In a world that is implicitly oriented towards the replication of its own processes, behaviours and conventions, all we ever do is look backwards, and even as we travel into unknown futures yet always and already blinded by the fallible visions of a shared imagination and memory that, like systems of belief, is so easily abstracted, detached from reality and comes to inhabit its own hyper-inflating space(s) of complex tautology.
Even where and when some great insight or discovery occurs, see them all swarm like moths around its naked flame and (eventually) obscure it, embellish it in so much unnecessary orthodoxy and unthinking rituals of acquiescence to a past that (in many cases never existed that) they make it almost impossible for further insights and discoveries to ever happen.
Notice too that self-definition is always and already a retrospective exercise, that we all find ourselves haunted by pasts that we project upon a future in ways that bind and bond us (as individual, nations and as a species) to the barren repetition of memory and behavioural orthodoxy which defines us as free only in as much as it also and simultaneously imprisons us all.
Daedelus Kite 