The Key (originally self-published in 2001; I quote from that edition) is Whitley Strieber's account of his conversation with a mysterious man he met in Toronto on June 6, 1998. Near the beginning of their conversation (p. 13), the man -- given by Strieber the rather grandiose title Master of the Key -- says that the Holocaust was the most important event of the last 2,000 years. When Strieber seems incredulous, he elaborates.
You were meant to have acquired the ability to leave the planet by now. But you are still trapped here. You may be irretrievably lost. This is of absolutely fundamental importance, because the earth will soon be unable to support you, and yet you will not be able to leave. This is because of the Holocaust. The destruction of six million may well lead to the destruction of six billion. So it is the most important event, by far, of the age.Why has the Holocaust prevented us from leaving the planet?The Holocaust reduced the intelligence of the human species by killing too many of its most intellectually competent members. It is why you are still using jets seventy-five years after their invention. The understanding of gravity is denied you because of the absence of the child of a murdered Jewish couple. This child would have unlocked the secret of gravity. But he was not born.You're saying that the catastrophe we're facing now -- too many people and no ability to leave the planet -- is punishment for the Holocaust?What is happening is consequence, not punishment. The Holocaust was triggered when economic disorder combined among the Germans with a feeling of being trapped due to over-population. The resultant explosion drove the German tribe to lash out against other tribes, especially the one that lived in its midst. Unfortunately, they murdered the bearers of the intellectually strongest genes possessed by your species.
I note in passing the emphasis on sixes here -- "The destruction of six million may well lead to the destruction of six billion," in a message delivered on the sixth day of the sixth month of 1998, which is 666 times three -- but the main thing I am interested in is what it implies about time and contingency.
On the one hand, there is a strong indication that human life is highly predictable. The child referred to was, it seems, fated to unlock the secret of gravity, just as Oedipus was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Had he been born, he would have gone through his life, making countless choices and thus unpredictably following one of an enormous number of possible life paths -- but still all roads, or at least the vast majority of them, would lead to his becoming a physicist and solving the riddle of gravity.
On the other hand, this otherwise inevitable fate was averted when the unborn physicist's parents were murdered by the Nazis -- which was apparently not a foreseeable event, since it apparently threw a wrench in the works and stymied the plans of whoever it was that had "meant" for us to expand off-planet by the end of the 20th century. This is strange, because one would have thought that large-scale sociopolitical developments would be much more predictable than the actions of any particular individual, especially those of a world-historical genius. There is no indication at all that Hitler was some unforeseeable "Mule" figure; on the contrary, the Master goes on to explain how the Holocaust, rather than being attributable to any person's act of free will, "was triggered" by economic and demographic factors and thus should -- one would have thought -- have been broadly predictable. How could the same predictive techniques accurately foresee the specific future scientific discoveries of a particular unborn Jew and yet fail to foresee the Holocaust?
But perhaps the expectation that a Jew would solve the mystery of gravity was not as personal as I have been assuming. After all, the Master does seem to say that it was the Holocaust as a whole -- not the death of one particular couple -- that has prevented us from leaving the planet, and that this was because it "reduced the intelligence of the human species by killing too many of its most intellectually competent members." Perhaps, given a critical mass of highly intelligent Ashkenazim in a highly developed country like Germany, one or another of them was bound to figure out gravity -- but then the Nazis went and essentially wiped out that whole population.
Where do any of these predictions come from, anyway? Elsewhere in the conversation, the Master that he and others like him have the ability to "exit the time stream" and see past, present, and future as a single "present" object. However, the fact that they are able to enter and exit the time stream -- that is, to change -- means that they are not truly atemporal but live and move in a Dunnean meta-time. And if their predictions are based on literally seeing a future that (from their meta-temporal perspective) already exists, the only way for those predictions to fail is for the future to literally be changed, as I discuss in my post "Changing the future and changing the past."
