Collective Trauma: The Fallout 11

I am not a historian. I do know a little bit. Here is what I know: our systems of government and economics are founded on the twin principals of fear and greed. This is inevitable. I will provide here a little sketch of our world history as I understand it. It is said that we began as chimp-like hominids swinging from trees in the African jungles some four to five million years ago. As the climate changed from glaciation and the forests gave way to savannah, our hominid ancestors had to descend from the trees and adapt to living in grassland. In order to see any threats coming their way they had to adopt a bipedal posture. They basically had to get used to walking on their hind legs so they could see what was going on, or they would be easy pickings for some marauding lion or leopard. So, the four legged ones all got eaten up and the ones on their hind legs, not so much, so they survived to replicate their genes in future generations till it became stamped in our hominid genome, that we would all from now on be two-legged critters. This provided advantages and we soon found that we could make tools to help us hunt, as we were acquiring a rather strange taste for meat, strange, I say, given that our digestive systems are not designed to accommodate a lot of flesh, maybe a little bit, but no worries. We also learned how to use fire to cook the meat, making it delicious (for some people, anyway) and easy to digest. Our brains grew and we kept escaping from predators while turning ourselves into a predatory species. So, even in our earliest history it was all about survival, avoiding getting eaten, and finding ways of eating others. During this epoch our various groups and bands would often fight for territory and resources. We learned how to kill and hate each other and so war was invented. Our brains continued to grow. We became very clever and adept at this business of survival in spite of our physical weakness. We developed culture and we migrated out of Africa to other lands, eventually filling the earth with our species. Always, behind our ever expanding brains, consciousness and cleverness was the ongoing fear of being killed or eaten, of being destroyed by natural disasters, of being attacked, robbed and killed by our enemies. We developed clans and tribes and eventually agriculture, farming communities, and soon we knew metallurgy and were building cities. It was considered safer living in a city, since there were always beasts and human enemies marauding about everywhere. Cities developed into nations and nations into empires, always at war, always killing each other and fighting for resources and power. We developed language, culture, writing, art and a sense of our recorded history. We became cleverer and ever cleverer. And we still wanted more than our share of resources and wealth, we continued to distrust and cheat and kill one another, we continued to go to war. This became our legacy as absolute monarchies evolved into constitutional democracies or gave place to republics. We harnessed ever newer, more efficient and more destructive forms of energy: coal, petroleum, nuclear. We were harming and damaging the environment and our very Mother Earth. Few of us cared: we were all set from our earliest genetic and cerebral programing to survive, thrive, conquer and kill all enemies and threats, and amass as much wealth as possible. Only in our religions and in our arts could be seen any possibilities of a better and higher potential to our humanity. Our art told a story of a transcendent reality behind our human brutality, and in another way, religion did this as well as we were reminded that we were also spiritual beings with connections to a deity. Religious and spiritual observances, music and visual art have gone on to remind us that we are, or can be, or need to be, better than we are. We have so many interwoven myths, but the central golden thread that unites these mythologies is that humans are somehow godlike, but fallen from a state of original grace, and that we have to, as the song says, get back to the garden. Now, our lovely liberal democracies boast about enshrining the very best of our humanity, of being forward looking and forward thinking. But...they still want to build the military, which is really a death machine, and continue the exploitation and commercialization of fossil fuels, which of course is simply going to accelerate pollution and global warming and ensuring the likelihood of a very dismal future for our planet. Our liberal democracies, like any more enlightened form of government, are simply another form of a light and happy face version of the fear and greed mobilization of the old tyrannies and despotisms. Made more palatable, of course, for the delicate. We can still sing Kumbaya. But until we really start to embrace and harness the comatose and gravely wounded divinity of our human natures, and rise above these ancestral impulses towards fear and greed and hate, we are really going to get nowhere. Our governments are going to do squat about this because they are so entrenched in greed, self-interest and corruption, but we as individuals and small groups, summoning the courage to transform into our better and higher selves, are going to move mountains. This is the way it has happened throughout history, and this has to happen again, and to keep on happening if we are going to save our planet and our own sorry little asses.