NO SECRETS ¹

What is culture? "Culture" and "cult" both come from the Latin verb "col-ere" that meant "till; farm; cultivate; worship". The Latin word itself comes from an Indo-European root which can roughly be represented by "kwel", that meant "turn, move around", and yielded among other words the English "wheel".

The relationship is hence between farming the land and worshiping the gods who guarantee harvest and produce. "Primitive" peoples still sing while they work the land, and these songs may occasionally be religious or magical. Also aggreculturalists tend to till the land by turning over the soil and pagan (rural) religious rituals are often circular.

An assumption appears to underlie this definition that, pre/non agricultural peoples had/have no culture.

In fact culture is the enacting of a story. All peoples have a creation myth that tells of the relationship between humans, the world and divine intentions and explains how things came to be the way they are. The story that our culture is enacting goes something like: The world was made for man and man was destined to conquer and rule it but because of some fatal flaw in his character, he is in fact destroying it and in need of salvation.

There are 10,000 other cultures still extant on the planet, inhabiting the most inhospitable regions, rainforests, deserts and tundra, enacting a very different story that goes: The world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place.

Literate cultures have relatively short cycles of growth and decay. As the “educated” elite becomes engrossed in intellectual abstractions divorced from primary production (growing food and fibre) over generations, they begin to make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of their ecosystems and the populace. This is not sustainable.

Our culture of patriarchal, salvationist religion² (worldview): Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christism, Islamism, Sikhism, Secularism, Democratism, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Atheism, Agnosticism, RastafarI etc. all living by aggre-culture³ is at the end of its natural cycle.

All the signs are here, baroque architecture, celebrity chefs, gender confusion, a rise in alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide, and disintermediation.⁴ This trend is on course as the complexity of our culture of middlemen devolves back into the sublime state of barbarism when all relationships are personal again.

What is barbarism? The root meaning is from the Greek word βαρβαροι, barbaroi, originally meant “people who say ‘bar bar bar’” (come down to the present as Berbers) instead of talking intelligibly in Greek. In Roman times that usage got bent around to mean “people outside the Empire,” (hordes outside the gates) and thus in due time to “tribes who are too savage to speak Latin, live in cities, or give up without a fight when we decide to steal their land.” Fast forward a century or two, and that definition morphed uncomfortably into “tribes who are too savage to speak Latin, live in cities, or stay peacefully on their side of the border”

What is civilization? The original meaning of the word in late Latin, civilisatio means “having or establishing settled communities.” A people known to the Romans was civilized if its members lived in civitates, cities or towns. A city is a human made environment from which the ordinary workings of nature have been excluded to as great an extent as the available technology permits. We can generalize this further, and say that a civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments.

What sets barbarian societies of the past apart from civilized ones is precisely that a lot less of the environment barbarians encounter results from human action. When you go outdoors, if you’re not outdoors to start with, nearly everything you encounter has been put there by nature.

The post empire phase of planetary consciousness entails thinking globally and acting locally; At this moment in her-story (the whole story, including so called prehistory) our culture has the information and the example of indigenous, animist, foraging societies, who have survived into the 21st century, to adopt co-creative relationships with nature; Communities overcoming ethnic and worldview differences to work with their ecosystem (home), both within city neighbourhoods and in rural village environments, to mind soil life and catch and store  water and fertility high on the landscape to optimize biodiversity and resilience. Regenerating diverse cultures of belonging in biologically productive, novel ecosystems where stable populations live within the carrying capacity of their watersheds and bioregions. Where virtue⁵  [integrity] would determine a wo/man’s status, where leadership could be situational depending on consensus and there would be no need for hierarchy. ⁶

1. Secret s 0-ciety: an inner circle-sanctuary where we can discharge the emotions tied up in our fears, losses and frustrations that prevent us from decolonizing our minds.

2. Re-ligion (to tie or bind again) and Yoga (union) are our culture’s responses to loss of contact with nature.

3. Aggressive culture: waging war on biodiversity to grow humans, dozen or so, favourite foods/stimulants, fuelling a population explosion, then locking it up and making people work, beg or steal for it.

4. Cutting out the middlemen. The word was coined in the 60’s when government regulations limited interest rates on savings accounts and consumers/speculators began investing in securities directly. The word gained new meaning in the 90s with the rise of the Internet where people could access medical, legal, travel etc. information on line.

5. Masculinity correlates with virtue etymologicaly, it has the same root as virility.

6. An hier-arch is a sacred ruler, originally hierarchy was the ranking of angels and other heavenly beings. In the 17^th century its use became, a system in which members of an organization or society are ranked according to relative importance, status or authority.