What We've Forgotten

To Forget is to Permit. To Permit is to Repeat.

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The great disease of our age is not ignorance but amnesia. We know more facts than any generation before us, yet we remember less. We scroll endlessly, but without depth. We consume endlessly, but without continuity. We live in an age where knowledge is infinite but wisdom is vanishing.

 

To remember is not simply to recall dates or events. Memory, in its truest sense, means to hold close what matters — to stitch the past into the present, to recognize the roots beneath the branches, to live with continuity of meaning. And when we forget, the cost is enormous.

 

Humanity has forgotten. America has forgotten. Civilization itself has drifted into a profound amnesia. We have forgotten history, forgotten civic duty, forgotten truth, forgotten the sacredness of the world, and most deeply, forgotten our own nature.

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Historical Memory

 

We once said “Never again” in the face of fascism. Yet Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, gave us the warning: “It happened, therefore it can happen again.” His words were not hypothetical. They were diagnostic. Hatred, once normalized, does not stay contained. It escalates.

 

As survivors of the Holocaust pass away, their voices — trembling with the urgency of lived memory — fade into silence. What remains are textbooks, sanitized paragraphs, or worse, distortions. Denial and revisionism creep in where memory should anchor us. Forgetting here is not harmless; it is preparation for repetition.

 

America too buries its past. The history of slavery, of lynching, of Jim Crow is often softened or erased in public education. Frederick Douglass wrote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Yet we often tell the story of emancipation as though freedom was a gift bestowed, rather than a victory wrested through centuries of struggle. Forgetting this truth allows us to pretend that racial justice is complete.

 

And democracy itself, perhaps the most fragile inheritance of all, is often taken for granted. At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government had been created. His reply was terse: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The condition was always vigilance.

 

History shows us how democracies fall: not in sudden coups but in quiet erosion. Weimar Germany is an example. Voter apathy, economic hardship, and political fragmentation opened the door for authoritarianism. Citizens thought their institutions would hold, until they did not. We are not immune.

 

To forget history is to dismantle our defenses. And already, the patterns stir.

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Civic Responsibility

 

Democracy does not sustain itself. It requires citizens. It requires sacrifice. But we have forgotten this.

 

In ancient Athens, Pericles declared in his Funeral Oration that democracy worked only because citizens were willing to participate, to defend it, to live for more than private comfort. Centuries later, Lincoln described America as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Both knew that democracy is not a spectator sport.

 

But forgetting has crept in. Voter apathy rises. Public service is scorned. Cynicism becomes the easy refuge of those who no longer believe. Silence in the face of injustice becomes normal. And silence, as history has shown, is complicity.

 

Institutions, no matter how strong, are only as healthy as the integrity of those who inhabit them. If citizens withdraw, democracy falters. If leaders act without honor, democracy collapses. Civic responsibility is not an accessory to freedom — it is the price of it. Yet we treat it as optional, as if rights perpetuate themselves.

 

We have forgotten that freedom is not cheap.

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Shared Values and Restraint

 

A society can survive disagreement if there is a shared framework of respect. That framework is what philosophers once called the social contract.

 

James Madison, writing in the Federalist Papers, warned against the dangers of faction — groups willing to sacrifice the common good for narrow interest. His solution was not suppression but balance: the cultivation of restraint, compromise, and humility. Without these virtues, the republic would unravel.

 

Restraint is unfashionable today. Humility is mocked as weakness. Self-control is abandoned in favor of spectacle. Politics is now theater, where cruelty becomes entertainment and humiliation is celebrated. Gandhi once reminded us that “Intolerance is itself a form of violence.” But intolerance has become a currency of power.

 

Freedom without responsibility is not liberty but chaos. Civilization rests on restraint — on the willingness to limit oneself for the sake of the whole. Without it, society collapses into license, where the loudest voice and the sharpest cruelty rule.

 

We have forgotten that restraint is not repression. It is civilization itself.

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The Role of Truth

 

Truth is the foundation of a shared world. Without it, reality itself disintegrates into fragments. Yet today, truth has been recast as preference, as identity, as branding.

 

George Orwell wrote, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Václav Havel, resisting communist propaganda in Czechoslovakia, spoke of the power of “living in truth.” Both knew that truth is not optional; it is survival.

 

In America, Watergate revealed that truth could still topple a president. But today, lies proliferate at such speed and scale that accountability falters. Propaganda corrodes not only politics but perception itself. If every fact is dismissed as “just your narrative,” then nothing remains to anchor trust.

 

Without truth, we cannot even disagree meaningfully. There is no common ground. There is only chaos.

 

We have forgotten that truth is not what we want to hear, but what is.

 

The Forgotten Depths of the Self

 

Beneath all this lies a deeper amnesia. Vedanta teaches that the greatest forgetting is not external but internal. We have forgotten who we are.

 

The Upanishads declare: Tat tvam asi — you are That. The Self is whole, complete, limitless. Socrates, from another tradition, echoed the same: “Know thyself.” Across cultures, the highest wisdom has always been inward knowledge.

 

But in modern life, identity has replaced Self. We identify with body, tribe, ideology, possession. We mistake the part for the whole. And in doing so, we live in restless incompleteness — forever seeking wholeness in domination, in consumption, in spectacle.

 

Vedanta names this condition avidya — ignorance of the Self. It is the root forgetting. All other amnesias flow from it. When we forget the Self, we scramble outward, filling the void with politics, entertainment, conquest. But no matter how much we gain, the void remains — until we remember.

 

The Forgotten Sacredness of the World

 

Hand in hand with forgetting the Self is forgetting the sacredness of the world.

 

Chief Seattle is said to have reminded the settlers: “The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth.” Gandhi observed: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” For millennia, cultures bowed to rivers, mountains, and stars. The Vedic rita, the Tao, indigenous reverence for land — all testified that the world is not inert matter but living order.

 

Today, bulldozers replace reverence. Forests become commodities. The Amazon burns, glaciers melt, oceans acidify. What was once sacred has been stripped to resource.

 

In forgetting sacredness, we forget our place in the whole. We treat the world not as mother but as quarry. The result is not progress but collapse.

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The Forgotten Humility of Knowledge

 

Knowledge once walked hand in hand with awe. Early scientists were philosophers of nature, seekers of wonder. Einstein confessed: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.” Schrödinger, co-founder of quantum mechanics, read the Upanishads and declared their insights aligned with modern physics.

 

But today, science is harnessed primarily for utility. Knowledge is bent to the service of profit. Curiosity has been replaced by engineering. Mystery is reduced to mechanism.

 

The Manhattan Project remains the starkest example. The brightest minds of a generation, without humility, created a weapon capable of ending civilization. Brilliance without reverence is dangerous. Knowledge without humility becomes power without wisdom.

 

We have forgotten that knowledge is not the same as wisdom.

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The Forgotten Limits of Power

 

Even kings once feared gods. Even emperors bowed to cosmic order. Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor of India, turned from conquest after the bloody Kalinga war and declared dharma as his guide. Power once remembered its limits.

 

Today, power bows only to itself. Politicians answer to polls, markets, or algorithms — never to higher law. Lord Acton’s dictum remains unheeded: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

 

Once, even in America, presidents feared accountability. Nixon resigned under the weight of Watergate. But now, impunity grows. Leaders lie openly, flout institutions, and test how far norms can be bent.

 

Power without limit is ruin. Forgetting this is the prelude to catastrophe.

 

Conclusion: Remembering as Liberation

 

What, then, does it mean to remember?

 

To remember is to re-member — to stitch back what has been severed. History, civics, values, truth, Self, world, knowledge, power: all must be held together again in rightful relation.

 

Remembering is not nostalgia. It is not yearning for some golden past. It is the recovery of what is essential and timeless. Augustine urged, “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.” Vedanta agrees: the root forgetting is of the Self. To remember the Self is to awaken from the illusion of lack, to see wholeness where we thought there was fragmentation.

 

From this remembrance flows everything else: reverence for truth, respect for the world, humility in knowledge, limits on power, and the courage to live with integrity.

 

Civilization cannot endure built on amnesia. We must remember. To survive, we must awaken.

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This essay is part of series​ that explores the ancient concept of dharma as both diagnosis and prescription for our modern malaise. Drawing from Vedanta and mythology, each piece offers a lens through which to understand our turbulent world—not as a random mess, but as a lawful unfolding shaped by deep patterns.​​​​​​​​