They didn’t seem terribly useful, compared to other long projects.
- Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
- Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
- Unite humanity with a living new language.
- Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
- Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
- Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
- Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
- Balance personal rights with social duties.
- Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
- Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.
Basically, a freethinker version of the Ten Commandments tablets.
The listed weights and dimensions are the most useful things to me. Knowing the approximate weight of a kilogram and length of a meter would be incredibly useful when trying to recreate things you find in records
Openly advocating genocide and eugenics? Yeah, definitely not what I would call useful
If you read “Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity” as eugenics and genocide, I think you might be jumping the gun a bit based on personal biases. Population bottlenecks require you to be very careful about species-wide gene pools. In a population of 10,000, you don’t want Cletus reproducing with his first cousin.
Pretty sure it was
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
You can’t maintain a population like that without birth restrictions, slaughter, or restricting resources. And this is humanity we’re talking about. The ruling class/ethnicity will prioritize their own making genocide an all but certain outcome.
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birth restrictions,
I already covered that. Trying to keep people from reproducing on a national scale doesn’t work without draconian policing of people’s lives, sterilization, etc.
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I think you’re intentionally missing the point. Yeah, condoms are fine. The government mandating when you can and cannot use condoms in order to enforce an arbitrary population number is not as fine.
Sure, fuck it. Condoms are draconian. You’re not clearly worth the effort.
It’s not the mechanic and that you’re focusing on that tells me you aren’t reading. Choosing who gets to breed is a huge vector for abuse and genocide.
People fuck.
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Yeah, but the other option is humanity grows to reach an industrial carrying capacity which would be horrific for the environment, and people. The average person would live at the poverty level of a medieval peasant in the polluted environment of industrial slums. There would also be mass famines every couple decades like back under the agricultural carrying capacity, but these would kill billions instead of hundreds of thousands. Mandatory birth control sucks but it beats the suffering caused by rampant population growth.
Yes. This is what happens with human societies without technology. This also happens in animal populations. As we are seeing now, when a society reaches a certain level of technology and medical care that ensures a very high infant survival rate, population growth tapers off and can stagnate. That’s the way you prevent overpopulation.
The idea we can restrict breeding when we’ve regressed in technology is just a way to ensure genocide through sterilization, killing infants, punishing parents, and the other ways we’ve seen humans try this very thing. It doesn’t work and leads to ethnic cleansing and terrible abuse by the elite classes. It’s like suggesting we use eugenics: it doesn’t work.
To be fair, the reason we haven’t overpopulated the shit out of the planet is because we lack the time and resources to raise kids. In the event that people had enough time and money to raise families, we’d probably cross replacement rates once more.
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I’m gonna have to go digging for the source, I’ll edit it once I find it. The creator of the guide stones wanted his identity protected but people found out who he was. Dudes real big into eugenics, it’s 100% telling people to do Eugenics and not at all concerned with population bottlenecks
Edit: could’ve sworn I’d read an article about it but it was apparently this episode of last week tonight.
TL;DW: it’s not 100% confirmed who the person that commissioned the guide stones is but it’s likely Dr. Herbert Kirsten, a man who was very outspoken in his support.for David Duke.
The only way you get a “population bottleneck” of 500 million from our current 8 billion is genocide. Even the world population in 1980 when these were erected was 4.5 billion. Still would have required genocide.
“Guiding reproduction” is definitely a euphemism for eugenics. Don’t be naive.
Or nuclear near-annihilation, which was a definite concern when these were erected. Or a pandemic.
That’s the part everybody seems to be glossing over. These stones were supposed to be read by a burgeoning society post apocalypse, not our current world with 8 billion people. The non-existent world these stones speaks to would contain presumably less than the 500,000,000 people its author states is the maximum, and acts as a warning along the lines of ‘don’t destroy the Earth’s environment like we did, that’s what lead to our downfall, too many people’. Not to say that take is correct or not, just what I thought when reading about the stones the first time. Seems like environmentally political rhetoric to me.
Imagine believing in a world where 90% of the human population is annihilated by some calamity, and the survivors have the psychological capacity to focus on anything other than basic survival and repopulation.
Utopian fantasyland. Believing things like this requires deliberate ignorance of the nature of human beings and pretty much all of human history. It’s magical thinking
Especially since these were put up in the 1980s.
If it were 20-30 years earlier, you’d write it off as Cold War/MAD Nuclear doomerism combined with that very particular breed of American fascism that inspired the Strangelove/Fallout aesthetic. People believing they could put the “best and brightest” down in bunkers to recreate an even better world after the inevitable collapse, without all those “undesirable” cultural elements polluting things.
But this was 1980. The Cold War was clearly ending. CFCs were still little-known as a global threat. The fossil fuel companies were still VERY effectively hiding the reality of climate change from the general public. The recession wasn’t clearly visible yet. There was no reason to be a doomer. That was a great time to be an optimist.
I’ll take nature over 7.5 billion people including myself. What we’ve done to this planet is shameful and never should have gotten to this point.
We are nature.
Were the cyanobacteria responsible for the oxygen crisis guilty? Plants contributed to the first of the five major recognized extinction events: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-arrival-of-tree-roots-may-have-triggered-mass-extinctions-in-the-ocean
The first major difference with us is that we’re capable of being aware of how our presence changes the environment, and therefore of changing our behavior. So I think you think both too highly and not well enough of us.
Bacteria don’t have the capability to be aware of what they were doing. Neither do plants. People do. That’s all that matters.
Yes, that’s my entire point. We have the capacity to change what we’re doing and we are. I’m sorry it’s not happening fast enough to satisfy you, but it is happening
Yeah that’s eugenics, guy. Eugenics loves dictating who can and cannot reproduce based on potential genetic factors passed to their offspring. Kind of the cornerstone.
The guy who built the Guidestones was very likely a KKK fan. Doesn’t deserve much benefit of the doubt.
So it’s eugenics to say that incest is bad?
Most incest involves rape. Prohibitions are sensible.
Bans on breeding based on a belief of genetic inferiority of potential offspring is eugenics. Don’t do that.
2 week old post, dude.
Til demonstrable facts are merely “beliefs” now. I don’t care how old the post is, your idiocy is timeless.
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Are you legitimately saying eugenics is something OTHER than controlling who can breed based on belief of genetic superiority/inferiority of their offspring?
Time to accept that you are a little bit of a eugenicist. I wonder what other people you think should be banned from having kids because of possible hereditary issues? I bet a lot of your beliefs are based on pretty flimsy knowledge of those factors, which is always how it is with eugenicists.
You could argue the opposite, genocide would be guiding reproduction away from diversity.
Conspiracists attributed nefarious intent on these stones. I learned about them from a podcast that studies conspiratorial thinking. I didn’t realize they’d been destroyed. I kinda think I heard that ep after the time when they were bombed, so maybe that was mentioned and I didn’t internalize it.
Heads-up: conspiracy people are potentially dangerous. They blew up these stones that were probably pretty trivial / harmless. They have shot people for perceived great-replacement bullshit (synagogs). This shit isn’t just amusing and stupid. They’re irrational and they can project and cause harm.
An entertaining watch on the Guidestones prior to its destruction: https://youtu.be/AEa3sK1iZxc
The supposed creator was a fan of David Duke of the KKK…
Why was it destroyed?
A politician said they were satanic. So someone bombed them. People are crazy.
Post-2020 republican doomerism
Source: I live nearby
It was bombed, as some people in our society deemed it “satanic”.
These had their version of the Ten Commandments in eight languages. I suppose it was bombed because mah gud.
If they were meant to survive nuclear apocalypse, then why did one small non-nuclear bomb bring them down? You’d think they should be better constructed or protected or something.
Elbert County, Georgia. A county with about 20k people in it.
They didn’t need to withstand a direct hit. Just the fallout/nuclear winter that would kill most of humanity.
I see. I guess odds were pretty low that a nuclear bomb would lay waste to a rural town.
As an aside, I wonder why they used so many languages if the nuclear winter survivors would have been rural Georgians like the ones who built the monument. I don’t imagine a Russian survivor would ever find themself in the American Deep South without functional airplanes and such.
The extra languages are probably to help it act as a sort of rosseta stone to help future archeologists.
They were quite likely put up by folks that believed the same wack job shit as those that destroyed them.
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I have mixed feelings on this monument. The parts recommending eugenics is not cool, but some of the messages like living with nature and valuing truth are important. Sadly, it was probably the encouraging of universalism, tempering with reason, and the living with nature that the religious terrorists took issue with.
I can’t say I morn the loss of the monument entirely, but the fact a more or less secular monument was destroyed for religious reasons kinda feels haunting. Kinda reminds me of the Taliban destroying the ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.
From what I’ve read on Wikipedia, this monument was poorly thought-out, but very well designed and rather badly executed. No major loss, in that case.
Good riddance for probably wrong reasons. Shame they plan to rebuild this crap. Guidestones for thinly veiled eugenics and genocide, they were. Blergh.
Are they rebuilding them? I live somewhat nearby and last I heard there were no plans to rebuild the stones. Do you have a link to that?
In late July 2022, Elberton Mayor Daniel Graves said the town planned to rebuild the monument exactly as it was, adding "We’re just getting geared up and excited about rebuilding them.
From the linked Wikipedia article.
Oh wow can’t believe I hadn’t heard about that, thanks!
