The Evolution Of Post-Truth In A World Without Gods

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, even the educated people in the world believed in monsters called dinosaurs. Giant lumbering reptilian beasts of various shapes. Leathery-winged vultures, tri-horned hippopotamus, spike backed iguanas, angry land sharks with tiny hands.  They spent decades debating how and why the creatures disappeared. Asteroids. Ice. Volcanoes. Blindness. Hunted by early man. Developed the technology for space travel. Carbon dioxide. When a person or idea aged into irrelevance, it was said to have gone "the way of the dinosaurs". But science kept evolving new theories about how the dinosaurs were actually birds, climbed into the ocean to reemerge later as mammals, were still living among humans after generations of inbreeding had shrunk them to manageable sizes.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the educated people believed in science. The study of nature and their environment using crude tools to try and imagine how society had evolved into the world they knew. They spent centuries trying to imagine the sky was filled with other worlds that followed their strict beliefs in atmosphere and elements. They stole the names of dead religions and pasted them on to pictures in the sky. If they did not believe in heavens, why did they name parts of the sky after fallen gods?

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the educated people believed in more than they could see. They imagined their present somehow reflected their ancestors' world. Time always linear and made to educate them about their potential futures.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the educated people believed.

What is education if not belief? All facts are statistics memorized or recorded by people eager to support whatever belief their parents, intentionally or accidentally, imprinted on them. Science. Religion. Language. Self-worth. 

I can not talk about how we relate to things now because now is an outdated concept. I can not say what we believe in because we do not believe. Faith has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Of the planets. Of history. I speak of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as if I had any idea what that meant. I only think what I have read in books. I can not claim to know. I did not write the books. All narrators are unreliable. All facts are misleading. All conjecture, including this conjecture, is egalitarian bullshit. I think. There are no bulls left to compare anything to. Planets worth of shit still but no bulls. Bullshit is just another useless term handed down, I think, by the people alleged to have existed before us.

Here is what I think the most. I think I was born, though this is also conjecture. I do not remember much of the first six years of my life, and that which I do think I remember is hazy enough that I can't discount the theory that much of my childhood is just what I was told as a teenager. My, as far as I know, parents relate their favorite fables with a tenderness that I would like to think of as genuine. There are pictures, of course, but they are of a child that I do not remember looking like. 

I think very much that I spent my teenage years listening to someone tell me that I couldn't just repeat what I was told, I had to think for myself. But I was often disciplined for not thinking for myself in the fashion that I was supposed to think for myself. 

I think I look enough like the people in control that I am as safe as a person can be when they are not the precise person in control. I think I have enough ancestry in common with those in control that they do not bother to even imagine killing me. They tell me that it is very possible that some day I will be the person in control. They tell me so often, and look so much like me that I can almost think it is true. But I strongly think it is not.

I think what I do and who I speak to are important. I think the people who listen to me are indulgent.

I think what came before me wasn't important. I think it is purely fable. Lessons for fools who can not think. 

I think there is no god besides consciousness. I think we would all be safer if we knew each others' intentions.

I think every love I've ever felt was a mistake. I did not learn anything more from love than I did from history.

I think every person has their own language, and that no science can properly explain how we understand and misunderstand each other.

I think our lips move out of habit.

I think our tongue was made for tasting, not pushing our thoughts on others.

I think our ears are warning systems not entertainment centers.

I think the future is a dangerous dream that will eventually kill us.

I think I haven't earned anything, just accumulated.

I think too much thinking leads to more thinking leads to more time not doing anything that might kill us. But eventually we must do something. We wan not think ourselves to immortality. We've been trying for as long as there has been thought.

I think eventually is the most powerful word I know. I think eventually would sneak up behind maybe and slit its throat. I think eventually carves power's tendons until it collapses to the ground.

I think the ground is eventually. I think the ground is all the shit accumulated from however many thinkers there were before us.

I think thinking has done more harm than any action. But is the only thing we do not know how to stop doing.

I think the dinosaurs were not reptiles, monsters, or birds. I think dinosaurs are just assemblages of bones with silly Latin names. Everyone wants to think that everything we pull from the ground is a piece of a fable. And that if we glue enough of our fables together then history will have a narrative flow that makes sense to us.

I don't think anything makes sense, and I worry what would happen if it suddenly did. 
I think my own thoughts are dangerous.

The world that I have spent all of my life perceiving as trying to kill me is not a safe place for any history I've heard or read about.

The world is the only thing worth loving even if it is incapable of loving us back.

The world is going the way of the dinosaurs eventually, I think.