There’s no better way to tell someone didn’t learn their lesson after a conflict than when they choose to focus on the real or perceived wrongdoings of the winner rather than how they won.
Julius Caesar. Alexander the Great. Charlemagne. Martin Luther. Oliver Cromwell. George Washington. The boys at the Alamo. Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt. Winston Churchill. Ho Chi Minh. The Taliban. Bashar al-Assad. Vladimir Putin.
Fill in whatever person or group comes to mind that has amassed a fanbase of haters who think there’s nothing to learn from these people and the only emotion to have toward them is contempt.
At a micro-level and in a more conventional context, it could be a soccer, football, or baseball team.
Or, say, a hockey team. For years the Soviets crushed everyone at the Olympics. Herb Brooks studied their strategy to figure out how to beat them, then trained his team accordingly.
That’s how you win. The Soviets were the best, and Brooks realized his boys had to be even better at the game. He didn’t just wallow in self-pity and talk forever about how they’re wicked communists.
Instead, he trained his boys so they put the best goaltender in the world on the bench.
Rocky Balboa gives a great speech to his son in the 2008 film about the difference between winners and losers.
Too often I see the losers (or their descendants) of a conflict fixate on the moral underpinnings or cause, typically by highlighting the failings and crimes of the enemy or their leader. They are blamed for every real and perceived problem going on.
They may be right or wrong, but right doesn’t make might. If it did, then how come the “bad guys” won and continue to win? Virtue matters, but it won’t win fights. Shrewdness, cunningness, brilliance, wit, pragmatism and adaptability make victory possible.
When you lose in a conflict, you don’t wallow in self-pity or focus forever on how bad the other person or group was. You figure out why they won from a practical perspective, and incorporate that into your strategy if you’re still in search of victory.
But perhaps that might require a level of self-awareness that, if it existed before, might have prevented the conflict in a lot of cases.