Octaves of Intelligence

1. Macrocosm

It's long been noted how thoughts create attitudes. But ephemeral moods are simply strong feelings that tend to crystallize over time into habits. These habituations, left unchecked, can imbue a person with strong beliefs, which almost always percolates through the psyche to define one's perception of self and even...reality.

So it was that through the ages, the humans thought they were the greatest species on Earth. This gave a nice boost to their collective ego and soon their humble attitudes drastically changed. They developed a mild superiority complex and felt they could do anything they put their minds to—they could conquer the world if they wanted!

So they gave it a shot.

The sophisticated apes quickly racked up major points with such accomplishments as tool invention, structure building, farming, and broad-spectrum domineering. After the success of agrarian society, they believed themselves the Gods of the new world—sculptors of reality—that's when the natural flow of Earthly affairs became historically detoured and got messy.

But this abomination all started with one rather innocent thought that arose 33,000 years ago. From this

singular moment, all of humanity's planetary perceptions became bottlenecked into a narrow tunnel-vision of possibilities.

That single thought is attributed to a caveman––it's always men starting trouble––who one afternoon, upon failure to hunt or gather any calorie-rich food, instead, ate a magic mushroom and had a psychedelic vision of paradise. This hallucination involved him laying in a woven hide- skin hammock, with two hairy women at each side. One was fanning him (or perhaps she was trying to shoo away the flies circling around herself) and the other was massaging the brutish fellow while he ate old berries from her tangled hair, like grapes on a vine...which didn't exist yet.

The day-tripping caveman, named Oort, soared through a magical journey which led to a deviant thought... an epiphany! A wild new idea, full of unseen consequences!

And this thought was basically: Gosh, it'd be nice to not have to work as hard.

So from there, the proverbial thought experiment snowballed. It rolled and tumbled down the powdery hillside of the collective tabla rasa, manifesting into the physical realm over a great period of time as the seeds of reckless ambition and blind entrepreneurship were planted.

Forgotten millennia came and went—while the Earth played the peek-a-boo game with the universe—and cavemen carved petroglyphs and danced around Prometheus's campfire. But soon after Oorts' shroom experience, the 100th monkey effect kicked in on a global scale. Rather quickly, all sufficiently developed bipedal societies simultaneously progressed out of their survival

mode into something more refined. They became sedentary and established villages! They constructed big boxy things, designed communities, experimented with monogamy, hoarded lots of junk, invented numbers to count how much junk they possessed, and then created the abacus to keep track of it all.

These hominids blundered right out of the natural cycle of things and excelled in all possible categorical directions of progress. And it was maddening in contrast to the ebb and flow of nature's own rhythms. Nothing should move as fast or haphazardly as these glorified neanderthals had demonstrated.