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October 2009 
Dance, Monkeys Dance!
Posted on Jun 27th, 2008
by 
Earon
Earon
I wanted to share with you a funny, thought-provoking little video on YouTube that helps present the idea behind my "Divine Primates" work. "Dance, Monkey Dance" is a video from Ernest Cline http://www.ernestcline.com .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
This is not just a cute metaphor. Humans are primates. We are not perfectable creations of a divine being, but rather are close cousins to apes and obviously related to the other complex animal species on this planet. We are different in a way, because of our complex symbolic thinking, but we live our lives with precisely the same motivations as the other animals. We seek to meet our basic needs in ways that allows us to function in our social groupings in relative peace and security!
No matter how long you spend at a university or in an upscale urban or suburban neighborhood, there will still be pick up trucks with gun racks and bars where people go to get drunk and strip clubs and fundamentalists acting as if they were licensed to enforce "God's Will" upon everyone else on earth. There will still be religious leaders who have sex with children and there will still be business people who lie, cheat and steal. Greed and fear are part of human nature just as generosity and hope. We are inconsistent and quirky and will never become "vulcans" or "robots" or "angels."
So, what do we do with this information about humans being primates? Do we give up all of our spiritual metaphors and aspirations? No. In fact, we learn to take better care of ourselves, to see through the greed and fear-based cultural constructs that create a culture where fear, depression and feelings of meaninglessness and futility are endemic. We learn that there is no such thing as a "free market" or "victorious war" or "bombing our enemies into the stone age."
What we do, is we slow down. We stop buying so much stuff. We recognize that buying more stuff and having lots of waste and money isn't going to give our lives more meaning. We take action to protect our security, but we don't bully and abuse other nations or other species just for the sport of it. We come to understand that killing and maiming and terrorizing other people encourages them to return the favor as soon as they are able.
Does this mean our economy will collapse? Things are changing either way. Our current way of looking at the world is grossly dynfunction and unsustainable. It is already "hitting the fan." Our greed and arrogance have caused us to fail to prepare for natural disasters and economic cycles. "Free market" delusions leave us open to real estate and mortgage crises that make many people wealthy at the risk of creating a depression. Primates should not be trusted to run an economy until we understand how to control our inevitable excesses - until we understand that we are primates.
When we learn to live more within our means, we become more grateful for being alive, and respectful of other people because, after all, we're quite a wonderful species. But we get carried away with things and we have to remind ourselves to behave in ways that help society function - rather than creating huge problems all the time. We become good neighbors because that is how things work well and everyone stays happy. We don't become good neighbors because we are afraid of going to Hell, but because we finally figure out that our consumerist culture, which is destroying our planet, IS hell!
There are paths to a better life, a sustainable life. To travel these paths, we will have to give up some of the things to which we are addicted. We will have to spend less time as workaholics and more time as partners and parents and friends and neighbors. We will need to consume far less gasoline and other nonrenewal energy and other resources. We won't all follow the same path, but we will each seek better ways to live. We will experiment and will learn to depend upon each other in new ways.
And we will build a future of meaning and compassion and partnership. It will not be perfect, but it does not need to be perfect. After all, we're primates - not gods.
Peace,
Earon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
What we are
This is not just a cute metaphor. Humans are primates. We are not perfectable creations of a divine being, but rather are close cousins to apes and obviously related to the other complex animal species on this planet. We are different in a way, because of our complex symbolic thinking, but we live our lives with precisely the same motivations as the other animals. We seek to meet our basic needs in ways that allows us to function in our social groupings in relative peace and security!
No matter how long you spend at a university or in an upscale urban or suburban neighborhood, there will still be pick up trucks with gun racks and bars where people go to get drunk and strip clubs and fundamentalists acting as if they were licensed to enforce "God's Will" upon everyone else on earth. There will still be religious leaders who have sex with children and there will still be business people who lie, cheat and steal. Greed and fear are part of human nature just as generosity and hope. We are inconsistent and quirky and will never become "vulcans" or "robots" or "angels."
So, what do we do with this information about humans being primates? Do we give up all of our spiritual metaphors and aspirations? No. In fact, we learn to take better care of ourselves, to see through the greed and fear-based cultural constructs that create a culture where fear, depression and feelings of meaninglessness and futility are endemic. We learn that there is no such thing as a "free market" or "victorious war" or "bombing our enemies into the stone age."
What we do, is we slow down. We stop buying so much stuff. We recognize that buying more stuff and having lots of waste and money isn't going to give our lives more meaning. We take action to protect our security, but we don't bully and abuse other nations or other species just for the sport of it. We come to understand that killing and maiming and terrorizing other people encourages them to return the favor as soon as they are able.
Does this mean our economy will collapse? Things are changing either way. Our current way of looking at the world is grossly dynfunction and unsustainable. It is already "hitting the fan." Our greed and arrogance have caused us to fail to prepare for natural disasters and economic cycles. "Free market" delusions leave us open to real estate and mortgage crises that make many people wealthy at the risk of creating a depression. Primates should not be trusted to run an economy until we understand how to control our inevitable excesses - until we understand that we are primates.
When we learn to live more within our means, we become more grateful for being alive, and respectful of other people because, after all, we're quite a wonderful species. But we get carried away with things and we have to remind ourselves to behave in ways that help society function - rather than creating huge problems all the time. We become good neighbors because that is how things work well and everyone stays happy. We don't become good neighbors because we are afraid of going to Hell, but because we finally figure out that our consumerist culture, which is destroying our planet, IS hell!
There are paths to a better life, a sustainable life. To travel these paths, we will have to give up some of the things to which we are addicted. We will have to spend less time as workaholics and more time as partners and parents and friends and neighbors. We will need to consume far less gasoline and other nonrenewal energy and other resources. We won't all follow the same path, but we will each seek better ways to live. We will experiment and will learn to depend upon each other in new ways.
And we will build a future of meaning and compassion and partnership. It will not be perfect, but it does not need to be perfect. After all, we're primates - not gods.
Peace,
Earon
Access: PublicTagged with: hope, stress, primates, monkeys, energy, sustainable, sustainability, future, sanity, spirituality
Earon, I'm surprised that you've taken up the corporate refrain condemning the “free market” with respect to the subprime crisis. Free market? Really? You mean with a currency that is debt-based and created by government, under legal tender laws that prohibit most businesses from accepting other forms of payment or from establishing parallel currencies? You mean interest rates controlled by the Federal Reserve?
What exactly is a free market? It is a place where you and I are free to engage and exchange whatever has mutual value?
So if you don't like “free markets” which we haven't had since FDR in the State, what would you like to replace it, even MORE centralized power, interference, and coercion?
When you speak of “We won't all follow the same path, but we will each seek better ways to live. We will experiment and will learn to depend upon each other in new ways.” that is precisely what a free market is, a place where individuals are free to find their own paths and discover relationally (as opposed to through coercion and mandate) how to best sustain themselves by engaging in mutuality.
Before the Great Depression and the confiscation of people's land after the USDA was created to get farmers hooked on petro-chemical agriculture, this country operated largely on a free market basis - AND people consumed way less. But with the current debt-based currency system, the only way the system sustains itself (until collapse) is through exponentially-expanding debt (such as the very mortgages as the latest manifestation of this sophisticated system of slavery) and exponential consumption of LIFE itself.
This system is everything BUT a free market system: in this country you are not free to build a house as you wish, if you were, there would be no need to take out a mortgage. If your financial resources, you could live in a tarpaper shack until you either made or bought bricks and start to replace one wall at a time with solid walls, as my friends in Mexico do quite sensibly, as the pioneers, the Native Americans, and people all over the world have had the freedom to do for millions of years, until politicians had better plans for how we SHOULD house ourselves.
Your vision is inspiring, but if you refuse free markets, you condone coercion and centralized monopolies on force and violence.
Whose property are humans?
Hello, Little Big O:
I like your comments! And I agree that I should present my comments on “free markets” differently. I was responding to the mischaracterization of “free markets” employed by the neoconservative Republican Party. I still find it amusing that libertarians formed alliances with the Republican party, which I see as more heavily opposed to “free market” values, individual rights and freedom of religion than the Democrats. Obviously, Republican opposition to “big government” is hollow.
My problem with free markets is that I haven't seen one - just rhetoric. We can't just go back to pre-depression America. In modern marketing parlance, the “free market” brand was corrupted. What will shake down in the Republican party as they regroup? Will they move to true “free market” ideals or will they continue in the opposite direction, relying upon fundamentalism and various social conservatism (i.e. coercion and prejudices) to drive their base? I've only seen the latter. Candidates like Ron Paul do speak to many of the issues of our day. Yet, they do not belong in the Republican Party and many “free market” proponents voted for Obama. I'd like to see these social progressives having a stronger voice in the Obama administration - but our two-party system can make that difficult.
The issue is what you see as the source of our problems. If the source is FDR's response to the Great Depression, then you will find comrades in the Republican Party. However, if what you see as the source of our problem is the corporate greed and lack of economic regulation (e.g., allowing people to buy stocks without money) that caused the Great Depression – that is a different story. I believe there is much common ground, here.
If what you see as the problem is local zoning laws and building permits, then you will find support in the Republican Party (except for different reasons than your own). But if you see the source of the problem as greedy, unscrupolous land developers and builders manipulating markets and building subdivisions and homes that make no sense, and often in a substandard fashion, then we, again, have common ground.
It is easy to idealize free markets, but some people with money and power constantly try to maximize their wealth and domination. Competition is not always welcomed in a healthy way, but often destroyed by monopolies and corruption in local and state governments. Were “company towns” free markets? Yes, they were. People were free to leave. Today, America is significantly a company town. Consumerism has numbed our minds.
My hope is that people in all political parties and persuasions will work together to build a new home where we can all stop pointing fingers and sit down to come to agreement on what works and what doesn't. Let's call it “Pragmatism House.” And we still don't need a government permit to build it. : - ) While it does seem that all the best land for building that kind of house is taken or controlled by others with power and wealth, I am certain that some is available.
Had humans in North America continued with a relatively free market approach to live, we would not have so terribly overpopulated our continent - and ended up with such powerful government. Yet, on traveling to China, I can definitely say that I would not want the responsibility for leading their 1.3 billion people into free markets. Governments are required to grow as populations and cities reach massive proportions - and they also tend to encourage such growth. Population growth in the US has been significantly fueled by religious groups that hoped to expand their influence - and by governments that sought settlers and souldiers to compete with other nations - and workers for manufacturing jobs. (I still have no idea why there is a tax incentive for people producing their 10th child.)
Wherever we are now, solutions are not simple. Ideologies, even free market, have much to offer as ideals (like freedom, opportunity, religious freedom, personal liberty) but must be applied with common sense in the current situation - not rigidly applied as if we were living in “simple” times. I am grateful to have been reminded of the importance of openmindedness and the need to listen to diverse values without the baggage of those who misinterpret them.