Man tries to badmouth life outside the civilisation he has created, and in doing so he digs his own grave.
Denigrations of our hunting and gathering ancestors, as well as of other free animals and even all of nature, are part of everyday life in the mass media and other publications. This phenomenon of degradation of all life outside the civilisational system provides a trail that leads deep into the core psychological problem of humanity today. An elucidation and resolution of this complex can be the decisive key to a very positive world view – and perhaps a late chance for humanity’s ability to survive.
In 1848, the explorer Major Mitchell, one of the very few early European settlers of the Australian continent respectfully dedicated to the hunting and gathering aborigines there, wrote of their existence widely witnessed by him:
“Such health and exemption from disease; such intensity of existence, in short, must be far beyond the enjoyments of civilised men, with all that art can do for them; and the proof of this is to be found in the failure of all attempts to persuade these free denizens of uncivilised earth to forsake it for tilled soil. ” [1]
Tom Petrie, who even spent several years of his youth living with pure hunter-gatherers, learning their languages and getting to know their way of life more intensively than probably any other European, expressed a quite similar opinion. He recalled as an old man in 1904:
“To them it was a real pleasure getting their food; they were so light hearted and gay, nothing troubled them; they had no bills to meet and no wages to pay. And there were no missionaries in those days to make them think how bad they were” [2]
TThese sentences do not fit at all with the vast majority of contemporary accounts by European colonialists of the existence of Indigenous Australians – whereby most did not even have a remotely similar insight to that of the two very experienced practitioners Mitchell and Petrie. They were usually described as miserable, starving and degenerate. How extremely low the existence of the Aborigines was considered in the eyes of the new settlers can also be seen from the fact that there were regular hunts in which the “savages” were chased with dogs and shot with guns. In many regions, such as Tasmania, the colonialists wiped out the original tribes down to the last human being.
Now, at first glance, it may seem as if the drastic contradictions between the extremely positive testimonies of the natural existence of hunter-gatherers by the practitioners Mitchell and Petrie on the one hand, and the no longer increasable humiliations by the colonialist system on the other, were something that has long since been overcome. But this is not true.
First of all, even across the boundaries of political camps and other movements, it is still quite common today to assume the entire existence of pre-civilisational cultures as one of predators, fear and hunger. In cinematic animations, we learn that before the advent of agriculture, people struggled for bare survival in a bleak world, constantly looking around in insecurity.
Even more drastically than the existence of human hunter-gatherers in nature, that of other animals is distorted and twisted. This phenomenon can be easily observed in the largest news magazines on the internet. Because these media use highly refined analytical tools to pay precise attention to what content people like to click on and what they don’t, they immediately act like a self-aligning mirror of the collective mind.
The first thing that stands out is that all but a single-digit percentage of the articles revolve almost exclusively around people themselves. This revolving around oneself goes so far that even the term “world” is often used when actually humanity is meant. So one writes “the world looks to New York” or with “world hunger” one means the hunger of people.
The few thematisations of other animals, on the other hand, are mainly divided into a few categories. In one of the largest of these, they are portrayed as “cute” or “sweet” – and thus demeaned. Another large field concerns photographic documentation of cases in which individual animals are rescued by humans and now photographed framed by protective human hands. Smaller shares are allotted to news about scientific news from the non-human animal world. And only in the per mille range, and thus in fact almost not at all, is the existence of those animals in the system of factory farming – the source of almost all animal food in the supermarkets.
In addition to the categories listed above, there is another one that is often the most common: reports that include photographs of scenes of prey in nature. Thus, a dying process that in reality might have lasted only seconds is torn out of the frame of time and delivered to the audience as a continuous event. The result – which is also often produced in cinematic documentaries – creates the impression that the existence of non-human animals in nature consists of being eaten over almost their entire lives.
In order to realise – as a person “pre-damaged” by the media – that there is a very similar contradiction between this artificial image of “cruel nature” in the media and the reality that can be observed in practice, as in the example of the Australian aborigines outlined earlier, it is best to take an unbiased look yourself at a piece of nature that is as uninfluenced as possible by civilisation. If you first concentrate on the – relatively easily observable – vertebrates, you can soon discover something of the utmost importance that has hardly any place in the world view of civilisation: Namely, the fact that free animals in nature are in a state of self-determined development of all their innate characteristics up to a degree of their existence that goes far towards absolute, while prolonged suffering, misery and infirmity are real rarities.
You can also reflect on this indirectly by thinking about how often you have encountered birds in real nature that have just been eaten alive or suffered in some other concrete way. There will have been only a few cases, whose number in relation to the thousands and thousands of freely unfolded and healthy specimens was a fraction approaching zero.
If the drastic contradiction between civilisation’s distorted image of other animals and their real existence is recognised in the first rudiments, then this discovery can be deepened into an extremely interesting level. Today, numerous empirical proofs from the neurosciences prove that the cognitive characteristics assumed as exclusivities of humans in the system of civilisation, such as “ego-consciousness”, “free will” or “reason”, have no stable basis as such. They were all artificially invented, or else they exist in other animals just as they do in us.
In addition to this, the sensory capacities including the processing procedures in the human brain are only below average. And finally, according to unrefuted findings of palaeontological neuroscience, the organic basis for everything to do with pleasure and the feeling of happiness was, at least in vertebrates, basically the same as that of a modern human being for about 500 million years [5].
If – after the discovery of regular freedom and the only tiny proportion of misery and suffering in nature – one has now also accepted these empirical findings around cognition, then a circle closes to the testimonies of Major Mitchell and Tom Petrie: Now there is nothing more to contradict that the other animals have also always felt that “real pleasure” in procuring their food in the wild. It can be concluded that they were also as “light-hearted and gay” in doing so as the two practitioners had recognised in human hunter-gatherers. And the stronger expression of the senses as well as the completely independent existence with nothing but the bare body indicate that the intensities of their existence must indeed be even very “far beyond the enjoyments of civilised men” and have been so in all history of animals on Earth.
Earthly nature was thus in reality for hundreds of millions of years not only a place of free development, while prolonged suffering and misery were only relatively rare marginal phenomena. But it was also a place of very intense and conscious experience and just as much enjoyment, light-heartedness and great pleasure.
But why does civilisation not want to acknowledge this? Nature is no less than the whole world. How can it be that humanity badmouths the entire world as much as possible, that is, concocts a completely darkened view of the world, instead of recognising it for what it has always been? Why does one do such a thing? And what other causal consequences result from it?
The question of why is easy to answer, but accepting that answer is even harder than acknowledging the magnificent and beautiful reality of nature. For it lies in the fact that the roots of civilisation consist in nothing other than the enslavement of non-human living beings.
With the so-called “Neolithic Revolution”, humans left that paradise of free development and enjoyment in which their ancestors – hunting and gathering only free animals and plants – had always existed. In order not to have to consciously perceive the unnaturalness of the lifelong subjugation of the bred and enslaved “useful organisms”, they began to twist and degrade the whole of free nature in such a way that their own unnatural position could be artificially elevated. This began with invented God’s commands to subjugate the earth and extends into the mass media to this day. And the price for this was the completely broken and false world view that all people now carry in their heads.
Those who manage not only to understand these connections, but also to really accept them, must first endure some great pain. But this pain does not last forever. And when it subsides, a level of understanding arises from which an extremely positive view of the world opens up. It is like suddenly discovering a very wide horizon from a hill climbed for the first time, in front of which a colourful and beautiful landscape stretches out – which cannot be perceived at all from the broken ground of the crazy civilisational world view.
And if you want to go even further and find out how it can be that humanity – despite its quite passable intelligence potential in some fields – seems to be doing everything in its power, especially in the present, to destroy all of nature and thus also its own livelihood as quickly as possible, you now have this answer in your hands: It lies in the intensified psychological problem that has arisen as a result of the ever more extreme intensification of the enslavement of other living beings.
It is estimated that today well over 50 per cent of the biomass of all the planet’s agricultural animals is accounted for by so-called industrial factory farming [6]. It is true that hardly anyone can see with their own eyes where the huge quantities of yoghurts and sausages piled up in the ever-longer refrigerated shelves of supermarkets come from. But every single person certainly knows.
That is the point. So people know it, they know that the existence of the animals there, which are very similar to them except for a few details, is determined by nothing but misery and infirmity throughout their entire lives – in other words, exactly the opposite of the situation of the free animals. And in order not to let this come to the surface of consciousness, the collective subconscious has agreed to turn the entire world upside down instead.
So today’s man has indeed obtained cheap food – in the sense of money. But actually he pays very high prices for it. These range from the broken and tightly constricted world view to severe disturbances in the mental health of his children. And as an overall causal consequence, they ultimately lie in the inability of the entire civilisational system to survive. Such a disturbed collective mind, which only revolves around itself and sees around it only artificially created gloom, cannot appreciate the real world. As a result, it is lost, cannot make the right decisions, has no orientation and no goal, knows nothing sensible to do with itself and finally perishes from all this.
The key to establishing a healthy self-image and consequently also the ability to survive can therefore only be to dismantle as immediately as possible the escalated perversion of the enslavement of other living beings. Such extreme forms as industrial factory farming would have to be abolished immediately, that is, from one day to the next. The whole of agriculture, including the perverse treatment of “crops”, would have to be steered into a massive extensification process. Every adult has a duty to participate in this. No one can manage to wriggle out of this responsibility. For there is always something they can do to help humanity come closer to reality again.
[1] Tim Low, Wild Food Plants of Australia, Angus & Robertson
[2] Tim Low, Wild Food Plants of Australia, Angus & Robertson
[3] CNN.com 07.01.2021
(4) https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/raetsel-der-woche-loewen-schlangen-und-antilopen-a-1046539.html
[5] The vertebrate mesolimbic reward system and social behavior network: a comparative synthesis. O’Connell LA1, Hofmann HA, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas at Austin, USA. PMID: 21800319 DOI: 10.1002/cne.22735
[6] Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Andreas Wijkman u.a. „Club of Rome: Der große Bericht — Wir sind dran“ / Teil.1 Kap. 1.4, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017