It does often seem to be correlated to reactionary conspiracy sentiments. There is the “non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!” thing
I guess also flat earth?
It actually has its roots in hyperdiffusionism, an early 1900s idea that some lost civilization invented all these technologies and did all the impressive things, and anyone who did anything neat is descended from them. This lost master race - surprise! This is totally a nazi thing. The people who came up with this were nazis.
The modern appeal comes from a lot of racism (it’s never aimed at, say, Romans), a lot from anti-intellectualism (the news constantly peddles bald-faced lies through “experts” so all experts are untrustworthy), and sadly I think a lot comes from the US de-funding schools (you never got a real history class so the first youtube conspiracy theorist you hear is your first exposure to “history” and you don’t know better). And some of it is still nazis.
it’s never aimed at, say, Romans
The swarthy Italians would never have had the intellectual base to produce the scutum, it must have been tower shield wielding aliens that brought them such technology!
(really though, the idea that people aren’t constantly thinking about their environment and how to improve it is kind of insulting to the intelligence of all of humanity)
The version where it’s re-framed as the us highway system being made by aliens is my favorite "americans don’t have the technology to accomplish this! They barely understand how it works and can’t maintain it!
typical german whinging about the superior roman brainpan. you people up north are too cold blooded. people down south in africa are too warm blooded. only we romans are JUUUUUUST right. (this is what actual romans thought, IIRC)
There is the “non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!” thing
I honestly think it’s mostly just this.
Yeah it’s just racism afaik
I think a lot of it is ego protection for people who don’t want to grapple with themselves not understanding how the world is put together. “well, I can’t figure out how to stack rocks, so how could someone else 5000 years ago have done it? something like this can only have been done by hyper-advanced technology” like John Fetterman recently being scared shitless by some pipework
Aliens built the big ben.
I refuse to believe white people could ever stop killing people long enough to make jt.
It’s just branch of anti-intellectualism. It comes from the same place as vaccine skepticism and extreme views about homeschooling. The ivory tower academics want you to believe that their mundane explanations for mundane things are correct, but what if wild speculation based on things I made up instead?
It’s also just kind of fun, like astrology. If you’re taking it seriously then you should be institutionalized, but if you just view it as a weird hobby/LARP/creative writing exercise then sure, why not indulge a bit? Who are you hurting by seeing what kind of crazy thing they say next? It’s so far outside anything that would be taken seriously that it feels pretty safe to put in the list of things you can enjoy knowing that it’s all pure fiction, even if some people believe it.
(after writing this): Hopefully this doesn’t come off as hostile. I’m a bit drunk and bouncing around.
I mean, both vaccine skepticism and homeschooling as cultural values can be seen as (partly) the ownership of children, as well as anti-intellectual skepticism (marxists here have reason to disagree with most economists, which could be seen as anti-intellectualism by a certain crowd). How dare you tell me to do something with my property? While any one individual might have legitimate reasons for whatever, its interesting to explore why these ideas spread beyond any one person.
I think a good example to use is the spread of right wing money churches in the US. While any one individual might have grown up in it, or have been swayed by the rhetoric, you can’t ignore the serious funding prosperity doctrine got from this business consortium. It isn’t particularly interesting to say “Oh, they’re all dumb” or “Oh, they were all brought up in the church” because we can’t do much with those explanations and they don’t offer much explanatory power as to why they spread or why they have entrenched power.
I think it’s fine for individual people to have a pile of “wrong” beliefs. Frankly, to verify everything would require more time and emotional energy (should they choose to give it, not necessarily a given), so everyone is going to have some. What I think is more interesting to question and explore is why particular ideas have draw or power in our society, even if a number of people have a harmless avenue towards that belief.
All good points. I should clarify that when I say “anti-intellectualism” I don’t mean “being stupid” but rather the more systemic issue of people being propagandized into distrusting the concept of basic institutions, to the benefit of reactionary forces. “Do your own research” isn’t really skepticism, it’s a more fundamental rejection of reality. There’s a difference between being critical of prevailing institutions or ideas, and being skeptical of the idea that these institutions are legitimate in the first place. Even Marxist critiques of economics are made in the context that the academic institution overall has some merit (or else there would be no reason to be critical of economics, specifically).
I think the ancient aliens stuff is sort of the sillier end of that more general rejection of reality. It doesn’t really matter if you believe in it or not, but it comes from the same place, which is a rejection of some basic assumptions that most of us do take as given. My guess, if I could make a better attempt at answering your question, is that it’s a low-stakes way of testing the waters with people about their willingness to challenge the more substantial baseline assumptions about reality. You put out an idea that is both unverifiable and irrelevant, like Jesus being an alien, and you plant the idea that there could be other things that might be wrong about what the established institutions say about things. Then you leverage that wedge of uncertainty into getting people whipped up about whatever your actual ideological goal is. More importantly, you do it in a way that undermines people trying to accurately describe the world, because accurately describing the world goes against reactionary ideology.
Crystals and astrological shit just look really cool
So do runes tbh, except I’m not about to decorate my house with them
I haven’t really looked into this specifically, but my vibe is that it’s people without any class or material analysis trying to explain a world that isn’t explainable with typical liberal theories. It’s the same reason people go anti-vax or blame one specific racial minority for all the world’s problems: things are fucked up, and what they learned in school doesn’t answer the question.
I’d also argue that this kind of thinking is more common with petite bourgeois types, as they’re more resistant to a class analysis, as doing so would paint them and their people as the bad guy.
It does feel like it has a grand overarching narrative like traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories, without actually mentioning Jews at all. Hyperborean/Atlantis vibes without the explicit racism (lots of implicit racism though).
There’s a lot of overlap.
false consciousness
“The government is hiding alien technology from us and preventing our lives to becoming better by it!”
Maybe.
There is the “non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!” thing
This boils down to white supremacy. If you asked well, what about the Carthage, Etruscans, the Greeks, the Roman’s, etc. they’d give you a bunch of bullshit about the Western Seat of Ideas.
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fun theories
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trying to find corroborative evidence for flood/atlantis/whatever
I wonder if there’s overlap between young earth creationists and ancient aliens. It seems sorta contradictory, but more bonkers things have happened. Looking back, a lot of young earth creationists stories/things (outside of the direct canon) was about sneering at coastal liberal elites, a themed version of a more secular complaining about snooty professors and woke coloured hair lesbians, just with the language changed.
Oh i feel ancient aliens and ancient technologies are wildly different groups. One is like “you didn’t build that” to all ancient people. The ancient technologies is more of cyclical history/fall from grace (due to sin, here probably evangelicals can come in)/golden age (here fashies can come in)/bible tells true stories twisted by time (again red meat, for evangelicals). Aliens don’t do anything that interesting for both of those groups, aside from racism, no lessons to be extracted.
I could see ancient technologies lost to history being real. But I don’t think there were any societies as technological developed as we are now. In several millenium though after a great cataclysm, maybe they’ll uncover remnants of our technology that puts everything they’ve developed to shame
Nah, we’d know. Like there’s some possibility people were doing, idk, ironmongery 100kya+ ago, but metallurgy leaves very obvious contimates in the soil, glass and ceramics never decay. Any refined aluminum would be a dead giveaway. Like it’s possible people independently discovered mettalurgy or pottery or something a few times and we just haven’t found the sites yet, but large scale industry makes a mess.
There isn’t any evidence for it, anywhere. The closest real thing would be that the bow and arrow was independently incented a number of times in different places.
I like how Rimworld deals with ancient metals. Instead of mining iron you just find a bunch of compressed steel or components as ore deposits.
That had been true for most of our cultural memory though. It wasn’t till the mid 1900 our engineering was as good as the Roman’s. So in living memory there were people who had the experience of living in a world that wasn’t as cool as existed in antiquity.
Now, that does forget that most people in roman times weren’t having a good time. Just that their good times were better than ours for most history.
I love ancient engineering, especially that weird stuff that winds up ahead of its time. It feels like, as someone who likes bouncing systems off each other to create new ones, many many technologies were developed lots of times and were lost when the economic conditions no longer supported people who could learn and recreate certain technologies. Like that ancient greek steam engine. The guy making it may have passed it on to a few other people interested enough to, but those people didn’t have the free time or interest to continue that design.
So the thing with steam engines, is you need to contain a very large amount of pressure to get useful work out of them. Like a lot of pressure. The idea that you could make a neat toy that spun around when you heat water has been around for ages. But we didn’t start making steam engines until the 19th century because the materials science wasn’t there yet. The 19th century was when we started being able to crank out large amounts of high quality metal, and reliably create very strong joins on the seams of those metal objects. And that got us started, but early on all we had for seals was greased leather gaskets, and we could only contain so much pressure that way. Someone had to bring in vulkanized rubber, which could withstand immense heat and pressure, to get us the powerful steam engines we associate with the industrial rev.
These aren’t new techs - i think mesoamericans were vulcanizing rubber 1kya, the steam engine in principle is 2kya, but the necessary metallurgy was 19th century, and that’s where the needed technology, industry, and economy came together to produce a steam engine that could contain the immense pressures needed to produce useful work.
It was a tech pulled out of the hat, but one could imagine different ways of, say, sharpening metal being lost and rediscovered a lot. Or something.
We kinda had something like that with plate armor. A lot of the techniques for making really advanced plate armor were lost by the 20th century, and the in latter half of the 20th a bunch of larpers and medieval nerds started reverse-engineering existing suits, consulting what manuals survived, digging through museums, and now we’re back at a point where there are a couple of shops in the world that can make the rally good stuff if you can put down, ikd, it’s probably 15k these days.
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It would be more cool if space aliens were real and liked to kick it.
basically what’s said already in this thread, but the podcast covered this loldeleted by creator
