Natural Human Consciousness

Once you start to doubt "progress" you start to see history in an upside-down fashion compared to most.

Some "event" took place around 2000 BC that sent humanity down the road of technological advancement and nature destruction. Something changed human consciousness.

It's "recorded" at least in mythological or fictional form in the epic of Gilgamesh. The character "Enkidu" leaves the wilderness and enters the city through an initiation. Prior to the initiation, the animals don't fear him. After, they do. I think that story encodes some actual historical "event". It didn't happen in a day, but there was a transition from natural life, and living in the natural order to an attempted separation.

That separation has reached an extreme, now. As many commentators have pointed out, that point of view is even expressed in the bible, which is a set of stories that were accumulated after 2000 BC.

For example in Genesis:

9:1  And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

9:2  And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

9:3  Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

The "God" of the bible is the new mode of consciousness. That is a new way of thinking. There's a variety of speculative explanations of its origin. I think it's likely that increased population density reinforced a sort of mass delusion, or mind virus of language. The new mode of consciousness is inextricably bound to writing and speech.

Once there is a sufficiently dense population a "shared model" of reality becomes at least as valuable as experience of reality. The shared model is based on simplifications of the natural world--the city itself is a simplification of natural geometry. The simplification is based on the low-bit-rate and low-fidelity of writing. The city streets become a grid, for example. Farm fields become grids and monoculture.

An individual's experience can be extremely detailed and rich, but the group experience is filtered through stupid, addled language.

Eventually the group consciousness came to be the individual's consciousness. It buried the prior mode of thinking completely.