Conclusions
Posted by Steve Welzer on 05/11/07* * * * * *
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences ... Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
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People have become the tools of their tools ... Our life is frittered away by detail ... Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, and take up a little life into our pores ... In wildness is the preservation of the world.
- Henry David Thoreau
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The sight of so many rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distressed for want, the insolence of office and restraints of custom, all contrive to disgust them [the Indians] with what we call civil society ... Their healthful, primitive morality could be instructive for transplanted Englishmen ... Happiness is more generally and equally diffused among savages than in our civilized societies.
When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
- Benjamin Franklin
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I’m about to retire. I’ve lived a full life in this culture. I’ve had my share of personal success and satisfaction. I don’t think that I’m either bitter or cynical. I’ve tried to keep an open mind in perceiving how people live and why things are the way they are. I’ve been through a number of “head changes” . . . from a typical middle-class American upbringing to a Marxist critique to a “Red to Green” conversion.
All that I’ve seen and experienced has led me to conclude that the intimations we had in the sixties regarding the pathology of this culture have essentially been borne out.
We also had intimations regarding what really-has-existed (not Utopian) way of life constitutes an alternative. I’ve become increasingly convinced that what occurred here between 1492 and the mid-19th century was an unmitigated tragedy in that a less satisfactory way of life suppressed and replaced a more satisfactory one.
Prior to the introduction of European pathogens, the lifeways of the Native Americans were characterized by vigor and health. Their life was physical and somatic. Ours is constricted, cerebral, alienated, and aloof. Our life expectancy is extended to 70 or 80 years because we live inside, protected, in a bubble. We sit a lot. We live in our heads, estranged from the natural reality which is “out there.”
Yes, all our technology is awesome, including that which extends the lifespan. We fetishize technology and longetivity. We fail to recognize how our values are skewed. We are not able to fathom what we’ve lost.
Aboriginal people did not live as long. As a kid I was outdoor-active and so got my share of bruises and injuries. Broken bones; exposure to the elements. The aboriginal life was more precarious - but the quality of their 50 or 60 years was better. My life was better when I was a wild indian.
The typical adult of our culture learns to keep his/her focus in cyberspace or the media or the celebrity-sphere or vacationland in order to avoid acknowledgement of the otherwise obvious: it’s a drone life. From house to car to office to desk (or mine or mill) - and back again. Day after day in the tunnel of preoccupation maintaining the edifice.
The tempest in a teapot that we call modern civilization, taken as a whole, amounts to a folly. It’s not worth the effort and the hassle. We’re doing ourselves no favor and we’re harming the rest of the biosphere.
I don’t put forward 1491 as utopian, perfect, “noble,” Arcadian, or harmonious. It was simply more sustainable and more satisfying than what we have now. The best thing we could do from here would be to gradually and incrementally go back to simpler, more local, more communitarian lifeways.
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MANIFESTO OF THE 1491 MOVEMENT
Prior to 1492 the vast majority of the indigenous communities of “the Americas” were doing just fine. The European invasion which began in that year was an enormous historical tragedy.
Over the course of just a few centuries from the lamentable date of October 12, 1492 the native inhabitants of this double-continent were subjected to the biological pathogens bred within the afflicted context of European civilization and the exterminist assault of conquistadores driven by need and greed. Overpopulated, discontented, repressive Europe craved acquisition and expansion. The flora, fauna, and tribes of Turtle Island suffered terribly as a result.
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The 1491 Movement wants to un-do the damage to this land, deconstruct the Leviathan that has been built up since the Columbian climacteric, and get back to essential freedom. Comparing the ways of the European invaders and the native inhabitants, we conclude that life is better when it is lived:
- more outside than inside;
- more in the body than in the head;
- more in immediate reality than in abstractions;
- closer to nature;
- in stable, local community;
- in responsible relation to a particular place-on-earth;
- with a high degree of autonomy (communitarian self-reliance);
- cultivating a basic, direct, natural health and vigor.
Our movement is dedicated to fostering a sense of perspective regarding what’s important for living a satisfying life. We assert that what existed here - in this place but another time, some 500+ years ago - was sane and healthy. How the people lived and what the landscape looked like in 1491 indicates the path we must take for our own liberation.