What an amazing essay! Thank you for this. I rarely comment on anything but felt the need here.
This is one of the most concise and open-eyed writings about our current myths and the likely times coming our way I have read so far. I will save this and come back to it regularly to fully internalise (much like Daniel Quinn’s and Tom Murphy’s work - who both shook my worldview and sent me on a new path I’m still in the early stages of discovery).
I do not yet know what my purpose is in this life, but thanks to writers with profound wisdom like you and many others (Daniel Firth Griffith and Robin Wall Kimmerer come to mind immediately) I can start asking the land what it needs of me and trying to listen for an answer. I know it will take a long time for me to decolonise my mind and be able to hear any answer, but I feel I have overcome the biggest hurdle: recognition that the land, the community of life, our great Mother Earth have spirit, awareness and agency, which we all are part of ❤️🌳🌏🙌
Thank you so much for your kind words, Florian. Feedback like this means so much to me, and I'm so glad that my writing resonates. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and without people like Daniel Quinn and Robin Wall Kimmerer (and sooo many others) I would have barely started figuring out what's really going wrong right now.
I remember very well how profoundly Daniel Quinn (and a few consequent ethnographies about hunter-gatherers) changed my life, and how I looked at every single thing in a different light after I read his works and started including the indigenous perspective. Everything suddenly fell into place, everything made sense!
I wish you the best for your journey, from the bottom of my heart. Not much can go wrong once you're traveling in the right direction.
Brilliant! Fittingly, I just finished reading "My Ishmael".
From the article linked with the photo of the Mbuti: "One of the paintings looks like a series of molecular structures. Mangase explains that it is their view of the sky through the canopies of trees. They see pockets of light peeking through the treetops, with this geometric representation reflected in their designs. According to researchers, the paintings show how the Mbuti perceive the forest as spiritual and symbolic to their cultural existence." COOL!
There are many forms of democracy, and ours is pretty much set up to ensure there is a permanent elite class of professional politicians to choose from. Think about it, Joe plumber doesn’t have the time or money to run for office, he’s too busy plumbing. Representative democracy is basically just swapping out oligarchies. In order of most to least like our system, there is direct democracy where the people actually get to vote directly on things the politicians introduce (a la Switzerland) -> then sortition which I think is pretty neat, where citizens are pulled for leadership randomly like jury duty. Couldn’t work with our population today, but that’s because our system is self-reinforcing to make dumb complacent voters as you point out. -> lastly would be consensus democracy, which as you pointed out works on the smaller scale. Worth nothing that even large groups like the Iroquois had consensus democracy, elected officials, and a high emphasis placed on persuasiveness and diplomacy. So depending on the type of system, it can scale more than you’d think. But not in a power driven state society.
Also, darkness and the devil. Most HG cosmologies have an upper and lower world. The key difference between HG / animistic thinking and Christianity and other world religions is that civilized religion totally denigrate the lower world and fetishize the upper. In HG thinking, the lower world is both sickness and death as well as fertility and birth, both in body and in mind (for instance, the many variations on traveling to the lower world to gain inspiration, insight, fire, creativity, etc). Modern religions obviously just keep the evil bad association, paralleling their disconnect from the living cycling world where death and sickness of one creature are a natural part of the ecosystem and necessary for other life to continue.
The upper world is more intangible, the shared animating breath or spirit that moves the world, but also seems to have some associations with whatever powerful ordering forces of the world or voluntary leadership that HG would have. Most of them have celestial beings who set the world in motion and keep it running, much like the literal functioning of the sun, moon, and atmosphere, but they way they relate to these is as wise or cunning elders or mysterious helpful strangers to be given gifts and entreated for help, rather than rigid authorities that must be worshipped and begged. But you can see where this latter relationship grew out of the former just like rigid hierarchies did.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Cimbri, I always appreciate your input!
Yeah, at this point I'm not even sure if a more direct form of democracy wouldn't be even more catastrophic than the current arrangement lol
But if one would have started out like this from the beginning, who knows... Nonetheless, your point is important - most of what I criticize is a single, very abstract form of democracy, yet it's the one that most people think about first when they hear the term. Ultimately, the problems boil down to the scale. It is simply too difficult to govern human societies of that size. On a small enough scale, other iterations might make a lot more sense already. And, as I say, it's not like the democratic decision-making process will magically disappear anytime soon, no matter how "dark" things get!
I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of the higher/lower worlds, and how civilized religion (with typical binary thinking) says one is "good" and the other "bad." In Buddhism this is found as a fractal reflection in all sorts of everyday situations, where the head is always "holy" and the feet are "dirty," so it's a sign of great disrespect to point your feet at someone - utter bullshit, if you ask me. My feet are just as holy as my head, as I'd be pretty much fucked without both of them.
According to Thai Buddhism, the whole body is like a scale of purity, and the lower you go, the more unclean the body part. For instance, certain tattoos of religious imagery are fine on the torso or arms, but taboo on the legs... And all this subconsciously creates a loathing of everything considered "low" and a reverence for everything considered "high."
Civilized religion often has a huge problem with the Earth as well, and since the feet stick to this dirty place of sin and worldly desires, and the head is furthest removed from it towards the clear, pure, innocent heaven, beliefs like the aforementioned manifest.
It seems like civilizations just love seeing pyramids/hierarchies everywhere they look.
David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. in The Dawn of Everything made a good case about the variety of different ways that societies in Northern America for example have shaped themselves.
The authors give sources on everything and admit we know very little unfortunately, very little left after the conquests. Still what we know shows there is no one standard way for tribal/nomadic/semi-agricultural (mostly) non-urban societies to make rules and negotiate everyday transactions.
A constant and versatile evolution indeed!
Apparently like the Australian inhabitants before the dawn of civilization on them, oral traditions passed down tell of ecological collapses in the distant past the tribes have learned to avoid thereafter.
It's almost the unmentionable, you-know-who, Ted K who made a good case as to why "freedom" of modern and civilized societies has little meaning in the sense of free movement, free spending of time, free negotiating of community living and so forth.
"Most of us are psychologically incapable to conjure up the same amount of empathy and care we have for our inner social circle for random strangers on the other side of the country (let alone the other side of the planet) that we’ve never met before."
That is one of the saddest things to believe. I'm not saying it's untrue. Just sad.
Your essay was extremely interesting and provocative. Wading through all the democracy talk, the nugget of good, practical, consideration you mentioned was subsistence farming. I agree. The most successful humans in times of crisis or catastrophe, I believe, are ones who, as you say, can farm, fish, forage, hunt, weave, make pottery, grow crops, etc. One needs a potable water source, of course, so placement upon earth is crucial. Life for those used to only buying necessary products to live will be at a disadvantage when the earth starts burning up, and manufacturing, supply chains, civil order, etc., collapse. Thank you for your insights.
What an amazing essay! Thank you for this. I rarely comment on anything but felt the need here.
This is one of the most concise and open-eyed writings about our current myths and the likely times coming our way I have read so far. I will save this and come back to it regularly to fully internalise (much like Daniel Quinn’s and Tom Murphy’s work - who both shook my worldview and sent me on a new path I’m still in the early stages of discovery).
I do not yet know what my purpose is in this life, but thanks to writers with profound wisdom like you and many others (Daniel Firth Griffith and Robin Wall Kimmerer come to mind immediately) I can start asking the land what it needs of me and trying to listen for an answer. I know it will take a long time for me to decolonise my mind and be able to hear any answer, but I feel I have overcome the biggest hurdle: recognition that the land, the community of life, our great Mother Earth have spirit, awareness and agency, which we all are part of ❤️🌳🌏🙌
Thank you so much for your kind words, Florian. Feedback like this means so much to me, and I'm so glad that my writing resonates. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and without people like Daniel Quinn and Robin Wall Kimmerer (and sooo many others) I would have barely started figuring out what's really going wrong right now.
I remember very well how profoundly Daniel Quinn (and a few consequent ethnographies about hunter-gatherers) changed my life, and how I looked at every single thing in a different light after I read his works and started including the indigenous perspective. Everything suddenly fell into place, everything made sense!
I wish you the best for your journey, from the bottom of my heart. Not much can go wrong once you're traveling in the right direction.
Excellent piece, David. Thank you.
Marvelous ramble. Thank you.
Brilliant! Fittingly, I just finished reading "My Ishmael".
From the article linked with the photo of the Mbuti: "One of the paintings looks like a series of molecular structures. Mangase explains that it is their view of the sky through the canopies of trees. They see pockets of light peeking through the treetops, with this geometric representation reflected in their designs. According to researchers, the paintings show how the Mbuti perceive the forest as spiritual and symbolic to their cultural existence." COOL!
Good essay! A few sporadic thoughts.
There are many forms of democracy, and ours is pretty much set up to ensure there is a permanent elite class of professional politicians to choose from. Think about it, Joe plumber doesn’t have the time or money to run for office, he’s too busy plumbing. Representative democracy is basically just swapping out oligarchies. In order of most to least like our system, there is direct democracy where the people actually get to vote directly on things the politicians introduce (a la Switzerland) -> then sortition which I think is pretty neat, where citizens are pulled for leadership randomly like jury duty. Couldn’t work with our population today, but that’s because our system is self-reinforcing to make dumb complacent voters as you point out. -> lastly would be consensus democracy, which as you pointed out works on the smaller scale. Worth nothing that even large groups like the Iroquois had consensus democracy, elected officials, and a high emphasis placed on persuasiveness and diplomacy. So depending on the type of system, it can scale more than you’d think. But not in a power driven state society.
Also, darkness and the devil. Most HG cosmologies have an upper and lower world. The key difference between HG / animistic thinking and Christianity and other world religions is that civilized religion totally denigrate the lower world and fetishize the upper. In HG thinking, the lower world is both sickness and death as well as fertility and birth, both in body and in mind (for instance, the many variations on traveling to the lower world to gain inspiration, insight, fire, creativity, etc). Modern religions obviously just keep the evil bad association, paralleling their disconnect from the living cycling world where death and sickness of one creature are a natural part of the ecosystem and necessary for other life to continue.
The upper world is more intangible, the shared animating breath or spirit that moves the world, but also seems to have some associations with whatever powerful ordering forces of the world or voluntary leadership that HG would have. Most of them have celestial beings who set the world in motion and keep it running, much like the literal functioning of the sun, moon, and atmosphere, but they way they relate to these is as wise or cunning elders or mysterious helpful strangers to be given gifts and entreated for help, rather than rigid authorities that must be worshipped and begged. But you can see where this latter relationship grew out of the former just like rigid hierarchies did.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Cimbri, I always appreciate your input!
Yeah, at this point I'm not even sure if a more direct form of democracy wouldn't be even more catastrophic than the current arrangement lol
But if one would have started out like this from the beginning, who knows... Nonetheless, your point is important - most of what I criticize is a single, very abstract form of democracy, yet it's the one that most people think about first when they hear the term. Ultimately, the problems boil down to the scale. It is simply too difficult to govern human societies of that size. On a small enough scale, other iterations might make a lot more sense already. And, as I say, it's not like the democratic decision-making process will magically disappear anytime soon, no matter how "dark" things get!
I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of the higher/lower worlds, and how civilized religion (with typical binary thinking) says one is "good" and the other "bad." In Buddhism this is found as a fractal reflection in all sorts of everyday situations, where the head is always "holy" and the feet are "dirty," so it's a sign of great disrespect to point your feet at someone - utter bullshit, if you ask me. My feet are just as holy as my head, as I'd be pretty much fucked without both of them.
According to Thai Buddhism, the whole body is like a scale of purity, and the lower you go, the more unclean the body part. For instance, certain tattoos of religious imagery are fine on the torso or arms, but taboo on the legs... And all this subconsciously creates a loathing of everything considered "low" and a reverence for everything considered "high."
Civilized religion often has a huge problem with the Earth as well, and since the feet stick to this dirty place of sin and worldly desires, and the head is furthest removed from it towards the clear, pure, innocent heaven, beliefs like the aforementioned manifest.
It seems like civilizations just love seeing pyramids/hierarchies everywhere they look.
Greetings!
David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. in The Dawn of Everything made a good case about the variety of different ways that societies in Northern America for example have shaped themselves.
The authors give sources on everything and admit we know very little unfortunately, very little left after the conquests. Still what we know shows there is no one standard way for tribal/nomadic/semi-agricultural (mostly) non-urban societies to make rules and negotiate everyday transactions.
A constant and versatile evolution indeed!
Apparently like the Australian inhabitants before the dawn of civilization on them, oral traditions passed down tell of ecological collapses in the distant past the tribes have learned to avoid thereafter.
It's almost the unmentionable, you-know-who, Ted K who made a good case as to why "freedom" of modern and civilized societies has little meaning in the sense of free movement, free spending of time, free negotiating of community living and so forth.
Thanks for your article!
"Most of us are psychologically incapable to conjure up the same amount of empathy and care we have for our inner social circle for random strangers on the other side of the country (let alone the other side of the planet) that we’ve never met before."
That is one of the saddest things to believe. I'm not saying it's untrue. Just sad.
Your essay was extremely interesting and provocative. Wading through all the democracy talk, the nugget of good, practical, consideration you mentioned was subsistence farming. I agree. The most successful humans in times of crisis or catastrophe, I believe, are ones who, as you say, can farm, fish, forage, hunt, weave, make pottery, grow crops, etc. One needs a potable water source, of course, so placement upon earth is crucial. Life for those used to only buying necessary products to live will be at a disadvantage when the earth starts burning up, and manufacturing, supply chains, civil order, etc., collapse. Thank you for your insights.