Voltaire, that crusty old observer of the human condition, said it 300+ years ago: "Ceux qui peuvent vous faire croire à des absurdités peuvent vous faire commetre des atrocités" and you don't need a translator; it's close enough and today it's real enough. It seems the only slack in the equation is just how much absurdity can be offered to a gullible following to incite their zeal for committing atrocities. The training manual for I.C.E. recruits in the US could be a good starting point.
And sometimes the absurdities aren't of the blood-lust generating kind; they're merely silly. Perhaps as entry-level training in unquestioning acceptance by sheeples, they have a use. Here's some examples, many drawn from postings on facebook, but also items that made it into journals dedicated to pseudoscience and claptrap.
Ancient Things Explained.
The pyramids of Egypt are amazing structures and the people who were their architects were indeed amazingly skilled in their craft. And they were people and they did employ skill and a craft. They were not folk from some other part of the galaxy, and if the mathematics of design seem amazing to some folk, well, those folk need to get past the five times table and books of fairy tales.
I have had skeptics demand of me that I explain the construction of those stone monuments and recite citations of experts to refute the theories of their own non-credentialled references. I generally tell them that I am not their research assistant and if they can read at a grade six level, they will find all the evidence they need. I'm not merely being insulting in saying that, because a grade six reading level really is the standard for most newspaper and public-circulation journals.
South & Central American Stonework
There are also pyramids in the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala and Peru and probably other places I've forgotten about. They also were built by earth people rather than by extra-terrestials. I wasn't there when they were built, but I have read reports on the construction of them and have talked to some archaeologists on site in Guatemala and Peru. The truth as it was being uncovered was every bit as fascinating as the weird stories the folk on the fringes espoused.
Rocks Around the Clock
Stonehenge & the stone circles of Scotland and islands in the British sphere now have to be protected from some people who want to dance naked (whoopee) and light bonfires around them and maybe carve a few messages on them. OK, the wiccans aren't into defacing things and they get in once a year, but the other oddballs? Keep 'em out.
If they can read, give them a library card and the title "Stonehenge Decoded". The words aren't too big, the scholarship is impressive and the evidence is clear. For neolithic peoples, these were burial chambers and solar calendars and the ones we walked into at Ireland's Newgrange, a short bus ride out of Dublin, were wonderful tributes to their construction methods as much as to the keeness of their celestial observations.
Here's one writer enthusing over the women of the megalithic era ("great stone" constructions 4500-3000 BCE in Europe):
These women belonged to the earliest European cultures:
• The Linearbandkeramik (LBK) people of Central Europe, who lived in longhouses and spread agriculture along the Danube.
• The Cardial Ware culture of the Mediterranean, whose women introduced farming to Iberia, France, and Italy.
• The Megalithic builders of Atlantic Europe, who erected stone circles and tombs across Ireland, Brittany, and the British Isles were the mothers of stability and ritual. They established seasonal calendars, baked the first bread, and built megalithic temples aligned with the stars.
Their maternal lineages — mitochondrial haplogroups H, J, K, and T — became the genetic backbone of Europe, still dominant today from Portugal to Poland.
It was they who transformed Europe from a continent of hunters to one of builders, farmers, and dreamers.
Now, how old are things like the pyramids and the stone rings and what are these principles of design and construction that the old folk knew about? Carbon dating will tell us the age of organic material and there was usually enough of it around as charcoal to serve. The patterns of stars in the night sky were often recorded in oral histories and inscribed in hieroglyphs and they too give us a window into times far past.
A World from the Water
And the patterns of those celestial lights were useful navigational aids for sea-going peoples of the Pacific, as well as for European explorers.
The notion that Columbus and Magellan and Cabot were bravely sailing off toward the edge of the world with God on their side and a priest in their baggage is stupid on the face of it. Would you invest in a flotilla that was doing that? Now, putting some money on an experienced navigator who incidentally had read some of the calculations of the third century Greek, Eratosthenes on the circumference of a spherical planet, that was a different matter. And it paid off.
Magellan set out with five ships to chart a sea route to the spice islands after the overland routes were blocked - damned Moslems discovered toll roads and the Portuguese were using the south-round-Africa route.
One lousy, leaking, leaderless caravel from that expedition limped into port a few years later with only eighteen of the original 270 crew members, and the spices that could be salvaged from the hold paid all expenses and returned a profit to investors. So much for the motivation of spreading the gospel of Christ! Mind you, the Doctrine of Discovery certainly didn't impede the stampede.
Hell, if Columbus had read a reputable source for global geography he might not have bumped into those Caribbean islands and he might have "discovered" a new world a little farther north. Of course, the atrocities inflicted on Indigenous peoples would have gone on just the same.
I don't like too much water. I figure anything deeper than a bathtub will try to kill me, and so I am in awe of people who get on boats, hoist up big sheets of canvas (or whatever they make sails out of these days) and travel off way out of sight of land. Beverly did that in another life, but she can swim. I only travelled once on a big boat out of sight of land and it had fourteen stories to it and a bar. A crew member told me that cruise companies used to try making ships ressemble hotels but sometime after the Titanic episode they decided it was easier to make a hotel float. I'm still impressed by sailors.
That brings us to the other side of the globe and the island chains in the Pacific Ocean. Long ago, Polynesian sailors set out from Pacific Islands and steered their huge canoes to New Zealand and other islands. And then they went back, packed up the relatives and returned to those same locations.
As the song goes, "How ya gonna keep 'em down" with those sorts of navigational skills? Some of the songs and recitations they used in their piloting as they watched the movement of stars in night skies and felt the different currents in the steering oars are still extant. And there are competitions today in which contestant sailing crews get to travel those same routes with only celestial navigation to go by. Wow!
So our ancestors had markers in the sky and currents in the water and they used them to full advantage; and if they made up stories about magical creatures to help them remember the marks, well they were no different than us. I believe my favourite politicians; don't you?
Getting back to basics, or down and dirty, or to the nitty-gritty, how about those big blocks of stone. Surely it must have taken aliens with anti-gravity technology to shape them, lift them into place and engrave them with pictures of their home planets. Nope, just a lot of hard work by skillful stonecutters. The quarries have been identified; the tools have been found and replicated; the processes have been recorded. Read about it; it makes for a story every bit as fascinating as the ones created by the kooks and cranks.
You can look those things up, but it's a lot of work. I like the report of professor Ken Fedder as interviewed by Michael Schermer of Skeptic (which you can also look up). He acknowledged the contributions of a host of sciences in creating a picture of ancient civilizations and their products. He's an archaeologist but he credits astronomy, anthropology, geology (sedimentation, glaciation plate tectonics, etc), folk legends, biology (as evolutionary theory applications and as DNA determination of pre-history hominid migrations) and even fossil records as all combining to give him a fairly clear picture of the life and work of early people. And he reflects in all humility, that some of those pictures etched in stone could be just art for the sake of art, or even playful pornography.
There's a Kokopelli deity in Hopi graphics of the American south-west associated with fertility, and the depiction of that mythical being shows an enormous penis. Also, at Abu Simba on the Nile, we saw and took many photographs (OK I took photographs) of the depictions of the Egyptian god of fertility, Min, with his enormous phallus. You'll find them on our travelogue page of Egypt. I think a descendant of that Hopi or Egyptian engraver also did some felt pen graphics on the wall of a toilet cubicle at a local
pub. But I digress.
People learn. They learn certainly by experience and the more intense the experiences, the more firm the learning. The earthquakes prevalent in the Andes taught the Inca builders to find the optimal configuration of the stone blocks in their constructions. An 11 degree slope and a ball and socket joint was the outcome.They found that putting a nubbin on the underside of a block to fit into a socket carved into the top of the block beneath and slanting walls at 11* would give the best protection against destructive tremors. The walls of Machu Picchu are still standing.
And those builders, whether in Asia or Europe or the Americas were artisans. Really! Would you trust your stone building to resentful slave labourers? Even where adobe bricks were used such as at some sites in coastal Peru, the bricks of clay were marked with a family "brand" and archaeologists deduced that they were a form of taxation. You paid your tax collector with so many adobe bricks and you branded them to prove that they were your payment. Clever, what? And simpler than spaceships from the Pleiades. Or my Revenue Canada form.
Why do some folk prefer those fantastic explanations? Well, I have some opinions on that subject, but you should quit reading right now if you put your last tooth extraction under your pillow, or rubbed your rabbit's foot before buying those lotto tickets.
Jason Stanley is an American academic recently relocated to the University of Toronto. When I tell you that a popular book of his is called How Fascism Works you'll know why he moved. The first chapter in that book is "The Mythic Past". He could just as accurately have titled it, "The good ol' times never were".
A favourite ploy of dictatorial dynasties is to repeat the lie that in the past, the ancestors of their particular belief system enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. It may have been based on male supremacy, but the women were happy to be cared for and to bear children. It may have had a slave economy, but the slaves were also happy in their freedom from managerial tasks under benevolent owners who only beat and raped them occasionally to assert their dominance.
And if you go way way back, they'll tell you, there may well have been intelligent beings from other galaxies who instructed the master race and gifted them with grand edifices that only they could create. The veiled belief is that maybe it will happen again and save us all from our crazy, capitalistic, macho selves. Lotsa luck with that one!
In line with that belief in a mythic past is a distrust of educated elites. Unless it is a product of undefined "ancient knowledge" from mystical sources, these scientific reports from ivory tower elitist academics are all suspect by these good ol' folk from Epstein land. It is as if by demeaning some perceived group of arrogant know-it-alls they can validate a bullshit mythology from baseball-cap-wearing leaders.
Popular humour is full of anecdotes where the professor gets a come-uppance from a humble tiller-of-the-soil, although the margins are a tad fuzzy for this concept. I have heard the version that asserts, "When your furnace fails at 3:00 am and it's 40 below, you don't expect one of those high-paid surgeons to fix it". True, but also consider the burst appendix in the same time frame.
And as always, money gets into the mix. If you can monetise an idea by snagging some book and video production, you can sneer at those "elites" from your private jet or penthouse tower. And from there it's a short hop to convincing your followers "faire commetre des atrocités". Ask the folks standing up to ICE in Minnesota how that's going.