The reason history repeats itself is that all the people who made mistakes in the past are now dead and gone. Most people alive are doing this all for the first time.
Yep, this is why we need to medically eliminate aging and achieve biological immortality. The conventional wisdom is that a society needs aging and death to eliminate old ideas and impediments to adopting new ideas and adapting to change, but this I believe is wrong. Young people fail to learn the lessons of the past because they never lived it, and so history goes in cycles; we keep making the same mistakes over and over. Eliminating this natural cycle should help society have a much longer memory, and medically fixing the problem where peoples' brains fail to be as good at learning and adapting with old age should fix the problems caused by older people being irrationally resistant to change and new ideas.
Seeing how badly a 'hegemony of the aged' cements in most places in the world in the form of wealth and political power, a lot of social problems and systems will have to be 'fixed' before that would be a net benefit.
Just go to you local city council planning meeting and see how gray haired and crazy the NIMBYs are, and they dictate local housing policy.
>Seeing how badly a 'hegemony of the aged' cements in most places in the world in the form of wealth and political power
I don't see the problem here with age. The problem you're describing seems to stem from other social issues, namely nepotism, classism, etc. People living longer isn't going to change that much I suspect; people have had these issues for thousands of years, and if anything, it's much better now than it was centuries ago. There's far more social mobility now than there was in Medieval times.
>Just go to you local city council planning meeting and see how gray haired and crazy the NIMBYs are
I think I already addressed that: age has an effect on the brain, so if we figure out biological immortality, we should also figure out along with that how to eliminate these aging-related problems/diseases.
The other problem you describe there is basically classism, and the ability of locals who gain power to shut others out of power. Again, this was much worse in the past when people didn't live nearly as long. The way to fix it isn't to have people die off early, it's to come up with laws and policies that counteract it.
The way to fix the NIMBYism problem is simple, and they've done something like this in Japan: you remove power from local government to set zoning policy. Obviously, local governments get people like this in power who don't look out for the overall good of society, and instead look to maximize their real estate value through manipulation of zoning, so you strip them of that power and move it to the state or national level. In the Bay Area, this means the state government needs to grow a pair and pass some strict laws about zoning, and severely curtail the ability of local governments to reject development.
