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pai mei · 06-09-2009, 11:20 PM

What is your explanation then for all the suffering in the world ? Look what is happening everywhere. Even in developed countries people accept to be free people just a few hours a day. The rest of the time they wear masks. At work each of us is "the good servant of Mr. Boss". A mask.

A tribe is not about renouncing the knowledge about how to do things easy. It's a social organization. That has worked for millions of years.

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If you like it so much …

People who dislike what I’m saying will challenge me this way: “If you’re so crazy about the tribal life,why don’t you get a spear and go live in a cave?” The tribal life isn’t about spears and caves or about hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering is a lifestyle, an occupation, a way of making a living. A tribe isn’t a particular occupation; it’s a social organization that facilitates making a living.
Daniel Quinn - Beyond Civilization

You do not understand what a tribe is. Read all the links I provided. In a tribe there is no chief that can give orders. He can only give advice. No orders like "do that or I and my servant people who let me think for them, will punish you !". The moment such a chief appears and other people give up their thinking and accept orders, and stop behaving like a group of friends, that is no longer a tribe.

For native Americans telling another what to do was something very rude. People were free. But they stayed together as friends and did not disband at the first hard time. Nobody forced them to share , but they did. Knowing that if one day they did not find anything, the others will share with them. Like a group of friends, something like the mafia but without the profit/capitalist side.

Read above about those settlers that were captured by Indians, then they did not want to return to our "civilization", not even for their families ! What kind of sorcery was that ? Are we not the best ? Why would anyone leave "us" ? What did they found there "on the other side" ? Family, friends, a community to be part of, personal freedom, free time.

Because there is no "us". You tell a "Savage" to come join us then you tell him : "no more tribe for you, be alone, work/eat/repeat/die". You will be a free person just a few hours a day . You will compete against all others. Enjoy.

Why isn't our life easier than theirs ? With all our inventions ? We do not need to renounce knowledge about how to do things easy if we chose to behave as a tribe. We should be working 1/10 of the work of today and still there will be enough for all. More important - free time to spend with families and friends. Or do whatever. That is what people really seek, no "work" and "stuff". Less environmental destruction, turning the planet into money - trash. Now people work just to have something to do.

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Crazy Horse, Tashunkewitko of the western Sioux, was born about 1845. Killed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska in 1877, he lived barely 33 years.

As a boy, Crazy Horse seldom saw white men. Sioux parents took pride in teaching their sons and daughters according to tribal customs. Often giving food to the needy, they exemplified self-denial for the general good. They believed in generosity, courage, and self-denial, not a life based upon commerce and gain.

One winter when Crazy Horse was only five, the tribe was short of food. His father, a tireless hunter, finally brought in two antelope. The little boy rode his pony through the camp, telling the old folks to come for meat, without first asking his parents. Later when Crazy Horse asked for food, his mother said, "You must be brave and live up to your generous reputation."

It was customary for young men to spend much time in prayer and solitude, fasting in the wilderness --typical of Sioux spiritual life which has since been lost in the contact with a material civilization.

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Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American Slavery, American Freedom:

If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians'. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages... . But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... . And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much. ... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow much. Black slaves were the answer.

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Marriage laws are non-existent men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man's head or at his hands.
The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in_ large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time ... made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of then; friends and expect the same degree of liberality. ...

Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, "they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help." He describes their work in the mines

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While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... hi this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. ... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. ..

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As Columbus wrote of the Arawak (before murdering and enslaving them),
"They are so ingenuous and free with all they have, that no one would believe it who has not seen it... Of anything they possess, if it be asked of them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to share it and show as much love as if their hearts went with it..."

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Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least “economically interesting” areas of the world where agriculture has not penetrated, such as the snows of the Inuit or desert of the Australian aborigines. And yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in adverse settings, bears its own rewards. The Hazda of Tanzania, Filipino Tasaday, !Kung of Botswana, or the Kalahari Desert !Kung San-who were seen by Richard Lee as easily surviving a serious, several years’ drought while neighboring farmers starved-also testify to Hole and Flannery’s summary that “No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.”

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Primitive small-scale agriculturalists enjoyed a similar unhurried pace of life. Consider Helena Norberg-Hodge's description of pre-modern Ladakh, a region in the Indian portion of the Tibetan Plateau.iii Despite a growing season only four months long, Ladakh enjoyed regular food surpluses, long and frequent festivals and celebrations, and ample leisure time (especially in winter when there was little field work to do). This, despite the harsh climate and the (proportionately) enormous population of non-working Buddhist monks in that country's numerous monasteries! More powerfully than any statistic, Norberg-Hodge's video documentary Ancient Futures conveys a sense of the leisurely pace of life there: villagers chat or sing as they work, taking plenty of long breaks even at the busiest time of the year. As the narrator says, "work and leisure are one."