Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

For the nitpickers reading this chapter, I acknowledge that we only understand human nature because we observe how people have acted throughout history. History gives us useful insight on how humans act. But that insight is useful only in simple cases. Will people who are hungry seek food? Yes. Will people exploit loopholes for personal gain? Yes. Will people lie if they think it helps a lot and they can get away with it? Yes. When we talk about the idea of history repeating, we’re usually not talking about the simple and predictable impulses of human beings. Usually we’re comparing, for example, one complicated set of negotiations with hundreds of moving parts to some past situation in which the variables were substantially different but we are still reminded of it.