Our Gemara on Amud Aleph enumerates which statues have indications of idolatry and must be destroyed:

 Any statue holding a staff, bird, or orb symbolizes dominion, indicating it is designated for idolatry.

 The Gemara explains that each item reflects the statue’s supposed divinity, signifying its rule over the world: A staff symbolizes dominion, as the idol rules the entire world, like one rules an animal with a staff. A bird symbolizes dominion, as the idol grasps the entire world, as one grasps a bird in hand. An orb symbolizes dominion, as the idol grasps the entire world, as one grasps a ball in hand.

Tosafos notes that the orb represents the world because it is round and cites a Yerushalmi stating that Alexander the Great ascended (presumably in a vision) and saw the world as a globe, indicating his future dominion.

The Zohar (Vayikra 138) also describes the world’s hierarchy and its spherical nature, noting time zones:

In the Book of Rab Hamnuna the Elder, it is explained that the inhabited world is circular like a ball, with some above and some below… There is a part where it is light when another is dark, so some have night while others have day. There is also a place where it is always day, with no night save for a short time. This account, found in the books of the ancients and the Book of Adam, is confirmed by Scripture: “I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, wonderful are thy works” (Ps. 139:15), and “O Lord, how manifold are thy works” (Ps. 104:24).

The Greeks, in the 3rd century BC, established the Earth’s roughly spherical shape as a physical fact and calculated its circumference (Cormack, Lesley B. (2015), “That before Columbus, geographers and other educated people knew the Earth was flat,” in Numbers, Ronald L.; Kampourakis, Kostas (eds.), Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science, Harvard University Press, pp. 16–24).

Yet, curiously, if your education was like mine, based on a standard curriculum, it emphasized that people in Christopher Columbus’s time believed the Earth was flat. Columbus was portrayed as a maverick adventurer-scientist-explorer who risked sailing uncharted seas, where others believed he would fall off the edge. This mythology about Columbus was widespread across the Western world (see https://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/10/er_evidence_town_hall/campus.html).

Why did this myth persist, and what are its origins? Common folk, uneducated, likely believed the ocean ended somewhere and feared traveling beyond those limits. It’s logical that Columbus faced superstitious ideas when convincing Ferdinand and Isabella to fund his trip. Yet, if you’re ready to be “red-pilled,” consider a subversive idea.

Recent gaslighting—Covid, CRT, transgenderism, campus propaganda, and wokeness—has revealed education as an indoctrination tool. This may have been happening longer, by insidious forces, only now exposed as they overplayed their hand. Psychologically and sociologically, a conspiracy need not involve maniacal villains plotting world control. It can be an unconscious collusion of interests. There is a bias to educate young people to view ancients as primitive, ignorant fools, fostering a superior attitude that discounts religion and tradition.

While ancients lacked our technology, they were keen, intuitive observers. Their astronomy was astounding without telescopes, and their medical traditions respected digestion’s impact on the body. They knew bad food by gut feeling, not needing Prilosec or statins, and understood stable relationships or nature walks regulated moods, not antidepressants. They literally trusted their guts.

The educational bias sees ancients as foolish and superstitious. Another myth is the “noble savage”—a simple tribesman in a loincloth, dimwitted yet serene. This is exaggerated nonsense. Given modern weapons, many ancients would have hunted animals to extinction or waged savage warfare, no better or worse than today. By casting them as simple yet harmonious, denying their intellectual depth and morality, we discount valuable traditions and wisdom.

Another subtle indoctrination is the fetishized fascination with dinosaurs. In my childhood, we played with action figures, Lego, and farm animals. By the 1980s, dinosaurs became a craze—on cereal boxes, in movies, and children’s shows. Was this coincidental, or did a mastermind push dinosaurs as fact, promoting evolution, which many religious people view as contrary to the creation narrative?

Some may think I’m paranoid with a conspiracy-laden imagination. Perhaps, but consider this: in history, nearly every scientific or technological discovery usable as a weapon—steel for swords, gunpowder for bullets, airplanes for bombs, rockets for V2s, nuclear power for doomsday—was weaponized. Chemical and biological weapons, though illegal, have been developed. Why would psychological theories, a new technology, be exempt? Do you think entities creating nuclear weapons would hesitate to manipulate the human psyche? As psychology uncovered unconscious levers of thought and motivation, nefarious actors likely exploited and weaponized them.

This is scary, but don’t worry—you’ve been conditioned to deny and forget it. Soon, you’ll return to Candy Crush or Instagram. And don’t forget to mask, vaccinate early and often, because that’s surely better than eating unprocessed food and exercising.