Imagine a situation:

If two villages tend their own crops, both will produce 900 bushels of grain.

If one village attacks the other, it could end up with 1,200 bushels of grain, and the other village will get none. (Whatever isn't stolen in the attack is burned.)

If both villages go to war against each other, each will produce 500 bushels of grain, since labor is devoted to fighting.

Both villages benefit from going to war regardless of whether the other chooses war or peace. Rationally, both must attack.

But these villagers are neighbors. They will not make this decision once; they will make it every year.

This is called an iterated prisoner's dilemma: a game in which you know you must play with the same person over and over again. You know they will remember how you treat them.

This is the value of remembering. Using knowledge of your opponent's past behavior to influence future choices.

The villages agree to cooperate. For five years they are at peace. They maximize their total grain production as a pair, rather than seeking to have more grain than their rival.

Then, on the sixth year, a misunderstood letter or a change in leadership or the influence of an outside power makes one village attack. It has defected.

How do we reply?

That depends on the strategy we are using.

The most Human strategy is some variant of tit for tat: tend to cooperate, but do unto others as they do to you. Start nothing. But if you are hit, hit back hard. Hit back harder each time.

So you punish the other village for attacking. You counterattack. Unwilling to walk away from a war they've already spent blood on, the other village attacks for the next two years in a row. A cycle of war begins.

If we take "A" to mean cooperating, and "X" to mean attacking (defecting), and both villages are playing tit for tat, the two villages' behavior over the years will look like this:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
AAAAAAAAAAAAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

They are now trapped in an infinite war.

Let's say that the villages' yearly grain production plunges from 1,800 bushels to 1,200 bushels in the first year of war, to 1,000 bushels each year afterwards. Yet neither side can break out of the cycle of retaliation.

The only way out is a moment of grace. Cooperation, spontaneously and for no reason, after 20 years of war. Forgiveness without cause. Unilateral mercy. Declaring peace.

This is the value of forgetting. Forget they hurt you. Forget what's rational. Do what's right.

Now, if the other village takes advantage of your disarmament, you will look like a damn fool. But if the other side stops fighting too, both of you can go back to the maximum global good: 1,800 bushels of wholesome grain a year.

Imagine that those bushels of grain are peoples' lives, and you understand the urgency of grace. You feel the need to forget the past.

[...]

This is why the Light wipes away memory. It strikes away the pain of the past to break the pattern. To create the possibility of grace.

This is why the Dark remembers. We need to remember how we were hurt, so we can avoid being hurt again.

This is the message I need! Not some sophisticated exegesis of paracausal semiotics—this one thought. Grace and memory. The Light offers escape from endless cyclic violence. The Darkness remembers the hurt that was done to us so that we cannot be exploited by those who would hurt us again.

We need the Darkness to avoid being preyed upon by those who see Light as an opportunity to feed.

But we need the Light too. The Light is the hope of grace through the grace of hope. The possibility to be more than what reason allows us. Because by acting unreasonably, we escape reasonable limits.

To be free does not simply mean to be untied or un-committed. It is not the “release from” something or disembeddedness which makes us free, but inclusion and embeddedness. The total lack of relationships causes anxiousness and worry. The Indo-European root fri, from which terms such as 'free', 'peace' or 'quietude' [Friede], and 'friend' are derived, means 'to love'. Thus, 'free' originally meant 'pertaining to friends or loved ones'. One feels free in relationships of love and friendship. It is not the absence of ties, but ties themselves which set us free. Freedom is a word which pertains to relations par excellence. Without hold there is no freedom.

An anthropologist proposed a game to the kids in an African tribe. He put a basket full of fruit near a tree and told the kids that who ever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run they all took each others hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats. When he asked them why they had run like that as one could have had all the fruits for himself they said: ''UBUNTU, how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?''

'UBUNTU' in the Xhosa culture means: "I am because we are"

On the way, innumerable sets of infrastructures in which people coped, played, ate, made friends, and loved have been destroyed. A couple of so-called development decades have sufficed to dismantle traditional patterns of culture from Manchuria to Montenegro. Prior to these years, such patterns permitted people to satisfy most of their needs in a subsistence mode. After these years, plastic had replaced pottery, carbonated beverages replaced water, Valium replaced camomile tea, and records replaced guitars.