#Bristol News. The Eternal Return of Protest: Why Humans Never Learn.

A darkly comic look at humanity's 2,000-year history of protest sacrifice. Why do we keep using the same strategies expecting different results?

(Image: The Jewish Independent)

You know what’s hilarious? And I mean genuinely hilarious in that dark, cosmic, “we’re-all-screwed” kind of way? We’ve been keeping records for thousands of years. We’ve written it all down. Every protest, every sacrifice, every martyr who said, “This time it’ll be different.” We’ve got the whole playbook sitting on shelves gathering dust, and we STILL can’t figure out that we’re running the same play over and over again expecting different results.

Palestine supporters going on hunger strike in prison? Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what humans DO. It’s in our DNA at this point. We’ve been doing it since before we had the good sense to write it down. And here’s the kicker - it’s never worked. Not once. Not in any lasting, fundamental, “Oh wow, we’ve actually changed human nature!” - kind of way.

But do we learn? Do we ever!

The Greatest Hits Album Nobody Wants to Admit They’ve Heard Before.

Let’s take a little stroll through history, shall we? Because this is where political satire meets historical reality, and it gets properly funny.

Two thousand years ago, some bloke got nailed to a cross. Big sacrifice. Huge. Changed everything, right? Did it usher in an age of peace, love, and human enlightenment? Well... sort of. If by “peace and love” you mean the Crusades, the Inquisition, centuries of religious warfare, witch burnings, and people killing each other over whose interpretation of “love thy neighbour” is correct.

But wait, there’s more!

The early Christian martyrs? Thrown to lions, burnt alive, the whole nine yards. Died for their beliefs. Very noble. Very inspiring. And what did we get? An empire that adopted Christianity and then spent the next 1,500 years using it as an excuse to conquer, colonise, and generally behave exactly like every other empire in history. Same shit, different branding.

The suffragettes? Hunger strikes in prison. Force-feeding. Women literally starved themselves for the right to vote. Admirable? Absolutely. Did it work? Well, women got the vote. Brilliant! And now we’ve got... the same political corruption, the same power games, the same inequality, just with better optics. Progress! Sort of. If you squint.

Gandhi? Fasted multiple times. Non-violent resistance. Brought down the British Empire in India. Incredible achievement. Really, no sarcasm. And what happened? Partition. Millions dead. Decades of conflict. India and Pakistan are pointing nuclear weapons at each other. Same tribal bullshit humans have been doing since we figured out how to sharpen sticks, just with better technology.

Bobby Sands and the Irish hunger strikers in 1981? Ten men starved themselves to death. TEN. For political status, did it change anything? Well, it made them martyrs, created more division, more violence, and decades later, people in Northern Ireland are STILL arguing about the same shit their grandparents were arguing about.

See the pattern yet? Because I do. And it’s hilarious in that way that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

The Hamster Wheel of Human Conviction.

Here’s what we do, and we do it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME:

Someone gets passionate about a cause. Good for them. Genuinely. They look at the world, see injustice, and think, “I’ve got to do something.” Noble impulse. Very human. And then - and this is where it gets good - they decide that the way to do something is to hurt themselves.

Not to change the system. Not to build something new. Not to actually solve the underlying problem. No, no. The solution is to suffer publicly and hope that the people in power will suddenly grow a conscience and go, “Oh my god, you’re starving yourself? Well, in THAT case, let me completely change everything about how power works!”

Because THAT’s worked so well historically.

And we - the rest of us - we watch this happen, and we split into teams. Team A says, “This is heroic! This is sacrifice! This is the only way!” Team B says, “This is pointless! This is theatrical! This changes nothing!” And both teams spend all their energy arguing about it on social media, whilst nothing actually changes.

Meanwhile, the people in power? They’re laughing. Because they know something we apparently don’t: symbols don’t threaten power. Sacrifice doesn’t threaten power. What threatens power is actual, material organisation and leverage. But that’s hard work. That’s boring. That doesn’t make you feel like a hero.

Starving yourself? Now THAT’S dramatic. That gets attention. That feels important.

The Cosmic Joke We’re All Missing.

You want to know what the real joke is? The absolute, laugh-until-you-cry, cosmic punchline that we keep missing?

It’s not that sacrifice doesn’t work. It’s that we think it SHOULD work, and we keep being surprised when it doesn’t.

We’ve built entire religions around the idea that suffering is redemptive. That sacrifice purifies. That if you just hurt yourself enough, publicly enough, dramatically enough, the world will somehow become a better place. We’ve turned martyrdom into a sacrament. This isn’t just social commentary - it’s the operating system of human nature.

And two thousand years later - TWO THOUSAND YEARS - we’re still doing it. Still expecting different results. Still thinking “well sure, it didn’t work the last few million times, but THIS time, with THIS cause, it’ll definitely work.”

It’s like watching someone try to hammer a nail with a banana, fail, and then pick up another banana thinking, “Surely THIS banana will work.” And when that doesn’t work, getting a THIRD banana. A FOURTH banana. A million bananas. And never - not ONCE - stopping to think “maybe... maybe bananas aren’t the right tool for this job?”

But we can’t see it. We’re inside the joke. We’re the punchline. And we think we’re being profound.

The Species That Honours Dead Martyrs and Ignores Living Ones.

Here’s another funny thing we do in our cycles of human behaviour: We LOVE dead martyrs. Can’t get enough of them. Build them statues. Write songs about them. Name streets after them. Make them into icons.

But living protesters? The ones actually doing the thing right now? We can’t agree on whether they’re heroes or idiots. We argue about their methods, their motives, whether they’re really sincere or just looking for attention. We psychoanalyse them, question them, dismiss them.

Then they die - or the cause fades, or enough time passes - and suddenly? THEN we honour them. THEN we say, “Oh yes, very brave, very noble, we should learn from their example.”

And what do we learn? Absolutely fuck all.

We learn to honour the sacrifice. We don’t learn to actually CHANGE anything. We don’t learn to build systems that make the sacrifice unnecessary. We just... add them to the pantheon and move on.

It’s brilliant, really. We’ve created this perfect loop where sacrifice is always honoured in retrospect and always questioned in the present, which means we never have to actually do anything differently. We just have to wait for the current crop of protesters to become historical figures, and then we can safely admire them without having to change our behaviour.

The Algorithm That Never Updates

You know what we are? We’re an algorithm that never updates. We’re running version 1.0 of human behaviour, and we’ve been running it for so long that we think it’s a feature, not a bug.

The algorithm goes like this:

1. Perceive injustice

2. Feel strongly about it

3. Perform sacrifice

4. Wait for change

5. Change doesn’t come

6. Die or give up

7. Next generation repeats from step 1

And we’ve been running this exact same script for MILLENNIA. We’ve got thousands of years of data showing it doesn’t work, and we just... keep... running... it.

Because here’s the thing about humans: we’re not actually interested in what works. We’re interested in what FEELS right. And sacrifice feels right. It feels pure. It feels moral. It feels like it SHOULD work.

So we keep doing it.

Even though - and I cannot stress this enough - IT NEVER WORKS.

Oh, sometimes we get concessions. Sometimes we get symbolic victories. Sometimes we get enough people uncomfortable enough that they throw us a bone to make it stop. But fundamental change? The kind that actually addresses root causes and restructures power?

Yeah, no. That requires something other than suffering. That requires organisation, leverage, sustained pressure, and alternative systems. Boring stuff. Complicated stuff. Stuff that doesn’t make you feel like a hero.

The Wheel Keeps Turning.

So here we are. 2025. Palestine supporters are going on hunger strike. And right on cue, we’re all playing our parts in this theatre of activist movements.

Some people are calling them heroes. Some people are calling them fools. Some people are arguing about whether their cause is just. Some people are arguing about their methods. Everyone’s got an opinion. Everyone’s got a take.

And you know what’s going to happen? The same thing that always happens in these historical patterns of protest.

Either they’ll stop the hunger strike, or they won’t. Either they’ll get some kind of concession, or they won’t. Either people will remember them, or they won’t. And in ten years, twenty years, fifty years, someone else will be on hunger strike for some other cause, and we’ll all go through this exact same dance again.

Because we’re humans. This is what we do. This is ALL we do.

We’re the species that keeps picking up bananas to hammer nails. And every single time we pick up a banana, we think “but THIS banana feels different.”

The Punchline We’re All Missing.

You want to know what the saddest part is? The part that would make you laugh if it wasn’t so pathetically tragic?

These hunger strikers - whoever they are, whatever their cause - they GENUINELY believe they’re doing something different. Something that’ll matter. They’ve looked at thousands of years of human history and somehow concluded that THEIR sacrifice will be the one that finally works.

And that’s not courage. That’s not even stupidity. That’s something much funnier and much darker.

That’s hope.

Hope that we can be better than we’ve ever been. Hope that this time will be different. Hope that human nature can be changed through the sheer force of moral example.

And THAT’s the joke. The real, cosmic, laugh-until-you-cry joke in this dark comedy of human existence.

We’re a species that never learns, always hopes, constantly disappoints itself, and then does it all over again. We’re stuck in an eternal return of the same failed strategies, convinced each time that we’ve figured out something new.

Jesus got nailed to a cross once. ONCE. And even he had the good sense not to come back and try it again, expecting different results.

But us? We’ll keep nailing ourselves to crosses forever. Because we’re humans. And apparently, we’re not very bright.

The wheel keeps turning. The hamster keeps running. The banana keeps failing to hammer the nail.

And we keep thinking “maybe next time.”

That’s not tragedy. That’s not even farce.

That’s just... us.

Welcome to the species that never learns. Enjoy your stay. It’s going to be exactly like everyone else’s.

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What do you think? Are we doomed to repeat the same patterns forever in our cycles of protest and sacrifice, or can humans actually learn from history? Share your thoughts below.

Tags: political satire, social commentary, protest history, human nature, dark comedy, cultural criticism, historical patterns, activist movements.