The whole concept of the Mandella effect has intrigued me for a while. I do remember the announcement of Mandella’s death being announced, and my father telling me who he was. I remember Amnesty international telling us why they couldn’t intercede for him, and the whole routine. I also remember the song “Biko” which was released earlier. So the two are not conflated in my mind.
The Berenstain/Berenstein Bears. I would be willing to write this one off, except I have a unique experience that shows me the timeline is fractured. Back in the 1990s, I was doing part time work at a library, transferring their card catalogue to an online database. Mindless work, just typing titles and numbers into a machine, but it paid decent, and let me watch the classes coming in.
As it turns out, one of the teachers came up to me and asked what I was working on. At that point, it was the Berenstein/Berenstain bears part of the catalogue. She said to me “Did you know that although it is spelled “Stein” it is pronounced “Stain?” And I honestly did not know that.
All these years later, I question why that teacher would have told me that if there wasn’t a difference. For the record, she was being kind, not a know it all, it was kind of a fun bit of trivia. Now here I am decades later, with a memory that doesn’t make sense if the covers were written out to Berenstain (and wondering why, as kids, we never made more songs and puns off the “Stain” part)
What troubles me far more than this is another incident have found. Way more significant than misremembering a line in Star Wars or Casablanca. No. Most Mandella effect stuff can be tossed up to simple missed memories. People do tend to hear what they want.
You see, there was an entire concept that existed in the past, both in psychology, and in myth. The concept exists today but the definitions do not. Jung postulated that we had another personality within us – not just the anima/animus – but one that reflected all our dark desires, and things that we didn’t want to come out. It was pretty dark and spooky to think of it – all those things you stop yourself from doing unconsciously, like shoplifting, touching someone without permission, or worse, were all stored up waiting to get out.
Somehow we have lost this concept, except in literature. Star trek does it well, where Captain Kirk was split in two beaming up, one as the Good Kirk, the other one mad for power. There are plenty of other examples (The portrait of Dorian Grey) – so while the archetype is still with us, we have lost the tracts that used to explain it in detail.
In other words, a whole behavioural concept has disappeared from history. And this, in a world where we need it most of all.
I remember there was a term for it – not the shadow, because that is everything below the conscious level, but something similar. Not the Anima/Animus, because that is more sexual in nature. We are missing something vital to our psychology, and only reminded of it by faint echoes in art.
If an entire concept can be washed away, what is going on with our past?
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