History is full of rotten wisdom

Somebody once said, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Actually, lots of people have said it. Like most platitudes, hearing it more often doesn’t make it any easier on the ear.
You also hear a lot of people talking about how much better things used to be than they are now. You hear that just as much as you hear the business about things changing and staying the same.
Does this make any sense to you at all? Quite frankly, gentle readers, it confuses the living day lights out of me.
If we go on the supposition that the first statement is true (which is an incredibly dangerous thing to do, by the way), then we must assume that things haven’t really changed that much, since the more they change, the more they remain the same. But if that’s true, then things can’t have been much better in any previous era than they are now since they haven’t changed.
See what I mean about being confused? If there is anything in this world more contradictory and misleading than conventional wisdom, I sure hope I never run across it. As I’ve mentioned previously in this space, one of my hobbies is collecting “found wisdom.” I define this as the profound expression of experience encapsulated in a pithy saying. But of such stuff are two-edged swords made.
Show me one pithy saying, full of age-old wisdom, and I’ll show you another that is accepted to be just as wise and pithy, that completely contradicts the first one. The runaway roller coaster of conventional wisdom is a pithy-less monster, intent on leaving us all babbling to ourselves.
Check this out: The love of money is the root of all evil. As most of you, no doubt, know, we can thank St. Paul for that one. But, a fool and his money are soon parted.
Okay, bubba, you’ve got a choice. You can be either evil or foolish, but you can’t be both. Personally, I’ve always kind of leaned toward evil, but I’m a pretty nasty guy and should never be held up as an example to anyone for anything.
Goodness knows, the foolish contingent has plenty of representatives. They may (or may not) be headed toward heaven on eagle’s wings, but they’re going to be poor as dirt until they get there.
It is the members of this particular group who, in addition to keeping the card sharks from starving, also keep the infomercial people in business.
“Order by phone. Save the C.O.D. charges. Just give your credit card number to some drugged-out wacko working on our phone lines. You’ll get a complete set of Ginsu cross-cut saws (in six to eight weeks, provided the manufacturer isn’t just as crooked as we are) and the afore mentioned wacko will be in Europe, spending up your credit, before you even know what happened.”
Sounds like a heck of a deal to me.
We are told that he who hesitates is lost. But then again, slow and steady wins the race.
The race goes not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Maybe not, but that sure is the way to bet.
Every dark cloud has a silver lining. Unfortunately, that is of little consolation to the guy whose house just joined Dorothy and Toto on a weekend excursion to Oz in a tornado.
Maybe I’m just being contrary (if so, it hardly qualifies as a new phenomenon), but somehow I can’t get over the impression that history is full of incidents of misread data. I consider the erudite epithets quoted here as prime examples of this.
Therefore, it pays to remember, gentle readers, that history does not repeat itself; historians repeat each other.