One million years ago, in the Stone Age, there was a band of cavemen named after various forms of glottal stops (think Ug, Urg, Ghu). Ug and co. were the first humans. When they pointed at each other, and uttered the right kind of grunt, the other cavemen would know that, for example, it was Ghu who had left the firewood out in the rain. This made them feel superior to the other monkeys that roamed the savannahs.
These cavemen were also hunters. One day they left behind their families in the flickering cavelight and set out at dawn in pursuit of their most prized prey: the woolly mammoth. Their families, meanwhile, rose gradually and spent the day picking berries, trapping fish, and generally lounging about. The day wore on, darkness fell, and still there was no sign of the two-letter-Scrabble-word hunters. Their families started to worry and fret, but finally, after the moon had begun to fall in the sky (there was no “midnight” back then), the hunters straggled back into camp, empty handed and bloodied.
These humans had experienced something together, some group of shared events, and when they dispersed to their various warm family caves they regaled their families with the story of the hunt. Each story was subtly different. Maybe one made Ug look a little bit more heroic, while another told of him hiding behind a bush when the group was surprised by a sabre-tooth tiger. But to the families listening intently, the story they heard was the only truth possible, and in their minds it was made real.
This version of the truth was sufficient for around one million years.
But progress waits for no caveman, and less than ten millennia ago some of the humans who lived in a place with many woody reeds invented Paper. This made a lot of humans happy and was generally regarded as a Very Good Idea. Now Wei-Ling and Zu-shi could agree on a shared truth about, say, a loan they had agreed to. And great poets could begin to write down the stories they would tell each night and share them with more people. This meant there were less fights between the humans, who are known to have very fallible memories. Or at least, when there was a fight the humans had something to gesticulate towards.
But then some enterprising humans, who lived across many small temperate islands, invented the idea of Categorisation. This made a lot of humans unhappy for much of their lives, but is still regarded as a Very Good Idea. After Categorisation many smart humans spent a lot of time putting things into boxes, so that when they took a walk in the forest they could reduce each bird they saw to a family, genus, and species. This made them feel a little more in control of the world despite the fact that the birds had no idea they were now Bluejays or Crows and carried on just being.
Of course, some humans were rather hurt by the new categories. They became “homosexual” or “foreigner”, instead of just Barry. But progress marched on.
Next, some other Greeks, as they were newly categorised, had an even better idea. They’d run out of things to categorise in the physical world and were consequently a little bored. They were forced to invent something called the Conceptual Framework. The Conceptual Framework was great because it let them categorise the inside of their brains. They could point to ideas and concepts and fleeting thoughts and call them “rational” or “superstitious” or “Marxist”. And indeed they did.
As history unfolded there were great mechanical inventions, too, like the wheel, and the forced indenture of horses. These meant that people from far off lands could meet each other and realise that no matter how different their eyes looked, they all shat in a hole each morning the same way. This was very bad for some of the humans, who rather liked hurting others who weren’t like them. Luckily, they remembered the new Conceptual Framework idea. Now they could happily place people into in-groups and out-groups based on whatever “-ist” label they applied, and they had good fun doing so and nearly blew up the world with atomic weapons.
About the time of the atomic weapon crisis, the humans were plagued with another problem. If two people told or wrote down two different versions of a story, and the listener wasn’t there for the events themselves, how would they know who to punish? This was a real conundrum, and had been solved so far by just punishing the person they liked less or who looked a bit weird or who was a woman. But to a Frenchman called Georges Melieres this was unsatisfying, and so he invented something called the Recording Device.
The Recording Device established a version of truth that could be shared by multiple people with full sincerity. They thought that this was a Very Good Idea. They used it to share stories, to bring the truth of events from across the world to their own neighbourhoods, and to watch other people have sex in the privacy of their own home.
The Recording Device did, however, have a dark side. Whenever something happened, humans started asking themselves if it was something that should be recorded. They came to view this as whether or not the event was valuable. This made them feel very bad about the events that didn’t have much recording value, like hugging their children or looking at the stars.
One enterprising man even worked out that he could trick people using the Recording Device and pretend that lies were the truth. He put all the humans who followed him in funny uniforms and they killed all the humans who acted differently from them. Some other humans put on different funny uniforms and killed all of his humans, so he had to stop. But it was far too late to stop the Recording Device.
Soon humans decided that they were sick and tired of having to be in the same place as their tribe when they wanted to share their recordings. They invented something called Social Media. Social Media was a big bulletin board where they could perform for each other and reward each other’s performances through their attention. Social Media was particularly exciting to the humans because it created a new fear for them, called the Fear of Missing Out. Whenever the Recording Device shone on them, humans began to play pretend. They stood up straighter and acted differently than when the device was off. Some of them were very good at playing pretend and they became famous. The people who were bad at playing pretend decided that it was their own fault and felt sad.
Now, when the humans look back at their inventions, at Categorisation and the Conceptual Framework and the Recording Device and the Fear of Missing Out, they are very proud. They call it the Enlightenment, and they call the times before these inventions Pre-History, because they do not count as real History if they were not written down and parcelled into neat little boxes. But for some unknown reason, many humans are still sad all the time, and they continue to wonder: Why?
