Germany: why do we forget the past?

We democratic Europeans have put our hands to our heads seeing that in Saxony-Anhaltthe AfD has just achieved around 44% of the votes in a historic victory. We ask ourselves why, especially in Germany, which has made the memory of its past a collective responsibility. But the thing is that history does not repeat itself because we forget it. It repeats itself when we manage to convince ourselves that this time is different.Regrettably, remembering does not guarantee learning. Historical memory can coexist with psychological mechanisms that, in situations of threat, frustration, or loss of trust, make precisely the solutions we know can be destructive attractive. When people perceive that their world is threatened, fear reorganizes priorities. We have a recent example of this in Ceuta. The threat can be economic, cultural, territorial, or physical, but whatever it may be, it always increases the need forsecurity, order, control, and belonging. And the threat does not need to be objective to be psychologically effective: it is enough that it is perceived as real. Symbolic threats can be as powerful as material ones. It is in this context that authoritarian discourses find fertile ground: they promise protection, offer certainties, and simplify the world.

In situations of uncertainty we cling to our group as a source of protection and identity, and then the border between "us" and "them" becomes sharper. The far right offers a psychologically very effective operation: "We are those who belong here; they are those who threaten what is ours".The immigrant person, the foreigner, feminism, the elites, the left, LGBTI people… can become different versions of the same mechanism: an "other" that allows us to define who we are. And from here on, looking for scapegoats is only one step away. Social psychologist Henri Tajfel explained how our group identity can fuel prejudices and intergroup conflicts. When we want to turn a complex crisis into a simple problem, a great cognitive temptation appears: finding a culprit. It is much easier to think "my life is getting worse because they are taking something from me" than to assume a systemic explanation that forces one to understand markets, fiscal policies, technological transformations, globalization, or inequality.There is still another reason to understand why we do not learn from the past: when emotion prevails, we choose the conclusion first and then construct the arguments that justify it. A person may know perfectly well that Nazism produced a catastrophe and, at the same time, think: “Yes, it was terrible, but this is different”. Thispsychological operation of exceptionalization allows us to live with statements like “We are not fascists”. “We only want to restore order”. “We only want to control immigration”. Historical information has not disappeared. We have not forgotten it. We have reinterpreted it so that it ceases to be incompatible with our current decision.There are other mechanisms involved in this selective "forgetting" of History, but I do not want to finish without highlighting what seems most disturbing to me: moral disengagement. Before accepting cruelty, we must make it stop seeming cruel. Albert Bandura conceptualized moral disengagementtoexplain how people can maintain a positive image of themselves while supporting actions that harm others. And this reminds us of what Hannah Arendt analyzed in Eichmann in Jerusalem: great barbarities do not necessarily begin with people who consider themselves barbaric. They can start with apparently small changes in language:from people to numbers; from immigrants to "waves"; from rights to "privileges"; from exclusion to "defense of our identity".Any action to curb the far-right that does not take these psychological mechanisms into account is doomed to failure. Just as we need philosophers to face AI and its consequences, we need psychology professionals to understand and confront fear. Because we see that the true danger is not forgetting History. It is remembering it and, even so, managing to think that this time it is different.