What is as ubiquitous as air and influences your entire life?
Answer: The Control System.
The Control system is 6,000 to 10,000 years old. It began as the Agricultural Revolution. The Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution has been mislabeled essentially on purpose. If it were correctly titled as the Power Revolution, there would be social unrest.
The Power Revolution
Native societies lacked two things in order to live in harmony with the earth and each other for perpetuity:
- Power, aka Binding Decisions. No one had the power to tell another what to do. Even chiefs were advisors.
- Ownership. No one owned more than they could carry. Land and resources were held in tribal common.
Human’s took dominion or control of the earth and extended it over each other. Violently taking power caused a chain reaction that led to civilization and the Earth in shambles today. Human’s have such short life spans that we have environmental and social amnesia. We don’t know what the Earth or human society naturally looks like. We think what we have today is normal. Visit the old growth redwoods to se what Earth really looks like.
Domestication Caused Detachment from Nature
Deeply inbreeding for desired traits is the domestication of plants and animals. Domesticated species loose their ability to cope in the wild and are dependent on humans. If you abandon your garden or farm, the domesticated plants do not persist. More viral wild plants take over.
Humans by natural only value what they depend on for a livelihood. Today people value money. Native peoples value nature because they derived their living form the wild. Humans perpetuate what they value money vs. nature. Since modern society does not depend on nature we commoditize and consume it. We view other species as interesting but not important or at best wild lands as a place merely for recreation and not the home to our relations.
The 30 million other species now mostly hanging on by a thread, thanks to civilization, have as much of an inalienable right to life and a home as Homo sapiens. As long as civilization will never recognize the equal rights of all species, civilization has no moral right to exist.
Species evolve into optional social organizational systems. Civilization is merely a new novel human organizational system. Tribalism is the evolutionarily proven human social organizational system, civilization is not.
Humanity has lived in harmony with the Earth for 85,000 or 250,000 years. In a blink of the eye or less than one percent of human existence, civilization has exploded human population beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity and plunged all but domesticated species towards extinction. This is not humanities fault, it is civilization’s fault. Don;t take it personally, you are a robot.
The unique enlarged human cerebral cortex is in a way misnamed as the executive center. It should be labeled the Natural Programming Override Center© (NPOC).
Animal brains have one purpose: run natural programs to survive: eat, sleep, procreate and be merry. If an animal is taught a new program for human benefit, especially by coercion of food, it becomes domesticated. Mammals are better at family than reptiles but they are essentially the same for this purpose.
Humans can run more complex programs involving abstract concepts. We can assign meaning to objects or concepts on top of concepts such as language, art or mathematics. To your dog it’s just a stick. To you it’s tool handle. Programs are downloaded into you by your parents, teachers and society.
Here is the crux, humans can write new programs. A program is also known as a meme. A meme perpetuates itself like a gene. A gene uses your busy to reproduce. A meme uses your brain to procreate. A meme is also like a virus.
The Homo sapiens species is too young to be able to distinguish between beneficial and destructive programs or memes. We live too short of a span and are disconnected from externalized costs too appreciate the results of our behavior. So humans run any program, good or bad.
A Natural Program© is given to us by evolution. It is how a species organizes itself to exist for perpetuity. This means coexist in harmony with our relations and contribute to the whole such as simply build top soil.
Birds fly in flocks, deer run in herds, wolves run in packs and whales swim in pods. Humans run in tribes and tend the garden because we naturally depend on the garden for our livelihood. Europeans have spent 500 years wrestling away the garden of eden Columbus found when he was found lost at sea. Throw out hunter gather, humans tend the wild.
Any program that humans run contrary to the tribal program we have evolved to run leads to our’s and the Earth’s destruction. Civilization overrides our natural programming with the control system.
Control Though Dependence
If one has no alternative for survival, you go along with what ever limited choices you do have. Dependence is one of the keys to the control system by giving people no other choice but to earn money to buy food and shelter.
Food, land and all the resources a community needed used to be free and in the commons. Everyone had the skills to use natural resources to make a good livelihood working only a few hours a week. Civilization is a lot more work than native tribal existence merely tending the wild.
Europeans cut down the valley oaks in the California central valley to plant modern agriculture. Native American burned around the valley oaks for ten thousands years. The average tree was 400 to 600 years old with a girth of 17 feet, stood 100 feet tall by 100 feet wide and yielded 500 pounds of acorn meat. One tree could feed a family for a year; one tree!
In the Willamette Valley of western Oregon, homesteaders either grazed off or plowed under the camas lily for annual agricultural production. The Native Americans cried trying to tell them that was already perennial food as far as the eye could see.
Destruction of the buffalo herds, locking up the food and land and denying people the skills to use wild resources civilization forces dependence by default.
Modern society allocates resources to those who contribute the most to reinforcing the system, brilliant. You get the most by contributing or exploiting the most. With incentives like this in place, you do not need a conspiracy theory, everyone will generally behave the same.
Tribal societies operate with the opposite ethic: absolute equality and never profit from a trade. The brilliance of the wigwam is three fold. Absolute quality, everyone has the same dwelling even the eldest chief. Everyone can make a comfortable home even the poorest member. Renewable, every home is made from small amount renewable resources taken at a rate to keep the system regenerative. Regenerative native cultures also never exploited one another nor commoditized natural resources.
People and Obedience Religion
Religion or spirituality today is all about people. In fact, the gods and deities even look like people. Almost lost is appreciation for nature, the great spirit or the lunar and solar cycles. Personifying god further detaches humanity from and appreciation of the wild and all other species. Today we have “all about people” spirituality.
The purpose of teaching religion at an early age is to impart obedience to absolute authority. God is all powerful, we will burn in hell or be cast out of the culture if we do not obey god’s word. Give me a break, as Jesse Ventura once said when governor of Minnesota, “Religion is for weak minded people.”
Civilization is Dependent on The Control System
If you take away the control system, civilization fades and regenerative natural cultures reemerge. Remove the overt control that we have not even discussed such as laws, military, media, corporations and give away free food, land, shelter, health care and education who would bother to slave themselves? People would just walk away and go live happy healthy normal lives instead of living stressed out month to month. What is the point in that anyway?
This is an introduction to the control system. To learn more about how things came to be this way and how to improve the future, read Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution by Chuck Burr.