Monday Meditations: The Apparent Myth of the Noble Savage

Those who follow the free path will often be accused of believing in a myth called the Noble Savage. The myth is that by living close to nature, primitive peoples were peaceful caring loving beings who wouldn't harm a fly and were wiped out by non-peaceful civilized people.

One argument used to attack anyone not fully endorsing civilization and its excess, is to point out that tribal cultures engaged in inter-tribal conflicts- what the accuser will usually call a war. They will point out that between 12% and 16% of all tribal peoples died in these conflicts. This is not a small number and is intended to show that tribal peoples were worse, or at least just as bad as civilized people- and thus not worthy of a so obviously positive title as Noble Savage.

I would argue that although I disagree with the original usage, that the tribal cultures do deserve the title of Noble Savage. And this is why.

Although tribal/pre-state cultures engaged in violent conflict/war, they did not commit deliberate genocide on the scale of state/civilized culture has over the centuries (The Native Americans, the Uighars, The Holocaust, The African Slave Trade, etc...). Yes, certain tribes did engage in slavery. Yes, certain tribes did kill off whole other tribes. In neither case was the practice an ongoing institutional attack upon those different from them.

Although the evolution of humans did likely cause the extinction of several notable species such as the Irish Elk, this was simply the result a new species introduced to an ecosystem. The same thing happened to every ecosystem where the great cats evolved, and happened throughout biological history whenever a new species with an edge evolved or otherwise entered an ecosystem. Modern civilized humans have engaged in deliberate extinctions for centuries (the passenger pigeon, the Tasmanian wolf, the Dodo, The European Wolf, etc...) and have also engaged in systemic extinction through deliberate and complete habitat destruction across every continent except Antarctica.

Finally, tribal humans lived and flourished for at least a hundred thousand years (more depending on what you are willing to consider human) and never overran their environments nor expanded their population like a virulent strain of cancer that simply won't give up. Whereas this description is so accurate a depiction of civilized humans that it is used in popular culture with impunity.

There is an argument, that the reason tribal humans were not as deliberately destructive is because they lacked our tools and technology. This is hardly relevant, because it is those differences, coupled with the cultural differences that make a culture tribal or civilized.

So call them Noble Savages- because they never overran the Earth like a plague, because they never considered genocide a good business strategy, because they never dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations to make a point, because they never gave small pox infected blankets to women and children, because they did not make and break two hundred peace treaties knowing at the beginning that they would break them, because they did not hunt the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon and the Dodo to extinction for sport, because they did not systematically torture those who did no agree with their holy book, because they did not believe that they were the rulers of this planet appointed by god and given permission to trash the place like a petulant child.

So fifteen percent of them died in war. More than this percentage of civilized people hate life.

Certain questions arise.

Saturday Thoughts: Don't Panic, The Wisdom of Douglas Adams, Part 1

"It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, 

ipso facto, those least suited to do it...

anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President 

should on no account be allowed to do the job. "

Douglas Adams

I stop and I consider the names that I know of leaders long past. I am disturbed to say the least. Alexander the Great comes to mind first- who historians conservatively estimate orchestrated the deaths of over 200,000 people. Next I think of Julius Caesar, then Adolf Hitler, then Josef Stalin, then finally I think of Gandhi- but he never held public office. Then I think of Abraham Lincoln, who I think is a positive leader, but who was definitely instrumental in the deaths of more Americans than any leader until those Presidents who presided over World War II.

"The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his armada Went down. Was he the only one to weep? Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War. Who Else won it? Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill?"

Bertolt Brecht 

Should those not mentioned feel slighted or vindicated not to have been indicted with Alexander or Caesar or Philip of Spain? Should we complain that Frederick the Second stole his cook's share of the glory, or wonder at a culture and tradition that allows such sociopaths into positions of power- and then proceeds to remember them fondly?

What service do these butchers and tyrants and monsters serve to domesticated man that he continually lauds them or tolerates them or apologizes for them?

What do these men (and they are nearly all of them men) provide that is necessary to the functioning of domesticated society?

So many questions best left unanswered.

Monday Meditations: What We Protect

The goal of people who walk the Free path is to protect their own life, their reproductive life, their communal life and the Earth's life. These tasks are tightly woven and knit together. They are not easy to separate, and attempting to do so is toxic to all tasks- much like an assembly line is toxic to craftsmanship.

You must first defend yourself and your life. For if you are dead you can do nothing. You must be able to defend your life before defending anything else becomes a possibility. But, those people who stop here are adolescents, short sighted and selfish and unable or unwilling to grow up.

You life does not belong to you alone.

Your life belongs to everything that shares your DNA, and that is everything on this planet that lives and replicates. Your life belongs to anything that you consume to remain alive- to the chicken unborn and the pig and the turkey, to the horseradish and the carrot and the lettuce and parsnip, to the bacteria that die and our digested in your gut so that you may process your food, to the influenza that you shake off and process like anything else in system.

Your life belongs to everything that has protected and nurtured you, from the earthworms that give you soil to grow food, to the oxygen that allows your lungs to breathe, to floods that fertilize the land, to the earth itself that makes all life here possible.

And so you must defend your life, because you owe it to everything that has kept you alive up until this moment. You may die at their hands of course, in a flood, beneath a mountain lion's fangs, in brush fire, trampled under stampeding cattle, taken by influenza or e. coli. The whole of life plays no favorites, the complex interwoven system favors nothing- no matter how we might like to pretend this is so. Fight with all your strength to survive and then have the grace to die with dignity. And remember, you live so that you can meet your obligations and protect the greater causes.

You protect your own life so that you may protect your reproductive life. All life, lives to reproduce. Life lives to create life and to perpetuate life. In this time of overpopulation, common wisdom would tell us that reproduction is bad, which of course is nonsense. Reproduction is not a sin, but the domesticated human's cultural and societal system that turns reproduction into a weapon and a factory is certainly not a good thing. Reproduction is the future, without reproduction the future falls apart with nothing there to construct tomorrow's stories.

So you must defend your reproductive life, because without it there is no tomorrow for your story. You must do this responsibly. The Hebrew's god may have commanded the Abrahamic religions to go forth and multiple, but the religions of earth ask only that you continue your story in a way that does not silence all others.

You must defend your life and your reproductive life, so that you may defend your communal life. Both of the earlier tasks are components in this task, for the community is made up of its members and its members past and its members yet born. True communities know each other, all each others in fact. They know not only your name, but your friends and your enemies. A community knows the whole web of interactions and intentions. This web in fact, is the community.

Human communities exist in groups of 200 or less, ideally around 150. Larger than this and the web breaks, the human mind is not adapted to hold more than 200 sets of social relations together in itself. Above that number the groups fractures into sub-communities and the unit is divided. Over large areas of course, this is necessary, but you should strive to find a coherent community in which you can belong and defend.

You must defend your life, your reproductive life and communal life so that you can defend the life of the earth.  How a community lives and makes its living directly determines how it treats the earth, and this is foremost for this task. Do not damage the earth and seek to lay patches of the gashes you have torn. Seek to live harmlessly, seek to put back as much as you take. To do otherwise is to bleed the earth and to attack your communal and reproductive lives as well, for if you harm the earth- you harm you unborn descendants before they are even conceived.

Likewise, you must not support those things that harm the earth that others have created. You must oppose and resist when others attempt to injure the earth. There is no other way, because the ability of the earth to sustain life, is equal to our ability to remain alive.

You protect the earth by protecting your own life. You protect your own life by protecting the earth. There is not separation, there is no point at which these two facts diverge. There are no exceptions.

Saturday Thoughts: The Benefit of Schooling

I need to learn arithmetic and calculations. But, do I need to learn it in a classroom over twelve years and including things such as calculus and quadratic equations that very few people need to understand and fewer actually use?

I need to learn to read and write, but do I need to learn the difference between a Shakespearian or Petrarchan sonnet? I need to know the history of our culture and the changes and context that it will provide for understanding current events, but do I need to know who the commanders were at the battle of Leningrad?

I remember being tested on all of these things and I know that I answered most of them correctly on the test. I do not remember the answers to these questions now, although I remember that I was asked them.

Accounting, however, was an optional class and I was never given any lessons on the laws and paperwork that I have encountered as a adult. I was never taught, despite five years of career planning classes, how to deal with my taxes or my health insurance or any things that I would actually need.

There is a distinct benefit to schooling, but that benefit is for those people who wield the whips. When we emerge from schooling, we lack basic knowledge of how to manage in the adult world, and because of the increased work load and the need to do extra-curricular activities to earn scholarships and be accepted into post-secondary education- parents have very little mentoring that they have allowed to add. And thus the domesticated adult emerges from the womb of high school blind and hairless. He lacks the teeth and claws that are used by modern society and the knowledge of how best to defend himself with them. He is unable to hunt for himself and so is relegated to a subservient role within the pack- begging from scraps from more the alpha and other successful hunters.

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor 

is the mind of the oppressed."

 Steve Biko- Activist

For twelve years, the developing mind of the young domesticated human is engaged in challenging and intellectually stimulating tasks- such as organic chemistry, the politics of Shakespeare's Macbeth, trigonometry, the history of the Russian Revolution, and how to dissect an earthworm. These tasks are deliberately challenging and seem very important. In this way, the mind of the young domesticated human is distracted. 

Once they have grown out of their most active period of learning, the young can be discharged into the wild where they are easily captured and roped into the existing herds. They are domesticated humans now, and not wild humans. But when the wild submits to domestication- it also sacrifices its freedom.

Monday Meditations: Mother Earth and Father Earth

The earth is alive. It is not alive is some supernatural sense of course, not thinking in a way that a domesticated human would understand as thought. But nonetheless, it lives and breathes, it eats and defecates and gives birth to all life on this planet.

And though it may not think as a domesticated human would understand, the earth, the Whole Earth, acts as though it thinks and as though is suffers when harmed, as though it nurtures when loved.

The earth is an ancient thing built with the bones and bodies of every ancestor that you ever had. Every thing that hunted you or was hunted by you lies within the earth, and so too for those things that hunted and were hunted by your grandparents- and on down the ages past until your ancestors were amino acids and not even alive by the standards of a domesticated human.

The earth is your mother, it birthed you and nurtured you. Everything that you have eaten to dampen your hunger, everything that you have wrapped yourself in to keep warm, everything that has sheltered you from the storm and the snow and the flood- all of it is a gift from the earth. Do not speak to me in metaphors, there is no metaphor here. You are made of earth, you have eaten earth and you are clothed in earth.

The earth is your father, it taught you and disciplined you. Everything that you know now, you know because of lessons that you or some other child extracted from the earth through observation. The earth taught Marie Curie about radiation. The earth taught Isaac Newton about gravitation. The earth taught Mercator of map making. The earth taught Polynesian chiefs of astronomy and seafaring. The earth taught Ancient Kings in the Near East about irrigation. These things are not given by gods, but come from diligent study under a rigorous taskmaster- Father Earth.

Do not put masks upon these ideas and make them into false gods. These ideas do not need hollow legs to run around on in the dreams of men. Earth is our father and our mother, it is ancient and so deep and dark and unknowable that even if we could stay here past the Super Nova of our sun, we would not understand even the topsoil completely. If you wrap this great unknowable Father/Mother into the image of a hermaphroditic god/dess you will blind yourself to the truth of the thing.

See it completely as it should be seen. You will not understand it all. It will test your sanity. We are not gods and we have never found or made a true god. Our gods are puny next to the depth of meaning that is our earth, our Father/Mother.

Saturday Thoughts: On Corrective Rape

Corrective Rape is, even as mere words on a screen, a poisonous tool of domestication. The domestic human has been trained by institutional violence and abuse (differentiated by also including psychological and social and similar forms of abuse). The domestic human has been bred for meekness and docility. The domestic human has been deliberately starved of skills and then turned loose to become a member of some ruling class member's flock.

The basic power dynamic amongst domesticated humans is simple- a small minority are allowed to have it, the rest are not.

Power is freedom. Or it might be more exact to say that power transforms into freedom when used upon ones self, and power transforms into oppression when used upon others.

Amongst domesticated humans, the female of the species is explicitly subordinate within the culture. The female exists as a form of pleasure for the male and as a method of producing more domesticated humans. In centuries past this could be stated explicitly, but in recent years the domesticated human has hidden this from himself. The self-deception is named progress. But the old rules can still be found looking through the cracks in this wall of deception.

Corrective rape is one such crack in the wall. Corrective rape is term used to describe the actions of a man who rapes a lesbian, bisexual or similar woman in order to cure her.

The logic is simple and ugly. By asserting a sexuality that removes the woman from the assumed position as pleasure giver and baby maker for the benefit of (male) domesticated human culture, the woman reclaims power for herself that would otherwise have been used by the (male) elite minority. By defining herself, rather than allowing a label to be applied to her, she further reclaimed her power. By choosing a role that does not exist within domesticated (male) human culture, she even flirts with the concept of withdrawing her power entirely from the hands of the (male) elite minority and placing her own power back in her own hands.

Rape is an assertion of sexual hierarchy. The purpose is to remind the victim of the proper direction in which things are supposed to flow. Violence flows down the hierarchy, power flows up the hierarchy.

By claiming a free and independent identity, a woman steals her own power from the upper levels of the hierarchy who believe such power belongs to them . Corrective rape is an attempt to reassert the proper arrangement as decided by the hierarchy of the (male) domesticated elite minority.