It is interesting to note that the men who, in the teeth of history, proclaim that, if you want peace, you must prepare for war, are the self-same men who solemnly declare that Experience teaches […]. But as a matter of brute historical fact, Experience generally doesn’t. We go on doing what our own and our father’s experience has demonstrated, again and again, to be inappropriate or downright disastrous; and we go on hoping that “something will turn up”–something completely different from anything which, on the basis of experience, we have any right to expect. Needless to say, it does not turn up. The same old mistakes have the same old consequences and we remain in the same old mess.
– Aldous Huxley, “A Case of Voluntary Ignorance,” Collected Essays (1958)
