Dreamers are those that can find their way by starlight and moonlight, and their joy is to see the dawn before the rest of the world. Adapted from an Oscar Wilde quote.
Continuing the Taker-Leaver Discussion from the last three posts.
To sum it up, the innovation of the Taker revolution was to put Food put under lock and key, and then justify a hierarchical system to manage it as essential to survival, which then became our prison as a cultural meme called ‘civilization.’ Civilization isn’t bad, just the hierarchical system that sprung from our Taker version of it. Increased food required administration need, and therefore bureaucrats to lock up the food to keep workers working. That part of the Taker story is essential to understand. After all, who would work hard when they could just wander into the woods and find food? The early bureaucrats created a hierarchy among themselves and the most powerful of them justified that they be the chosen ones, (ordained by hierarchical priests of whatever religion) to lead the Taker populations. Along with that, the Leaver story was (and still is) scorned and minimalized, resulting in the Leaver cultures being exterminated or sidelined to remote places. The Leavers lived spiritually within the natural world while the Takers lived through ego and sought to dominate nature.
I tell this Daniel Quinn story of Leavers and Takers as way to emphasize the hierarchy as a controlling factor. Other authors like Psychologist Steve Taylor use the overemphasis of ego over spirituality as the focus for the same outcome (The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era) which is about how ego created the hierarchy. It was also a symptom of the rise of hierarchy. I like the Quinn story as a simpler and easier to grasp the idea. The Taker story is a good way to introduce a solution – get rid of the hierarchy as we currently know it and create a more egalitarian society. The Taker story is so entrenched in our psyches, it will take some deep thinking to do something different. And my goal in the blog is just to get the reader to think, not just accept what I am saying.
So, the Taker story goes back to the early days of empire agricultural systems. We had to defend our ‘civilizations’ from other empires, and, also to take land we wanted from others who didn’t want to give it to us. And who benefits most? Large scale empires such as the Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, were a later aspect of the expanding hierarchy. Originally, they would have been just ‘city areas.’ Increased food meant Increased population and therefore the need for more land (the neighbors or some Leaver land!). Leavers would have community protectors, but hierarchies needed indoctrinated armies to defend and conquer ‘their’ domains.
The solution then is not to get rid of civilization, just the ancient Taker version of it that still controls our minds today. And it isn’t to adopt the Leaver lifestyle (hunter-gatherer or simple farmer), just the Leaver mindset. We’ve come too far to go back, and there’s no reason to do so. As Daniel Quinn puts it, our solution is ‘To go beyond Civilization’ (see my earlier posts about this, 1, 2, 3) with the best of modern civilization and the mindset (worldview) of the Leavers.
The original hierarchical system with its Taker story had been amazingly so successful in controlling humanity, it now controls the whole planet. Even if we wanted to escape, there is nowhere to go with 8 billion people. So whatever solution we need, it has to come from where we currently are now. That solution, as I said a few lines back is to go beyond the Taker Civilization story and to create a new kind of story and a new kind of civilization – A developed human society that has highly developed material and spiritual resources, and a complex cultural, political, and legal organization that thrives within an understanding of connection to the natural world.
We called the Leavers primitive, but they exhibited more civilized beliefs and behaviors’ than any version of so-called ‘civilized’ humanity these past many millennia. They lived in harmony with their natural surrounding and each other in the ‘tribe,’ and to a large degree with each other tribe. It wasn’t perfect but it worked for most of human history. The ‘human spark’ (some 45 thousand years ago) was probably the game changer, but it also created the Taker mindset that is so problematic today.
Hierarchical control, has always been control of our perceptions. As a communicator, I have long said that those who control the information, control the minds and perceptions of the culture. While propaganda is as old as the Taker revolution, today we are engaged in an information war for the very soul of humanity itself. Why else would we sacrifice ourselves for the leaders who watch us kill each other while they sit back and make monetary profit from our suffering.
Originally, the hierarchical controllers used food as a weapon to control us. Now, they still use food (think what you do to put feed yourself each day – if you are lucky to have food), but now they use cultural memes set up long ago that we no longer question. We are slaves to a system that creates scarcity and competition in our minds. This fear drives our thinking. Interestingly, the popular ‘Hunger Games’ books and movies capture it all nicely in how the hierarchy works to subdue us into compliance!
Defeating the Taker Mindset begins with recognizing what that mindset is truly about. And that starts with recognizing the false narratives used to control us that we accept as gospel. Our greatest need is to retain free speech and a discerning consciousness as part of our sovereign individuality and creative expression of who we truly are – our authentic selves.
“The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence” Thomas Berry. The Taker story has diminished the natural world as irrelevant. The Taker hierarchy creates commercialization of the natural world, dependency on the hierarchy, the justification to exploit everything, and sadly, destruction with its inevitable and negative side-effects, is seen as acceptable to maintain the system as we accept it. When fear of scarcity rules one’s thinking, then survival takes precedence.
Leaver societies lived in tribes, where living within the tribe was beneficial and abundance for all members a norm. but this can also create a negative aspect of tribalism – mistrust of others outside the tribe. This is something we need to leave behind. Today it is seen in many forms such as ‘Xenophobic Nationalism’ (dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries, and identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations). I am arguing here, as does Quinn, for a ‘New tribalism’ that bonds us, is global in nature, yet retains the unique aspects of our individual cultural places. That is not such a tall order as you might think. The Leaver mindset is more than simply living within the natural world, but also one where we all practice collaboration, sharing, respect, integrity, compassion, and individual sovereignty within an social environment of trust.
Today, the hierarchy, controls us by locking us into a mindset of fear and distrust. This results in us feeling despondent, downtrodden, and powerless (just what the hierarchy wants). This makes people feel incapable of breaking out of this cultural prison – this is a victim mindset. Victims tend to lash out expressing our dark sides. And the Taker story we live makes us all victims, unless we start expressing our better angels. Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be´ Goethe. What Goerthe is saying is that people live up to conditioned expectations. “Believe the best in others and it will bring out the best in them” (LeadershipLegacy).
“When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave it, change it or accept it. All else is madness” Eckhart Tolle. Perception is reality (see early post The Hierarchy 1 {Jan 2018}). A worldview is just that, a way of thinking and perceiving the world. To change a worldview merely means changing a way of thinking – being open minded and being willing to change. That brings us back to ‘dealing with worldviews’ and our way forward.
To Be Continued ………..
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