The Path to Extinction
March 20, 2024
I was listening to Oppenheimer speak and several thoughts came to mind. Clearly he was a man wrestling with the demons of so many innocents dead largely at his hands. He had the incredible will power to push his conscience aside to do what logic told him was necessary to change the course of human history. Yet I have a cognitive dissonance in my mind. I had seen him just after watching a documentary on Native civilizations which pre-dated our European world by what could be 20,000 years. The native nations lived in relative peace and harmony for the entire history of what we call civilization. War after war, mostly over resources, consumed the history of my ancestors. Religion played a pivotal role in shaping our world view. We imposed this on native cultures. Yet what if we had stopped to learn from them instead? We say that human nature is selfish and corrupt, yet there was no evidence of this in the 20,000 year history of natives. Compared to the European model, they were superior in the essential ways. They never had a single conflict over resources. This is because they lived in balance and harmony with Mother Earth. We found technology that was “more advanced,” yet how advanced were we? We destroyed the environment of the old world before we set foot in the America’s. We needed to travel to other places in search of resources due to our misdeeds, they did not. We slaughtered millions and committed genocide. Now we must rest on our laurels, and it isn’t much to stand upon. We are victims of our world view. We shaped our reality with our beliefs, and reinforced it with our actions. This was the wrong course. Our technology wasn’t evil, our minds were. We should have seen the abundance of the new world and asked ourselves how such things were possible. We should have stood in awe that such “primitive” people could produce such abundance. When our first settlers nearly froze and starved to death and the natives saved them they didn’t ask themselves why? Having lived in the wilderness myself for 12 years I learned about Mother Earth. Her lessons are the supreme logic. Technology must be balanced with nature. It must be sustainable. Otherwise crisis cannot be avoided. Earth did not evolve to sustain our civilizations. Everything is about evolution. She cannot adapt to us, we must adapt to her. This has been true of all species which survived the pantheon of time. We must find a way toward this path before we go extinct.
Posted by Chad Morrison.