But it's really only in the last couple of hundred years that the top down culture has predominated as strongly as it has. I think it that, that has been a big experiment and maybe a detour. Now, there's no question that civilization has produced the ability for people to create and do big things like moon-landings and road systems but I also think that in some ways it's gone too far and that's why I am very interested - and I'm always talking when I have my guests on about indigenous tribal culture and indigenous ways of seeing and being because I think we have so much to learn from those people
H2: We have a guest coming up next week who is a shaman from Peru and he's going to be sharing with us some of what he feels the ancient wisdom of his ancestors has to say to modern American people.
R: Sounds like a good show
H2: Yeah I think - I think it will be. It occurs to me sometimes that the word "civilized," which we take as being such a positive term, actually means enslaved to the status quo and slave to the hierarchy. Civilizing people is to force them to change, to be like us.
R: Well it's not always a forced process, sometimes it's a process that's produced by addicting people. What some invaders and civilizers in quotes have done is they have gone to indigenous people and they say, "hey do you like these metal pots and these metals knives? Well all you have to do is work and then you can have them" Now, the interesting thing is, indigenous cultures, they, they're really the people who are the most successful in some ways in this world. Indigenous cultures, it used to be one hundred fifty to two hundred years ago that indigenous people were considered savages and they lived in brutal ways; brutal savage lives that was hard and difficult but then researchers like people like Laurens van der Post and anthropologists actually studied indigenous people like the San Bushman of the Kalahari and what they found is, it's not a hard, brutal life. They worked two or three hours a day and they're done.
H2: mmm
R: Their life is easy. They have less work to do so when these explorers come and bring the benefits of civilization, what they're bringing is long work days, compared to slavery compared to what they had. They used the technology, the y offer drugs and medicine, It's scary. I remember I was on vacation in Jamaica once and there were some people there offering dental care to locals. The only thing was, in order to get the dental care, they had to sit through a sermon and get religion.
H2: mhm
H1: Yeah
H2: We do that, we do that so often and as, who was the dentist that traveled?
H1: Weston? Weston Price? I was just wondering him -
H2: [ss] Weston Price when he traveled discovered that in fact, the indigenous people had far better teeth than we do in a civilized western culture and that when their cultures were civilized that dental health went downhill fast.
R: well my guess is that along with civilization came the kind of food that most people eat in America -
R: which is barely food, you know?
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