The catastrophic injury to the psyche I mention in the conjecture deserves some explanation.
Humanity is incredibly resilient and adaptable. So the cause of this injury would have to be mythic in scale to wreck consciousness. It would have to be something that almost made us extinct. In effect, people who sustain this injury are like the survivors of an airplane crash, wandering bewildered, catatonic, completely disoriented. I believe it was some disastrous event in humanity’s distant past that shocked us so badly that we nearly lost touch with reality. Each generation simply passed the mass psychosis on to the next, one child at a time, metamorphosing with each iteration into our current, permanent, institutionalized catastrophe.
Maybe a comet hit Earth or planets changed position, causing a pole shift and massive geological changes. Not like the pissant tsunamis we have seen lately, more like stuff in the movie 2012 Maybe the Flood. I happen to think it was a mass transmigration of souls from the second dimension (see Myth of Three Cultures for the whole story). But the basic idea is one of trauma: something from the outside causing damage so massive we have blocked it from memory and are thus replaying it without knowing or knowing why. (I got this idea from Immanuel Velikovsky.)
Generally, we attribute our troubles to error, evil, ignorance, or a flaw in human nature: ie, some version of the doctrine of original sin, which every civilized religion has. Their solution is always some kind of disciplined effort at which only a few can for now.
But I do not think what we live with today is just how things or people are. I think it is the result of some kind of disaster. Who knows what, exactly. But it was big. It was impersonal—nobody’s fault. And now we seem to have a chance to finally move on.
I do not mean just using darkness. We live in a benevolent universe. It is basically supportive of life. It is a set of conditions in which life exists and therefore can exist to its full potential. So a universe that, for whatever reason, caused the calamity that hurt us so badly will also provide for our recovery.
The conjecture includes something about accumulating vital energy. This is because only the organism can heal itself, and it needs energy to do it. Darkness is the best way I know of so far to accumulate this energy, because it provides for very deep rest. Fasting is another way, though my experience (two long fasts of 11 and 23 days and many short fasts of less than five days) is that the organism tends to use the increase in energy on a grosser level. And there are other normal ways of accumulating energy. Sleeping. Relaxing on the lawn, etc.
Living among Mayan Indians for a year and a half and trying their calendar–which is really a schedule of various streams of cosmic energy that cycle on short and long timescales–I now find it plausible that a huge wave of energy is approaching the globe, which is already beginning to enable everyone’s organism to completely heal. We will spontaneously go back to ordinary safety, happiness, peace, and harmony.
I believe this is our destiny. Darkness is simply a way to participate in what is happening anyway. It is way to run out and meet it.
Have you ever read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn? He would probably connect this catastrophe to the agricultural revolution and the beginnings of “civilization” 10,000 years ago or so…
Yes! Quinn is one of my five all-time favorite authors. I studied all his work intensely and participated in social experiments based on it for about five years. Most of my other writings are marked by his influence, some explicitly like Tribal Housing, From Where? (which Quinn read and liked), and Sociality Undenied (which my Eugene neighbor, John Zerzan, personally critiqued).
Yes, I think that’s exactly what he would say. It sounds like you might have read Origins of Agriculture already (so important to me it’s practically the only thing on this site I didn’t write). I wonder, as the authors of this article do, what could have caused this change? Was it just an accident? How could healthy people (whom I don’t think we remotely resemble) do something so drastically incorrect? I find it hard to believe, thus the catastrophe idea.