# Remembering History Can Sustain Catastrophic Patterns by Scott Atran > “People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history's catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., "the maginot effect" for war and the soon-to-be "box-cutting effect" for terrorism).” > **— Scott Atran**, *2004 Edge Annual Question, response passage* ## Sources and Context - **Direct publication and locator:** [Atran's Law — Scott Atran](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11410) — 2004 Annual Question response, contiguous sentence(s) within the representative extract. - **Exact original excerpt:** “The major events that determine human history follow a power distribution (a more or less straight line on a log-log scale), with catastrophic and cascading consequences (economic and health crises, political and cultural revolutions, war and terrorism, etc.), because people naturally prefer to act upon the future based on their modeling of past occurrences. People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history's catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., "the maginot effect" for war and the soon-to-be "box-cutting effect" for terrorism).” - **Context and editing:** The selected complete second sentence is Atran’s claim under his Power Law of History. Its point is about self-defeating patterns built from remembered past events, not amnesia as the sole explanation. No editorial words were inserted. - **Local Edge archive:** [[research/Edge 2004 Full Quotation Curation|Edge 2004 Full Quotation Curation]], response EDGE2004-045. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Greatest Transformation in Human History|The Greatest Transformation in Human History]] - **Article:** [[articles/An Order of Operation|An Order of Operation]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Human Animality|Human Animality]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Human Animality|Human Animality]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history's catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., "the maginot effect" for war and the soon-to-be "box-cutting effect" for terrorism).” — Scott Atran, 2004 Edge Annual Question, response passage https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-scott-atran-remembering-history-sustain-catastrophic-patterns ```