Freedom and the Indians

"Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. ...Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free." --H.L. Mencken

"The more I consider the condition of the white men, the more fixed becomes my opinion that, instead of gaining, they have lost much by subjecting themselves to what they call the laws and regulations of civilized societies." --Tomochichi, Creek Chief

"I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, & restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 16 Jan. 1787

"We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home. You had yours. We did not interfere with you. The Great Spirit gave us plenty of land to live on, and buffalo, deer, antelope and other game. But you have come here, you are taking my land from me, you are killing off our game, so it is hard for us to live. Now, you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting. You white men can work if you want to. We do not interfere with you, and again you say why do you not become civilized? We do not want your civilization! We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them." --Crazy Horse - Sioux

The Great Lie is that this is civilization. It's not civilized. It has literally been the most bloood-thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. ...Or if it does represent civilization, and that is truly what civilization is, then the Great Lie is that civilization is good for us. --John Trudell

Mary Rowlandson was taken captive [by "indians"] ...she rather shrewdly negotiated with her captors, bartered using her knitting needles to get food and ultimately to win their approbation ...And this is not that unusual. There were a number of women captives who either defended themselves, negotiated, or, extraordinarily, about a third of female captives actually chose to stay with their Indian captors, preferred the Indian life. --Author Susan Faludi on "The Terror Dream", Democracy NOW! 

Happiness is more generally and equally diffus'd among Savages than in civilized societies. No European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies. --Benjmin Franklin, 1770

"We [Indians] have always been freer than the white man, even when he first came here. ...

"The white world puts all the power at the top, Nerburn. ... When your people first came to our land they were trying to get away from those people at the top. But they still thought the same, and soon there were new people at the top in the new country. It is just the way you were taught to think." --Lakota elder Dan, Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002, pg.157

The BIGGER Picture:

1. What well-known institution do other founders -- and well-known personalities throughout history -- warn against? Proof! They've ALWAYS been out to get you. And they did.

2. H.L. Mencken, U.S. founder James Madison, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, and Prof. Chalmers Johnson all explain the main factor we should fear. Can YOU find the common denominator? The REAL Fear Factor?

For the REALLY big picture, THESE articles.

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Good questions, Don!

1. "What is the explanation for the greater technological progress of the less civilized Euros?" --Don Duncan

Trade. The main thing pale-face contributed to the world was the mastery of trade including "money" and double entry bookkeeping which enabled specialization and division of labor, and thus the extremely efficient production of "stuff" as George Carlin was apt to put it.

This didn't come without extreme down-side effects, however.

Also the "scientific method," basically a simple technique for asking questions -- and finding and checking the answers.

2. "Why are native Americans poor, suicide prone, and alcoholic, more than all other ethic groups?" --Don Duncan

I'm not sure "all other ethic groups" applies. As far as "alcholic" apparently there is a genetic predisposition.

As to the rest, more than likely because their basic culture -- the culture of egalitarian hunter-gatherer freedom -- was forcibly replaced with regimented, fenced-in, pale-face hierarchy. Like this:

"The white world puts all the power at the top, Nerburn. ... When your people first came to our land they were trying to get away from those people at the top. But they still thought the same, and soon there were new people at the top in the new country. It is just the way you were taught to think."

"In your churches there is someone at the top. In your schools, too. In your government. In your business. There is always someone at the top and that person has the right to say whether you are good or bad. They own you.

... "When you came among us, you couldn't understand our way. You wanted to find the person at the top. ... Your world was made of cages and you thought ours was, too. Even though you hated your cages you believed in them. ...

"Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn't look out, they would make us live in a world of cages, too." --Lakota elder Dan, Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002, pg.157

3. "Why doesn't a freer, happier life translate into material wealth?" --Don Duncan

Well, to a certain extent, that question is backwards. The more important question is, why doesn't "material wealth" translate into a freer happier life?

At what might be called the "spiritual" level, there's a conflict between material goods and freedom. First, producing "stuff" requires self-discipline and takes hours from free spontaneous behavior. Further, a surplus of material goods requires not only time but also stable locations. Farms and factories for example. And then you have to maintain stuff.

Then there are the "addicitve" properties of the newest I-phone, the latest movie, hot showers, etc. which tends to "encourage" folks to spend even more hours of their lives accumulating "stuff." And/or "money" to buy stuff later.

At some point, the production of stuff should be efficient enough to free most people from the necessity of spending much time acquiring even an advanced level of "stuff."

At a talk he called, "I Dreamed I Was A Libertarian In My Maidenform Bra," L. Neil Smith suggested an 8 hour work week -- and that was July 31, 1982, at The Nevada Libertarian Party "CANDIDATE'S CONVENTION" in Las Vegas.

What went wrong? I'm sure you know. On the surface, it was this:

In the 1930s, Lord Keynes predicted that some day everyone would have a four-bedroom house, at which point, the American dream having been fulfilled, people would lose their incentive to work. Keynes believed that peoples' affluence would eventually outstrip their appetites--that their demand for goods and services would reach a plateau, beyond which the amount of money they spent would represent a smaller and smaller percentage of their income. Therefore, he argued, the government would have to adopt fiscal policies designed to keep people from hoarding too much of their income. --Unlimited Wealth by Paul Zane Pilzer, pg. 17

The banksters along with their government-gangster cronies just used that argument as another excuse to loot folks.

That affluence is exactly what's supposed to happen. But as you well know, Don, the "government" -- along with it's brown-nosers, suckups and hangers-on -- particularly the bankers -- have done quite well with adopting "fiscal policies dessigned to keep people from hoarding too much of their income." Translated, that becomss, "steal peoples' money -- and thus the hours of their lives spent earning money -- using taxation and inflation."

L. Neil was right but over-estimated the necessary work week. That difference is what the government/banking axis costs the average "citizen" who buys into the establishment bullshit. Bastiat nailed it:

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --Frederic Bastiat

There are now two "forces" that I see likely to seriously disrupt the current "order."

1. Income disparity caused by the "Reverse Robin Hood" effect of fiat money and fractional reserve banking, and

2. Increasing automation which will make most jobs obsolete, possibly reaching a tipping point in maybe 10 years according to Pew Research -- and maybe sooner according to gonzo futurist Ray Kurzweil.

And, closely related, will the robot revolution result in R2D2 or Terminator 2?

Your guess is as good as mine as to how this will all turn out.

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Responsibility or blame?

We cannot begin to sort ourselves out until we understand that there is such a thing as responsibility, that it has nothing to do with blame, that blame is a fixed, socially-agreed-upon thing, while responsibility is self-defined, something we choose to take upon ourselves independent of social agreements, and is only as great as we are great. -- Victims and Blame by Dean Blehert

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General Semantics. From 3 Directions - - -

Seminal semanticist Alfred A. Korzybski: "The map is not the territory."

Seminal physicist Richard Feynman: "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." --and thanks to Brian Canton

Lakota elder Dan: "We didn't see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was." --Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002 p. 165

When you take words as the things they represent (mistaking the map for the territory), as a result, you may often fail to "look at the bird and see what it's doing." This behavior is common, especially in "Western" super-"educated" cultures where book-learning -- which is nearly ALL words -- is emphasized.

This quirk of perception is surprising to members of those cultures which don't take the words as primary -- so much so, they often miss the implications. As Lakota elder Dan put it once he caught on, "We didn't see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was."

The question is, what is the main influence on your primary focus of attention. Is it what's suggested by words or is it the underlying reality?

Here's an interesting little test - - -

How did you do?

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But what about emotions?

Unless you believe in "intelligent design" or that the process of evolution was suspended in the case of "emotions" then clearly emotions are a result of the process of evolution, which means that, at least in our small face-to-face ancestral (tribal) groups, they are an essential part of the human survival algorithm.

Do they work in modern society? FWIW I think they MOSTLY do, but that's irrelevant. We have them, get used to it. It's time to understand their evolved functions and make the most of them. --L. Reichard White, Monday, April 04, 2011 6:04 AM

Why you MUST speak out. For your own good - - -

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, when I looked at the kind of people that would be coming under my care in palliative care, but also the kind of people who would get sick when I was in family practice, a number of salient characteristics presented themselves. One was the repression of anger. People didn’t know how to express negative emotion. They were afraid to do so or did not know when they were angry. People who were pleasers, they tried to always not to disappoint other people. They never knew how to say no. They took on everything without a murmur, because they saw their role as always being the caregivers and the caretakers. And they had an exceedingly powerful sense of duty, role and responsibility.
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Now, if you look at the role of healthy assertion of boundaries and anger, for example, it’s actually there to protect you. I’m talking about healthy anger. It’s not there to attack anybody; it’s just there to protect your boundaries. That’s the same role as the immune system have. The immune system also functions like a brain. It has memory, it has reactive capacity, and it has learning capacity. In fact, the immune system has been called the “floating brain.” And it’s in interaction with the brain up in our heads.
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Now, women, for example, with breast cancer, who don’t know how to express anger, they’ve been shown to have diminished activity of a group of immune cells called natural killer cells. Natural killer cells attack foreign bacteria, virus and also malignant cells. have been able to increase the natural killer cells. In other words, they protect our boundaries. Women who don’t know how to express their boundaries emotionally, they suppress their boundaries immunologically, and therefore they’re more likely to develop disease. The same is true, of course, of men, so that the immune system is in constant interaction with our emotional responses.... --Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction, Attention Deficit Disorder and the Destruction of American Childhood