When trying to make up for mistakes, we become vulnerable to new forms of manipulation. In looking for immediate solutions, we tend to choose flawed solutions that are easy to hand.
Applied to the social/communal sphere, our effort to avoid repeating atrocities (such as Nazism or slavery) creates new opportunities for totalitarianism: our insistent righteousness by saying “never again” becomes blind rigidity, overpowered extremism.
Rather than learning from the past, we become more concerned with becoming virtuous and increasing our positional distance from it. As such, we cease to react to some forms of empirical reality and embrace the symbolic, as it alone offers an eternal, ideological guiding star divorced from the world’s complex muddiness.
Since all symbols are stand-ins (reductive categorizations), the secondary traits of people (race/sex/religion) also become primary and more readily defensible. Yet, the symbolic defense becomes convoluted and complex, perhaps in inverse proportion to the discounted reality, as if we seek to recapture/recreate reality’s confusion, which we threw away for certainty.
The past is thus repeated from our desperation not to repeat the past.