So no one knows who said that history is "one damn thing after another," but the alternate view is t

So no one knows who said that history is "one damn thing after another," but the alternate view is that of Hegel, who I wrote about here, and who describes this cyclical process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (many others argue Fichte really said it first and then Hegel turned it into a home run). Hegel said history had a process and that it had resolved to a point in which governing men had been kind of sorted out. This last part is rather ridiculous of course, but so is the argument that events that nothing to do with humans, like tsunamis and coronaviruses, are a counterpoint to Hegel.

Hegel's philosophy of history seems to be primarily concerned with human thinking. It's true that nearly apocalyptic events happen that have nothing to do with human thinking, and yet human thinking seems to soldier on and there is a narrative to it. That narrative hasn't stopped moving largely in a direction that seems somewhat discernible.

I was listening to John Michael Greer on the Hermitix podcast, and they were talking about the silliness of Hegel, joking that COVID-19 isn't a thesis. It's just a thing fucking with our lives. That's true, but there is a thesis for it. Nassim Taleb's whole philosophy is undergirded by the idea that humans need to approach the world assuming that black swan events will hit (though this wasn't really a black swan). He's the one pointing out that our worldviews aren't adequately factoring in these sorts of huge, disruptive events. So there's the thesis, guys. I don't see a tension here.