The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Past generations:
When we think about history, we tend to render the
past into a kind of dead and spiritless caricature. Perhaps we feel smug
and superior to past eras, and so we focus on those aspects of history
that indicate backward ideas and values (not realizing that future
generations will do the same to us), seeing what we want to see. Or we
project onto the past the ideas and values of the present, which have
little relation to how those of the past experienced the world. We drain
away their own generational perspective, something we see most
obviously in filmed versions of history, where people talk and act just
like us, only in costumes. Or we simply ignore history, imagining it has
no relevance to our present experience.
We must rid ourselves of such absurd notions and habits. We are
not as superior to those in the past as we like to imagine (see previous
chapters on irrationality, shortsightedness, envy, grandiosity,
conformity, and aggression). There are cultural moments in history
that were superior to our own when it comes to participatory
democracy, or creative thinking, or cultural liveliness. There are
periods in the past in which people had a deeper grasp of human
psychology and a bracing realism that would make us look quite
deluded by comparison. Although human nature remains a constant,
those in the past faced different circumstances with different levels of
technology and had values and beliefs quite different from our own,
and not necessarily inferior. They had the values that reflected their
different circumstances, and we would have shared them as well.
Most important of all, however, we must understand that the past is
by no means dead. We do not emerge in life as blank slates, divorced
from millions of years of evolution. All that we think and experience,
our most intimate thoughts and beliefs, are shaped by the struggles of
past generations. So many ways we relate to the world now came from
changes in thinking long ago.
Whenever we see people who completely sacrifice everything for
some cause, they are reliving a shift in values initiated by the early
Christians of the first century, who revolutionized our way of thinking
by devoting all aspects of life to some ideal. Whenever we fall in love
and idealize the beloved, we are reliving the emotions that the
troubadours of the twelfth century introduced into the Western world,
a sentiment that had never existed before.

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Whenever we extol emotions and spontaneity over the intellect and
effort, we are reexperiencing what the Romantic movements of the
eighteenth century first introduced into our psychology. We are not
aware of all this, but we in the present are motley products of all the
accumulated changes in human thinking and psychology. By making
the past into something dead, we are merely denying who we are. We
become rootless and barbaric, disconnected from our nature.
You must radically alter your own relationship to history, bringing
it back to life within you. Begin by taking some era in the past, one that