Humans have known no peace. We have always been this way. It is our nature. Three lies right there. And how effortlessly they flow. There is no alternative. Another lie but maybe one that we are starting to at least question. The first three lies are nevertheless confirmed by practically all of history. All the history that we are shown.
And on this basis, we can all agree that the only way is forward since the past was always worse. The purpose of the lie is to keep us going forwards never to remember the past, only to bury it and to leave it further and further behind, safe from rediscovery
But civilised beings have known peace. Other tribal cultures are records of our past. We find them in hidden corners of the globe living in peace with one another because they, unlike us, are not on a crusade of expansion. And when a group lives unthreatened by others attempting to push into its territory or its food supply, there are other ways of dealing with disputes.
The record that magically fails to appear in any corner of Imperial history, is the many separate jigsaw pieces of investigative science – archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, etymology. The record can be read from every word and its point of origin, every habit of culture, every fossil, bone or man-made stone. All the atomised pieces fit together into one big jigsaw called the Richness, Complexity and Sophistication of Humanity over dozens of millennia, not three. An alternative picture of how humanity has been since we’ve been here. At peace by negotiation, not fighting over property.
Slaughter is about control over land and capital. Religion, or more recently Public Relations, provide the excuse for it – to pretend that the enemy are moral primitives. To pretend that our own cause is honourable.
The living present across diverse cultures is a snapshot of history – we see history at different stages progressing along the same path. Lewis Morgan shows through the evolution of family structures that humanity organises on a universal pattern. One form of organisation witnessed in the present is the distant ancestor of another apparently different form that is also here in the present. When left to their own devices, humans evolve organically and similarly. There may be environment-specific variations, but it is essentially the same pattern.
If you were evolving from scratch then you might consider firstly issues around security. Will you choose to get together in small numbers or large numbers? From such basic questions, humans across the globe arrived at identical answers. Hence the pattern. It is not only a pattern that is confirmed by scientific enquiry, it is confirmed by basic common sense.
But instead we find ourselves on a very non-organic road – land theft subsequently defended by force, and subsequent inheritance defended by Law. Injustice held in place by legitimized violence. We have been frog-marched down this road down which we have no further wish to travel.
Aside from property, theft, greed, insanity and violence, all other diverse world cultures progress along the same organising principle, a common universal sense, a life in balance, a road mapped out like a destiny waiting for our family structures to evolve through it, whichever end of the planet we came from.
The evidence of our ancient intelligence to survive through the millennia is here today in the organising principles of peoples who are not organised around acquisition to the bitter end but instead around survival, security, sustainability through countless millennia.
If we share we live forever. The appeal is that we do not have to compete to exist and so we do not have to commit such hideous crimes against the soul.
The lie says “There is no alternative. There is no peace. Liberty can only be assured by dominating and controlling other people”. And so the Master’s subjects bow to him in their ignorance of the alternative, in their greed for power and in their fear of disfavour. The subjects hope that the master will treat them generously. And they will absorb and regurgitate the values of the system that offers them favour and they will insist at length to the rest of us non-believers that we have a functioning democracy, a fairly elected, representative and accountable government. Maybe not in the home, the school, or the workplace, and actually not terribly much in evidence in Government either but… somewhere.
The truth is that they can’t kill the past however hard they try because it has an inconveniently persistent habit of manifesting itself in everything in the living present, including that part of the human brain that is wired for it. Nature is so much bigger than the intentions of our venerable System. For anyone who cares to travel beyond the ever-shrinking mental container called the Official Version, nature shows the truth they try every day to kill. Every second, the past lies on every face waiting for us to acknowledge it and act on it. And so the National Security stands waiting for the truth to out. And out with the truth comes national Security’s true purpose – to keep what is ours from us. Restore Order.
And they will have their say on the matter, they will shout it from every newspaper, every TV station, every billboard, and every one of its favoured servants will acknowledge a few problems here and there but hey, look at my iPhone.
Koyaanisqatsi is a seminal film produced and directed in 1982 by Godfrey Reggio. It is the most eloquent film I have ever seen, but it has no words. To quote Reggio, “our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live”.
Koyaanisqatsi means “a way of life that calls for another way of living”. And it is our task to find that way, It seems almost too vast an undertaking, to change the route of this juggernaut that carries us to extinction. But like any problem, we can start at its beginning.