We Think Primitive People Live In Fear

We have major misconceptions about primitive people in our culture. One of the biggest misconceptions that we have is that non-civilized or  so called "primitive" people live in great suffering and constant fear.

When we think of indigenous populations that still exist in the world or of primitive people that lived before the rise of civilization mother culture brings certain negative images to mind.

"The images are often of people who are sickly, squatting half naked with stained teeth, scavenging through the jungle, short, poorly nourished, living desperate lives in a hostile environment."

- Thom Hartmann

Without settled agriculture we assume that these people must exist in a daily struggle to find food. They are constantly living in fear of going hungry and in fear of the evil spirits around them. 

Without technology they must live at the whim of nature. How terrible that must have been, struggling to keep up with your prey whilst remaining one step ahead of your predator.

Mother culture tells us that such people aren't fully human. They don't belong in history, they belong in this murky place called "pre-history." There was no purpose in pre-history, nothing was achieved apart from the fact that it set the stage for our arrival - the arrival of civilization when man fulfilled his destiny and became fully human.

These myths only survive because most people in our culture haven't been exposed to any different ideas. Our history tells us about colonization and how we improved the lives of the "savages" but we learn little of how they actually lived. "You don't need to know how they lived," says mother culture, "it was an inferior lifestyle and we are good to be rid of it. There is nothing we can learn from these people."

How It Really Is

If one takes the time to actually investigate the lives of so called primitive people it will be found that they actually don't live in constant fear. Neither are they boiling with rage, depressed, schizophrenic or malnourished.

They live happy and healthy lives. Their diet is more varied and more nutritious than ours. 

They have fewer degenerative diseases, they have tall strong physical bodies and they don't all die at 25; they actually enjoy a relatively long life span.

They don't grunt at each other, instead they have complex spoken languages. They also have deep spiritual beliefs, tribal customs, legal systems and long histories.

Whilst low level inter-tribal battles take place regularly indigenous cultures live blissfully unaware of warfare as we know it - the kind that sets out to commit genocide and wipe out ways of life.

This isn't to say that living an indigenous lifestyle is perfect. Of course there can be major problems and issues. But it isn't savage and it isn't brutish. They don't go round grunting and hitting each other on the head with clubs. Nor do they go round committing wanton killings. "Lord of the Flies" is not an adequate representation of how people live when they don't have the structure of civil society.

When civilization has made contact with indigenous societies the latter rarely jump for joy and go off and to join the bandwagon of "progress and development." Yet we force it on them, assuming their lifestyle to be sub-human. Our culture's mythology suggests that they don't know what is good for them, so we must educate them in the wonders of civilization.

There is value in the indigenous way of life. There are great lessons for us takers to learn. In fact they need to be learned if we are to stop ourselves from destroying the world. It is not the primitive people who do not know what is good for them; it is us.

Related Articles From Deep Ecology Hub:

• The Great Forgetting
• Takers And Leavers
• Mother Culture
• We Think Evolutionary Law Doesn't Apply To Us
• The Ecophilosophy Of Deep Ecology

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