Today’s announcement by the scientists at CERN that they have discovered a subatomic particle that my very well be the fabled Higgs boson will rate a few headlines that, for the average citizen, will amount to a sound bite no more remarkable than the one that tells us what Snookie had for lunch.   The reaction to this news by the population at large is an apt metaphor of our times.  Most of us are far too unknowledgeable to distinguish the significance of the truly remarkable from idle entertainment.

In the history of human science, however, this discovery is by far the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.  It eclipses the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of fire, the discovery of the New World, the discovery that there is no such thing as gravitational force, the moon landing or the discovery of DNA.   At the highest levels of human intelligence, this knowledge has the potential to change everything.  It changes our entire understanding of existence itself and yet, most of us will know more about Mitt Romney’s vacation plans than we will the fact that there is no such thing as empty space, at least  in the traditional sense, that matter is most likely ten dimensional and that existence is not really a solid physical system of things, but merely the manifestation of energy in a sea of great cosmic nothing.  In short, we have discovered that physical reality is much more akin to the experience of a digital character in a software program than the antiquated and now obsolete notion of cold hard substantial stuff.

And yet, here we are, in the Twenty-first Century entrenched in a battle for democracy against people who believe in angels and that dinosaurs never really existed.

We live in an age where the truth is so complex and difficult for ordinary people to understand that myth has become a simply far more convenient and appealing reality.  We are all witnesses to one of the many instances in history when human technology has gotten away from ordinary human comprehension, a cultural condition that may very well lead us to disastrous effect.  One of the possible consequences that arises when technology eclipses the ability of the ordinary man to understand it, is that the scientists who have developed what seems like magic to the ignorant will be burned at stakes by terrified and ignorant masses.   Huge leaps of technology have always been the cultural triggers of dark ages.

In the Ninth Century, a Viking sailor, probably having learned a thing or two from Arab sailors, came to know a very useful thing.  He learned how to shape a sail on a boat in such a way that he could sail up into the wind.   Sailors nowadays call this “tacking”.  It is a matter of routine and every modern sailor knows how to do it.  Instead of being heralded as a genius that had liberated his people from the constraints that forced them to sail only in the direction of the wind, this innovative Viking sailor was not considered a hero of any kind, but rather was burned as a witch.  His skill was considered magic because the idiots around him could not understand it, grew afraid and lashed out against the object of their fear.

Similarly, when the Roman Empire began to implode under the weight of its own territorial overexpansion, most of the citizens of Rome had no idea what it took to build and maintain such a vast and technologically advanced culture.  They had become lazy and ignorant having been seduced by the affluence that was afforded by technology and empire.  As the poet Juvenal said in the First Century:

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

This self-imposed comprehension differential, this inability to understand the complex, lead Romans to burn down their own empire in favor of a simple dogmatic culture that launched a dark age that lasted a thousand years.  Dogmatic mythology has a singular benefit, especially to the ignorant.  Everyone can understand it and, therefore, an entire culture can be brought into alignment around a single set of principles based on faith rather than knowledge.  In other words, order becomes more important that truth.  Ignorance is the opening through which the tyranny of fear seizes control of a society.  It usually enters a culture waving a patriotic flag and thumping an easy to understand doctrine that reduces human life to a didactic checklist of right and wrong.  Because the purpose of such a doctrine is order and not understanding, doctrine becomes a tool to calm fear and not the advancement of human inspiration.  It works, for a while, so long as alignment is the only goal.  In the process, human imagination is burnt at the stake to keep the ignorant, made nervous by their blindness, feeling safe from the power of knowledge.  The fear is that those who know too much will take advantage and even enslave the ignorant.  Violent might, the trump card of the desperate and the ignorant becomes justified under a false claim of preserving freedom.  Fools enslave themselves by false claims that forced order is somehow freedom.  This brand of paranoia is the exclusive province the ignorant or the manipulative seeking to control the ignorant.  Those with knowledge know as fact what is and is not a threat.

So while the natives or our nation gyrate in their charismatic ecstasies and roll on the floors of churches speaking in tongues; while the wealthy, who have always preyed upon the ignorance and superstitious tendencies of the ignorant, entice these well-meaning fools into peasant armies of devotion to their betters, a violent storm is brewing.  It will be perceived as a clash of iron and flesh driven by notions of spiritual truth propelled by ignorance.  But in reality, it will simply be the high drama of energies in a field of Higgs boson particles full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.   We will only suffer in consciousness for want of any real physicality to shed even a drop of substantial matter that we might otherwise call blood.  A millennium from now, when these nervous monkeys have had enough of their fear and murderous lashings out against imaginary demons conjured by their own superstitious minds, they will rediscover the Higgs boson recalling that it was known a thousand years before and rendered less terrifying in comparison to the wake of their own violent fearfulness.

Silly monkey of light and shadows, when will you find the calm inside your own mind to face the unfolding of the secrets of this existence with something other than bared teeth?