In history you read about elves, fairies, little people, spirits. It was an accepted part of reality.
But now that’s obvious nonsense and if you see fairies then you need a doctor.
Are we insane now?
Yes I know, nutrition, literacy and the scientific enlightenment. But still.
In addition to the poor treatment of autistic and other neurodivergent folks, note that there was a huge uptick in a lot of fantasy folk tales ri_ht around the same time people started using gas lamps in their homes.
We used to tell stories about seeing fairies and so.
We still tell stories about seeing fairies and so on. Nothing has changed.
I myself have only really encountered a fairy one time.
I for one have been a fairy - at the last halloween party
The fey were made up as a way to ostracize people who were “weird” e.g. autistic people like myself. They weren’t REAL children, just weird puppets left by the weird forest people who stole our sweet, normal human baby!
No they weren’t. You’re just leveraging your fetish. Norse has a whole taxonomy. British Isles has a whole big thing. Moderns talking to machine elves even. The world is bigger etc.
Exactly what in my comment indicated a fetish?
A fetish for moaning about the woes of the neurodivergent. So intense that you begin to see it everywhere
We’re a cluster of primates trying to understand the nature of the universe. We still got a ways to go yet.
People used to believe in myths which are unfalsifiable because they wanted to explain things that they didn’t know how they really worked. Now we realise that we should admit when we don’t know something and had scientific methods to try and find out what’s really going on. And no point were we insane, just using normal human psychology.
I think they actually saw the stuff. Myths came after that.
I actually think we might be seeing differently now.
I hear that it was more common to see the little people in times of starvation. And now we don’t starve. So that’s something to consider
absolutely perfect response
I don’t understand the question.
Ok it’s better now
You gotta read the body too. It was too long for the title character limit. Lemme fuck with that
I don’t get it with the body either. No we are not insane as a species and if only because insanity is defined on what we as collective see as normal. But what is “deep history”? And people don’t get send to a doctor just because they believe in fairytales, at least where I live.
Humans seem to have an inert need to have answers and guessing one seems to be better than “I don’t know” for many.
Imagine if it became the fashion to wear glasses that block out the color green. If you do not wear these glasses then you are wrong, bad and deserving of condemnation. So everybody wears them.
Three generations down the road, anybody who mentions the color green is considered a fool.
It’s an obvious idea. Maybe it happened to us.
Then there would still be the possibility for someone to take off the glasses.
Or invent spectrometers.
Or make others curious.
I’d claim that our issue is too much belief and not a lack thereof. Beliefs remove the potential for excourse y for discussions and for admission of being wrong. Believing is the act of removing an item from analysis, from critique and in its final form from thinking about it.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you - if that’s the case please apologize.
But only wrong bad people take off the glasses. So nobody does that but wrong bad people. And nobody can trust them because they’re wrong bad.
And spectrometers are clearly hippy dippy nonsense.
The wrong bad people do not sow curiosity, they sow poison!
You see how that works.
Do not discount the gravity and inertia of convention.
What “in history” are your taking about? I’m not aware of historical documents reporting the existance of fairies. I don’t think you find something like this is the writings of ancient Greek historians like Herodotus. Sometimes they report fanciful things about far away places where they are reporting stories they didn’t themselves witness, like say tribes of dog-headed people, but you don’t see the same thing when they report goings on they witnessed.
And wouldn’t you expect there to be fossils or other remains? Do your see faeries in the pictures left by the ancient Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians?
No uh because fairy skeletons don’t fossilize ever because reasons. or they don’t die or anything. notice how a lot of these fanciful things have an escape clause against discoverability?
A lot of this was about neurodivergent people. How they had become what they are because of malice by fairies, not by happening to be born with a certain neurology that is likely to be even beneficial.
