The Pull of the Familiar

In the West we see history as linear: armed with science and superior minds, we march toward a better and better world — never mind that all our achievements have brought us to the threshold of unwelcome change.

Wisdom traditions see a different trajectory in human affairs: spirals and cycles.

Because we insist on the linear narrative, we are surprised when the old forms return. This is true of our personal lives as well as our collective lives.

In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel observed that the human embryo, in its journey from a single fertilized cell to a living creature, passes through stages that mirror the entire evolutionary history of its species — briefly sprouting gill slits like a fish, developing traces of a tail, and so on. It relives, Haeckel postulated, in compressed form, the story of its species’ long becoming.

The biogenetic law, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, has been discredited. Haeckel overstated it. And the science doesn’t hold up. But the metaphor survives: forms repeat. Patterns laid down by history, by evolution, by culture, by family, by individuals become the grooves along which new growth flows.

The past does not simply precede us. It lives inside us, exerting its influence on our minds, our emotions, our behavior, even when we deny it.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner

I. The Story We Inherit

Before we are old enough to question anything, we are already living inside someone else’s story.

Parents not only feed and shelter a child; they transmit both verbally and without speaking. Often without knowing it or even wishing it, the emotional undercurrent of the parent’s own lives get transmitted; these may include the longing of a life unfulfilled, unspoken fears, unresolved grief, and elaborate survival strategies. An alcoholic parent, for example, might produce an alcoholic child — or a teetotaler. But whether the child moves toward the pattern or away from it, the pattern remains the reference point. As Jung points out, it is the unspoken, the unconscious, that powerfully imprints the child.

The structure repeats, even though we struggle against it, and is handed down through generations until someone does the work of loosening its grip.

Those of us who have found our beginnings challenging, spend parts of our adult lives trying to escape that inheritance. We flee our parents’ religion, politics, neighborhood, class. We choose different partners, different cities, different professions. But then one day we hear our mother’s voice coming out of our own mouths, or find ourselves at a party, gravitating, in a crowded room, toward the one person who carries the same wound of our parent, for example. the one with the alcohol problems.

And we understand: we are not free.

Awareness of the pattern is not freedom from it. It is instead only the beginning of deeper work that requires a new vantage point, a new level of consciousness; finally we learn to act from outside the narrative. This process requires diligence and time.

II. The Civilization We Inherit and Create

What the individual does in one lifetime, civilization does across centuries. The human embryo develops the way millions have developed before it. It is recognizable. And yet while it resembles all other embryos, each is influenced by specific environmental factors, by maternal health, by DNA. And there are other mysterious forces at work, some suggest karma; anyone who has spent time around infants and small children knows they do not enter the world as blank slate, but appear to come with their own dynamic and sometimes with a clear set of instructions.

Society is not an abstraction. It is made of people. Each person is a carrier of private and cultural inheritance, each one like a droplet of water that joins a far larger current. When an individual or a country faces a crisis and needs to summon courage and purpose, it calls on its history, the memory of a parent’s love, long-dead heroes, its founding principles, and its community. In this manner it emboldens itself.

Sometimes we view the solidity of our lives and the structures we build and are filled with pride, only to find ourselves, under pressure, returning to old forms and old patterns.

Look Around.

Between roughly 300 and 600 CE, the decaying Roman Empire faced waves of migrating populations, changing the character of the lands they entered. Feudalism emerged: a world organized around the dominance of a very small number of people over nearly everyone else. Lords and peasants.

Here we are some 1,500 years later revisiting ancient stories and ancient forms. The West is consumed with fears of immigration. And is there worse to come? Many now fear collapse and the implosion of states that can no longer govern themselves. And on the horizon, a new category of refugee: those displaced not by armies but by the earth itself, by fire and drought and the slow failure of water, by coastlines that will no longer hold. The migrations of the 4th to 7th century were substantial for the time. What is coming in the 21st century may dwarf them.

At the top of this destabilized world, a small number of people, empowered by extraordinary resources, accumulate more and more power. Their story differs from the Middle Ages, but the structure is the same: a handful of individuals deciding and implementing plans as to how the rest of us live, work, speak, and are permitted to know. Democracy, which appeared to be a permanent condition for at least a few countries in modern times, begins to look like what it may always have been: a remarkable, fragile, unlikely experiment.

The Pax Romana brought two centuries of relative stability to much of the known world. The Pax Americana anchored a particular order for roughly seventy postwar years. The men who ruled and who rule remain unsatisfied, driven by appetites they cannot satiate. Buddhism has a name for this being: the hungry ghost. The hungry ghostis characterized by an enormous stomach, and a too small mouth and esophagus to ever take in enough. Forever famished.

III. The Question Beneath the Surface

When the story a civilization tells about itself begins to crack, people don’t just question their politics. They question everything — their identities, their bodies, their place in the order of things. Gender roles, long assumed to be fixed. The narratives of the homeland itself.

And some look further still — past the body, past the earth. Dreams of colonizing Mars. Dreams of merging with machines, uploading consciousness, escaping the cycle entirely. If history repeats its forms, if the individual recapitulates their parents’ unfinished story, if the civilization recapitulates the feudal past, then transcendence feels not just desirable but urgent. Can we finally outrun the pattern?

Fortunately or unfortunately, we bring ourselves with us wherever we go. The mind that designs the algorithm, that trains the model, that decides what the future should optimize for — that mind is still the product of everything that came before it. The inherited story goes with us. The appetite to fill the inner emptiness with power, with distraction, with accumulation, goes with us.

Continuing on this path promises to bring deep suffering. We need a reckoning that most individuals, and most civilizations, find ways to avoid. But there is a way through.

IV. The Only Way Out Is Through

This is where pessimism is tempting — and where it becomes a trap.

Development is not a clean recapitulation. It is messier, more variable, less predictable. Individual organisms, and individual people, do sometimes break from the pattern. Evolution happens. Transformation happens. Not through escape, but through awareness — accompanying the external efforts with the slow, difficult, unglamorous work of changing the conditions from the inside.

Just like the embryo develops in predictable stages, the infant develops into a fully grown adult by embodying physical changes and different stages of consciousness development, including, among others: infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc. Each of these levels is a self-contained reality. You no longer remember how you thought as an adolescent but it was radically different than what you think now. It was a world which had its own internally consistent interpretation of human experience. So too, when we reach maturity and pass onto the age of wisdom this is also a natural progression in which the world looks radically different than it did when we were young.

It’s a good idea not to stand in the way of this development into wisdom, lest you stiffen with age. If you go with the flow you can maintain the resilience , the creativity of a child.

But you can also cultivate this level of wisdom and not wait passively for its arrival.

Awareness is not freedom. But it is when freedom begins to becomes possible, when we must engage in disciplined and tireless work, without any guarantee of a reward.

What would it mean to do that work — not just individually, but collectively? To become conscious of the civilizational story we inhabit, not just as a private psychological project but as a political one. What if we refuse to flee into machines, into amusement? What if we insist on the human experiment? Can we do the work of inner transformation that frees us, at least partially, from our ancestors’ unfinished business, and bring that richer attention to bear on the world?

These are not rhetorical questions. They describe actual work: therapeutic, political, communal, imaginative. Work that is already happening throughout the world, in ways that mostly do not make the news.

The question is whether enough of us will do it — before the familiar form closes around us again.

©2026 Shulamit Elson