AS we approach the end of yet another eventful year, it is usually the time of year to reflect upon some of the lessons that could be gleaned from the incidents big and small that took place in the preceding 12 months. When I tried to do so, however, I could not help but be overcome by a tremendous sense of futility and resignation. For it would appear that at least as time marched forward in the nearly two generations (if we take one to be approximately a quarter century) since I was born, history – at least those parts of it which pertain to how humans behave, interact, organize themselves or otherwise be governed – keeps on perpetuating itself in a negative direction. It is as if we as the human race have not collectively or singularly learned from painful past mistakes but are instead doomed to repeat them, due primarily to our own follies.