We might go down as the generation that stood up against abusive power and discrimination; having fought and lashed out against oppressive authorities that had tormented people for centuries. With the advent of social media and other tools in place, we have been able to stand up for victims who, in the past, would have wailed away in sorrow without anyone to hear their cry, and because of this, we pride ourselves as being on good side of history, the generation who got it right.

Because we believe we wouldn't be oppressive in any form, be it racism, sexism, or the rest, it's easy for us, on some level, to believe that we emit a radiated aura of justice and moral superiority, which, relative to the actions of our past ancestors, one can make a case as to why we believe such, but in doing this, we blind ourselves to how we also swim in the depths of those discriminative patterns.

I have recently been coming across videos on various platforms, mainly TikTok, where people, mostly women, are attacking, ridiculing, and belittling the partners of various celebrity figures, who they believe, in some way, don't fit the standardized expectations for someone who should date said celebrity. Now, this isn't to say that this behavior is only common amongst women, because men also, one way or another, act this way. What is common here is the dehumanization of people, usually people with socially unpopular traits.

The philosopher and writer George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." A true saying, but one I believe is not complete. We see schools and other institutions, even family, having conversations about the horrors and evils of our past, all in an attempt to prevent the future generation from ever walking in the same direction, but we make a common mistake when talking about this issue, that being, moral absolutism.

In the world of moral absolutism, there are objective and universal moral principles that apply consistently to all situations. These principles are considered to be fixed and unchanging, providing clear guidance on what is morally acceptable or unacceptable. This is when we say things like, The blacks were wrong for (xx), the women were right for (xx), etc.

The issue with using moral absolutism when discussing our past is that we ignore the individualistic complexity of the variables that were at play during those times, a complexity that exists in every single one of us. What happens as a result of this is that we do create a society where the exact evil action of the past isn't repeated, giving us a false sense of achievement, because even though we have eliminated the act, we haven't faced its motivation in ourselves.

To simplify the past as good and bad is to ignore the sophistication of humanity and everything that makes us whole. A good example of this is slavery. To suggest that the people of the past who owned slaves and were bad to colored people are in some way just bad people is to miss the lesson. In doing this, we ignore a large number of possible events and/or combinations of them that would have led to such behavior or belief. A good one would be the involvement of religion, mostly Christianity, as an instrument to justify slavery. Some people misused some biblical quotes and stories to make slavery make sense. Understanding this can make us reconsider our judgments of the people of the past.

To stop history from repeating itself, we have to look beyond the surface of just narrowing actions and behaviors to just good or bad; it takes noticing the varied complexity that caused them to act in that manner and also how those shadows that existed in them also exist in us. Doing this would give us a better chance of catching the patterns in ourselves and stopping the cycle.

But it does still happen in our society; the videos and comments dehumanizing a person because of their looks and other unpopular traits still keep their popularity in society. Everyone jumps on the train, seeing nothing wrong in it, because to us, what it means to dehumanize is something so far from us, somewhere in the past. And because of this, we blind ourselves and also pride ourselves on discriminative acts.