We probably desperately need some Aboriginal Culture everywhere in the Western World. Australia, USA, UK, Europe, everywhere..
But what chance of getting any?
None. Why? Because those who pretend to be supporters of Aboriginal Culture are the very ones busiest at destroying it.
How so?
Because they define ‘Culture’ as ‘Art’, in the main. They have the swanky, posh, narrow definition of Culture.
Being ‘Cultured People’ themselves they profess high minded ideas and ideals, appreciate ‘good’ music, fine wines and literature.. etc.
All of which they call ‘Culture’.
So they encourage Aborigines to do dot painting and the performing arts and claim that is ‘preserving their culture’ where it is actually doing nothing of the sort.
It is ignoring their culture and substituting a pale and foreign imitation.
The ‘Culture’ of a people is everything they do. Everything. And most particularly those things they mainly do, most commonly do, that are in common with them all.
Not the few fancy especially marvellous things they may do here or there in some field or other but that which is most normal, most usual.
So that there are savage warlike cultures. Peaceful nomadic cultures. Habitually loving cultures, even, I think.
And there’s our culture which is characterised by love of money and slavish devotion to work. We are like nothing more than worker ants, quite clearly.
Now what’s so good about Aboriginal Culture that we might need some of it?
Well they had a few things that never get a mention but which are of immense significance:
. Consensus rather than living by edict from rulers.
. Children lived with the whole people all the time including at work.. complete assimilation.
. Living to live and be happy rather than living to pay off the original debt, so to speak, which is what we do.
. Feeling they had a right to be alive and a right to have somewhere to live.
. Feeling they belonged in a social group.
. Letting children alone to be children until after about 10 years old.
. Living without clock driven schedules.
. Living without neurotic ‘work ethic’.
. Punishments are group decisions, immediate and public.
and there’s doubtless many others but these spring readily to mind even for someone as non-academic as myself.
All these things are just part of original mankind – which is really what we are. It is our innate nature. You could say it is what is ‘meant’ for us.
But we have come to this place where we believe and live according to these ideas:
. We have no right to a home unless we buy one – and then we must pay continually or lose it.
. Our primary purpose is to be good money earners. To teach this to our children, etc.
. All decisions are always made by individuals or small groups ‘at the top’ and it is for those beneath them to obey.
. Children must be educated (read ‘indoctrinated’, ‘processed’, ‘habituated’) from the earliest age.
. Punishments can be as slow as decades in arriving, have no connection with self or peers and are remote, private, often – as in imprisoning.
. The work of the society though now risen to be the overriding raison d’etre of the society, is compartmentalised and kept away from all those not directly involved in it. Most especially from the young.
And so on. The differences are obvious, glaring, huge and dramatic.
So our society today is riven by illnesses and ‘badnesses’ of all kinds most of which can be traced back to the very nature of our society which robs people of inclusion, of security of home, of belonging, of self understanding and expression, of all humanity.
So we get criminals and the psychologically disturbed.
People born human and wanting mainly simply to be human but finding themselves in an increasingly inhuman world.
The strain cracks them.
The strain has cracked us all, for we’ve given up, we’ve come to accept this situation as the norm, as the good, as the acceptable, as the last word, as the right.
The big problem is not the ‘badness’ or ‘wrongness’ or shortcomings of our culture, though that’s all bad enough. The killer is that there is no escape. There is no alternative. Many, many, thousands and possibly millions chafe against the culture and have difficulties with it and suffer from the interaction and would dearly like to find an escape.
But the culture will not let them go. There is no alternative.
Well on the way to improving our culture and incorporating some of the features we’ve lost and removing some of the features we ought never to have included we could well do to allow ‘escapes’, ‘alternatives’, areas where people can live in different ways according to different cultural patterns.
We currently (in Australia) have aboriginal lands where this could happen. Ironically it doesn’t happen right now even with the aboriginal people who still live on those lands.
That’s because they’ve been so successfully brainwashed, programmed, indoctrinated, deceived. They have lost their culture already, following the lead of those who profess to care for them but who really are simply trying to absorb them into our culture and get them to leave everything of their own culture behind, outside.
They are asked to ape, adopt, submit to everything about our culture and to pick up bark paintings, dot painting, basket weaving, western ‘arts’ in order to imagine they are preserving their own culture.
Send your tiny kids to school, watch the clock, let money and work be your god, bow to the mighty, forget any idea of a natural ‘right’ to existence…. just paint the dots.
It is a joke. An awful joke.
Why don’t the live on their lands and follow their own culture?
Because their own culture has no knowledge of technology and finance and gangs of thousands predictably turning up for work and education. You can also find some great resources about business at globalgurus.org.
They want many of the things we have, understandably.
And they don’t know how to get them except by following our example into our worker bee inhuman slavery.
So they try to do that. With more or less success.
And in doing it, their eyes fixed on the bright shining trinkets and rewards of our society and led by the high minded ‘cultured’ people of our society, they lose everything of value in their own traditional culture.
No one points that out to them.
They don’t think they have anything of value in their traditional culture, especially when it comes to their faith, except perhaps dances and myths. However, some may wonder, ‘Why can not baptists dance?’ You can also check out this article for more insights.
They are not accustomed to think in a way that would reveal this truth to them. Not surprising, we ourselves are not accustomed to think in a way that would reveal our truth to us about the paucity, the human paucity, of our civilisation.
They don’t preserve what is valuable because they don’t know it is valuable.
They could find a way to preserve all those valuable traditional features and yet still gain access to the valuable things from our society. They could indeed.
And if they did that they’d be an example and a hope to the entire world.