All humans everywhere at all times have always done the very best that they could, in every moment, given the information they had available to their conscious awareness at the time. We have always acted, from our heart of hearts, to make the world a better place. In our culture, by the time most of us are adults large parts of our minds are inaccessible due to accumulated un-disharged1emotional trauma.
Hominids that were trapped in their bioregions of the near north during the last cold snap in the present Ice Age, for generations, developed survival patterns honed in extreme scarcity. The providential Earth Mother had abandoned her children, there was not enough to go around and the ritual sacrifices were no longer efficacious. The oppressive relationship with women and corporal punishment of children, wars of conquest and fear of scarcity that epitomize our European hegemonic culture was born.
- Knowing that intercourse would bring into their world another mouth to feed, sexual attraction became fraught with dread.
- The nigh on constant sound of infants crying from cold and hunger became intolerable and lashing for showing feelings began: Punishment ultimately breeds dishonesty and violence.
- As the food supply diminished, competition between tribes became necessary and war between kin for access to food/land arose.
- The natural response to un-discharged trauma is to perpetuate the conditions that caused it and so, even though our culture has produced a food surplus every year for the past ten thousand, we choose to create artificial scarcity, putting a high value on what is rare.
Following the retreat of the glaciers that left behind fertile soils up to one hundred feet thick composed of the razed and composted boreal forests and the ground up rock of glacial till, the bare ground became host to the pioneering cereal grains: oats, barley, rye and emmer. The people foraging in this abundance of calories selected for the varieties of emmer that did not drop their seed, that were easier to harvest, thus was wheat created and their population exploded. The Aurox also multiplied whom they likewise domesticated and so was born the wheat/beef people that we can still recognize today by our addiction to the opiate analog exorphins in both: porridge, milk and cookies, bread and butter, cheese toast, macaroni pie, pizza, cheese burger, crix and cheese, cheese cake, cake and ice cream...
The population grew beyond the carrying capacity of their bioregion and our cultural ancestors began waging war on biodiversity as they expanded out from ground zero in the “Caucasus Mountains,” conquering and enslaving their neighbours. This is the birth of aggre-culture2. Jared Diamond in his essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” calls it catastrophic, as it imitates the destruction of forests wrought by the glaciers. Daniel Quinn in his “Ishmael” trilogy calls it totalitarian as, though it was not the first or only time humans practiced minding our favourite foods, we were the ones who practiced it full time.
From hamlets to villages to towns to cities, settled life spread, eventually manifesting as the city states of the Sumerians. Their choice of gypsum, limestone and alabaster for the sculpted figurines depicting themselves tells us they were Caucasian. The treatment of the eyes would lead one to suspect that they lived in absolute fear, undischarged in a thousand years of repression. Indigenous peoples around the globe remark this in us still.
This is the beginning of the age of empire, hierarchical societies that must grow at all costs. Urbanization, standing armies, wars of conquest, haves and have nots, slavery, famine and greed, none of these were normal to the human condition before. However, within a few thousand years this so-called “civilization” had overrun the “Middle East” and had crossed the Himalayas into the valley of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers. By now there arose a need to explain what had gone wrong? Why all this suffering? This period, known as the Axial Age, marks the arrival on the planet of salvationist re-ligion3. No matter if we call ourselves Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Christian or Muslim we all live by aggre-culture. We all put our food under lock and key and make people work, beg or steal for it. We all think that man is fatally flawed and in need of salvation or nirvana and that it is our prophets that have the inside track on the one right way to live. The story that our culture is enacting: “The world was made for Man and he was destined to conquer and rule it but due to a flaw in his nature he is in fact destroying it.”
So here we are, our sky god, book based, male dominated, adultist, classist, sexist, racist, speciesist culture, ruled by the threat of violence, has now colonised the minds of the majority of humanity. Whether we see ourselves as being at the end of Kali Yug or facing imminent Armageddon we all carry with us the expectation that the world has to die before we see our next Golden Age or One Thousand Years of Peace.
Well I am here today to tell the truth and the truth shall set us free. There is no fire next time; there is no judgment day. These infantile mythologies we live by are just two among ten thousand others that have held out in the equatorial rainforests of Amazonia, the Congo and Indonesia. In the Kalahari, in the deserts of Australia and in the Tundra of the north the autochthonic, animist, land based/centered, tribal peoples of the earth have continued to count their wealth in terms of their relationships. Evolving laws, customs and institutions appropriate to the bioregions they inhabit. Their infant nurture priority being that they experience constant skin to skin contact until they decide to venture out. Their economy based on the gift: give support, get support. Living largely matrifocal, egalitarian lifestyles, the disciplining of children by punishment is unheard of as adults model appropriate behavior and life skills. Despite the fact that they have been driven into the most inhospitable regions of the planet by conquering pastoralists and aggre-culturalists, they continue to nurture, to sustain and to celebrate their deep connections to the land, to the plants and animals, to the elements, earth, air, fire and water, and to the celestial beings, the sun, moon and stars. All Our Relations. The story that they are enacting: “The world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place.”
When the “leader of the free world” takes on the dismantling of the prevailing globalization agenda of the OECD [Old Eurocentric Colonialist Daemoncrats] it is just one element in carrying forward a natural cycle in all literate, complex cultures: de-centralization and dis-intermediation. From the point of view of the status quo of the elite this is a disaster. Their historians refer to these periods as Dark Ages. The break down of the arrogance of empire and a return to more local politics and economics based on a bioregional reality is inevitable. It does not have to be uncomfortable.
Because the so-called nation states of Europe established their borders based on ethnic/language lines after millennia of conflict, they failed to recognise the ecological regimes they inhabited. Before the age of conquering tribes and imperial adventures, cultures co-evolved with the bioregions they were a part of. There is always an optimum and unique way to interact with the geology, the biological communities and the climates we dwell within if cultures are to be sustainable. At this point in history we have the information we need to determine these parameters and to re-inhabit our ecosystems in ways that support biodiversity and the resilience it provides.
The divide and conquer monoculture imposed by the industrial growth society is coming apart at the seams as resource depletion meets population growth. It was always going to be a dead end.
Now we have the opportunity to consciously localize our politics and economics in keeping with ecological limits and ramify cultural diversity appropriate to place. If we can discharge the historical trauma that holds our ethnic, religious and class differences in place and focus our attention on working together to mind the ecosystems we call home we will regenerate abundant life and become foragers again.
I am fed up of people talking about transforming capitalism. This system is only the last of a ten thousand year old history of oppression and exploitation of nature and people. The business model is the problem. There is no way of making a profit and accumulating wealth without the destruction of ecosystems and the victimisation of humans. The climate emergency is about eliminating racism/white supremacy and deposing ethnic nationalist leaders. The solution is to work on what gets in the way of us joining with our neighbours in reconnecting, regenerating and co creating with nature, resilient ecosystems.
1. Humans have inherent processes to discharge emotions associated with hurtful experiences. Fear causes cold sweat and shaking; grief and loss brings up crying with wet tears; rage, anger and frustration elicit temper tantrums; embarrassment is discharged with laughter and boredom with excited non repetitive talking. In our culture these processes are interfered with when adults mistakenly shut down the discharge thinking that this will end the hurt. The opposite is true. The hurts accumulate creating the so called unconscious or shadow.
2. Aggre(ssive)-culture: waging war on biodiversity to mind our favourite foods/addictions.
3.Re-ligion: literally to tie or bind again, like the word Yoga meaning union, both represent responses to the loss of our connection to nature.
