The end of memory

Once at BYU in an Old Testament class, in 1974, the professor wrote "4004 BC -- The Garden of Eden" and not a single student, certainly not I, a well known skeptic, snickered, let alone challenged this. I understand how clipped thinking works. There is this thing out there, it can't be named or even described really, we feel it groping with our hands, and when we feel it's near, we become very careful what we think. Our thoughts could betray us. With most students it probably never rose to that level of consciousness. They followed the brethren and that was that. I was struck at that moment of how insidious lies can be--even the brightest light of day will not dim a certain kind of lie--in fact, it steals that light, wraps itself up in it, and delivers a stirring impression of your idea of a saint. We were children sitting in a university level Sunday School class.

And they lied to us.

When you look into it, the amount of lying or framing it another way (that is, lying about it), mythmaking that has gone on in history is mindboggling. We don't realize that we are polliwogs swimming in a sea of narratives. Inception, Contraction, Release, Relaxation--we are soothed by this rhythm, this is how things make sense, and we will find a narrative, build one up from nothing, from the barest of shadows of facts, to slake our thirst, we do this reflexively, as a community, with common consent. We must have answers and garbage in, garbage out.

They couldn't help that they lied to us. They lied to them.

How far back does this lie go? When did self-deception and groupthink become the common lot of humans? When did mankind "fall" from his primoridal behavior patterns so far, that lying became the only way to cope? Tracing this story, the story not of the origin of consciousness (I hypthesize that consciousness is innate in self-repicating negative entropic systems), but of the disease of consciousness, the disease we inherit in early childhood when we start to understand the contours of the thing that cannot be named, the thing we must skirt around. An analysis of the thing would reveal that it is extremely complex, but we have no idea about that, we do not think about it, we do not even acknowledge the thing's existence. It's there but we don't talk about it. How long has it been there?