A Species with Amnesia… and Baggage
If you are like me, when you first found out about a bunch of deranged sociopaths pulling the strings at the top of the world, wilfully and seemingly cheerfully carrying out false flag attacks and instigating wars that lead to the deaths of thousands of people, you have a lot of questions that need answering.
Who is in this group?
What are their motivations, their purpose, their ideology?
Where do they exist: just in America (lol, no), or do they spread their tentacles across the whole world?
When did they emerge: is this a recent thing (lol, no) or has some shadowy social entity always been with us?
Why are they such complete assholes?
But perhaps most fundamentally… just how? How is it possible for people like this to exist?
As you might expect, there are no easy answers. I’m still getting my head around each of these questions, and I feel like i’ve been at this almost full time for a while.
Firstly, we need to start understanding ourselves, us, as individuals and as a species.
The individual stuff is ultimately up to each one of us, although I do have some pointers that might help. But the stuff about us as a species, I feel like I can help with more directly.
To understand us, we need to understand how the human race has evolved, both by itself and with outside intervention, to come to the stage where we have allowed a group like this to exist with the passive consent of a majority of us. So this becomes fundamentally about history: not conventional history, but real history.
And I love history.
My favourite subject in high school was History. Really, you might say it was the only part of school I actually enjoyed, leaving aside sport and the 3pm siren.
I won the school History award in Year 11 and Year 12; the fact that I was swimming in a small pond is besides the point. I think what I liked most about History was the invitation it gave for personal investigation—there was less of the sense that you were being taught an objective truth than other subjects. The curriculum really only skimmed the surface of world events, and it was obvious to anyone paying attention how much more there was to uncover if one was willing to dive further in.
Plus, there was Nazis. I still have a strangely vivid memory of the attachment I had to my Third Reich textbook, even reading it at home not for homework but simple because it was interesting. And the Nazis are nothing if not interesting: this sounds bad, but they are one of the gifts of the conspiracy world that keep on giving.
But then I bombed my Year 12 exam. Not surprisingly, as I find nothing more intellectually unnatural than being forced to coherently describe complex and multifaceted historic chapters of the world in a brutally constrained time period. And with History at high school falling to my bottom subject, History at University fell down my preference list as well.
So, for some reason, I ended up studying Forensic Science instead, which turned out not at all to be a path towards CSI-like adventures but more so a life in a lab coat inserting samples into a spinny wirring machine that goes ping.
To cut a long story short, I hated it: with my ambiguous misery in high school transferred into a more defined misery throughout my 4 years of undergraduate study, which I balanced out in my personal life with, among other things, a lot of weed.
It was a long way back. The first step was a random and now defunct post graduate course called Integrated Human Studies. It was, as the name suggests, an interdisciplinary study of the human race: combining aspects of biology, sociology, psychology and of course history.
I owe that course many things. Firstly, through it I developed a research proposal that would then lead to a PhD scholarship, which gave me three and a bit years to re-structure my life and start investigating the world on my own terms whilst getting paid to write a dissertation on the side.
It started my love of non-fiction reading, which has developed to the extent that I find it almost impossible to justify devoting the time to novels anymore (I have a similar if not quite as acute problem with non-documentary movies and TV).
It fostered a love of interdisciplinarity, or of finding the underlying patterns of life that emerge across different fields of study. This lead me to delve into the work of authors such as Ervin Laszlo and Ken Wilbur, who revealed to me that the world is actually far more interesting than I had given it credit for.
It encouraged me to explore further: to books about drugs, about yoga, about near death experiences, about (perhaps my favourite) a book about what a 13 year old mute child with autism is thinking. And finally, back to history.
And then I found one particular history book. An incredible, paradigm-altering book that unleashed the long dormant history beast within me. It was Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock. I felt like I was, in an intellectual sense, finally home.
There is a central thesis that lies at the heart of Hancock’s books: we are a species with amnesia. We have at our disposal only a fraction of the story of our history, with even that grossly fragmented and distorted, yet we cling to it as fact with the same religiosity that a Christian might to their Bible.
What have we forgotten? That’s a big question, so let’s start with Hancock’s thesis.
Hancock is an author who walks the walk before he talks the talk (and he does indeed seem to enjoy his own words; takes one to know one). He has visited (and, in some cases, admittedly trespassed on) virtually all the most significant and controversial ancient archaeological sites in the world: the Giza Plateau in Egypt, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Macchu Piccu in Peru, Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, Tiotihuacan in Mexico, among others.
And it is his conclusion, based on rational deduction from the evidence — along with the more intangible spiritual impacts these mysterious locations have had on him — that these sites could not have possibly been built by our known ancient civilisations: whose technical and intellectual prowess is, under a linear and gradual theory of human evolution, by default inferior to ours.
This makes no sense. And it makes no sense because it is not history. What we see instead are the handiworks of a lost civilisation, one whose knowledge of and use of the sciences leaves us in the shade.
Hancock has a barely contained disdain (disdain that is largely mutual) with establishment sciences and academia. However, he remains an academic at heart (one of the reasons I bonded to him so closely over my many long car rides listening to his self-narrated audiobooks) and he understands how to build an argument.
What are his central arguments?
The transport and use of vast amounts of raw materials through means we still can’t understand, then transformed into astonishingly precise feats of architecture such as pyramids, with greater masses than our modern day skyscrapers and whose methods of construction contemporary humanity can still not grasp.
A detailed understanding of astronomy — of the stars and their passage across our sky — and the use of this knowledge to create time stamps encoded into these architecture, which date back well before the accepted origins of human civilisation: back to 10,000BC and beyond.
And perhaps most intriguingly, evidence of a shared spiritual, or religious, worldview that hints at some unexplainable connection and coherence between disparate races of Earth peoples.
This latter point is the one that resonates with me most, and Hancock is most compelling when he leaves the science aside and turns to mythology. He notes extensive similarities between the stories that have been passed down and retained across numerous civilisations, most notably the repeating reference to a great cataclysmic event, typically a world-wide flood, that was responsible for wiping out much of humanity. Hancock places this event during the Younger Dryas ice age over 10,000 years ago: a timeline that is disputed by other alternative ancient history chronologists (and Bible scholars, obviously).
Regardless of the exact date: it is this Great Flood event (which I wrote more about here), that is the source of our collective amnesia.
The occurrence of a Great Flood is just one of the similarities that Hancock notes across ancient mythologies: the events before and after it are also noteworthy.
What do we make of the recurring motif of half-men, half-god like figures — Virachocha in South America, Quetzlcoatl in Central America, Osiris in Egypt, even the Mesopotamian Ziusudra and the Hebrew Noah — who all emerged after the cataclysm to bring back civilisation (with varying degrees of success) to a decimated mankind? Are these historical embellishments of simply great reforming men (and they are basically all men, sorry ladies), or are they evidence of actual encounters with supernatural overlords, and/or extraterrestrials?
To be sure, there has been outside influences on our history, which are important (not to mention incredibly cool) to understand. But let’s not lose focus on us: what did we do to bring on this situation?
And this is the important part: why do virtually all of these myths seem to suggest that it was the moral descent of mankind that was the catalyst for this global flood? Leaving aside the slightly vexed debate around literal divine punishment, as the Bible decided to frame it, this conclusion becomes unmistakeable and unavoidable: we did this — at least in some part — to ourselves.
We lost our way, too carried away with exercising our personal freedoms, too carried away with technology, too carried away from the Earth on which we lived (child sacrifice also probably didn’t help, although what’s changed now amirite?). In short, we fucked up as a species, and we got what we deserved: the manifestation of collective karma in its full brutality.
What’s more, if we follow these myths and legends even further, one other possibility begins to emerge: this catastrophic event was not a once off. If we are to believe these stories, humanity has in fact been progressing through repeating cycles of creation and destruction: evolutionary sucker punch after punch.
Also, yes, in case you hadn’t already guessed: we are coming to the end of our current cycle, says Mr Hancock.
There is much more to unpack here, which is ok ‘coz I have a lot of time on my hands. But let’s get back to the point: what’s with all the deranged psychopaths, hey?
Yes, we are a species with amnesia: going through memory wipe after memory wipe, starting — perhaps not unlike our own lives within a grander cycle of reincarnation. But with this amnesia comes incredible trauma, which still stays with us — as a society and as individuals — today. Those with undiagnosed trauma — for those whose memories slip to and from, elusively and debilitatingly — are those most likely to keep allowing abusers into their lives. It’s harsh, but it is true: and it is what we currently see in the world.
We are a species not just with amnesia, but a whole lotta baggage: no wonder most other species prefer to keep us at arms length.
Well, it’s time to get to the bottom of this trauma, and that requires channelling my year 11 and 12 emo self and becoming our own diligent alternative ancient history student (with or without the Nazi fascination, your choice).
If we can shed this baggage — as individuals and together as a collective, lifting ourselves out of this repeating cycle of trauma, to ascend it perhaps, or more simply just to leave it behind — then we can start to focus on the future.
Or, even better, the present — starting with this wombat video: