1) I am putting my tweet responses to @GeorgeMonbiot's profound point, in thread form, so people can read it as a thread. Obviously this was hurriedly put together, but I can explain this in far more depth, with supporting evidence.
https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1425343429261864963
2) The reason we have become disconnected from the natural world, is that since powerful individuals* started taking over our societies 6000 years ago, the people they ruled were taught or rather coerced to think in an unnatural way, so they wouldn't challenge their rulers.
3) People were coerced into seeing the world in terms of simple ideas, which the powerful controlled. These ideas people were drilled into accepting as fact, caused them to become detached, not only from the natural world, but even from their own feelings.
4) For most of the time since these powerful individuals took over our societies and ruled by force, if you challenged the ideas the powerful demanded you accept, it would result in you suffering a painful and horrible death.
5) Over many generations people came to accept the ideas enforced on them as fact, because it was very dangerous to think for yourself. Over time, people became domesticated like livestock and subservient to their masters.
6) It became necessary for the powerful, to ensure people objectified the natural world they used to revere, because the powerful obtained their wealth by unthinkingly over-exploiting the natural world people had always loved and revered.
7) What I'm saying is that it became essential to the powerful that people stopped revering the Earth, the natural world, so the powerful could coerce people into unthinkingly exploiting the natural world as a commodity. The detachment was deliberate, and not an accident.
8) This is why in all civilizations ruled by powerful individuals, they wanted their subjects to turn their reverence from their personal relationship with the natural world, to gods who they created and religions, they controlled.
9) The reason the British ruling classes created the largest empire the world has ever seen, and created the industrial revolution, is that they perfected this method of psychopathic like detachment, and took it to new levels.
10) Britain didn't create this huge empire and the industrial revolution, because they were cleverer than everyone else had better technology (that followed), but because they objectified people and the natural world in the most coldly psychopathic way.
11) This world view just saw everything as commodities to be exploited in the most efficient way. People were taught that feeling anything for other people, other animals, and life in general, was just sentimental. Now get on with it, and exploit it.
12) As other powerful rulers saw what profits and wealth could be made with this outlook, they copied it, and this dreadful world view spread around the world. The indigenous peoples who objected to this world view were wiped out with genocide, including cultural genocide.
13) It's what lay behind schools indigenous peoples were forced to send their children to in Canada and the US. They were brainwashing centres in which the attempt was to remove the last vestiges of a culture that did not defer to the powerful and see the Earth as a commodity.
14) If there was still a culture that saw things differently. Who maintained a world view that the Earth was to be revered and people could have a personal relationship with it, this threatened the whole scheme of commodification of everything, lest their own people rediscover it
15) This is how we have been groomed and gaslighted into destroying the natural world which sustains us, and which all people used to revere. This is how people have become brainwashed into destroying natural systems unthinkingly.
16) My explanation here is seriously abbreviated, and imperfect. But it contains the gist of something I can explain in much greater depth, with substantial supporting evidence.
17) I'd like to see anyone credibly refute what I say, with an evidence based argument. How else can it be explained that we are destroying the life support systems that sustain in a globally suicidal way? Natural systems, which once everyone revered.
18) *This take over of our societies by powerful individuals and their henchmen, was done much in the way gangsters can take over neighbourhoods and run protection rackets. That is what they started, giant protection rackets.
19) Protection rackets in which those who destroyed the Earth's natural systems for profit, gave kickbacks to leaders supposedly representing the public interest, and were in turn given special protection to ply their life destroying trade.
@threadreaderapp Please unroll?
A) To conclude. What I didn't mention, is that because this happened incrementally over many generations, people never noticed what was happening. People were brought up in families, communities, societies, where this abnormal thinking, was simply accepted as how things were.
B) You often see it claimed that people, humans are competitive, stupid and greedy, and that is why we ended up with a climate and ecological crisis that we are unable to address or solve.
C) However, this cannot be true and is a clear falsehood, because modern humans have been around for 200-300,000 years, and up to 6,000 years ago, we all lived in egalitarian societies, where resources were shared equally, and everyone revered the natural world.
D) No one, or no ideology enforced this mode of behaviour, which persisted for 98% of the existence of modern humans. So why did people only start to act competitively and selfishly in the last 6,000 years, and then only in certain types of society?
E) It's rather obvious that this unthinking, competitive and selfish behaviour is cultural and not innate in people and only became pre-eminent, when that culture came to dominate the world.
F) My reason for making these points is not to blame as opponents claim, but to offer solutions. If this was innate human behaviour it would be difficult to change things. But if this is learned behaviour, constantly reinforced and enforced, then things can change.
G) If we simply stopped enforcing and reinforcing this mode of behaviour - and neoliberal ideology is all about enforcing and reinforcing this competitive and selfish behaviour, things would start to change by that measure alone.
theguardian.com/books/2016/apr…
theguardian.com/books/2016/apr…
H) The only way we can really undo this malign behaviour, which has led to us destroying the natural systems that sustain us, is to recognise this behaviour. To recognise how it has been imposed on us and how destructive it is.
I) My purpose on pointing this out, is to positively point to solutions. The first baby steps into creating a truly sustainable society.
J) In response to one of my threads the other day someone posted a link to the speech by Charlie Chaplin at the end of the film the Great Dictator, where the Jewish barber has been mistaken for the dictator and delivers this speech instead.
K) When you listen to this speech, often considered one of the great monologues in movie history, you see there is nothing new in what I say. What we must ask ourselves is why, when we've long known this, have we ignored it?
L) The answer is simple. It is not in the interests of the powerful and very wealthy, who enjoy huge power, status and wealth, who lead luxurious lives, for people to understand this, and to return to their cooperative and egalitarian roots.
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