Excessive focus on the past as better then the present leads only to stagnation. You wind up with policy-making that is just a cargo-cult of what history books and half-remembered stories say, rather then dealing with reality.
Is it overly focusing on the past or is it discounting the past because the present has to be better, while in reality we are making the same mistakes.
The periodicity is there, but we ignore it because we assume we are necessarily improving regardless because of our falsely assumed temporal-progress trajectory.
You see this in system design where someone makes something new, as a goal of improving an existing system, but really the only quality it has is that it is new. So they are also constructing a future shitty system at the same time. In many instances, one should ignore time and think about states. Or at least heavily discount it and don't let it distort your thinking.
