Something happened to severely damage the planet surface – it could have been a close pass by a comet or large asteroid, a meteor impact, or as has been suggested by others, the arrival of the moon and its entrapment in orbit around the Earth. As this best describes what happened to our ancestors, and thus ourselves, I will use it for this explanation while leaving an open mind when further information becomes available.
Some time before impact we would have noticed it was on its way, a light in the night sky getting slowly bigger as it approached, until it was concluded that impact was unavoidable. At this point a once ordered and highly functional people would have gone into survival mode as they explored every variant of fight or flight. Options included building shelters for the few to guarantee the survival of the species, praying to God, bugging out to caves and other places where people thought they might survive and simple dissociation – ignoring what is about to happen and just getting on with life.
As the day came closer most of the shelters were filled with the privileged similar to what was planned in the event of a nuclear war. The people behind one of the shelters realized at the last minute how futile this was, rounded up a few young women as surrogate mothers and placed them in the shelter with all of the small children they had resources for.
Then the moon arrived and as it bashed and crashed it’s way around the planet slowly getting locked into it’s orbit it set fire to or destroyed most things in it’s path. The smoke and dust clouds would have darkened the sky for some years similar to a nuclear winter. Very few people survived, all of them left mentally scarred and stuck permanently in survivor mode as there was no one who could explain what had happened or reassure them that there was no longer a threat.
Because the whole population was stuck in survivor mode, instead of working out what had happened and rebuilding their lives, most took their new lives as a sign from one god or other that this was the way they must now live.
As luck would have it, the shelter with the children survived and even though their technology eventually failed they retained suppressed memories of that technology which has slowly re developed. They also left one legacy that we could do without. The young women were riddled with guilt for what had happened, even though they had done nothing wrong. Unable to tell the children what had happened, they invented a variant of the “God has punished us” myth and left as their suppressed psychological legacy two options. Build a time machine and go back in time, work out what went wrong, and fix it or kill us all and let God sort it out. We can’t build a time machine!
So every day we are driven subconsciously to poison the air, water and soil we need to survive, while others plot to start world wars and destroy us that way. It really is time to leave survivor mode, we probably can’t survive it much longer.