In the beginning, out of a whole subspecies of great ape, a descendant of a peculiar tribe which had left the shelter of the trees to walk on two legs—heads risen high above the long grass—was cold. Actually, it was the beginning of a long night and his entire herd was freezing. Several had died over the past few days, in a search for warmth, as they came across predators: both large and microbial, and elemental.
Perhaps it was the ancient ancestral memories—genetically inscribed into his being—of gaining salvation by the forest, ultimately through the treetops above everyone’s heads. Or perhaps it was the times he’d witnessed old dry wood and leaves suddenly kindle as lightning, working its explosive heat through a tree, set everything ablaze. Perhaps it was that he had once accidently created a chemical reaction himself while trying to dig into an old dry log with a stick—looking for insects—and the friction brought out sudden smoke and charred, red-hot wood and flame. Perhaps it was a mixture of all these things.
Perhaps it was just too much chaos, but at some point this ape snapped.
He went entirely insane. Bonkers. Bananas even. He whittled away furiously and again with just dry wood and leaves. In a violent, frustrated fidget, he assaulted the inanimate splintering object. And it was just anger, nothing more.
But that angry ape changed something. He started an ember which became a raging fire that not only saved his herd from the bitter freezing winter cold, but also lit up the night.
And you can be sure every ape there noticed.
However, from that point forward, life wasn’t simply sunshine and rainbows and summer barbeques. The ape’s mania didn’t improve. He only slipped further and further into madness. That ape and some of the others who had watched the whole scene play out all began to be plagued by severe delusions.
Delusions of control.
They tried to recreate the experience. It didn’t always work—especially at first—but every time it did—every time they brought forth fire—it enforced the delusion. They could control so much with the fire. Life was suddenly moldable to their will. They could have heat when they wanted it. They could have light when they wanted it. They could eat food at the temperature and even—eventually—with the texture and consistency that they wanted it.
The ancestors of those very apes later called this delusion of control very strange, intuitively gratifying words like “conscious thought”, “reasoning”, and "intelligence". But those things never accurately captured the true defining traits of the genetic mental pathology that overtook this particular ape population thereafter. For example, most earth animals were plenty “concious”, but this species of apes were the only animals exhibiting this psychotic pattern of breaking down into episodes of “reasoning” before taking an action. When other animals were cold, they found caves, or huddled together, or dug into the soil. They weren’t dementedly predisposed to dwell, as the apes had, on unnatural delusions of mental supremacy, with deranged fantasies and hopes of finding some sort of meaning or grandeur in their actions.
There was always some level of change that the apes were, in fact, effecting on their environment. But with every sought-after change that the apes made, several other unintended consequences often also came about, with or without their limited ape senses picking up on it. Though there were plenty of times the apes did notice that their attempts to control things actually left other aspects of their lives off-kilter. However, despite that obvious obstacle to their control delusion, the apes had been “reasoning” their way through life so long at that point—for thousands and thousands of years—that the delusion of control had also become part of their very genetic makeup, and their evolution. A genetic pandemic.
And it was the same with that violent, frustrated fidgeting of the mind that first led to all of this. With the help of their increasing madness, that purposeful anger took on new, more friendly labels—“hope” and “faith”—a kind of counter-emotion to the chaos of reality. This adaptation allowed the apes to really loose their shit and all sense of reality, and they caused problems for other species on the planet, and each other.
Eventually, naturally, many sought to control the control. They did things like attempt to control each other, then control the self, then went back to controlling each other, but through the self. It became a bit convoluted until suddenly again one of them must have remembered the trees that had sheltered them ages and ages ago, and the fearful lightning.
From way back in their ancestral DNA memory, this ape postulated that control was solely in the control of much higher beings that existed far above their heads. There was then some squabbling and some tribal violence and war over this. But eventually, those apes that believed one or many gods controlled everything eventually tried to control that very belief, to use it to control others, but through their own self, checked by self-control, so that everything was in control. Because that was how God apparently wanted it.
This brand of madness became known as “the right wing” because the apes of that time really liked to eat chicken, and only God could choose the juiciest wing on the animal. The apes that couldn’t drift as easily into that new madness became known as “the leftover” wing, or “the left” for short. Interestingly enough, the new madness also became known as “conservative”, and the old madness took on the terms “progressive” and “liberal” so as to fool people into thinking they weren’t at all about control. This, of course, was another aspect of their delusion of control, and so countless other groups of apes joined together in an effort to fight these two dominant parties and regain either control or freedom (or at least one group’s controlled version of it).
It was very convoluted indeed and it went on this way for some time. The good news is that neither brand of madness increased large enough to again become ingrained into the genetic pathology of the species. The bad news is nothing really changed, apart from a lot of wheel spinning; which later turned into gear spinning, which later became turbine spinning, which led to voltage spinning, and ultimately head-spinning as the voltage carried new forms of control instantaneously across the planet, in the blink of an eye.
It was only then that the madness began to truly and largely be felt by vast swatches of the population, across all levels of “authority” and social-economic “status”. More than ever before the apes sincerely felt the creepy reality of it all and began to ask themselves a plethora of existential questions in order to regain their sense of control. These spurts of intuitive awareness were widespread. More than what had always been felt by the economic and social minorities, who had sometimes ventured into ideas like “control is merely an allusion” because the disparity of being able to affect their own lives was often just part of life for them. However, even for most of those apes, the driving need to control was an inescapable compulsion, and this is why every ape asked these sorts of questions anyways.
The only real exception to all of this tended to be the more submissive of the species. From the beginning, before the vast structured, civilized civilizations of ape became prevalent, simply existing as the sole maternal reproductive organism of the species kept ape females pretty grounded, compared to their manic male counterparts. It was a fact of their very existence, knowing control was simply an allusion. Control could maybe also be attractive, if it was confused as a display of power, but in time most of the female apes agreed: It was size that really mattered. Everything else was just compensating for something.
After civilization became huge and messy, and the “dominant” and “submissive” cultural divide became its own entity and the sexes became more equalized, it was predominantly the submissive apes who the dominant apes would attempt to implicitly control. The most submissive apes still attempted to avoid the worst parts of the delusion like the plague, moving between partners, ideas, and parties, just looking for something honest for once. And still, the interesting part about all this is, although most “reasoning” dominant apes liked to call the submissive apes “crazy” for their seemingly indecisive thoughts and actions, it was, in actuality, those same submissive apes who were technically the most sane. Many of them literally felt their dominant counterparts were particularly delusional, and tried to tell them so regularly.
Toward the end, briefly, when the line between submissive and dominant apes began to be most honestly questioned, various submissive and dominant apes, together, consistently attempted to break through their own and their culture’s deluded sense of control, especially when it came to issues like their offspring, the infirmed, the otherwise suffering or disadvantaged, the environment, animal cruelty, and other people’s gender identity. Unfortunately, “Liberal” apes often tried to control these attempts at authenticity on the basis of being “liberal” ideas, which allowed “Conservative” apes enough leverage to question them. Overall, the final effect was that the dominant apes, as they had for thousands of years, got caught up again in their various delusions trying to explain just what had gone wrong. The more submissive apes overwhelmingly shrugged, and ultimately attempted to hold onto whatever honest beauty they could see in the world, and enjoy their last bit of enjoyment.
It’s not surprising that, eventually, all the apes were lost as the Earth’s climate indifferently went haywire in response to the very contrived actions of this particular, very delusional species of ape. The fire that they had once used to save themselves from the elements and had introduced some control to their life, became the element that eventually overwhelmed them to the point of obsession, and the Earth to the point of flash floods, deathly scorching heat, and furious ruinous storms which lasted centuries.
Overall, these hopelessly hopeful, unconscionably conscious apes—this speciated plague—with all their various, weighty "reasonings" on their many leanings, pressured that whole expansive ecosystem into initiating a giant global reboot.
So be warned, my little delusional Martians. The moral of this historical tale is: I think, therefore, I am already duped.
