12/07/2022
Netflix recently began showing Ancient Apocalypse, a series based on books by popular English journalist Graham Hancock, who argues that the survivors of a lost civilization of white men built the Great Pyramid, and taught ancient civilizations, conventionally believed to have constructed other ancient wonders, everything those people knew. Leftists are fuming. It’s “white supremacist,” they say. England’s Guardian goes so far as to brand it “the most dangerous show on Netflix” [Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix, by Stuart Heritage, Guardian, November 23, 2022]. Yet again, this emotional reaction is a window into the leftist mind.
Archaeologists and their friends in the media are spitting nails about my Ancient Apocalypse series on Netflix and want me cancelled … pic.twitter.com/olWw69IabD
— Graham Hancock (@Graham__Hancock) November 25, 2022
Presented by Hancock, the series is based upon his best-selling Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods, which were widely panned by mainstream scholars as “pseudohistory.” Hancock’s theory, which he has discussed at length on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast, is as follows:
A relatively high civilization existed about the time of the Last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago. This civilization built the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, which are typically dated to about 4000 B.C. These ancients also constructed the monumental Gobekli Tepe megalith site in Turkey, which almost all scholars say is 12,000 years old, and many other great monuments, including those in Central and South America.
Then, at the end of the last Ice Age, planetary calamity struck: extreme climate fluctuation called the Younger Dryas, possibly caused by a series of comet strikes, followed by the Ice Age and the megaflood recorded in numerous myths. The timing aligns perfectly with Plato’s tale of Atlantis.
During this period, Gobekli Tepe — astronomical inscriptions on which describe what happened and when it will recur — was buried to protect it. Survivors of the lost civilization spread around the world and taught primitive hunter-gatherers agriculture and important and advanced skills. Mythology records these teachers as gods. The Genesis Account, for example, reflects a simple hunter-gatherer people being “taught civilization” by these “gods.”
From the point of view of the Scientific Method, this theory is worth studying if only to prove it wrong. Yet it has “triggered” the leftists who now dominate such fields as archaeology and ancient history. Hancock’s theory, they claim, is “racist.”
This, in part, is because he takes research into Atlantis even slightly seriously. Victorian researchers in this area argued that white “magicians” travelled the world, founding civilizations. This could be why primitive people, like the Hawaiians, upon contact with whites, believed they were gods. They had a folk memory of white people teaching them agriculture or simply arriving from the sea. Hancock has played down this idea, and the relevance of Atlantis, argue his critics, and he doesn’t mention it in the Netflix Series. But he does quote ancient sources in Fingerprints of the Gods that refer to “the bearded, white-skinned deity” and “a white man of august presence.”
“Sure, the series is entertaining, I guess, and it’s cool to see many of the ancient structures he visits,” wrote Jennifer Sandin for Boing Boing [Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix’s “Ancient Apocalypse,” November 27, 2022]:
If it were just a wacky tale of Atlantis or aliens or such, it might be easy to laugh off. But the whole theory is steeped in racism and white supremacy, so it’s not just harmless entertainment.
Sandin cited Slate writer Rebecca Onion’s interview with John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas. Hoopes cleverly worked in Donald Trump just to make sure Onion knew how nefarious Hancock really is! He said:
If you research Graham Hancock and look at his books over time, as I have, one of the things that you discover about him is that he self-edits. He doesn’t use the word Atlantis now except very sparingly. He has also edited himself since 1995, when, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he came out and said that it was an ancient white civilization. He no longer says the “white” part in the series. If you pay careful attention, he does talk about “heavily bearded Quetzalcoatl” who arrives, according to myth, to give the gift of knowledge, but he doesn’t mention the other part of that trope, which all of us know about, which is that this visitor supposedly had white skin.
It’s similar to the way that Donald Trump operates. He will get to the edge of something, but he won’t say it, because he knows that his followers already know it. He can say, “I didn’t say that,” and he didn’t say it, but everyone knew what he said because it was already known, right?
[The Ancient Absurdities of Ancient Apocalypse, November 18, 2022]
University of Kansas Professor @KUHoopes is a keen critic of my Netflix docuseries Ancient Apocalypse (https://t.co/C1vnlsZBgX). Here’s my invitation to @KUHoopes to debate me face-to-face on the @joerogan Experience when I’m next back in the US — probably Spring of 2023. pic.twitter.com/OhnrXsxiON
— Graham Hancock (@Graham__Hancock) December 4, 2022
On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Hancock challenged Hoopes to debate.
Other critics argue that Ancient Apocalypse is racist because it implies that Egyptians didn’t or couldn’t build the Great Pyramid [Why Archaeologists Are Not Looking For Atlantis, by Katy Evans, IFL Science, November 28, 2022].
They argue that Hancock’s claim that some ancient societies couldn’t produce magnificent architecture is “racist.”
Thus Carl Feagans of Archaeology Review quotes Hancock and drops an “R” bomb on a relatively innocuous claim: “Think about it,” Hancock says in the program. “Could those farmers, who archaeologists tell us never built anything bigger than a shack, really have achieved all this?”
“If this isn’t a racist comment,” Feagans averred, “it’s one that is completely bigoted. And I really hope it’s unintentional” [Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse — A Review of Episodes Three and Four, November 28, 2022].
These ad hominem arguments unveil, again, how the leftist mind works. If a person reacts with extreme emotion to something, he’s probably experiencing cognitive dissonance. He secretly doubts an opinion central to his sense of positive identity, and so aggressively attacks the messenger. If not, then why use emotional insults such as “racist” and “pseudo-history”?
Leftists are high in Narcissism and Machiavellianism, but allay their negative feelings by creating a false “perfect self” and obtaining status and power over others. Leftists attain power by convincing themselves that the “mainstream” viewpoint is true, then promoting it and winning praise. That is what scientists do, by the way, as I have argued in a recent book. They are highly intelligent and conscientious, particularly high in rule-following, both of which are conformist and force them to adopt a dominant narrative [The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, by Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, 2022].
Leftists convince themselves, and everyone else, that they are “morally superior” to others to avoid dealing with the anxiety, depression, and the chronic low self-esteem with which they struggle [Mental Illness and the Left, by Emil Kirkegaard, Mankind Quarterly, 2020]. This explains their need to compel everyone to say and believe “Black Lives Matter,” for instance, or why they block British streets to fight “climate change” [Just Stop Oil activists face new penalties if they obstruct M25 motorway, by Joe Middleton, The Guardian, November 28, 2022].
One more observation about leftists helps explain their obsession with “racism” and “white supremacy,” and their corollary, irrational hatred of anything that disrupts their Narratives.
Conservatives are group-oriented and tend to identify with people who are genetically close either racially or ethnically. These are their “moral circle.” Conservatives care about and sacrifice for their moral circle more so than leftists.
That’s because leftists are generally individualists who care about getting power for themselves, though being highly anxious they do so covertly by virtue-signalling rather than by trying to obtain it in a clear fight. Their moral circle often includes genetically distant races and ethnicities. Cooperating with those outgroups allows leftists to accumulate power within their own group [Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle, by Adam Waytz, et al., Nature Communications, 2019]. Example: the Labour and Democratic parties’ zeal for importing immigrants from the Third World to augment political power.
Thus, to some degree, leftist anger about the plight of minorities makes sense, as does leftist fury over Ancient Apocalypse. If Hancock is right, then he has taken signal achievements away from “indigenous peoples” such as the Aztecs and Egyptians.
But at least these serious academics aren’t yet claiming the Egyptians were blacks!
Anyway, even if Hancock is wrong, his challenge to archaeological orthodoxy provokes the leftist gatekeepers of that discipline because he suggests their conventional Narrative is wrong.
The Guardian asks: "why has this been allowed?" Because some still believe in free speech even for questionable history? Interesting the first impulse of the Guardian writer seems to be to ban it because it is "the most dangerous show on Netflix". Hmmmm. https://t.co/3YTjx0A1wD
— Mike Yardley (@YardleyShooting) November 29, 2022
In daring to challenge that narrative, Hancock reminds leftists of what cowards they are. And insomuch as they’ve worked hard for their academic credentials — they’ve “followed the rules,” as conscientious scientists do — they’re furious that an “outsider” who has not followed the rules receives the fame they believe they deserve.
That is why Ancient Apocalypse has upset them. As for Hancock and his theories, about which I am certainly unconvinced: Instead of simply dismissing him as a “racist,” “white supremacist,” and “pseudoarchaeologist,” let’s just be open-minded.
Edward Dutton (email him | Tweet him) is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, Łódź, Poland. You can see him on his Jolly Heretic video channels on YouTube and Bitchute. His books are available on his home page here.
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