In order for our human civilization to advance to the present state, to the most technologically and politically sophisticated stage of our human evolution so far, it was necessary to leave the infancy, the childhood and the teenage brutishness of our humanity behind.
As an advancing civilization we have had to learn new sets of rules and ideas over the centuries to overcome the challenges and problems that limited us. A good example is what Cognitive Scientist (U of T) John Vervaeke refers to as the axial revolution.
In order to make these giant leaps, as we did in the Axial, Industrial and Technological revolutions, we had to leave some things behind. Some of those things, such as tribal warfare, mafia-state brutality, and the universal human practice of slavery, were worth letting go of; other aspects of our humanity, secrets of our relationship with the earth, with nature, with the cycles of the seasons and with our sacred and aspirational storytelling and myth, all necessary for our self-understanding and enlightenment, were left behind.
Important parts of our humanity and our souls were collateral damage. This is what I’ve called the Great Forgetting.
Chapter Excerpt:
Versions of the idea of forgiveness, inclusion and loving one’s neighbor, even from a different tribe, appeared in India with the Buddha in 700 BCE, in China around the same time. We attribute this to Jesus at the beginning of the common era, and it became enshrined in the Christian Canon in roughly 325 CE with the Council of Nicaea. This was the moment in history when Christianity and monotheism was proclaimed as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine. Religion, incidentally, means To Bind, and it bound the empire within a single unifying psychic framework that has since expanded to global proportions.
This binding was necessary to solve the serious issues of instability that had plagued the Roman Empire: internal strife, and conflict between members of hundreds of distinct cults and tribes within the boundaries of the empire as well as conflict with the many external pagan tribes and their cultures that bordered the empire. This was the birth of the Religious Mind. A psychic field which, as a coherent collective consciousness, expands its territories, defends itself from threats, stabilizes food and energy supplies, and manages rules of reproduction.
This Religious Mind was the dominant coherent psychic structure on the planet for centuries even up until almost the present time. Ironically, the methodology of advancing the Golden Rule framework and the Rule of Law to bind society was systematic assimilation of groups that threatened social cohesion through the expansion of religion and the exploitation of successive transfer frontiers.
This resulted in an ongoing genocide that has continued into the present age. The power structures of society, driven by a higher-order drive for cohesion, which is rooted in the Religious Mind, simply helped us to scale tribal violence and expand our capacity to exploit transfer frontiers from Tribes under the Dunbar number, fighting against each other, to Farmers and Herders murdering each other, to Societies of competing City-States warring with each other, to countries and empires warring with each other.
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Chasing Quicksilver - EP 8 - The Great Forgetting