It apears it only goes to back to the 19th century, and may be connected with the case of Phineas Gage, who miraculously survived massive brain damage.
Basically, it seems that we are ruled by a crazy cult.
What I claim is, that the cerebellum is a statistical machine, which is fundamentally limited by the fact that it gets overwhelmed by spurious correlations once it gets too powerful, and it begins to hallucinate.
Mammals evolved the neocoretex, a data reduction machine, which resolves this problem by reducing a large amount of inputs into a much smaller number of values that carry all the information. When the cerebellum acts only in this latent space, and is thus restricted by what can be represented within this latent space, it can be powerful, and avoid hallucination.
The more "counterintuitive" situations the creature has to deal with, the bigger neocortex/cerebellum ratio it needs to avoid hallucinating.
Thus when a person's neocortex gets damaged, they become what may seem like super smart, they make insane conclusions and appear to be able to understand anything, but none of it is actually real, and they are just insane.
What they seem to believe (which is not shared publicly, because it would get "misinterpreted, but allows to be acknowledged internally) is that as animals got too intelligent they failed to breed, but intelligence is still good for not dying. And the neocortex evolved to keep us dumb so that we could breed, and only lift its veil in times of dire need, so that we could use our intelligence to survive. And so, they concluded that they can create a supersmart race by destroying our neocortexes with various means, so that we can be smart all the time, not only in emergencies, and gigantic progress would result.
In reality, they made most people insane.