Final episode in a seven-arc series on the art of critical thinking.
Ancient history is based on present interpretations of texts written by the rulers to justify and glorify such rulers. It’s more propaganda than records, and contain paradoxes such as the stratigraphy of ancient ruins that repeat themselves after an unknown ‘dark age’—the historian’s equivalent of the astronomer’s ‘dark matter’—marked by catastrophic destruction and tales of comets, bloody auroras, plagues, and earthquakes.
We’re conditioned to believe our world is stable and such cataclysms are fables. Although in a plasma universe, traumatic events are more recent and likely to repeat. Our collective PTSD is strong and pervasive. To the psychiatrist, the neurosis is the problem. To the patient, the neurosis is the solution—a coping or adapting mechanism, however sub-optimal—that aids survival.
Science critic Mel Acheson explains how to expand our thinking in-line with our expanded observational ability, and not take any of this too seriously. For example, the Palomar telescope, which accompanied Big Bang thinking, has been expanded into the James Webb Space Telescope—although its images are still being interpreted with Big Bang thinking of the belief-fortified dogma of mainstream science.
We need to be playing with thinking.
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