Indigenous Societies - Why Does Our Culture Abhor Their Lifestyle?

Mother culture teaches people to detest indigenous societies. Our social conditioning tells us that primitive life is disgusting even if we can't always articulate why.

Even the poorest of the poor in our society would probably elect their situation over going back to a tribal hunter gather life, if given the choice. Even though their life in our society might be a sad and lonely struggle they wouldn't give it up to go and live with the Kayapo of the Amazon.

To people in our culture life in indigenous societies seems meaningless, detestable and ugly. Even though no indigenous culture has ever willingly given up their lifestyle and often they would rather die than join civilization we cannot see why. They are ignorant and savage; they just don't know what they are missing.

What Is It That Ignites This Fear?

When we think of primal people we conjure images in our minds of half naked squatting, sickly looking people. They are constantly living in fear, trying desperately to find food whilst ensuring they don't get consumed by predators, disease, famine or overrun by their neighbours.

People who have actually spent time in indigenous societies tell us that their lives are nothing like this. They do not live in perpetual fear. They are a happy, content people, they are not depressed, drunk, isolated from one another and they are not leading meaningless lives. There aren't even any creatures that prey on humans.

But this doesn't satisfy mother culture. Still she must insist that their life is detestable, degraded, savage. They may think they are happy but they are ignorant. They don't know what it is like to be us.

We see indigenous societies as living like animals, that is to be living a life that is not fully human. We don't see them as having complete control over their lives because they don't have complete control of their food supply. They aren't full-time agriculturalists like us.

We see it as animal behaviour to go out into the wilderness and find whatever food is growing there - to take a chance.

To roll the dice of the gods is to see whether there is game or whether today is a day to go hungry. This is abhorrent to us. We can't rely on chance; we can't rely on the gods. The gods might not send us the food that we want. The game might not be there, the fruits might be spoiled or another creature might have got there first. 

To us this is outrageous. To live at the whim of nature, in the hands of the gods is a truly animal way to live. Living that way we are no better off than the beasts.

How Indigenous Societies See It

Primal peoples don't think this way, they don't feel the need for absolute control. Why spend precious energy sweating away in a field to grow what grow naturally? Why toil away raising livestock when there is free game to be taken in the wild? 

What are we afraid of? That unless we grow our own food there might not be any there tomorrow when we want it?

Indigenous societies are not concerned that one day there might be food and the next there might not be. If there are no pigs they will get rabbits. If there are no rabbits they will get fish. The world is full of food and it doesn't just disappear overnight. There is always something to eat.

We don't detest non-agricultural peoples because they have less technology. We detest them because they have a different attitude to us. They will live in the hands of the gods, whereas we will not. They will roll the dice and accept whatever they can find. They can accept that they won't always be in control. We will not.

We Think Agriculture Makes Us Truly Human

According to our culture living the way indigenous societies do is a way of life that is no better than animals. To us there is no oppourtunity, no room to grow, no ability to master our environment. Our culture desperately wants humankind to be some sort of higher life form than other animals. So we feel we must take control of our food supply, thumb our noses at the gods and pat ourselves on the back at our ingenuity.

When we think about indigenous societies we assume that they are trying to become like us, but just lack the tools and know-how to achieve it. Hence they are stuck in an animal-like lifestyle, with no means of control. Once a society masters agriculture they can control their food supply and when they have control they rise above the animals and become truly human.

To us being truly human means being civilized, and to us being civilized means taking control away from those incompetent gods. Man lived in the hands of the gods for hundreds of thousands of years but during that time he achieved nothing. He was no better than when he started.

Indigenous societies don't see it as shameful or sub-human to live in the hand of the gods. They don't make the false distinction between man and nature that we do. They are aware that they are a biological creature that must participate in the community of life without subduing or destroying it.

Such is our fear of living in the hands of the gods that the poorest of our culture would surely choose to stay in their situation rather than go and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle.

This is how the terms takers and leavers came about. Leavers live in the hands of the gods, i.e. they leave the running of the world up to them. The takers however feel they need to take control of the running of the world because the gods are too incompetent to do it. They see the wilderness as a state of primeval anarchy that must be brought to order. They see the world as a job that the gods botched up, which needs to be corrected by man.

Living in the hand of the gods is the biggest fear of our culture.

The problem for the takers is that they don't have complete mastery of the planet yet, they have not completely taken over from the gods. They are still vulnerable to severe ecological collapses, their crops are vulnerable to pests and they are at the mercy of extreme weather. So they don't feel safe. 

The natural world still has some power over them. They won't be safe until they have taken complete control of the planet away from the gods and into their own hands. When mankind has the ability to contol the rain, control the floods, control the droughts, control the crops. When he has control over everything and the gods have been thwarted completely then man will be safe, then the world will have been brought to order and then the world will be a paradise. Then man will truly be free.

Living in the hand of the gods is our culture's biggest fear. The driving force of all our advances has been the desire to obtain more mastery over the planet so we can take it away from the gods. We can't stand to be at their mercy. But what we need to realize is that the more mastery we try and obtain the more we destroy the planet. 

Instead of trying to fix the problems we have caused by taking control with more control we need to ease up and let go. The world was fine before the people of our culture came along. It was not in a state of anarchy and it does not need man to rule it. We need to be a part of the community of life, just not its totalitarian dictator.

Related Articles From Deep Ecology Hub:

• We Think Primitive People Live In Fear
• The Story Of Civlization
• The Great Forgetting
• Humans Rule The World - Our Cultural Belief
• Takers And Leavers

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