I stumbled onto one of the most terrifying and beautiful theories I've ever heard. It's called the "Bicameral Mind."
The psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed something that rewires your brain: what if human beings, as recently as the builders of the pyramids and the heroes of the Iliad, weren't "conscious" like we are? They didn't have an inner self, making choices. Instead, one half of their brain literally spoke to the other in the voice of a god or a king, and the other half listened and obeyed.
Think about it. Every ancient civilization was run by the direct, auditory commands of gods. Those weren't metaphors. They heard them. That's how you coordinate thousands of people to move mountains of stone not with complex logistics, but because the king heard a command from his god, and every worker heard their own internal god-voice telling them to obey. Society was a chorus of hallucinations.
Then, around the time of the great Bronze Age collapses, everything fell apart. The stress broke the system. The voices… stopped. Humanity experienced this as the gods abandoning the world. In that sudden, deafening silence, we had to invent a new way to be. We had to learn to think instead of listen. We built an internal narrator this thing we now call consciousness, the sense of a "self," our own inner voice we control….
We aren't the pinnacle of evolution. We are the orphans of a louder, stranger mind. The voices of the gods weren't fiction. They were us, talking to ourselves before we knew who "we" were. And all of modern history our art, our anxiety, our search for meaning is just us trying to live in the quiet aftermath.
by Friendly-Seesaw-5742