Despite our progress in technology, we are no longer capable of some things that we once were.  There’s the Moon, unreachable.

Even  more striking are the rapid collapse in social technologies.  We are living in rags and claiming we are the summit of civilization.

Anthropic Evidence You are Living in a Post-Apocalyptic SciFi Story

The more I think about it, the stronger my suspicion that my tribe might be like a band of scavengers that survived some cataclysm ca. 1960, and now regard any enduring antediluvian social institutions with bewilderment and loathing.

The disaster happened long ago.  You and your grubby clan live on what a man of the old time would have recognized as a type of suspension bridge.  To  you it is just home.

Among you there is a certain movement against the cables overhead.  They are unaesthetic, they block the view, they are in the way of a watchtower the chief would like to build.  And look at all that metal!  Think of all the progress we would be able to achieve with it.

A couple of folks have suggested that the cables might be holding the bridge up.  Nonsense!  The cables run up from the ground, not down.  But worse, such talk calls into question the stability and centrality of the surface where the village lives.  Such talk is wicked.  The agitation to cut the cables has redoubled, just to stick it to those stodgy old deniers.

Your fellow villagers say that the bridge is so far beyond anyone’s ability to make that it is absurd to think it is man-made and could fail; that if it is manmade it is so advanced no one could possibly understand what it is for or how it works; and, besides, if it is manmade, the villagers can fix any problems and probably make improvements.