Cultural insanity

Time Magazine 8/8/2022, “Into the Metaverse:”

The internet as we know it today spans nearly every country, 40,000 networks, millions of applications, over a hundred million servers, almost a billion websites, tens of billions of devices, through which billions of people are able to interconnect.

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An old cautionary tale has it that there once was a kingdom in which all of the grain crop one exceptional year somehow became poisoned, causing anyone who ate its products to go insane. That posed a terrible dilemma for the king and his advisors, for the stores of grain from previous years were very modest, not nearly enough to feed the entire population of the land, and there was no way to procure food from without. The kingdom would face either widespread famine and starvation, if the harvest were destroyed, or widespread madness and chaos. After much deliberation, the king reluctantly decided to have the people go ahead and eat the grain, hoping its effects would be temporary, that at the very least human lives would be preserved. “But,” he added, “we must at the same time keep a few people apart and feed them on an unpoisoned diet of the grain from previous years. That way there will at least be a few among us who will remember that the rest of us are insane.”

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Examples of sanity were discernible just hundreds of years ago. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753:

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

The sane among us understand that we have to gradually get back.