You Should Know

The "tribal savage" attitude/behavior is created/reinforced by capitalistic societies/interests. We need to actively create an alternative system and it will reshape society as we go.

"The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. [...] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: "Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations." In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. [...] Our species [..] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it." (from the book "A People's History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium" by Chris Harman)

-

"Is it true that our human nature is “survival of the fittest”, greed, competition; that we can't really think about the benefit of the whole and that it's all about the individual - “if I can survive, if my family can survive, that's fine, I don't care about anyone else”? Or maybe it's human conditioning, a second nature, which means a condition that's been practiced for so long that now it seems like it's innate. Because when you think about it, from a very early age we go to school, and the main purpose of this is to basically propel us into the “real world”, where we need to find a job, get a career, and try to survive as isolated people in separate houses, with the family, the car, and all that. But it's a very isolated experience, where you try to build wealth only for yourself. And that's what we're pushed to do, that's what we're encouraged to do, that's our definition of success. But who says? We don't come up with these ideas when we're born, we learn these ideas." (from the book "How To Change The World" by Elina St-Onge)

-

"Ownership of things in common was so universal throughout the American continent when the Europeans arrived that even the cooking pot, Columbus noted, was available to anyone who wanted to take from it, and this even in times of starvation. Two centuries later, Thomas Morton could also say of the Five Nations inhabiting New England that “although every proprietor knows his own . . . yet all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them.” The idea of ownership of land was so alien among Native Americans that individuals made no effort to secure for themselves the lands they occupied, frequently moving grounds, and readily sharing them with newcomers. As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning and selling the clouds or the wind.” William Cronon too comments, “This relaxed attitude towards personal possession was typical throughout New England.” [..] No effort was made to set permanent boundaries around a field that a family used, and fields were abandoned after some years and allowed to return to bushes. What people possessed was the use of the land and the crops; this is what was traded, and this usufruct right could not prevent trespassing. In fact, different groups of people could have claims on the same land, depending on the use they made of it, which might not be the same. Several villages could fish in the same rivers recognizing their mutual rights. And when one left the clan they left everything they had possessed. Yet, these unattached, nomadic tribes had a far deeper communion with the land and agriculture than the privatizing Europeans and so much respect for it that though “they had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking,” at the time of the Europeans’ arrival “the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air.” The result of this lack of attachment to private property among the Native peoples of America was a communal outlook that valued cooperation, group identity, and culture. [..] The dislike for individual accumulation was so strong that they invented the ritual of the potlatch, that is, a periodic redistribution of wealth, to free themselves from it." (from the book "Re-enchanting The World: Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons" by Silvia Federici & Peter Linebaugh)