[analogZero]

You know, tovarishch, on reading through your post for #2 I got to thinking about that saying. Much like the one others may be familiar with "if we forget the past, we're doomed to repeat it", I got to thinking that it holds some connection to Leerock's thread on original thought. It seems odd that we repeat the events of the past, that we build great empires all the while knowing that all others before have fallen. Perhaps we're fueled by unoriginal thoughts, as leerock so adamantly argued. Perhaps we as a collective people have no other idea than to work from the same blueprint, and try to improve it. To make the house more sturdy so that next time it will be able to weather the storms thrown at it. As a result it would seem futile for us to pursue the same directive time and time again, and yet we do. It's much like the families who live in areas prone to natural disaster, that to an outsider you see it as ridiculous that they would continue to live under repetitively destructive conditions, yet to those who live those lives there's something there that binds them to their decision to rebuild. So would it be that our hold on tradition is what causes the cycle to perpetuate itself, or is there simply no other way? Likely we're victim to what we know, servants to the world that we were born to and built around us our whole lives and as a result we know only what we experience. That we can't see a way forward other than by knowing what the path looked like behind us. It could be that when we come to an unexpected fork in the road, it's expected that things will divide much like an empire as it fractures and crumbles.