The Mandela Effect

Ch. 33

 "The history of Western civilization has been about power," T explains, "getting it and keeping it. It's strange that homo sapiens developed 800,000 years ago, but suddenly, about 5,000 years ago, we spontaneously developed societies and power structures – kings and serfs – and it happened at several places on the globe at once: Egypt, India, China, and in the Americas.

"At all these locations, civilization sprung up near the equator. Great empires rose. As time passed the power centers moved and changed, and eventually the empires fell only to be replaced by new ones.

"Now this could easily be chalked up to humanity and the desires of individual men; but I think its more than that. I don't know what happened in the Indus River valley, or in China, or in the Americas; I haven't done the research to track it. But looking into the Mandela Effect led me to the Bildaberg Group. And Bildaberg led me to this."

"What is," Jon asks, "this?"

"This is the rift," T says matter-of-factly.

Jon takes another sip from his water.

"So, once I heard the story of Bildaberg," T continues, "I thought it was weird that they would pick a tiny town in the Netherlands to meet. Sure, there is the idea of privacy. But there are luxury resorts all over the world. These are men and women to whom money is no object. So why the Netherlands.

"Moreover, although Europe was recovering in the early 1950s from the decimation of war, I just imagine that there were better places they could have gone. Places more adapt at hosting such an event. They could buy an island! They could rent out an entire African village. Why the Netherlands?

"Then, it occurred to me," T says wisely, "it wasn't that they choose Bildaberg. It was that they had to go to Bildaberg. Something was there that brought them there. Not the other way around. And if that something was important enough to bring the richest, most powerful people in the world; it had to be big.

"That idea sent me down another rabbit hole: trying to figure out what the something was. The group is so secretive that there is no mention of most of what they do. If this was their most closely guarded secret, it wasn't likely that I'd find anything about it. So, I needed another way to decipher it.

"It wasn't even me who found the first breadcrumb. It was a friend of mine, back when I still had those."

T shakes his head, laughing at the sentiment.

"I was going over this crazy theory I had with a friend, one of the last who would still listen to me, over a pint. She said, 'Well of course it was the Netherlands.' I didn't understand how it was so clear to her. She clarified, 'Well maybe not of course, but it was going to be somewhere north and west.'

"I didn't understand what she meant, and it turned out she was joking. She was remembering from history that these great meetings between leaders had occurred at Westfalia and Pottsdam. And with the growing influence of the US, it would just keep moving north and west. Not much north and west left, so why not the Netherlands.

"I blew off the comment at first. I think she was making fun of me anyway. But, there was a kernel of an idea there; the start of an explanation. I started tracing powerful empires, especially ones that appeared suddenly.

"The easiest place to start was with Nazi Germany itself. Broken after WWI, it went from the poorest nation in the West to the second, or arguably the first, most powerful in just a few short years. That got me thinking about other older Empires. Sure, there were some notable ones; but in the west, the Goliath is the Roman Empire; before them, the Greeks; before them, the Macedonians. Then, you have to go back to the Egyptians.

"In each case, the nation found the power to control the known world. But how did they do that?

"I went all the way back to the beginning: the Egyptians of the Upper Nile. I traced through history the center of power, trying to make a concise line that connected the Egyptian capital with Bildaberg."

T points to the map on the wall with the red string and pushpins.

"And I got this. A slowly moving, sometimes jumping, center of power that can be traced from the very beginning of civilization until this year."

"Ok," Jon speaks finally, "but you called it a rift. What is the rift?"