Memory Against History: Collective Amnesia and the Logic of Recurrence

This study examines the structural relationship between collective psychology, individual consciousness, and the persistence of historical recurrence. It argues that the failure of societies to learn from past catastrophes is not primarily the result of insufficient historical knowledge, but of a psychological and anthropological tendency toward selective forgetting. Drawing on the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon and the literary representations of memory erosion in George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, the article demonstrates how traumatic historical experience is gradually excluded from both individual and collective awareness in the name of psychological survival and social stability. The analysis is further developed through the literary testimony of Richard Aldington and the philosophical conception of historical inevitability in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which reveal that war and civilizational rupture are lived as trauma but remembered as abstraction. In the contemporary digital environment, this process is intensified: the external archive of civilization expands while the internal capacity for historical reflection diminishes. The study concludes that collective amnesia is not an anomaly but a structural feature of human societies, and that the recurrence of violence, displacement, and systemic crisis emerges logically from the limits of psychological endurance and the discontinuity of historical consciousness.