| I started rereading the Axe Maker's Gift. I have come to the opinion that this is the single most important book I have ever read, even putting it ahead of my cherished :"The Republic" by Plato, and his chapter "The Allegory of the Cave". I had a professor once that said we learn to relearn. What the Axe Maker's Gift gives us, is historical context which gives substance and relative clarity to everything we know, by providing "Context." And the concept of "Context" is one of the primary ideas all people should be aware of.
The Axe Maker's Gift prologue:
This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. This Faustian Bargain was sealed more than 1 million years ago, but as you will see, the bargain didn't turn out to be quite what either party might have expected.
We call those with whom we made the bargain Axe Maker's. But they make more than axis. They make everything. The make our hopes and dreams. They make what we love and what we hate. They make all this, because they make the tools to change our surroundings. And when their innovations are taken up and used, the effect is to shape the world in which we live, the beliefs for which we fight and die, the values we live by. And our very nature.
Originally the Axe Maker's were ancient hominids who had the talent to reshape stones one piece at a time, and in doing so, create tools that would chop up the world. This axe making ability to do things in the proper order is one of the brains many natural talents. In our ancient past, the all-powerful axe maker's talent for performing the precise, sequential process that shaped axes would later give rise to the precise, sequential thought that would eventually generate language and logic and rules, which would formalize and discipline thinking itself. The newly dominant sequential talent of the mind used the "cut and control it" capability to extract more knowledge from the world and then use that knowledge to cause even further change. Thanks to the axe maker's talents and gifts, at any time, things literally would never be the same again. |
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