Are we in the End Times, or at a New Beginning?
Modern Ignorance and Ancient Wisdom: Part II
“The reason people always think it’s the “end times” is because human civilization works in cycles. Over the course of thousands of years there are lots of “end times” and this is just another one.” - Michael Krieger
If you haven’t read Part I of the Modern Ignorance series, please consider starting there. In this series I will explore the historical tendency for technology, wisdom, and important medical advancements to disappear into obscurity. By the end of this article, you will see how a discussion of this is relevant to more immediate concerns.
Now for some examples.
First, consider this fascinating headline from a brief press release in 2013: “Ancient technology for metal coatings 2,000 years ago can't be matched even today.”
The article describes mercury-based platings of gold or silver from the ancient world:
Artists and craftsmen more than 2,000 years ago developed thin-film coating technology unrivaled even by today’s standards for producing DVDs, solar cells, electronic devices and other products… the high level of competence reached by the artists and craftsmen of these ancient periods … has not yet been reached in modern ones.
Astonishingly, this is not an isolated re-discovery. Chrome plating, present in ancient China over 2000 years ago, also wasn’t re-invented until 1937 (Germany) and 1950 (US) (!)
Most of my life, I was under the implicit assumption that technical knowledge has gradually accumulated and piled up over the eons to deliver us to where we are today. And in 2022, we are surely at the historical pinnacle of human achievement so far, at least technologically. After all, scientists designed the mRNA covid vaccines in as little as two days! And “everybody knows” the covid vaccines are safe and effective.
When the conventional wisdom of “everybody knows” butts up against reality, it can sometimes be uncomfortable.
When it comes to metallurgy, in reality, a hundred generations went by before humanity re-invented an apparently inferior form of chrome plating. What’s worse is that it’s not obvious how we lost that knowledge.
In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, "We know what we know, we know what we don't know, but we don't know what we don't know."
And metal platings are not the only amazing innovation that was lost in the intervening eons. There are ancient Chinese seismographs and buildings that can withstand 9.0 earthquakes and machines to drill hundreds of meters into the earth! Ancient China is not the only source of amazing architectural and engineering innovations, either.
Take Polynesian vessel design and building from the stone age, built without the benefit of a single nail. Could most modern humans use not just stars, but also ocean swell patterns and observations of wildlife to discover tiny islands in vast oceans? Clearly not. (This video is short, informational, and inspiring.)
These are just a few examples of humbling near-losses of ancient knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps my readers will pop by to leave some other examples in the comments. I’d love to hear more about which I’m unaware.
Some of the writings of explorers from the 19th and 20th centuries hold additional clues about the unique challenges posed by cultures with strong oral traditions, but no writing.
Fifteen years ago I discovered the best book I will probably ever read, aside from Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. That book is entitled Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, written by Weston A. Price, DDS, and published in 1939.
In the post-Depression era, Price, an American dentist, was dismayed by the tooth decay and crowded teeth he saw in his midwestern practice. He set off on a global adventure with his wife to search for people with consistently good dental health, and to discover and document the conditions responsible for it.
As he traveled around the world and accumulated archaeological, biogeographic, and biochemical evidence from native people and their foods in over a dozen remote areas all around the world, he came to a set of conclusions. Tooth decay and deformed dental arches leading to crooked and crowded teeth were not genetic, but a result of nutrient deficiencies caused by modern, refined foods.
The photographic and statistical evidence in the book is compelling.
In relation to the first part of the series where I discussed the potential disappearance of physical books, it bears mentioning that in a quick search on Amazon, nothing but a condensed summary of this book appears to be available on Kindle. (Granted, a web version is available via the Gutenberg project.)
Price’s book bothered me deeply at the time. It forced me to grapple intellectually with an underlying assumption I’d held my entire life: “Modernity and technology are a boon to humanity, and unquestioningly advance human life.”
Growing up I was immersed in nature. I grew up on the edge of the Adirondack Mountains, running barefoot during summers, and exploring the countryside on foot, by canoe, and by bicycle. Until I was 12, I didn’t shower much because every day I spent hours playing with friends in a local lake.
In college I majored in biology with an environmental focus. As a master’s student I studied root rot fungi and forest pathology, and as a PhD student, fungal parasites of arthropods. There was a good deal of time in the wilderness doing orienteering and so on.
I had a healthy respect for forest management, working several summers with a team of crusty old foresters in the Forest Service. I was not a Luddite or deep green environmentalist but I was certainly a conservationist. Whether you believe it is designed by God or honed by eons of evolutionary forces like natural selection (and I’ve held both views), the practical end result was the same: I believed that complex natural systems should generally be respected. It’s not that I believe humans should not “play God” but rather that monkey wrenches should not be thrown into highly delicate and incompletely understood systems.
And despite that, when I encountered Price’s book in my early 30s it hit me like a ton of bricks, because even though it was generally concordant with my worldview it destroyed my conception of what I thought “everybody knows.”
In order to illustrate this I’ve selected a few of my favorite paragraphs. Please read this excerpt in full and enjoy the beauty of the prose, even if some of Price’s chosen words may offend modern sensibilities 80 years onward.
(From Chapter 10, ISOLATED AND MODERNIZED AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES):
The marvelous vision of these primitive people is illustrated by the fact that they can see many stars that our race cannot see. In this connection it is authoritatively recorded regarding the Maori of New Zealand that they can see the satellites of Jupiter which are only visible to the white man's eye with the aid of telescopes. These people prove that they can see the satellites by telling the man at the telescope when the eclipse of one of the stars occurs. It is said of these primitive Aborigines of Australia that they can see animals moving at a distance of a mile which ordinary white people can not see at all.
While these evidences of superior physical development command our most profound admiration, their ability to build superb bodies and maintain them in excellent condition in so difficult an environment commands our genuine respect. It is a supreme test of human efficiency. It is doubtful if many places in the world can demonstrate so great a contrast in physical development and perfection of body as that which exists between the primitive Aborigines of Australia who have been the sole arbiters of their fate, and those Aborigines who have been under the influence of the white man. The white man has deprived them of their original habitats and is now feeding them in reservations while using them as laborers in modern industrial pursuits. This contrast between the primitive Aborigines as they still exist in isolated communities in Australia and the modern members of the clans is not, however, much greater than that between these excellent primitives and the whites, near whom they are living.
In my comparative study of primitive races in different parts of the world, of modernized members of their groups and of whites who have displaced them, as well as in my study of our typical modern social organization, I have seldom, if ever, found whites suffering so tragically from evidence of physical degeneration, as expressed in tooth decay and change in facial form, as are the whites of eastern Australia. This has occurred on the very best of the land that these primitives formerly occupied and becomes at once a monument to the wisdom of the primitive Aborigines and a signboard of warning to the modern civilization that has supplanted them.
At least for me, it was and is difficult to read the excerpt above without experiencing a profound sense of loss and marvel, simultaneously.
Isn’t it amazing that with all the losses of knowledge and wisdom that humanity has suffered that so much still goes right?
But a particular sentence in that passage now stands out in horror given our more recent context that didn’t exist when I first read it fifteen years ago.
The white man has deprived them of their original habitats and is now feeding them in reservations while using them as laborers in modern industrial pursuits.
Is this excerpt a harbinger of things to come? Could it be a foreshadowing of the hubristic neo-colonialism and neo-feudalism that may await us in the so-called “Smart Cities” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution / Great Reset of Klaus Schwab and his protégés?
These technocrats certainly have some interesting ideas about how to 6uild the world 6ack 6etter so that all will finally be well.
From bugs as food to using the human body to mine cryptocurrency (pay careful attention to the patent number) to “you’ll own nothing and be happy” , there’s more than ample evidence that the World Economic Forum crowd — the world’s corporate and political elites — is arrogant and delusional enough to believe in their right not just to total control over society and the individual, but to shape the very course of human evolution. And they’ve just been enriched by tens of trillions of dollars in the last two years at the expense of a global population that is being impoverished by the “New Normal.”
And what is the direction in which they would like humanity to go?
This crowd seeks to bio-engineer humans to be smaller and allergic to meat for the sake of the planet, to have cat-like eyes to help us see in the dark so that we can stop burning so many fossil fuels at night, and to conceive and gestate humans in artificial wombs.
I’ll grant that there are some life-saving possibilities there for infants born prematurely, or even for microchips in our brains, but let’s be honest.
They want control.
They think we’re stupid.
They’re laughing at us.
Do I fear that their dystopian visions are possible? Not really.
Twenty years ago I worked as a lowly lab technician on a DARPA project to engineer plants to sense anthrax. We used various techniques to get plants to take up genes, which would be expressed in the first generation just fine, but which would be silenced in the second.
The plants didn’t like what we were doing. They found a way to turn the genes OFF.
What I’m terrified by is not the power of the technology itself, but their determination to seize complete technocratic control and continue throwing monkey wrenches into the world’s natural systems. If you think the covid vaccines have been catastrophic you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Wait until Klaus Anal Schwab and his buddies block out the sun to stop climate change.
There’s a limit to what mad scientists can accomplish even with virtually unlimited spending, but Bezos’ moon launch aside, the experiments aren’t so innocent and exciting anymore. Our self-appointed overlords are no longer satisfied in launching astronauts into space for a few months to float around and subsist on food-like substances such as Wonderbread and Tang as their sole carbon sources.
So what truly worries me is not their competence.
What bothers me is their zeal and hubris. Like the early industrialist mindset of herding indigenous people into reservations, they don’t know what they don’t know, in all of the educated ignorance.
What bothers me is that these people clearly learned nothing from watching Jurassic Park.
And their bizarre vision for humanity to reshape society for the supposed betterment of the world is every bit as, if not more terrifying, as subsisting on a diet of cheap white flour and refined sugar as a slave laborer in a reservation.
These people must not be allowed to run the world and turn us into ignorant slaves in a global neo-feudalist experiment. The most important thing is to ensure that they are not allowed to bury and re-write history.
An essential part of taking back our lives after these two years is realizing that the greatest heists of all time have not just been financial.
It has always been this way. But as my dear friend Maria Balli wrote on Facebook, we must endeavor to make sure it’s different this time:
The most important thing of our times is the fact that we can know what is and more than ever before.
We cannot say we didn't know. We cannot say we were controlled.
We did. We weren't.
This is why the internet is changing. Because people, huge numbers of people, got the chance to know. We CANNOT let that go. And I am sure we won't.
Wow! Look what I just came across on Telegram on Robin Monotti's channel! These people are nuts. "The delusion these people have of seeing themselves as GODS is very explicit. They are fanatics, worse than religious fanatics because the only higher power they see is theirs: one which responds only to their own moral-compass-free world.
"Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds, but OUR intelligent design... Science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm."
https://rumble.com/vvljx2-top-advisor-to-klaus-schwab-summarizes-the-future-of-transhumanism.html
Totally agreed. Their hubris can be also summarized as incompetence. Just look at any large institution and see how dysfunctional they are. Coalition of banks to implement a new digital id system? Makes me laugh, banks can hardly hold their shit together. Have you used their web sites and mobile apps (if they have one)? Have you interacted with any government website? Do they strike you as competent? The only way they can survive is through brute force, this is why they want more and more control, that's the only thing they know. I think with all the global planning and grand vision the new world order will collapse under its own idiocy. Life and creativity thrive only where there is joy and playfulness and freedom, the exact opposite of what control is.