The Top Ten Reasons To Scrap Modern Culture
As I watch bombs drop in Gaza, rockets fired back across the Israeli boarder, and the media debates “acceptable civilian casualties,” it gives me the feeling that our culture may be twisted beyond hope. After 10,000 years, our culture has still not found a way to resolve conflicts without war. We are beset today by numerous unprecedented threats, and all we can think of doing is either killing our neighbor or shutting of their natural gas supply.
This has inspired me to list the top reasons why our culture cannot be saved and should be replaced by something better. Our essay turned into a community effort of Culturequake friends and writers. We hope you will find something here that resonates and inspires you to bring change in whatever way you are best at. With no further ado, here are the Top T en Reasons to dump our culture and move on to a better way of living.
We do not treat the earth as a scared place. Christianity for example sees the earth not as a sacred place, but merely as a way station where humans are tested to see whether they are worthy of heaven or hell after death. If the earth were a sacred place under Christianity, then humans would not have a place in it because humans are not sacred. You are born to die to go to a better place. In Christian theology we are all born sinners; we do our best to approach holiness.
In contrast, animism sees the earth as a sacred place and sees humans as having a place in a sacred place. Humans are just as holy as oak trees, birds, or mushrooms; all species are valued the same.—Daniel Quinn, the C-Realm Podcast, Episode, 88.
After 10,000 years, our culture has not been able to create peace, health, happiness, or general welfare for humans and all other species. We just keep inventing new ways for a minority to control the majority and to concentrate wealth. Infinite growth on a finite planet is also physically impossible. We continue to consume precious nonrenewable resources and soon begin to runout in an event called “peak everything.” Consumption by 6.8 billion has put humanity into an ecological carrying capacity overshoot of 20 percent. We are sawing off the branch we are standing on. However, because of our short life span or environmental generational amnesia this does not matter to most people. People have never experienced what the world was like during their grandparents or even parents early lifetimes. This is a major stumbling block to cultural change coming to the masses.— Chuck Burr and Karen Taylor.
The paved surfaces will crack and plants and trees come up to help humans depave. We need these lands back for food production, wildlife habitat, and flood control. Apart from the deadly car and truck fleet on the roads now killing off the Earth’s sweet climate and slaughtering humans and many times more animals—there are other problems caused by asphalted and concrete surfaces: walking on them is hard on our feet, knees and back. Additionally, when there’s ice one slips; that doesn’t happen nearly so easily on natural ground. And cars pack the snow down to create icy conditions as well as filthy slush. Depaving is joyous, and includes removing useless lawns. The Depavers, my old band, was fun and has bequeathed to posterity tunes with lyrics for the task at hand: liberate the Earth!—Jan Lundberg
If I had an inclination to let our culture die to let another be re-born, I’d simple walk away from the beast. Because most people are disenfranchised our culture goes wrong. There are so many people with absolute power over everyone else that, by propagating the notion that it’s perfectly OK for anyone to justify doing harm to somebody else, we live in semi-assault mode for far too much of our days. The system has also made it impossible to live without cash. You cannot get food, clothes, or get around without freely flowing currency at hand or the click of a mouse. Currency dependent sharing systems, like guns, draw more than their share of disasters.
In the U.S. you become enslaved for 40 years of work capitalizing someone else’s dreams just for the chance to own a roof over your head. The odds favor the capitalist at a cost to the rest of us. In the rest of the world it is worse, – we say ‘but you cannot even get a mortgage out there…”. But at least outside of the mortgage grid, any capable man can live well, off the radar, and well enough to build and manifest a proud home for their grandkids in but a handful of years. Without capital, you can’t be free of the cash based indemnities system’s gray zone of pseudo slavery. Authority should, by definition, be empowered to do no more than distribute the wealth blood of the land. Authority bent on accumulation and gaining the right to accumulate more soon shifts astray of it’s human base of simple moralities. As long as obeisance to that pattern is a strategic choice, we’ll seldom know gaia.—John Cruickshank
We will have a chance [to flourish] when we respect the air, the water and the soil that sustains and supports us and all life. T’is very simple: we kill the living environment for whatever reason, greed, comfort, pleasure, riches, stupidity, bigotry, wealth or plain meanness; we kill ourselves—it is that simple. All other reasons don’t matter, never did, never will.—Tony Pereira
We need systems that fit and work for people rather than making people fit and work into a system that exists. The current system serves no one really; no one “truly” benefits at the end of the day, as everyone is held back from progress and achieving our highest potential.—Vladislav Davidzon
One reason we got to this sorry state of affairs, and it is a primary one, is that our land tenure system is structured in such a way as to create poverty and huge rich vs. poor gap, requiring workers to work longer and harder making things that are not really necessary for quality of life, or low quality items that are not durable.
So we need to start over the what I call an “earth rights” ethic—which is both the ecological consciousness and the economic justice in land consciousness. Then we harness the power of these principles via public finance policy of “green tax shift” which includes both environmental taxes but actually more important capture of land rent of surface land for the benefit of all. All in all, if properly done, this would provide framework for localizing the economy and building sustainable, ecological towns and villages.—Alanna Hartzok
Our culture is fundamentally flawed in being based on competition instead of cooperation and community. Arguments:
a) Competition is a remnant of a world of true scarcity, where survival was secured by the process of eliminating those deficient in one survival qualification or another. Competition assured the survival of the fittest. In a world of developed sufficiency, the emphasis should be on stability, which is almost the antithesis of competition.
b) Competition in an already established range of sufficiency merely encourages redevelopment, over-development and redundant development, serving to deplete the quality of what already exists in sufficiency, and to corrupt the sensibilities of those subject to its excesses.
c) Competition alienates people from one another and is entirely disruptive of the humanizing qualities of love, friendship, trust and fellowship.—Irv Thomas
The attitude of God-given “dominion” over all of creation, allied with “rugged individualism” are our culture’s worst memes. These attitudes result in a lack of accountability and a attitude that we have the right to destroy as we please. Rugged individualism, often seen as “everyone for themselves,” is used to divide and conquer. We see it’s use by corporations, citing “states rights” finding it much easier and cheaper to corrupt local
officials than federal. It is also used to undermine efforts to work for the common good and to privatize publicly-owned commons.
Underlying all of this is a pervasive attitude of “sanctimonious arrogance” or “unquestioning belief,” a human trait that is my personal definition of evil. It is a cross-cultural attitude underlying the malevolent characteristics of all negative memes. The lack of intellectual humility will always be the most difficult and limiting factor in our attempts to change for the better. When we feel that we have certain knowledge, we drop a millstone in the road to discovery and the achievement of wisdom.—Marc Hulbert
The number one reason to start afresh: The existing cultural paradigm is focused on the past and the future, ignoring the most substantial aspect of our reality—our presentness. We are all here together, along with our Source (whatever the name), in this moment. We must start, and move, from here.—Jim Prues
Its is good to get a number of different points of view from time to time. Lets think in new ways outside the box. We won’t solve our greatest challenges or make the world a better place for our children and all other species with the same level of thinking that got us here today.
Daniel Quinn
C-Realm Podcast, Episode 88
Jan Lundberg
Culture Change
John Cruickshank
Sunny John and the Hobbit House
Vladislav Davidzon
Ecospace Conscious Community
Irv Thomas
irvthom1@comcast.net
Richard Heinberg
Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
Marc Hurlbert
Fixing Air
Visit Culturequake.org to learn more about Culturequake the book and the online Magazine. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC
Tags: culture change, overshoot, peak oil, sacred earth
Jan 22, 2009
Because “sustainable” is now such an over-used word with varying definitions, the Community Planet Foundation has come up with a new word: “C-Sattainable” (pronounced see•es•tainable). C-Sattainable adds Common Sense to the concept of sustainable by addressing, as the core issue, the amazing wastefulness, inefficiency, and inequality of the everyone-for-themselves paradigm, as opposed to one based on the Highest Good For All Life. Thus, through using Common Sense to create a world that works for everyone and for all life, sustainable is attainable through basing its essence of cooperation for the Highest Good For All. See http://www.communityplanet.org.
Jan 22, 2009
This is a very conscious and intelligent commentary. I agree with most of what is written above. The dilemma must be patently clear to us all by now, whether we acknowledge it or not. The existing paradigm on which we have premised our ‘civilisation’ is, and has for at least a century, been entirely unsustainable.
Irv Thomas comments on the invalidity of competition as a modus operandi is bang on.
The farce of hoaring ourselves to the system of wage slavery for the slim chances of owning a shelter as Cruickshank points out, should shame and embarrass any self respecting individual.
Human arrogance in the form of self righteous and axiomatic belief systems as Hulbert indicates is an
insurmountable impediment to critical and inspirational thinking.
Here we are, on the brink of total collapse and we ‘the people’, ‘ickse wikasa’, or however we identify
ourselves and the collective, have not found the means and will to connect our resources, to create
an infrastructure, network and resource base, that is prepared for a major shift of power. It’s going to happen, it’s got to happen, but it seems to many of us are acquiescent, and or, self interested.
The exciting thing about our predicament is, if we make a push for ‘real change’ there are infinite possibilities of how we can live, these emerging modes are not set in stone -
I would look suspiciously at any proposed system such as deep ecology or lofty idealism that is not rooted in practice, research, and a diversity of approaches. There is not one way, technology is not inherently evil, we have to balance our perspective within the whole, and look at the quality and contribution of our service/intention. This is a simplification, but it moves us away from the competitive model.
The ego, or the self interested ego, is an obstacle because it centers the universe around itself and regards others as separate. Leaving the study of the ego to psychologists and spirituality is a grave mistake. Its incumbent upon all of us to see what our real motivations are in order to see the value
in our actions and ultimately our purpose. Science has been subverted and abused by the elite, but at its best, it is an invaluable tool for creativity, productivity and abundance. When we enter the equation of value and virtue into science, we will discover how to realise better our dreams but we’ve got to stop thinking that anything we do is value free or neutral.
Thought has a quality, and is as important a process as brushing ones teeth, building an earthship, or ‘depaving’. What we think, what we dream, is of inestimable value, thus through dreams of conquest and exploitation we have this monopolistic and violent existence.
Dumping ‘modern culture’ is essential, but I suggest we should drag all the treasures, the virtues and insights of the great thinkers and artisans, and the psychological and metaphysical knowledge that helps unravel the mind and set it to constructive and enlightened pursuits.
Toffler sums up more comprehensively than any other in Third Wave, the panoply of processes and ways of being that is necessary for humanity to have any hope of co-existence. A wave of individuals that do
not fit into any narrowly defined cultural stereotypes but that are able to straddle the whole range of possibilities connected to whatever it is that humans decide to direct their perceptions toward.
In order to sustain a world that allows diversity in fact, to flourish, we need to be interested in people, and unlocking their potential…to get there, heaps of prejudice, greed, and primitivism has to be tempered if not set aside.
If “Necessity is the mother of invention”, then, our current situation will elicit myriad means of transformation and consciousness – positive change. The alternative is even more unthinkable than the daily hell that exists.
If ever there was a time, it’s NOW, that we need to be dreaming and doing better things – collectively – sorting out what is important, both practically and materially. The logic to be kind and virtuous is not such a nonsense, and yes, there is SUCH A THING AS A FREE LUNCH. Where do you think the inhabitants of the Mayflower, and decades of colonialists got their means of sustenance. It grew on trees, on came from the kindness of others. Time to reverse all the obscene subversive materialist language that the propagandists that encourage the masses to race to the bottom, propagate.
After 2000+ years of fumbling around in the darkness, with war upon war, and violation, desecration genocide and paralysis, haven’t we earned the right to tap Nature’s abundance?
Can we not at last learn from our errors, the glaring mistakes that inform us of our past iniquities such as the abuse of resources on Easter Island, the Buffalo jumps in North America, the excesses of Cortez and species decimation under Western Colonialism?
There is enough data to avoid and repair much of the damage we have done, and to advance us into a balanced world of abundance. It requires iron will, sacrifice, the patience of saint’s, commitment, abundant humour and ingenuity.
Anyone up for the job?
I certainly hope so, because if we don’t volunteer for it, the lot we are about to receive under our present masters is going to be demoniacal, YEP, vastly more than it is already.
The credit crunch, “War against Terror,” and ‘worldwide food shortage’, has served many purposes, I believe, it has downsized the workforce of corporations with massive savings, it has created an enemy, increased revenues for the airport authorities and security services, it has created mass paranoia and retarded human freedoms to pre 2nd WW levels and justified genocide and commodity theft, it has tripled supermarket profits and has set the scene for Monsanto and Cargil to enforce the use of devastating terminator seed technology – to sum it up, the poor will get poorer, and many of us that think we are riding the wave today will join them in the near future, and the rich, well, this is their dream come true. We gotta hand it to them though, when they have a dream, no matter how heinous and ambitious, they, essentially a handful of elites, see it through to the bitter end (that’s our bitter end, not theirs).
Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence,”
as any traveller will know, poverty is relative, and as any body in who knows anything about anything, we, the majority, are all poor compared to the Robber Barons that run ‘the UN-economy’.
Time to wake up?
Maybe!
While there’s still time.
PEACE
Jan 22, 2009
This is a very conscious and intelligent commentary. I agree with most of what is written above. The dilemma must be patently clear to us all by now, whether we acknowledge it or not. The existing paradigm on which we have premised our ‘civilisation’ is, and has for at least a century, been entirely unsustainable.
Irv Thomas comments on the invalidity of competition as a modus operandi is bang on.
The farce of hoaring ourselves to the system of wage slavery for the slim chances of owning a shelter as Cruickshank points out, should shame and embarrass any self respecting individual.
Human arrogance in the form of self righteous and axiomatic belief systems as Hulbert indicates is an
insurmountable impediment to critical and inspirational thinking.
Here we are, on the brink of total collapse and we ‘the people’, ‘ickse wikasa’, or however we identify
ourselves and the collective, have not found the means and will to connect our resources, to create
an infrastructure, network and resource base, that is prepared for a major shift of power. It’s going to happen, it’s got to happen, but it seems to many of us are acquiescent, and or, self interested.
The exciting thing about our predicament is, if we make a push for ‘real change’ there are infinite possibilities of how we can live, these emerging modes are not set in stone -
I would look suspiciously at any proposed system such as deep ecology or lofty idealism that is not rooted in practice, research, and a diversity of approaches. There is not one way, technology is not inherently evil, we have to balance our perspective within the whole, and look at the quality and contribution of our service/intention. This is a simplification, but it moves us away from the competitive model.
The ego, or the self interested ego, is an obstacle because it centers the universe around itself and regards others as separate. Leaving the study of the ego to psychologists and spirituality is a grave mistake. Its incumbent upon all of us to see what our real motivations are in order to see the value
in our actions and ultimately our purpose. Science has been subverted and abused by the elite, but at its best, it is an invaluable tool for creativity, productivity and abundance. When we enter the equation of value and virtue into science, we will discover how to realise better our dreams but we’ve got to stop thinking that anything we do is value free or neutral.
Thought has a quality, and is as important a process as brushing ones teeth, building an earthship, or ‘depaving’. What we think, what we dream, is of inestimable value, thus through dreams of conquest and exploitation we have this monopolistic and violent existence.
Dumping ‘modern culture’ is essential, but I suggest we should drag all the treasures, the virtues and insights of the great thinkers and artisans, and the psychological and metaphysical knowledge that helps unravel the mind and set it to constructive and enlightened pursuits.
Toffler sums up more comprehensively than any other in Third Wave, the panoply of processes and ways of being that is necessary for humanity to have any hope of co-existence. A wave of individuals that do
not fit into any narrowly defined cultural stereotypes but that are able to straddle the whole range of possibilities connected to whatever it is that humans decide to direct their perceptions toward.
In order to sustain a world that allows diversity in fact, to flourish, we need to be interested in people, and unlocking their potential…to get there, heaps of prejudice, greed, and primitivism has to be tempered if not set aside.
If “Necessity is the mother of invention”, then, our current situation will elicit myriad means of transformation and consciousness – positive change. The alternative is even more unthinkable than the daily hell that exists.
If ever there was a time, it’s NOW, that we need to be dreaming and doing better things – collectively – sorting out what is important, both practically and materially. The logic to be kind and virtuous is not such a nonsense, and yes, there is SUCH A THING AS A FREE LUNCH. Where do you think the inhabitants of the Mayflower, and decades of colonialists got their means of sustenance. It grew on trees, on came from the kindness of others. Time to reverse all the obscene subversive materialist language that the propagandists that encourage the masses to race to the bottom, propagate.
After 2000+ years of fumbling around in the darkness, with war upon war, and violation, desecration genocide and paralysis, haven’t we earned the right to tap Nature’s abundance?
Can we not at last learn from our errors, the glaring mistakes that inform us of our past iniquities such as the abuse of resources on Easter Island, the Buffalo jumps in North America, the excesses of Cortez and species decimation under Western Colonialism?
There is enough data to avoid and repair much of the damage we have done, and to advance us into a balanced world of abundance. It requires iron will, sacrifice, the patience of saint’s, commitment, abundant humour and ingenuity.
Anyone up for the job?
I certainly hope so, because if we don’t volunteer for it, the lot we are about to receive under our present masters is going to be demoniacal, YEP, vastly more than it is already.
The credit crunch, “War against Terror,” and ‘worldwide food shortage’, has served many purposes, I believe, it has downsized the workforce of corporations with massive savings, it has created an enemy, increased revenues for the airport authorities and security services, it has created mass paranoia and retarded human freedoms to pre 2nd WW levels and justified genocide and commodity theft, it has tripled supermarket profits and has set the scene for Monsanto and Cargil to enforce the use of devastating terminator seed technology – to sum it up, the poor will get poorer, and many of us that think we are riding the wave today will join them in the near future, and the rich, well, this is their dream come true. We gotta hand it to them though, when they have a dream, no matter how heinous and ambitious, they, essentially a handful of elites, see it through to the bitter end (that’s our bitter end, not theirs).
Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence,”
as any traveller will know, poverty is relative, and as any body in who knows anything about anything, we, the majority, are all poor compared to the Robber Barons that run ‘the UN-economy’.
Time to wake up?
Maybe!
While there’s still time.
PEACE
Jan 22, 2009
I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but seeing the past through rose-colored glasses seems naive at best and dangerous at worst. When we read ancient history, it’s full of battles, insurrection, natural and man-made disasters, and turmoil. The notion that culture has somehow corrupted us is short-sighted. Culture has also given us the institutions that create security, modern medicine, ecological awareness, etc.
I woudn’t argue that human culture has created problems, but it has also solved problems. We can’t go back to the Garden of Eden anymore than we can make Adam spit up the apple.
Let’s learn to live in this world and do the best by it rather than wishing for a world that probably never existed.
Feb 08, 2009
Evolution’s missing key, Vibhuti – http://www.psproof.com
Feb 08, 2009
Evolution’s ‘ lost key ‘, Vibhuti = http://www.psproof.com