Georgia Guidestones are no more

If you've been around skeptical circles for a while, you'll have no doubt heard of the Georgia Guidestones - a granite monument that was constructed back in 1980 in a rural area in the US state of Georgia.

They consist of 4 upright slabs of granite, weighing 20 tons each, and a central pillar with a slab resting on top. They have a set of “instructions” for the future, written in eight different languages (English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, Hebrew). The “instructions” were:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature.

Depending on how you read them, most of these sound pretty reasonable, but many people put more nefarious interpretations on them.

The creator of the stones was kept secret, using the pseudonym “R. C. Christian”. At the time, the creator said he wanted to make something similar to Stonehenge in the UK but with a clearer message. This was achieved by both the instructions for humanity, and the fact that the stones were astronomically aligned - they used a shaft of light to tell the day of the year at midday, were aligned with the sun at equinoxes (equal day and night) and solstices (longest day/night), had a hole through which the north star could be seen, and was aligned with the limits of the moon's cycle.

There have been several theories people have floated about these monuments:

One recent one is that they are related to a conspiracy called “The Great Reset”, which is based on a World Economic Forum document that talks about how the pandemic is a good opportunity to reflect on what we need to do to ensure our continued survival - things like finance, climate change, population increase, resources, etc. The conspiracy theorists have morphed this sensible effort into something evil, and claim that its objective is to reduce the population - and that the COVID pandemic, as well as other government policies around the world, are attempts to reduce the population.

The Georgia Guidestones have been roped into this conspiracy because of their first precept - to maintain the population at below 500 million. The conspiracy quotes this as a target that governments around the world are aiming for. However, the more rational explanation for this can be found on Wikipedia. As the stones were created in the 1980s during the cold war (when the population was a little over 4 billion people), the creator was apparently influenced by cold war thinking, with the threat of global nuclear war and its devastating consequences looming over everyone. The stones were therefore created based on the thought that it was likely that most of the world's population would be killed off during nuclear war, and that whoever remained would both be fewer than 500 million people, and that they would have lost a lot of the knowledge and expertise that we have gained. Hence the (overly simplistic) effort to make the stones useful as an astronomical tool (possibly taking the idea of being bombed “back to the stone age” too literally), and the instruction that the population should be “maintained” at below 500 million, rather than that it should be “reduced” to below 500 million and maintained there.

There's also been a claim that the guidestones are satanic, and this one seems to have become popular over the years. A local religious leader said at the unveiling in 1980 that the monument was “for sun worshipers, for cult worship and for devil worship”. Kandiss Taylor, who ran for state governor (and lost) and who's famous in America for driving around in a campaign bus with the slogan “Jesus, Guns, Babies” on the side, called them satanic and made a promise that she'd remove them. Mark Dice, a popular YouTube conspiracy theorist, said that the stones had a “deep Satanic origin” and that they should be “smashed into a million pieces, and then the rubble used for a construction project”.

Back in 2015, a documentary Dark Clouds Over Elberton: The True Story of the Georgia Guidestones, recently published to YouTube purported to expose the identity of R.C. Christian as a local doctor - Herbert Hinzie Kersten. The name Kersten is a German variant of Christian, so perhaps that makes sense. Kersten had a reputation amongst the local community for his views about population control, with white supremacist and eugenic undertones.

Over the years, the guidestones have been subject to repeated vandalism, including a lot of graffiti. The stones were eventually protected by barbed wire (also to prevent cattle from using them as a scratching post!) and security cameras.

On the 6th of July, around 4am (caught on the security cameras), somebody detonated explosives under the Swahili/Hindi stone, destroying it. And because the monument had the large slab resting on the upright slabs, the remains were deemed dangerous, at risk of collapse. And so, the whole monument has been dismantled.

A smaller stone at the site had an inscription alluding to a time capsule buried beneath the stones, though the inscription was unfinished:

Placed six feet [1.83 m] below this spot

On

To be opened on

As the stones were being dismantled, the crew dug down 6 feet beneath them in search of the time capsule. Alas, it wasn't found. Perhaps they didn't look well enough, or (probably) it was never buried (as the inscription was never updated) - I guess we'll never know.