The Future, the Present and the Past

[outlier_lynn]

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at the Standford Law School. For the last couple of years, he as been writing and lecturing on the loss of cultural freedom in the United States and, increasingly, the world.

This post was made by pdi. He has given us a link to the full presentation of the speech from which I will expand a bit.

(quote)...This captures the point. If you understand this refrain, you're gonna' understand everything I want to say to you today. It has four parts:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  
• Ours is less and less a free society.

(end of quote)



I suspect everyone reading this can agree with the four principles Lessig builds his essay upon.

Those principles can be generalized to become the theory of how human beings interact with the three concepts from my title: The Future, the Present and the Past.

Rewriting the four points as necessary to generalize, we might have:

• PersonalCreativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  
• Our individual past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  
• Our personal future in enabled by limiting this power of the past.
  
• As time passes we are less and less free.

The lesson? The better we are able to keep the past from making decisions about our future, the more freedom we have.

Where is your history in your way? Love? Sex? Art? Job? School?

There is a quote (which I have no source) that goes something like this: He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it. I think it is completely backwards. It is the knowing of our history that keeps us from choosing a new path. We are forevere limiting ourselves by the decisions made in our youth and childhood.