Life’s experiences leaves their mark on us. Most of the time we think of this as positive - learning from life. But experiences also distort our thinking. Someone who has been through severe poverty may go through life always insecure even if rationally they have made enough to feel secure. Someone whose parents have had a difficult marriage or who comes from a broken household will likely carry that over to their own marriage. They have no other experience on which to base their behaviour in marriage.
This holds true at a societal level too. Certain ideas have strong hold on the national imagination and it is difficult for people to think rationally about this. Examples include the Kashmir issue in India and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
One of the most valuable services that a human can provide another is to free them from this grip of the past, to help them to drop their 'baggage'. To quote from Landmark, to be “informed by the past, but not limited by it”. To help a person to design their future, outside of the constraints of the past. However, the requirement for such a service is not even widely recognised today, leave alone provided.
On a national level, I see an impact from this, for poverty alleviation and national progress, economically and otherwise. In particular, moving people out of poverty can be quite challenging because of the mindset changes required of the poor. If societies as a whole could provide service, it stands to reason that, freed from the ‘demons’ on the past, individuals and therefore societies will progress much more rapidly and in a win-win way, than they could otherwise.
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