20140405 History is useless.txt

History is useless. April 5th, 2014. Opposition. Win.

Good afternoon honorable members of the house, chairman and members of the proposition team. As it was said, our motion for today is "History is useless". You’ve studied history at school and maybe didn’t like it, but the same as literature and social studies it formed your character. History is not abstract but applied science for you personally. What I’m going to do now is to show that you can benefit from conditions detecting, having behavior and consequences examples. So, as usual, let's get started.

Let’s start with historic recurrence. According to Wikipedia it is the repetition of similar events in history. Of course, absolutely all conditions can’t be repeated and repetition is not strict, but common patterns can be detected. As an example, you might remember decay of Roman Empire. It was large. Honestly, it was too large and it was too difficult to rule remote territories. Uncontrolled growth means separation. Have it ever happen after that? Well, you can also remember previous century with its collapse of European colonial empires. Control center stopped looking powerful and it led to the fall. 
This historical example can be applied in real life if you are a businessman who controls big distributed corporation; a manager with a lot of manages or just only you trying to handle too many tasks. Don’t take too much, delegate but control. 

Let’s imagine that you’ve detected pattern. What‘s next? You’ll need to act! And it is always good when you have some examples of successful & unsuccessful behavior. Maybe you should act impulsively and quick, maybe you should weight every decision. Greeks wanted revenge at Trojan War as soon as possible. They hadn’t navigated to Troy carefully and at the beginning of the War they attacked Telef who was their ally. It led to battle, big troubles and human losses. Examples of successful not acting you’ve seen this year. Putin’s silence about Crimea’s intervention dropped prices of energy companies’ stocks. Panic sell from American investors was compensated by buying from our side. Some political analytics think that it was his main goal. 
Acting is all about patterns. The more patterns you know, the better decision you’ll make in real life.

Let’s finish with consequences. The key of act is what would happen next. You have some ideas of consequences, but they are limited to your personal experience. And what if you can broad your experience without actually experiencing it? Just read about it and you’ll get the knowledge of ancestors. Now you’ve learned about fail at the beginning Trojan War. You have an example of situation when mistaken accusations can lead to big troubles and you’ll be more careful in your life. 

To sum up, you can benefit from knowing about historic recurrence; knowing historical examples helps you to act optimally and foresee the broader range of consequences to be prepared to.  

That’s all. Thank you for your attention.