The current paradigm, this thing we call “civilization”, has produced many things, both good and bad. I personally would not want to live without guitars, for instance, and had the world as we know it not grown up around us, I doubt I’d be able to enjoy the fine instruments we have today. But guitars is just a personal preference, after all, one rooted in my being exposed to them. Had guitars never been invented, I’d probably be just as happy with a really nice tortoise shell with a gut string stretched across it.
Our civilization has also produced horrors and degradation and depletion and want; a wealthy elite who suck the world dry and the rest of us who cling on for dear life, stressed, anxious and confused… and increasingly, eager to adapt a new and better way of life, a new and better relationship to the planet. Or is it really that we crave not something new, but something old, a way of life ancient and forgotten?
The Great Forgetting refers to the wealth of knowledge that our culture lost when we adopted our new civilized lifestyle. The knowledge that allowed indigenous cultures to survive, the knowledge that we had once also been tribal and the understanding that we were but one mere culture of thousands. All of this disappeared in a few short generations.
The Great Forgetting accounts for an enormous cultural collapse as once tribal people found themselves in a new and strange mass centralized society. New beliefs, new ways of life rushed into this cultural vacuum to fill the void. But without being tested by natural selection over thousands of years this new culture was evolutionarily unstable.
It is only recently that the Great Forgetting has been exposed. Understanding it holds the key to making sense of our destructive culture. And remembering what it is that was forgotten holds the key to our future.
via Have You Heard of The Great Forgetting? It Happened 10,000 Years Ago & Completely Affects Your Life.
