Imagine you are an untouched tribesman somewhere in the Amazon in 2020. You have heard of the marvels of the modern world – along with its evils – but you have never seen this world and nobody you know has ever seen a car. Then a road is built for a mine that passes near enough to your village that you can see in the distance a shiny 2020 Jeep Wrangler drive by on the dirt road. The Jeep kicks up its dust and on down the road it goes. You don’t know where it came from. You don’t know where it’s going really. You have never seen anything like it. You tell people what you saw – or try to – but you don’t really know what you saw in reality because it’s beyond technology you have ever seen. You speculate on how it works, how it was made, but you mostly get called crazy, it doesn’t matter, or you can’t know, and start to wonder yourself if you’re crazy and if you really saw what you think you saw. Then it keeps happening. More and more cars drive by on the road and somehow others don’t see them. You’re not sure how others don’t see them, but it seems apparent they either cannot or do not want to see them and it’s no good telling people about it. It interrupts their happy lives in the tribe.
Eventually there are so many you stop wondering how somebody makes just one of those shiny modern things you are seeing and you realize there must be somebody making hundreds or thousands of them. Somehow hundreds or thousands make more sense than just one because it means they must be very valuable somehow to an entire society you have never seen and all the doubts you have about the existence of cars crumble because it is apparent that this society has teams of people to solve the complexities of building these impossible, incomprehensible machines.
(Henry Ford did not invent the car, he invented the assembly line.)
One of the shiniest and most beautiful of the cars you see, your favorite, is so beautiful it really stretches your imagination that these machines can be made by people. How could something so complex and beautiful be made by humans? You strain to see the details of it and you can barely make out the markings on the metal plate on the back and it says “TB-12”.
It’s the last one you really make an effort to see because it’s just so beautiful you want to believe God made it. There are many other reasons you stop looking but you can’t count the reasons, can’t count the questions you have anymore, fear is a factor, concern the modern mine will swallow up your tribe’s land, so many factors, but you also seem somehow sure you never want to ride in a car, cannot join this car-making society, but you do want to know what the markings mean, how many other markings like that there are, then you wonder if curiosity kills the cat and you just stop and continue living, happy to be alive and well.
If I feel like I wrote something that has been written before, is that bad because it’s unoriginal? Or is it good because everything worth writing has been written anyway so it’s possible it was worth writing again?
This tribal observer would definitely be said to be at an industrial observation post, and it’s interesting to imagine that, but I did not write this thinking of an industrial observation post.
