Remembering and Learning

Human groups, big and small, share various dynamics, not all of course, but a few important ones. One of those shared is the significance of what any group, organization, or even society chooses to remember... or to forget.

Remembering can, if we choose, inform learning. Mark Twain famously opined, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." That's even true for us as individuals ('When will I finally learn to....?') as well as for human collectives of all types and sizes.

In that spirit, here's a quote from an article written in The Atlantic in 1866 by Frederick Douglass, internationally recognized fierce advocate for human rights… and escaped enslaved person.  He wrote in and to a post-Civil War USA mired in too often deadly definitional struggle over just what human rights meant (and for whom) and their importance relative to other 'realities' and 'considerations'.

Not a struggle foreign to us today... at work, with AI, with organizational and social disparities, nationally and internationally...

"Whether the oppressed and despairing..., no longer able to repress...deep yearnings for [personhood], or the tyrant, in ...pride and impatience, takes the initiative, and strikes the blow for a firmer hold and a longer lease of oppression, the result is the same,--society is instructed, or may be."

May we all find ourselves instructed, consciously and responsibly, and especially those we choose to follow...at work and outside it.