What is the essence of relationships in Hunter Gatherer society? What lesson can we take from this and apply to our own relationships - to friends, to spouses and to our children.
At the heart of all our modern relationships is the need for control. Our school system is all about control. Institutional life is all about control. We seek to reform our wives and husbands. Our friends and children become improvement projects. We seek to control our own lives.Why - because the idea of property and hence the fear of its loss is our driver.
The most important piece of property that we hang onto is our life itself. The Western ideal is to cure death itself. None of this fear of the loss of property and hence control applies to a hunter gatherer. The HG has no property. A reason I believe why the native Americans were so bemused by the white man's need to negotiate treaties for land. Who could conceive of owning land in a Hunter Gatherer society. You would have hunting grounds that you would defend but you did not own and hence control the land itself. How could you, as a HG, imagine that you could control nature?
Security is still an issue but the HG finds security through working smartly with nature and relies on the collective wisdom of the group, or tribe, to tackle this difficult task. In this context then, the essence of the HG worldview is the need to develop the types of wisdom and personal value that will contribute to the survival of the group or tribe. They accept that the world out there is more powerful than they are. They know that they cannot control it - that they can only "access" it. To access its bounty, they have to understand it. To understand it they have to understand themselves and they have to be in harmony with the group so that its collective wisdom can be tapped in a timely way. So personal growth and trusted connection to the group and so to its collective wisdom is the core survival process. They depend on the community for their security up to a point but not on any individual. They take charge therefore of their own lives. Their purpose is not the illusion of happiness but of growth and integration. Power in the group comes then not from the application of force but comes to those that are the most spiritually developed and the most integrated.
Facilitation is a core skill. You act as a spiritual midwife to the growth of those in relationship with you and they return the favour.
So in this world, your spouse is your key partner is developing your self and him/her. Your job as parents is to ensure that your children have the range of experience that will set them on their course for the maximum development and hence the security of the tribe. The entire tribe participates in the raising of all the children. Your friends are part of the social and economic unit, the tribe, that gives you all the best chance of coping with a dangerous and uncertain world. Knowing that life is fragile, death has not the fear for the HG as it does for us. So paradoxically they enjoy life more. This lack of fear is not rooted in a belief but in their observation. Being students of nature, they can "see" that life does not end irrevocably but is transformed within a great cycle of death and renewal.
So how can this knowledge help us?
Since the dawn of agriculture and settled living, we have lived in a growing illusion that we can succeed in controlling the world around us. Even our new Gods have set us apart and in control over nature. For us, controlling nature is our Destiny. In small areas we applied technology and it looked as if we would conquer nature. Today we are seeing the cracks. Disease such as AIDS and SARS. Breakdown in the food system - mad cow. Weather anomalies. In our institutions we spin the wheels harder and harder but we accomplish less and less. Many loyal and hard working employees are getting laid off and cannot see why their deal with the company has failed. Most families today are one parent. Marriage is failing as a concept that we can live with. More than 30% of our children are failing in school. Many have to be drugged to stay in school. Addiction to things, to sugar and to escape is rising. Look at what we are watching on TV now!!!! Health care cost, especially drug use are out of control.
The illusion of our being able to use technology to control our world is cracking.
Controlling what cannot be controlled is exhausting - Hunter Gatherers show us that there is a societal model that we can apply again which at its heart is built on one idea which we can replicate. That one idea is that we cannot control others, or the world. There is only one person that we can control and that is ourself. In this world of accepted uncertainly comes a new security. This security is based on the power of a group to solve complex problems and to understand the world so that they can cope with it.
Our security come with earning a place in such a group. In tribal life there are no handouts.
Such an idea does not require us to wear skins and go back to hunting in the classic sense just as the ideas of the greeks and the Romans did not require men in the 14th century to put on togas. Many of us are starting to accept that we cannot control others or the world. Many of us are already earning our place in social and economic tribes. Web-logging itself is I think an important agent in this process. Many of us are now self-employed in an new way and if we look carefully are in fact "hunting and gathering". The world of the Hunter Gatherer - the world of wild and not domesticated humans - our home for 4 million years is I think re- emerging from a 7,000 year experiment with domestication where the HG thought he was domesticating plants and animals but ended up domesticating himself!
For me, this book written in public is a voyage of discovery - I have some ideas already but they will become clear to me and to you as I write more. It would be fun to have you along for the voyage.
I have an old map found after 15 years of reading. Here is where I intend to go. I will look at work itself and how the economy in HG terms could be adapted to our circumstances. Inside this part we will look at the ideas of the Gift and of a world view of Abundance. We will see how the Hunter Mindset fits the emerging world of the Free Agent Nation. We will look at how HG groups governed themselves. We will look at their relationship to food, water and the spirit. We will see how they dealt with the issues of health and education and how they used the power of the community to have the most important impact on both. We will look at art as a functional world of participants rather than voyeurs. We will examine the world of the spirit and how the HG made the connections to the universe and to the natural world and integrated this into his being. We will look at how gender operated as two distinct worlds that came together as opposites to offer the power of the whole. We will see the difference between property and place. Place being the intensely understood piece of land where all was known about and where the soul resided for all time. We will look at the needs for us to fit into not only place but into a social scale that enables and supports community and growth (Magic Numbers) We will reconsider time and discover once again the access points to dream or non linear time. We will look at the stages of life, their gateways from child to youth to man to sage, We will look at death and finally we will look at purpose and how Hunter Gathers find meaning in their lives.
Welcome to this journey
12:06:12 PM 
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The latest infectious meme in the blogosphere, which suggests that perhaps the best relationships require no compromise at all, started when one blogger innocently observed that a prime example of how compromise works in marriage is the process of deciding "which movie shall we see". Before you go see what others have to say on this subject, think about where you stand on this spectrum:
