Have You Heard of The Great Forgetting? It Happened 10,000 Years Ago & Completely Affects Your Life
This article summarizes the ideas of Daniel Quinn, first written about in The Story of B, which was a sequel to Ishmael. The longer, original essay can be read here, and comes highly recommended.
The Great Forgetting refers to the wealth of knowledge that our
culture lost when we adopted our new civilized lifestyle. The knowledge
that allowed indigenous cultures to survive, the knowledge that we had
once also been tribal and the understanding that we were but one mere
culture of thousands. All of this disappeared in a few short
generations.
The Great Forgetting accounts for an enormous cultural collapse as
once tribal people found themselves in a new and strange mass
centralized society. New beliefs, new ways of life rushed into this
cultural vacuum to fill the void. But without being tested by natural
selection over thousands of years this new culture was evolutionarily
unstable.
It is only recently that the Great Forgetting has been exposed.
Understanding it holds the key to making sense of our destructive
culture. And remembering what it is that was forgotten holds the key to
our future.
