How long does it take for a fresh potful of stew to become a leftover pot of stew? Right after the first meal? Later the same day. Next day? Maybe you could you say the stew is a couple of hours old, but still fresh?
Fresh, is a word loosely used. What’s fresh to one is stale to another.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days”. Mr. Franklin puts a useful number to the freshness of guests and fish. Most folks aren’t that precise.
Words like fresh imply meaning, but describe no particulars. Fresh is better than stale. Greed is worse than generosity, Good is better than Bad; these are abstractions which describe perceived opposites but without substantive evidence as to why.
Pots of stew can be served many times. Each serving is fresh to the newest diner.
Many ideas presented as fresh ideas are not fresh ideas at all, but leftovers served many times over.
Edmond Burke, George Santayana, Winston Churchill, and many others have said, in slightly different words: Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat
the past.
It’s leftover wisdom but as good as fresh because
it’s true.
Other ideas are ever-stale because they’re not true.
A myriad of socialist-communistic ideas have been served up as fresh ideas, over and over, from the bloodbath that followed the French Revolution until today.
Fresh fools are tempted by these stale collectivist-totalitarian ideas because promotors sell them as brand-new thinking.
The more clever of the new revolutionaries admit
to the failures of the previous revolution but say this time
it will be different. This time they’ve got it right.
Stalin described the people who fall for such deceptions as, “useful idiots”. They don’t know they’re being scammed because they never learned the lessons
of history.
They also never learned how to parse meaning from implication.
Except in technology and science there are very few fresh ideas. Tried-and-true, along with its evil counterpart, failed-and-re-failed are perennial.
Bad stew, even when fresh, still tastes bad.
Tasty stew, even as leftover, remains tasty.
The importance of fresh vs. leftover is how tasty the stew and how good the idea.