Sir Godfrey Gregg

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives, they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better, so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better.

Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past, sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon.

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly an inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn?

Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?