this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
160 points (94.4% liked)
Creepy Wikipedia
3970 readers
45 users here now
A fediverse community for curating Wikipedia articles that are oddly fascinating, eerily unsettling, or make you shiver with fear and disgust
Guidelines:
-
Follow the Code of Conduct
-
Do NOT report posts YOU don't consider creepy
-
Strictly Wikipedia submissions only
-
Please follow the post naming convention: Wikipedia Article Title - Short Synopsis
-
Tick the NSFW box for submissions with inappropriate thumbnails.
-
Please refrain from any offensive language/profanities in the posts titles, unless necessary (e.g. it's in the original article's title).
Mandatory:
If you didn't find an article "creepy," you must announce it in the thread so everyone will know that you didn't find it creepy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Or nuclear near-annihilation, which was a definite concern when these were erected. Or a pandemic.
That's the part everybody seems to be glossing over. These stones were supposed to be read by a burgeoning society post apocalypse, not our current world with 8 billion people. The non-existent world these stones speaks to would contain presumably less than the 500,000,000 people its author states is the maximum, and acts as a warning along the lines of ‘don't destroy the Earth's environment like we did, that's what lead to our downfall, too many people’. Not to say that take is correct or not, just what I thought when reading about the stones the first time. Seems like environmentally political rhetoric to me.
Imagine believing in a world where 90% of the human population is annihilated by some calamity, and the survivors have the psychological capacity to focus on anything other than basic survival and repopulation.
Utopian fantasyland. Believing things like this requires deliberate ignorance of the nature of human beings and pretty much all of human history. It's magical thinking
Especially since these were put up in the 1980s.
If it were 20-30 years earlier, you'd write it off as Cold War/MAD Nuclear doomerism combined with that very particular breed of American fascism that inspired the Strangelove/Fallout aesthetic. People believing they could put the "best and brightest" down in bunkers to recreate an even better world after the inevitable collapse, without all those "undesirable" cultural elements polluting things.
But this was 1980. The Cold War was clearly ending. CFCs were still little-known as a global threat. The fossil fuel companies were still VERY effectively hiding the reality of climate change from the general public. The recession wasn't clearly visible yet. There was no reason to be a doomer. That was a great time to be an optimist.