Why can’t we admit our crimes and mistakes?

Question from the Internet:

“Why is it so that in almost every consequential human endeavour, we admit our mistakes, except in war?”

I am not sure what you mean by “admitting mistakes”. We never actually admit our mistakes.

We might perform some meaningless “public apology” when society forces us, threatening to destroy us if we do not “apologize”. But we never actually accept responsibility for our crimes. Our present society is full of fake “apologies and confessions”, which we perform only to get better positions and rewards. At the same time, in the background, we continue with the very actions we just “apologized” for.

This is the reason for never learning from the past; this is the reason for helplessly repeating the same old crimes and mistakes while digging deeper into crises.

We are all born with an inherently self-serving, self-justifying, proudly and fiercely individualistic nature. Our ego, the self, justifies itself in any given condition, after any, even the most horrific crimes, since from our egocentric and subjective point of view, we acted in the only possible manner to serve our self-interest.

And we cannot make calculations and decisions for anything else but self-interest.

Similarly, war is also always justified as a last resort.

Instead of “admitting mistakes and apologizing for them” so we can continue doing exactly what we have been doing, we need to study and understand our inherent nature. We have to come to such repulsion and hate towards our own selfish, egocentric and exploitative nature that we become ready to change and further develop ourselves to become a better, truly Human version of ourselves.