The Ten Principles of the Georgia Guidestones, America's Strangest Monument

Are you familiar with the Georgia Guidestones? When someone first mentioned it to me I thought it both interesting and strange.

Located 90 miles East of Atlanta, the monument consists of a set of 10 guidelines inscribed on a stone manmade structure in eight modern languages. At the top there's also a short message inscribed in four ancient language scripts. Some people are calling it an "American Stonehenge." The slabs and capstone stand just over 19 feet tall.

The creators of this monument have chosen to remain anonymous and the man who conveyed the instructions to the Eberton Granite Finishing Company 19 miles away used a pseudonym. Obviously it cost a pretty penny to produce and install. Purportedly the group behind this had spent twenty years in planning.

The inscriptions are in the following languages:
English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian.

The ten commandments inscribed there are as follows:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

A lot of it sounds "nice" but one gets a little concerned about the first two, the first especially. I'm curious how they propose to reduce the earth's population by seven billion in order to fulfill their concept of balance with nature.

Does the second statement refer to a return to eugenicists helping create a more perfect race? Is it Brave New World inspired, as if Huxley's book were a manual, instead of a red flag?

Heres what WIRED wrote about the Guidestones:
The Georgia Guidestones may be the most enigmatic monument in the US: huge slabs of granite, inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. Only one man knows who created them—and he's not talking.

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it's hard not to think immediately of England's Stonehenge or possibly the ominous monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built in 1980, these pale gray rocks are quietly awaiting the end of the world as we know it.

You can find the rest of that story HERE.

In addition to the set of instructions on the stones, there were some very precise astro-physical instructions as regards the layout of the stones. You can read about that here at the Smithsonian magazine website.

A site called Atlas Obscura features the guidestones on this page. It highlights a few of the unique features of the stones in this paragraph:

The guidestones also serve as an astronomical calendar, and every day at noon the sun shines through a narrow hole in the structure and illuminates the day’s date on an engraving. The names of four ancient languages are inscribed on the sides near the top: Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

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Someone spent some serious time and money creating this thing. It's not hard to see how something of this nature could provoke some serious conspiracy theorizing. Now all we need is are receipts showing who paid for it. Any guesses?

Impediments to Sustained Attention

Several decades ago, while walking quietly through an old growth deciduous forest in Pennsylvania, I stopped to contemplate a chirping sparrow which was flitting from branch to branch in a young elm tree. The little bird hopped from this branch to that, chirped a few times and flitted to another.

This hopping about captured my attention so that I stood there quietly observing for the longest time. For some reason, and I know not why, it entered my head that my own thought life was like this little bird, flitting from this topic to that, bouncing about almost aimlessly, momentarily intent on this idea then leaping to another intense interest, ever flitting here and there, from this thought to another unrelated branch of thought.

What was the meaning of this? This was long before I'd ever heard the concept of ADHD, attention deficit disorder. And, the pattern has not really diminished all that much.

This Appalachian mountain memory was brought to mind by a lecture on Optimizing Brain Fitness by Professor Richard Restak in which he lists a set of impediments to sustained attention. These impediments, he stated, were:
1) Boredom
2) Emotional blunting or burn out
3) Sensory overload
4) Multitasking

The word that leapt from this list for me was multitasking, though each of the other items contribute to our inability to maintain focused attention for a sustained period of time. Prof. Restak says we are not really multitasking when we multitask, because our mind doesn't really do two things at once. We are flitting back and forth between the two.

Have you ever been to a party where you get introduced to new people but later can't recall their names? Once again it's a matter of focus. Our minds may be focused on "managing the room." Or we're distracted by everything else going on. If it is a business meeting, someone may hand you their card and later, if you wrote a note on the back, you will remember who the person was. That act of writing a note required a moment of focus.

In this lecture he also talked bout how to learn new material. Rote memorization is possible for short term quizzes, but long-term value is created when we involve ourselves more deeply in the information, by writing a paper about the topic for example.

"The most important principle for improving your memory is focusing your attention on what you are trying to learn." This is why disruptive behavior in a classroom is such a problem. It distracts other students and interferes with their ability to focus.

This morning I posted a story in response to a California decision to forbid suspensions in K thru 8th grade. In School Daze: Whats's Going On I took a walk down memory lane to my own grade school experiences in which I can't recall a single suspension taking place throughout my elementary school years in the 1950s and early 60s. Were there any students suspended for bad behavior in junior high when I moved to New Jersey? My memory may be faulty but in those days students listened to the teacher, obeyed when told to spit out their gum, and showed respect.

On one occasion my 5th grade teacher asked me (told me) to not put my pen in my mouth, which I did quite frequently evidently. I liked the taste of the metal, I think. At least that is what I said in the 500 word essay I had to write (as punishment) explaining why I kept putting my pen in my mouth.

As I look back over the meandering direction this blog post has taken, it's apparent I've lost my focus. And rather than drag you with me any further, let's turn the page.

Till next.

Extra Credit: What was your experience in elementary school? When and where?