retention period of about a century. I can’t point to a peer-reviewed study proving it, but after sixty-seven years of watching history repeat itself with astonishing regularity, I’m convinced the average civilization remembers about as much as Dory, adjusted for lifespan, of course. Dory got about three seconds. Our public memory gets roughly a hundred years. Then the slate is wiped clean, and the next generation confidently begins making all the same mistakes, convinced they are blazing an entirely new trail.

There are exceptions. Events so catastrophic that they permanently scar a civilization can linger a little longer. The World Wars have remained part of our collective consciousness because they were so enormous, so bloody, and involved so much of the globe that they became cultural reference points rather than mere historical events. But even there, the clock is ticking. We have already passed the centennial of the First World War, and the Second World War is rapidly approaching that same horizon. Listen carefully to our political debates and you will notice something remarkable. The lessons those wars once taught as common knowledge are no longer common at all. Either we have forgotten them, or someone has quietly rewritten them.

That should surprise no one.

Every totalitarian movement in history has understood that controlling the future begins with controlling the past. Orwell didn’t invent that idea; he merely described it brilliantly. If citizens remember where disastrous ideas led before, they become understandably reluctant to repeat the experiment. If they don’t remember—or worse, remember a sanitized fairy tale—they become eager volunteers for the sequel.

The twentieth century alone produced enough evidence to settle the argument forever. The Soviet Union imprisoned, starved, and murdered millions. Mao’s China turned ideological purity into one of the greatest human catastrophes ever recorded. Cambodia descended into insanity under the Khmer Rouge. Eastern Europe spent decades trapped behind an Iron Curtain built as much from propaganda as concrete. Across parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, socialist experiments routinely delivered shortages, repression, corruption, and poverty while promising equality and liberation.

Yet somehow, each new generation is introduced to these episodes not as warnings but as footnotes—or worse, unfortunate cases where “real socialism” simply wasn’t tried correctly.

That is not historical education. It is historical laundering.

Since the 1960s, American education has increasingly shifted away from teaching history as a continuous story of cause and effect and toward teaching history as a prosecutorial brief. Students are frequently presented with America’s failures divorced from its successes, its sins detached from the context in which they occurred, and its progress treated not as something remarkable but as something expected and therefore unworthy of mention. If history is taught at all, it often becomes less an effort to understand the past than an exercise in recruiting activists for the future.

The result is predictable.

A population that knows only grievances but not accomplishments eventually concludes there is nothing worth preserving. A people taught only oppression will inevitably seek liberation from institutions that, despite their flaws, created the greatest expansion of liberty and prosperity in human history.

But the real trick is even cleverer than that.

Losing history doesn’t merely erase yesterday. It removes the constraints reality places upon today’s political promises.

In a healthy society, proposed solutions arise because genuine problems exist. Reality dictates what can reasonably be done because reality stubbornly refuses to negotiate. But once history disappears, the process reverses. The solution comes first. Then a problem is manufactured to justify it.

Need greater government control? Invent a crisis of oppression where ordinary disagreement once existed (illegal immigration anyone?). Need more centralized economic planning? Describe free markets as having failed, regardless of every measurable indicator showing the opposite (Commie Mamdani’s reason for existing). Need expanded bureaucratic authority? Discover an emergency requiring powers that somehow never expire (remember Covid? Or have we already forgotten?).

It is political alchemy. Fairy dust and unicorn farts become public policy because no one remembers enough history to recognize the old magician’s tricks.

This may be the greatest danger posed by historical amnesia. It doesn’t simply leave people ignorant of the past; it leaves them defenseless against those who would manufacture the future. A citizen who knows history asks uncomfortable questions. Compared to when? Where has this been tried? What happened last time? Those are dangerous questions for anyone selling utopia.

People deprived of history, on the other hand, become infinitely easier to persuade because every bad idea arrives disguised as a brand-new one, and there is nothing quite so profitable, politically speaking, as convincing millions of people they are witnessing history for the first time when, in reality, they are merely standing in line to repeat it.