A few weeks ago, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee voted overwhelmingly to add another $25 billion to an already inflated Pentagon budget request by President Biden of $715 billion. It is not my point to debate whether the military of the largest armed force in the world needs more money of not, but merely to point out that the U.S. is a country that readily spends money (more than the next 22 countries combined) on ‘protecting’ itself than it is willing to spend on social programs to help the needy in a casino capitalistic culture. I think this also emphasizes an inordinate fear of others that has been (and continues) systematically conditioned into the population. The inordinately large cost of a modern military is mostly due to the cost of the highly technical war toys (especially since 1945) that are used to ensure dominance in a battle situation. But I might add that despite such an arsenal of war toys, super powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not defeat fighters in poor countries (like Afghanistan or Vietnam). Living with such arsenals is a really expensive way to deal with living with fear that never deals with the societal issues arising out of the inequities created.
I am always amused by the plethora of movies that project a dystopian future (e.g., Mad Max, Blade Runner, Hunger Games, etc.). Sadly, they are conditioning people into accepting that the future is going to be dystopian. I saw a post the other day by ‘Return to Now’: “Why is it that everyone I meet, that expects a pending societal collapse, is focused on weapons? Do you have seeds? Do you have tools? Do you know how to filter water? Where are your crafters? Who can blacksmith, work leather, sew, do carpentry? Who knows medicine, herblore, and can identify edible plants? We won’t survive a collapse by killing each other. We will only survive with benevolent skilled communities working together”. Then I read the numerous comments that talk about protecting yourself from marauding gangs. We are so convinced about humanity’s nasty nature it is disabling us. But then it is all part of the victim conditioning we have taken as the lifestyles we live. It’s as if we cannot even conceive that we can live in peace and harmony. If we look at our hunter gatherer ancestors we see tribalism conflict with some groups, but not warfare.
In a bit of satirical commentary from a Native American, “Before our white brothers came to civilize us, we had no jails. Therefore, we had no criminals. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things that (so they tell us) are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society” John Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. While we like to romanticize Native American culture as ideally living within nature, it needs tempering with some reality, as it does for most indigenous cultures worldwide. It’s not that they were eco-saints, but they did live more connected to the natural world and understood though centuries of learning what worked and doesn’t work, for they thrived where those that didn’t learn vanished.
It’s not about technology being the problem, it’s about modern humans not learning what is appropriate technology and its limitations in being sustainable, and how we need to live together so all thrive in peace. John Lame Deer’s quote is a bit idealized but it is not far off the mark either. Indigenous cultures do not have property related crime but as I said they were not saints. The whole community policed the rules that were established for they were as neatly and elaborately organized politically as we are today to maintain as much harmony as possible within the group and often between different groups. Rules were enforced to provide some kind of reconciliation and rectification for everyday problems, with severe punishments that could typically include destruction of property, compensation demands, beatings, expulsion from the tribe, and even death for the worst offences, which were rare.
What made indigenous peoples work I think was that they talked through everything, and from what I can gather from anthropological records, they did so in lengthy detail. Every person in a tribe was a sovereign person that agreed to abide by the rules of the tribe gaining what philosopher Daniel Quinn calls ‘Cradle to Grave’ security within the tribe (see previous post Reframing and Visualizing a New Society 1 {March 2018}). I look at modern media and especially social media and I think the biggest problem we have today is what celebrated author Charles Eisenstein calls a ‘Babelian’ loss of understanding of language. We are so engrossed with instant memes from social media that we no longer think about or dissect what we hear. Indeed, I think we have stopped listening and now only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest. It’s part of the great polarization that is occurring that further creates separation. I have talked at length in previous posts about developing a ‘New tribalism’ that is a new way of living within communities – not a return to the past but the best of the past with the best of modernity for new kind of society (see Reframing and Visualizing a New Society 1 {March 2018}; Wisdom of our ancestors 3 {April 2018}; Transforming the world? Neo Tribalism for business and living {April 2018}).
The one skill that we all must cultivate now is one for communication and especially communicating well and with transparency and honesty. And good communication means listening well for full comprehension and not just hearing what we think we are hearing. We are presently so embedded in our worldview (beliefs) positions that we more and more becoming incapable of looking at other viewpoints. Indeed, the extreme perspective and censorship of modern mainstream media platforms has reached the point where most people are willing to attack ‘the others,’ verbally for now, but increasingly I see emotional and physical abuse becoming more common. The inability of so many people to talk to people who disagree on politics, and now the jab, is not a healthy situation. It is being driven by a powerful few, intent on keeping us focused on our differences so that we do not sit down to rationally discuss what connects us all. How often do we speak of what we want to see in the world instead of shouting how we get rid of what we think are the problems creating our separation? And we have to start talking in metaphors that speak of peace and Love and not War metaphors (see previous post Framing for Positive Communication and Interactions- How language creates our thoughts and frames our behaviors and well-being {August 2018}) that drive aggressive beliefs and behaviors (see recent post Coming Back into Our Sovereignty – Part 9: The Power of Words 2-Freeing our minds {May 2021}). What we need to is tap into our wisdom and not our simply react with our emotions.
To Be Continued ………………
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