The Loop: Joan Westenberg’s Powerful Essay on Why Human Nature Guarantees History Repeats Itself

If you’re tired of the endless “AI bubble” debate, Joan Westenberg has written the essay that puts every financial panic, political upheaval, and technological frenzy into a single, sobering framework.

The Loop: Joan Westenberg’s Powerful Essay on Why Human Nature Guarantees History Repeats Itself Published on April 27, 2026, The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again is not another hot take on markets or politics.

It is a deep, unflinching examination of why humanity keeps making the same catastrophic mistakes — and why the real culprit is not capitalism, social media, or any particular technology, but the unchanging operating system inside our skulls.

Westenberg’s central argument is elegantly simple and profoundly unsettling. The modern human brain was shaped over roughly 200,000 years on the African savanna and another 10,000 years in small agricultural settlements.

That “kernel” — our neurological hardware — has received no meaningful updates since.

Political systems, ideologies, and technologies are merely application layers that evolve rapidly.

The brain, however, still runs on the same dopamine circuits, amygdala-driven fear responses, and in-group/out-group sorting that helped our ancestors survive. As a result, we are wired for the same predictable failure modes: over-optimism in good times, scapegoating in bad times, and a preference for simple narratives and strong leaders when things get ambiguous.

Financial bubbles are the clearest, most repeated example of this loop.

Westenberg walks through the greatest hits with clinical precision:

1637 Tulip Mania in Haarlem, where a single Semper Augustus bulb sold for 5,200 guilders — the price of a grand canal house and ten times a skilled craftsman’s annual salary — before the market collapsed in just three weeks.
The South Sea Company bubble and John Law’s Mississippi Scheme in the early 18th century.
The British railway mania of the 1840s (one in ten English investors bought shares in lines that were never built).
The two American railroad depressions of the 1870s and 1890s.
Radio stocks in the 1920s.
The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
The 2008 tranched mortgage derivatives rated AAA by the very firms that issued them.
NFTs and JPEGs of monkeys in 2021.
And, yes, AI stocks in 2026.

Each time the same script plays out: euphoric prices, breathless declarations that “this time is different,” followed by sudden collapse. Nine days before the 1929 crash, economist Irving Fisher famously announced that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau.” In 2005, Alan Greenspan assured Congress there was no national housing bubble. The brain’s reward system, Westenberg notes, makes the *hunt* feel better than the meal — anticipation is more pleasurable than reality.

The same neurological machinery produces political cycles. When institutions falter and trust evaporates, frightened middle classes turn to “strong men.” Westenberg traces the pattern from Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 BCE, through Napoleon in 1799, Mussolini in 1922, Hitler in 1933, and Perón in 1946. These figures don’t appear in a vacuum; they exploit the brain’s ancient preference for dominance hierarchies and simple authority under stress. The prefrontal cortex — the part that handles nuance and long-term thinking — hands control to older circuits that crave decisive action.

Closely linked is the scapegoating mechanism brilliantly described by René Girard in *Violence and the Sacred* (1972). Societies in crisis rarely blame complex structures or the actual beneficiaries of the system. Instead, they unite against a weaker, marginal group — Jews during the Black Death or Weimar hyperinflation, Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 (800,000 killed in 100 days by their own neighbors), Chinese merchants in Indonesia, Catholics in Elizabethan England, or immigrants today. The violence against an innocent victim creates temporary social cohesion; guilt is quickly forgotten. The brain’s lightning-fast (under 200 milliseconds) in-group/out-group sorting makes this pattern neurologically effortless.

The Loop: Joan Westenberg’s Powerful Essay on Why Human Nature Guarantees History Repeats Itself Then there are the technological loops. Every transformative invention follows the same trajectory: utopian promise, rapid adoption, societal panic, clumsy regulation. The printing press (Gutenberg Bible, 1455) took roughly 150 years to ignite the Thirty Years’ War, which killed a third of the German-speaking population.

Radio gave Hitler a direct voice into every German home and later coordinated the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Social media is simply the latest iteration. What has changed is speed. The telegraph took 50 years to saturate the industrialized world. The internet took 20. The smartphone took 10. Generative AI has achieved near-ubiquity in roughly half that time.

Westenberg’s conclusion is neither nihilistic nor optimistic — it is realistic. The Loop cannot be broken because the brain cannot be updated. Institutions can slow it down (the post-1945 order bought humanity an unusually long stretch of relative peace), but every new generation forgets the last iteration. The best we can do is recognize the pattern when we feel the familiar rush of novelty, certainty, or righteous anger.

When the next “this time is different” slogan appears — whether in markets, politics, or technology — the wise response is not to argue the details but to remember that the operating system hasn’t changed in ten thousand years.

The Loop is essential reading precisely because it refuses easy answers. It doesn’t tell us to stop innovating or investing or arguing about AI. It simply reminds us that the hardware running the show is the same one that once traded tulip bulbs for houses — and that history, for better or worse, is still very much on repeat.