U.S.A. & Easter Island

[salinen]

What do they have in common? Well, big ass worthless heads destroyed Easter Island, and they're doing the same here. The once great American Empire kicks and screams how it rules everything, and the big ass worthless heads (politicians, corporations, & the media, no diff) continue to use the same dated methodology and mythology and is blind to the reality of it's failing system. It knows no other way. There are answers that will work. But utilizing sane approaches haven't a chance.

Oh, but wait. We're so much smarter than those foolish Islanders.

Tails, you lose.

[ladjf]

1. I think our terrible political problems are caused by the fact that

criminals have taken over the reigns of Government. They aren't insane, just greedy and unscrupulous. The Senate rules have guaranteed that no real governing will be allowed to take place.

[arcane1]

2. Easter Island willl have been the story of all of human civilization n/t

[salinen]

3. I predict

that as the environment worsens, people will panic and destroy eachother. Everyone is being taught who to kill.

[RKP5637]

4. Yep, that's what I think too. Humans have really serious conflict issues

with each other and will kill the species off rather than any natural catastrophe because we are a predator species.

[Peace Patriot]

7. What predator species ever killed itself off...

...by mass slaughter of each other, or over-breeding beyond the food supply, or killing off the entire food supply?

I think something entirely different, unique and not easy for us to understand is going on with humans. We certainly do NOT follow the rules of any known predator species. Think about wolves, tigers, falcons, spiders. They evolved to kill for their food, so they kill other species (only very rarely their own--some spiders) and eat them, and they sometimes fight and kill each other, but not mass killing, most often male vs male, one on one, mating rivalry--and they don't always kill even then, just wound and dominate. Then the species continues, in numbers uncannily suitable to the food supply.

Now think about Hiroshima, or Vietnam, or Russian work camps (millions died), or just about any war. For that matter, think of global warming or GMO foods. We ourselves are destroying our own food chain and have fought wars since time immemorial, so it is NOT "rats in cage" over-crowding of the industrial age--though industrial conditions and technology are likely connected to the sheer scale of modern human slaughters of each other. Our slaughters of other humans are not new, and have not always been connected to resources (land, water, minerals, markets)--sometimes to dignity, self-concept, or monomania.

Our success at clever invention exceeds our wisdom. That is one problem. Seems like our evolution--our development of brain power (technical expertise, creativity, dexterity) has had a rather goofy outcome. It resulted in skills are that looking rather suicidal, at the moment, like somebody handing a gun to someone who has just threatened to kill himself. Such success at food production and manufacturing whatever we want that people confidently mate and bring children into the world at a rate that far exceeds the ability of Planet Earth to sustain it. Now a whole third of the globe is suddenly going industrial (China/Asia). Out of control garbage and pollutants. It's doing us in. YET, all of this had a set of actually good motives--as to improving human life. You think the guys who invented refrigerators and washing machines, and mass produced them, weren't thinking of easing their wives' work at home? They were! Yeah, the financiers had financier motives. But the basic theme running through many industrial stories is improving the human lot, along with other motives, of course. Creative invention, making better widgets of all kinds, has almost always started with someone trying to improve life--to make it easier, more fun, full of more variety, more interesting, better organized and more efficient goods and services for more people.

We have permitted the exploiters, the banksters, the super-rich and so on--"organized money" as FDR called it--to leach off this basic human motivation and enterprise, and don't seem to have the smarts or wisdom to rein them in. And the rest of us find it hard to truly "think globally"--partly because the rich don't want us to, and we have permitted them to control information and opinion. How many people stop to think of Planet Earth when they grab three paper napkins for their sandwich and they really only needed one? Not many, I would suspect. It IS hard to remain conscious of the full impact of our lifestyle as it ripples across the planet. Our evolution needs to go there--it needs to leap our awareness outward and around the globe, for our survival as a species. Maybe it will. Nature as manifested on Earth does NOT design creatures to fail. They may fail in truly catastrophic events--planetary events--as with the dinosaurs. But generally critters adapt over time to changing conditions and we are THE most adaptable, changeable species of all. We seem designed to evolve quickly. We have enormously flexible brains and abilities. Adaptability is our name.

I wouldn't let this resurgence of war that the Bush Junta visited on us all get you down. The human species was making significant progress away from war when their quite deliberate, greed-driven reversion occurred. They INTENDED to stem that anti-war progress. They said so. I think it's an anomaly. I think we will get past it. And the reason I think that is that they had to lie so much, and manipulate the newsstream so thoroughly, and even install corporate-run 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, to impose it. Do you know that nearly 60% of the American people opposed the Iraq War (Feb. '03, all polls)? Even with all their fear-mongering and propaganda, most Americans opposed it. It took ten years into the Vietnam War to get that kind of an anti-war majority. Most people want peace and social justice. That is actually a big change in the human psyche over the last half century. And our will has been thwarted.

Don't go thinking that all humans are predatory beasts. Most people prefer cooperation, friendship, love, community. How do we organize, or re-organize, ourselves to achieve it? Most people act very decently in natural disasters. They help each other. Most people act very decently in economic disasters. Look at how people helped each other during the first Great Depression and how they have done so in several IMF/World Bank-inflicted economic disasters in Latin America. People rarely devolve into what we wrongfully call "wild beasts," even in dire circumstances. We adapt. We arrange what comfort we can, with what little we have. We like friendship and sharing. Very few us like predation and war. We have to be pushed and bludgeoned and lied into it. (Look at what the army has to do to strip soldiers of human sympathy and turn them into killers? It's not easy.)

We are more complicated than animal predators and come with a far different and far superior set of skills, as to adaptability. We have most certainly turned killing into a science. But we also have the ability to recognize it as such and to reject it. We can dismantle our armories. We can "beat our swords into plowshares." We have that ability. A wolf cannot give up its teeth and claws. It would not survive. It must kill. We have a choice. Maybe we have had to go to excesses of killing in order to see it. But we CAN see it, and we CAN change. As for taking only one paper napkin when that's all you need--it's easy. Saving the planet is that easy. Educating all of humanity to do it is the hard part. But you know what? People are naturally, inherently, cooperative for the common good. All our leaders have to do is ask--or rather, all we have to do is restore our ability to put leaders in power who will ask--and who will also help us tame the predatory few who don't need the unconscionable profits they are making from destroying our planet.

[RKP5637]

8. Thank you for your very astute reply! One of the most salient points you made IMO was

"We have permitted the exploiters, the banksters, the super-rich and so on--'organized money' as FDR called it--to leach off this basic human motivation and enterprise, and don't seem to have the smarts or wisdom to rein them in. And the rest of us find it hard to truly 'think globally'--partly because the rich don't want us to, and we have permitted them to control information and opinion."

This is to me a common thread throughout many of the situations we find ourselves in ... a better choice by me than predators would have been exploiters and greedy. Capitalism in many ways has been good as it rewards some basic instincts, but it can certainly lead to exploitation and greed, and unfortunately what we are experiencing now as in the past is the merger of exploitation, greed, wealth and political power with revolving doors. And now with the SCOTUS ruling that corps. = people for contributions that revolving door is now fully opened. And this is not unique to capitalism by any means, institutions being exploitive. We see the few taking advantage of the many throughout history.

One way to help stop this would be to reign in the endless money moving into political financing. It's a self-perpetuating spiral into more and more funding and clearly our M$M now held by a handful is more than anxious to have more funding and being complicit by exploiting the masses.

Thanks!!!

[DCKit]

5. Great analogy. We are Rome. We are Easter Island. nt

[Strelnikov_]

6. It has happened before . .

it will happen again.

As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the human peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them.

. . .

Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elites treating themselves to necklaces of 2000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster, reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEO's. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.

From Chapt. 5, 'The Maya Collapses', from 'Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed’ by Jared Diamond

[Peace Patriot]

9. I have read that the natives of Easter Island cut down all their trees and

did it so thoroughly that the forests never grew back. They could then not build their wooden canoes any more and basically got stranded on the island. No more visiting other islands. No more trade. The giant face statues were erected toward the end of this inadvertent cultural suicide, and peer out over the ocean likely as pleaders of the natives' cause with whatever Gods they believed in, to come assist them. To grow the trees again. To let them make their boats.

Maybe it was David Attenborough. Can't recall. The analyst admitted that it was a guess at the purpose of the statues, but the story of the forests and the canoes is, indeed, what happened to that culture.

It's the most basic lesson in "sustainability." Even if it means fewer canoes per year, don't cut down the whole forest. Forests are intricate ecosystems with many components. This is why industrial clear-cutting of real forests--original forests, forest that grow fine wood-- is so destructive. Native forests (as opposed to plantations) have evolved over eons into inter-dependent ecologies comprised of birds and numerous other critters, of fungi, bacteria, rocks/minerals and rich soils, and many other plants besides the trees--all of which the trees need, along with time, light and moisture--to slowly grow fine wood. Every component contributes to the trees' growth and quality in some way. If you cut it all down, it doesn't "grow back." What grows back are weak trees--lousy, loose-grained wood, subject to disease and rot--without the ecology in which they evolved, to create fine wood. You have to maintain all components of the forest in abundance to keep growing fine wood. You won't destroy a forest by cutting down one, carefully selected (selected to preserve the ecology) tree, here and there, but you can--and you will--destroy the forest by cutting too many. The rich soil, full of its own little critters, will fry. The birds and other tree critters have no home and die out or go away. Whatever these critters contributed to the soil is gone. Fog drip will not accumulate. There is no massive tree canopy for it to accumulate in. This further dries out the soil and kills soil life. The soils may bleed down creeks and rivers, never to be rebuilt. The cycle of life has been forever altered. Desertification may occur, or a different ecology that will never grow fine wood again.

Indigenous cultures generally have the wisdom, knowledge, respect for Nature, and religious/social system needed to keep their ecologies in tact. They may use all sorts of forest products. They may even manage the forest with some agricultural practices (prescriptive burning and so on). But the notion of just destroying the whole thing for short term profit would be unthinkable.

We can't know what happened among the Easter Islanders. Perhaps greed. But we can see well enough what is happening to us. Our culture produces people who really don't care what they are doing, with forest destruction and pollution. They are greed-crazed. And they will go to extraordinary lengths of lying to the rest of us and buying governments, to keep destroying and polluting, for yet more money that they don't need. They are quite ill with insecurity and are also caught up in systems--corporations--with profits spiraling to the top, in which thoughtlessness is strongly reinforced. Workers and communities are brainwashed into thinking that this enterprise is good for them. The corporation then just moves elsewhere after exhausting a resource or polluting an environment that they are going to be required to clean up, or if the workers form a union, or for whatever fickle reason that "organized money" moves around to different places.

Bad system, in which government "of, by and for the people" has been ferociously attacked and weakened, as to acting in the interest of the people or the ecological integrity of the place. Globalize this system and you kill not just one forest or community but the entire planet--and quite possibly the entire human race.

In this sense, we are Easter Island. Those sober, giant stone faces looking for help that never comes, are us. We are mystified by what we have done to bring such a curse down upon us. Somehow we lost our wisdom. We long for and pray for help. We don't know what to do. We are bereft. Everybody feels it, one way or another. We know something is deeply wrong. We don't know how to fix.

But we do, and that's the thing.

We are not yet Easter Island.