No.453589[Reply]
I was intrigued by the idea when i read it first in a book called strata. I have to wonder if this is what we are experiencing today with mass mental illness.
'Once we were overpopulated. And we found that the more people there
were, the more they were the same. It was the only way we could survive.
People had always dreamed of a unified world. We thought it would be a richer
one. It wasn't. It meant that the Eskimo got educated and learned cost
accountancy, but it didn't mean that the German learned to hunt whales with a
spear. It meant everyone learned how to press buttons, and no-one remembered
how to dive for pearls.
'Then the Mindquakes got us. That would have been – yes, a couple of
years after the Terminus probes. People just died. Died in their billions,
too, their minds just kind of folded in on themselves.
'Afterwards, we had to start over. At least we had all the toys of the
Spindle Kings to play with, and we could spread out – we had to spread out,
after the Quakes. They made us look hard for mental elbow-room, new worlds
where we could flee and learn the forgotten ways.