There was a time in human history, and for many, many millennia, when facts and reality blended on a daily basis with made up stories, with dreams, spending many hours discussing and elaborating them together by the fire.
These were times when the night was dark, very dark. People nowadays don't realize how dark it was on New Moon or cloudy nights; just beyond the fire…. have you ever been around a campfire in the wild? or even by a cottage? Soon the night surrounds you like a wall, only a little circle of light around the fire remains, and as the hours pass by and more wood is added to the fire, with the social circle also being restrained to the circle of light surrounding the fire, and more and more as the night deepens, and strange cracking and other noises can be heard here and there through the night coming from the outside the circle of light…
The reality is changed by the night, and any fact becomes as uncertain as the weird sounds coming from the night. And people shared their dreams, many of which obviously partly invented (did we remember our dreams more 50 000 years ago? I don’t think so; they were made up), and everything blended together, and…
Faith! That is what is distinctive of Homo Sapiens: faith. So people believed the stories as true, think of Ancient Greeks… Did they really believe in Zeus and all? Yes and no.
Contrary to the monotheist religions that followed up, the Ancient Greeks knew their Pantheon of Gods were made up stories. They did! And same with the First Nations of America, a small glimpse of what our ancestors might have behaved like, all First Nations people knew that dreams and facts blended, that facts are always told, reported, so a story anyways.
So the life of the humans, well Homo Sapiens, is made up of a blend of stories some based on facts, but the same fact can be seen many ways, and humans have known that for a very long time; for always actually. This is what humanity is: stories and faith. If you believe it, it becomes true, you just need to make it up well, so that people believe it. It’s been like that for always, this IS what a human is. The Ancient Greeks structured it into tragedy and comedy, and on this is still based the whole theater and film industry of making stories that rules our world. How many times did fiction foretold reality?
And so Neanderthal, with whom Sapiens mixed, wasn’t like that at all. They didn’t have faith nor stories. Most certainly, they spoke little by the fire.
Neanderthal acted exactly like those in the spectrum of autism, and research is ongoing to link autism with Neanderthal.
Some of us humans have a hard time believing; in anything. It’s the Neanderthal genes.
In the long story of humanity, there’s been so many ways to be human, it all narrowed down to a few large cultures nowadays but there were so many ways to be, to think… the set of values around which groups of people gathered, their beliefs… has been very, very diverse, just think of the Aztecs normalizing human sacrifice, and making it a show and a a cultural value… that’s just one exemple. There existed many human societies whose values would shock us now, to the point that they’d be very difficult to believe.
But what stands out is that most if not all of the members of these human communities firmly believed in the story they lived in. They eventually gathered more people around one fictional idea and went to war with it… My story is true, I have more believers following me…
All this because we’re losing capacity to realize that reality has many sides. No, it’s impossible for a reporter, the media, to be totally objective. Impossible. It’s always a story told a certain way, that you believe or decide not to.
Dominique Rock
