by Professor Maximillian Toxopeus III
Citadel21 Publishing
February 29, 2176

Preface

In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing this 11th edition of my proto-internet research on the first decades of the third millennium, popularly known as the pre-memetic or post-medieval period, into printed format.

I am told the former editions have given particular pleasure to a certain sort of my readership, namely the ones in the outer citadels who have currently been shadowbanned on the Sol Tachyon Relay. Those familiar with my research won’t see any reason for the author prefacing his work by a disquisition upon how and why the study came about (as the matters discussed are common knowledge and widely understood).

Nevertheless, my publisher demands a preface, so I have made the effort here to write one. I have devoted it to include answers to questions I have been frequently asked by my readership. Also, I have composed a small introduction on my latest research concerning the high suicide rates of the early 2030s, at the height of peak-fiat society, just prior to the hyperbitcoinization event of 2034, which ended the pre-memetic period at the onset of the Information Revolution.

First, how was it possible that people couldn’t see that it was the debasement of money that caused all societal issues?

To this question I’d gladly refer the inquirers to the 16th century of endo-planetary history, when for decades the belief was still held that the Earth was at the center of the universe, even in the presence of abundant empirical and mathematical evidence that the heliocentric model was the correct paradigm. Anybody with a telescope could have simply concluded that the Roman Catholic narrative was absolutely false and nonsensical.

Then how was it possible that so many people for such an extended period of time refuted Sol to be the center? Were people just simply of less intelligence back then? It is a comforting thought if that were to be the case, because it would clear the contemporary man of ever having to scrutinize his own situation.

But that is exactly what happened during the Scientific Revolution. The people were simply so immersed and indoctrinated with the ecclesiastic narrative that they never questioned it, and since this idea was held by the large majority, people felt comfortable they had the truth in hand.

But let me also emphasize how hard it is for a human being to admit they have been wrong for their entire life.

The pain and accompanying responsibility it takes to admit such a huge mistake is something most human beings are unable to accept. It is simply easier to continue believing in lies than to update the mental model. Hence, the heliocentric model became the dominant view only after all geocentric believers had died out — this is why it took decades.

Contemporary man always feels most advanced, yet never ponders the fact that his thinking through history has always been obsoleted with adequate time passing. It’s a persistent human fallacy across the ages, and something our society should guard against through means of critical thinking; i.e. don’t trust, verify.

To expand, unlike the 16th century revolution, the 21st century turning was a monetary transition. As Dr. A.D. Fergusson pointed out in his 1975 classic on the Weimar hyperinflation in the interbellum period, a currency debasement is severely difficult for the human brain to register. Even at the later stages of the Rentenmark meltdown, most Germans continued to conclude it was the prices that were going up, instead of their measure of value going down.

Later psychobiological studies would indicate that the neurological nucleus that governs the value perceiving function is located in the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus plays a major role in reality-perception, but suffers from low neuroplasticity, i.e. it is resistant to paradigm shifts. This psychological phenomenon is now popularly known as Emerald-City-Syndrome or ECS in short, named after the fictional city from L. Frank Baum’s fairy tale from 1900. The inhabitants of Emerald City couldn’t perceive reality properly, as they had become unaware of the green-tinted glasses they were forced to wear.

ECS was a major contributor to the prolonged global economic deterioration of Peak Fiat Society, accompanied by the suppression of free speech by government through general propaganda, social media infiltration and memetic warfare. All done in order to inhibit hypothalamic-resets that would blow the veil on the dismal monetary reality. This period is now commonly referred to as clown world, due to the mass formation psychosis and irrational behavior displayed by the populace at large.

A final point on why the revolution lasted for as long as it did, was the weaponization of archetypal hooks as a ploy by the nation state (the post-feudal power structure) to hack into the collective unconscious of the brain to control the narrative.

The breakthrough discovery and treatise “Epigenetic methylation patterns that encode for hereditary innate memes.” by Prof. C.G. von Franz in 2059, finally laid the neurobiological framework for understanding mass psychosis events. At the onset of the Scientific Revolution it was the archetype of the bushfire — an ancient innate fear-meme conserved in most primates — that was employed by the Church in order to instill a control system based on the phobia of eternal suffering in an afterlife inferno called ‘hell’.

Interestingly, in the early 21st century it was the flood-meme that was used as the device of control. The flood archetype wasn’t scientifically recognized until a few decades into post-hyperbitcoinzation, despite its cross-cultural mythologic prevalence. Advances in the field of simulation and geo-informatics confirmed the neglected theories explored by Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley — that the terrestrial globe had been shocked by a massive deluge as a result of a large comet strike.

In-silico experiments and oceanic studies concluded that a massive impact had indeed occurred in the Gulf of Mexico around 2342 BC. The geological scarring was just a faint echo in contrast to the living evidence of epigenetic imprints — present in the cells of all human beings across the solar system — resulting from this endo-prehistoric cataclysm.

The hook of the flood-motif served as a decoy that kept people anxious and afraid of an oncoming water-hell of rising seas, whilst it provided governments with a macro-economic-behavioral tool to extend and pretend solvency, and mask the real incoming killer wave — a tsunami of fiat currency caused by unprecedented national debt levels and technological hyperdeflation.

On the addition in this 11th edition regarding the suicide rates pre-hyperbitcoinization, the most difficult part of this study was the discernment between death from hunger and self-induced death. A model was constructed based on a data scrape from the period ‘31-’34 on proto-internet ‘blogs’, checking for related words concerning either famine or attempts at ending one’s life. By this method I was able to reclassify about 30% of the hunger deaths as suicides, totaling over 14% of the global population within the time frame.

Some of the starvation deaths might still be considered false positives, as we know from biographical excerpts that at the end of the prolonged hyperinflation, people simply lost the will to live. Extraneous overload on the desperation-regulation neural nuclei caused many people to lose the motivation to eat. Hence, I consider the 14% to be the lower bound figure.

Concerning suicides that occurred after this period in post-hyperbitcoinization, I discovered there are two classes of Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome (BDS).

One is related to the total loss of wealth of the fiat savers. The other group consists mostly of males who have a form of Hypothalamic-Reset Resistance (HRR), i.e. they are the ECS-heavy cases who continued to endure value perception impairment even after all fiat currencies had collapsed.

The new world didn’t make sense to them, as their hypothalami didn’t adjust, leading to psychotic behavior, self-mutilation and suicide. Some scholars suggested re-immersing these cases in simulated fiat counterfeit realities, but these projects were terminated due to ethical objections and lack of funding.

I hope the reader will be delighted with this 11th edition, including the latest research and excerpts. Lest me only to bequeath thanks and praise to the Department of Adversarial Access (DAA) of New Nihon (Luna) and their continuous efforts to allocate compute to attack the archival nodes on Terra to liberate historical data and narrowcast it onto the STR. I continue to tithe the proceeds of my work into funding their operations.

Thank you,

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Toxopeus III
New Granada, Mars