Our political discussions and media coverage are far too shallow to be useful. We must go deeper and much further back to understand the world today and learn how to get where we want to go.

Almost everyone misunderstands what culture is. Most think it is soda pop, pop stars, blue jeans, language, and TV. Some think it is capitalism, communism, or progressivism. Some see culture as Western culture or Eastern culture.

Look at the motorcycle picture. The motorcycles will fool you. All of the people above belong to the same culture, as does a soccer mom in a Chicago suburb. Keep guessing. This makes a huge difference in how we understand what is happening today and where we are going.

Our Culture

The answer is, that we are all Takers. We all belong to the same culture, tea-to-tiler or Taliban, one culture. The Dali Lama or Duncan Donuts cop, one culture. Our Taker culture began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution when they locked up the food and privatized the land, began the population–food race, invented war, stratified knowledge, and ended the formerly one universal religion of animism. A culture is made up of many things, but the above are far more important than whether someone eats tabouli or tater tots. It was forgotten in just a few generation that there used to be probably 10,000 unique Leaver cultures before our now universal Taker culture—The Great Forgetting.

Some suggest that modern progressive exuberance or scientism has replaced Christianity as the modern religion or culture. The believe is that “here and now” and a better life for each generation from technology has replaced Christianity's faith in an “unseen unknown afterlife” and will culminate in a technological singularity that will save humanity.

They are right to identify exuberance, but today’s exuberance is the same that caused a tribe of agriculturalists between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to start overtaking their Leaver neighbors in an unending conquest that is now largely complete. The age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and Manifest Destiny are past examples of the same exuberance. The ultimate hubris was inventing one god in a human form. Today, all but one or two million Leavers, versus of 6.8 billion Takers, are left alive or are not yet assimilated.

It’s Pointless To Discuss Anything Else

Peak oil and financial collapse seem important because they immediately affect us and are within our lifetime scale. But, they are just noise along the way of our 10,000 year Taker cultural odyssey. Nothing will change for our children until our culture ends. It will be one rise and fall, migration and conquest, resource war after resource war on and on until our culture is replaced with a resilient diversity of many new cultures again in harmony with our ecosystem. Until then we are just building and operating the Taker prison for our children and ourselves. Only when our culture ends, will the earth be allowed to start healing itself. A change of leadership within the same culture is also a waste of time.

Here comes the important part of the essay: discussing anything else today except walking away from our culture is pointless. This has to do with the difference between programs and vision or the cultural story. When Columbus invaded Haiti, he brought with him the greatest virus of all, a new cultural story.

A program is doing more of the same. If the effort in Afghanistan is failing, send more troops. If test score are falling, spend more on education. If the banks are failing, send them more money.

A program is like a stick in the river of our culture. Programs run contrary to the cultural story. Recycling is a program to combat our consumer economy. Smart grids are a program to combat our excessive use of cheap fossil fuel energy. Green building is a program to combat urban sprawl. Food aid is a program to combat the population–food race. Organic farming is a program to combat industrial agriculture.

Programs are fruitless efforts to combat the symptoms caused by cultural story that the world belongs to man. Until the story is reversed, all programs are a complete waste of time. If new cultures do not replace our Taker culture, there will be no Great Turning or awakening. If you truly want peace, social justice, and Ecotopia, you have to starting living under the remembered story that humanity belongs to the earth.

The Problem is Not Humanity

You Cannot Invent a New Social Organizational System

Here is the rub. You just can’t invent a new social organizational system like a tribe. We have been trying to perfect a new social organizational system called civilization for 10,000 years. But, civilization continues to fail more each year for more people and species. If civilization was going to create world peace and plenty for all it would have done so already. It never can because a story based on one species taking everything it can gets it’s hands on will never work. We even treat members of our own species as poorly as we do all other species we exploit.

The Great Remembering

The only solution worth discussion is developing new cultures that live by the original story that humanity belongs to the earth. Going green is not enough. Driving a hybrid and having a backyard vegetable garden is not going to get you there. It’s deeper than that. I am beginning to thing we are going to have to start depaving, give up our iPods, and start making music for ourselves. I am not sure how far this is going to have to go. But I do know that it has to go back to a level of population and consumption that allows the earth to start rebuilding biodiversity and topsoil.

We will have to remember our relationship with the cultivars, how to live on local sunlight, how to find security by giving support to get support instead of making things to get things, and we might even have to remember animism. We have a long way to go. I am starting the journey for my family.

Hierarchies have strong defenses for attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment. The point is we have to create new cultures that borrow from what we can from the present that fit within the framework of the past. This is the only way we will make a difference.

We have to become the change we want to see, find like-minded friends, and start our own new tribal communities. We must develop a high enough level of group self-reliance that will allow us to walk away in stages. We need doers, speakers, bloggers and podcasters to inspire millions to build the alternatives we need. Lets walk towards something better, not away from something bad. Its time to start living our truth.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

1. *The first use of the Taker and Leaver stories that I know of maybe Daniel Quinn’s use in his 1992 Ishmael book series that states the Leaver story as, “Man belongs to the world” and the Taker story as, “The world was made for man.” Another widely known version was an adaptation by Texas professor Ted Perry as part of a 1994 film script of Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech at a tribal gathering in response to US government’s decision to buy or take his people’s land. The makers of the film took a little literary license, further changing the speech and making it into a letter to President Franklin Pierce, which has been frequently reprinted. No such letter was actually written by or for Chief Seattle. The National Archives has a fractionating history of Chief Seattle’s speech. See the four following references.
   

Daniel Quinn
Ishmael, p. 239

Nancy Zussy
Chief Seattle Speech: Washington State Library, Version 3

Jerry L. Clark
Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech

Wes Felty
Chief Seattle's reply to a Government offer to purchase the remaining Salish lands

Joanna Macy
The shift to a life-sustaining civilization, The Great Turning

Ernest Callenbach
Ecotopia

Marija Gimbutas
The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe

Dan Piraro
Bizarro

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