[quote=“heyvictor, post:20, topic:622”]]
Ahhh the old “anal impulses” again. Damn them anyhow.[/quote]
this made me laugh until i crapped myself. 
ironic, huh?
The Noble Savage lives an unrepressed and fearlessly free life, that like a drug is both psychologically powerful and addictive.
HeyVictor, consider this,
Crystal Methamphedamine was designed specifically to help stressed soldiers,exhausted from continuous front-line combat, fight mental numbness during combat by heightening their sense of awareness, intensify their ability to focus, increase their martial confidence, and powerfully energize their otherwise physically exhausted bodies.
By every measure (save side-effects), Crystal Meth is one of the most successful designer drugs ever made, And the fact that these “pep-pills” (as they were euphamistically called in the war) are a favorite amongst military forces world-wide for the last sixty-five years is testimony that speaks for itself.
I’m not going to waste your time telling you what i think Meth is about, because i know and have experienced the reality of Meth face to face.
Don’t fall for the Establishment-line, nobody, including me, is going to spend money just so we can itch and scratch.
Psycho-active drugs break-through the mass psychosis of our collective delusions and denials that we call normality , and allow us to experience life free from Ego’s fear-driven, repressive defence-mechanisms.
That’s why psycho-active drugs are a danger to Establishment-conformity, and why these drugs are so attractive and so psychologically addictive.
I’m not expert but that sound way to romantic, I’m certain there is both fear and certain (mainly social) constraints/taboos affecting that.
Crystal Methamphedamine was designed specifically to help stressed soldiers,exhausted from continuous front-line combat, fight mental numbness during combat by heightening their sense of awareness, intensify their ability to focus, increase their martial confidence, and powerfully energize their otherwise physically exhausted bodies.Sounds like what they really need is rest, and good food, not amphetamine's.
By every measure (save side-effects), Crystal Meth is one of the most successful designer drugs ever made.
I’d say table sugar or high fructose corn syrup.
That's why psycho-active drugs are a danger to Establishment-conformity, and why these drugs are so attractive and so psychologically addictive.
I am pretty cool for the most part with most natural drugs, just, most often they come with ritual/spiritual or practical uses and not purely recreational like we have today when these other uses are non-existent, which imo, leads to heavy abuse.
Here’s what Erowid’s has to say…
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/meth/meth_effects.shtmlnot something I'd call my drug of choice.
The Noble Savage is an archetype, and archetypes are idealized representations.
The ideal that The Noble Savage represents is NOT a person who is never afraid, but a person who never allows occational fear to degenerate into the neurotic preoccupations of our chronic-fears.
The Noble Savage, free from our neurotic fears, is fearless enough not to seek the security and authority of a hierarchical father-figure.
The Noble Savage is fearless, in that he is free of the chronic, neurotic fears that would prevent his nobility.
Not every communal egalitarian living in a State of Nature will rise to the nobility of The Noble Savage archetype, but those who are the most fearless, will.
The more Noble the Savages the more they constrain imposing themselves upon each other, or nature.
In combat, one’s immediate need is the immediate energy to fight and survive.
Recreational, in that we are Re-creating a psychological state so much more alive than the mass psychosis of normality, that it can easily lead into heavy abuse.
I would say that in combat, one’s immediate need is to get out of combat. I would also say that fearless is the wrong word for what you are describing. Bravery or Will, perhaps. People who can handle fear.
I’m not sure that calling the earth a mother necessitates a female gender. The ROLES of mother and father usually break down along those lines, but they don’t have too. The mother is the caretaker, whereas the father is the provider and disciplinarian. At least, those are the roles I’m familiar with. Honestly I don’t know what a father is really supposed to do, because I didn’t have the benifit of one. When I became a parent, I struggled with my new role because I have no Idea what a dad should do. Then I thought back to my mother, and decided that If I could forget about being a dad and be a mom instead, I’d make an OK parent. Maybe earth is like that, the mother figure, the parent, without gender.
I don’t know. my experience with nature has been that it isn’t interested enough in my specific well being to properly be called a parent.
I’ve done too much skimming of the board lately, and somehow this got past me.
I have zero sense of humor about homophobia here, hoodie.
I suggest if you want to keep posting here that you apologize for this remark, or find another board.
I expect your next post to come in the form of an apology. Otherwise, you will find it shunted to our new Humanure Bucket forum.
The Crystal meth posts don’t help the situation. You may want to consider that you’ve chosen the wrong forum to express your perspective in general - I recommend googling some other more appropriate venue for such discussion.
I’d like to resurrect this thread and, if folks are willing to join me, take it in a new direction right now: a new variation on the theme of “noble savage.”
Here’s how I feel/think about the celebration (some might call it “romanticism”) of indigenous cultures:
Indigenous/nature-based societies are comprised of people who can and do maintain healthy, stable relationships among each other and with their surroundings. I think that this can serve as a great definition of what it means to be noble (not a racist descriptor of indigenous societies in the least, since it describes a behavior) – and for me, simply contemplating the knowledge that people can and have lived that way for over a million years gives me the kind of peace of mind I need. (In other words, I need to remind myself over and over that people are not inherently flawed.)
Allowing myself that peace of mind has inspired some pretty exalted sentiments. Those sentiments in turn are my main motivation for rewilding. I want a close-knit, highly functioning society. I want to live without pollution, litter, or sidewalks. I want to escape the myriad forms of destruction surrounding me in the city. I want direct, intimate experience as opposed to mediated interaction (exchanging money for goods, communicating using technology, etc.). These wants are all emotions that stem from unfulfilled needs, and when I reclaim those needs and direct my wants toward them, I feel a sense of completeness. Even if I’m not very public with these emotions, they are there, and they are powerful.
The reasoning is there too, of course. I understand that civilization is socially and ecologically unsustainable. I understand that the socio-historic position of a civilized society which spans the globe shares striking similarities with past civilizations as they were about to collapse… and I understand that while rewilding doesn’t guarantee that I’ll survive a (probably violent) crash, it can give me huge advantages if I do survive past collapse. I understand that rewilding doesn’t mean giving anything up, just re-adapting myself, and trading one paradigm for another (indigenous people have art, and music, and those other innately human behaviors that I love).
But these “understandings”, in the end, don’t motivate me. I’ve had to learn for myself recently that I can’t make a whole lot of progress in rewilding until I accept and celebrate the knowledge that rewilding just feels better.
That means, of course, that I’m claiming a preference. We’re taught in civilization that acting from preference or emotion is always problematic, and that acting from reason is a mark of maturity. We’re also taught to distrust, deny, or subordinate our emotions and instincts. After all, we get good grades if we put reason above emotion, and we keep our jobs if we elevate abstract justifications for why we should work over how we feel while working. We can “win friends and influence people” if we demonstrate that we are the most reasonable, the most metered, the least likely to yield to emotion (a “distraction” from reality).
I have found that appealing to emotion can be just as valid as appealing to reason when making an argument for rewilding. Showing someone the grace of rewilding rather than telling them is inherently an emotional appeal, and it effectively convinces people of rewilding’s virtues. At the very least, when you talk to a person’s emotions and deep unfulfilled needs instead of talking to their intellect–when you embrace their personal stories–even if they don’t agree, they notice an odd, refreshing feeling of friendly disagreement.
(One more unvoiced knock against reasoning: since it’s not pure logic, it too sits in the gray areas – and therefore, it can be twisted and used to destroy (theology, science) as easily as the emotional faculties can be manipulated to destructive ends (Rush Limbaugh, advertising). Growth economics, for example, takes pains not to appeal to emotion. Oh no, instead it appeals to reason, and perpetuates behavior that is so extreme and anti-social, growth economists may as well be psychopaths holding everyone hostage at gunpoint.)
So I’m a romantic, and I nearly idealize indigenous societies (they provide for more human needs than this society does, after all!), and there’s nothing flawed about that. It’s not necessary or productive to feel embarrased about seeing indigenous people (and envisioning future nature-based societies) on an emotional level, and when I elevate those societies by saying “this is what I want” (instead of “this is what is reasonable”), I’m not acting from an irresponsible “id”, racist stereotyping, liberal white guilt, or any other condition involving reason “tainted” by emotion.
I remember being very young, walking in the forest and prairie, and wondering if I would find a group of people to live with there. Those were romantic (I’ll use that word) visions of a life that felt less boring and more emotionally intimate than anything else I had experienced. Those were not reasoned actions, they were strictly emotional and instinctual, and I can trust those motivations. I had not learned yet to justify and analyze despair – or if I had learned something of that detached behavior, being close to nature gave me temporary sanctuary from it. I trusted the way I felt as a participant in nature. The staff of The Economist (the way this thread began), however, doesn’t trust the motivations of that 6 year old child, and no amount of appeal to reason will inspire me to agree with them.
Sorry to come really, really late into this conversation. Couple of observations.
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It really, really bothers me that the only time I ever see the question of gender come up in these conversations is when an emphasis is put on the feminine. If someone suggests we could refer to humanity as womankind instead of mankind; if someone suggests we could see what is commonly understood as “God” as female; if someone refers to this planet as a mother rather than a genderless thing, someone always says, “Oh, I don’t like to get into gender.” What is it about the female or the feminine that gives people the heebie-jeebies? (Note I didn’t say “men”–I see women creeping out about this too. Why is that? Are we self-hating now?)
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The main problem I see with the Mother Earth concept is not that it invokes gender but that it implies a relationship of separateness. After all, we are not part of our mothers (or our fathers either–same problem). If what we are aiming for here is relationship with all other living things on this planet, I think we need a different metaphor. The Gaia hypothesis works pretty well for that, conveying the concept of Earth’s biosphere as a giant living organism and all of us parts of its (her?) body. If I am a cell in Earth’s body then by definition I am not separate.
Of course then we would have to again consider that the Earth might be feminine in nature, or at least asexual. Now, pure maleness, or I should say the male sexual characteristics, are only needed for fertilizing an ovum. The male does not become pregnant and does not feed offspring with his body, as female mammals do. (Please do not throw up the seahorse in my face; fish are not mammals, and holding baby fish in a pouch is not giving birth to them. Yet people will persist in holding up male seahorses as “proof” that males “give birth.” Hahahahaha. snort) Femaleness at least produces the eggs that actually turn into new beings, if not carries them throughout the pregnancy process until giving birth, and sometimes afterward will nourish the offspring with mother’s milk. There’s more involvement there. And asexual beings are not simply beings without gender; they are capable of producing complete offspring by themselves without seeking genetic input from others of their species. In other words they are a lot more like females than males. This would be why scientists call one-celled organisms “mother cells” and their offspring “daughter cells.” And if you look at multicellular animals who are capable of parthenogenesis, both they and their offspring are female.
So while it may not be terribly helpful to see the Earth as mother, it’s not out of line to see the Earth as female.
I speak for myself only in my response… and since I believe I initiated the discussion of gender as it can and/or cannot be applied to planet Earth, and also because I have a lot of strong feelings on this subject, I feel obligated to respond.
If you see people/God/the planet in a feminine role, then you are perfectly welcome to say so.
But it seems to me that your claims here are based on an awful lot of assumptions about the motivations, feelings, and “wrongheadedness” of people who do not see things the same way you do.
To illustrate what kind of assumptions I mean, I pose the following questions:
How does not wanting to assign a gender to A) the entire human species, B) “God”, and C) the Earth translate to misogyny and self-hate? If I said, “I don’t want to say “mankind” when referring to all people,” would you say I hated men? Would you call a man who said the same thing “self-hating”? Would you say that everyone who desired not to use the word “mankind” had the heebie-jeebies about maleness?
Have you ever asked someone who has a gender-neutral attitude towards the world how they ACTUALLY feel about femaleness? Have you asked EVERYONE with that attitude how they feel? Until you have, you have no evidence upon which to make a blanket statement about what gives those people the heebie-jeebies. You cannot infer another person’s feelings without asking first. I do not say “cannot” as a moral imperative, I say it as a fact. Let me repeat: unless you are omniscient, you cannot say how other people feel. If you go through life doing that, sooner or later you are going to make some costly mistakes.
I myself have internally consistent, self-respecting reasons upon which I construct my value system about gender, and I’m willing to use those reasons as examples to challenge your claims.
A) First of all, rejecting “mankind” and replacing it with “womankind” sounds a lot like a standard that I don’t want. I don’t want to be a “spokeswomen” for my entire species if it means that men’s voices are not included. It’s really impossible to speak for someone else, as I emphasized above. Burdened with the impossible? No thanks.
B) Secondly, I don’t know what you mean by “what is commonly understood as God”. If you mean an understanding wherein people are formed in God’s image (western monotheistic religious tradition), well, there are problems with that right off the bat for me. If you mean that the more broad conception of a Creator or Great Spirit could be seen as female, I pose the question, why limit its gender? Why can’t it be either male or female, as the situation warrants? Maybe in some situations it behooves itself to display male behavior (however it is defined by a culture), and in other situations, female behavior?
C) Lastly, who said we had to decide if the Earth was male or female? Who said we had to even consider the question? What if I would rather ask, “Is the world around me more like an accountant, or an artist? An inventor, or an explorer?” Those kind of questions are infinitely more interesting to me because they actually deal with behavior and patterns and dynamics, not a branded identity. (I could make the questions even more fluid by stating them in E-prime… but the point remains nonetheless.)
I have more to say, but I’ll stop for now.
Firstoff, refering to the two-leg-folk as “womankind” is, from a linguistic point of view, confusing, to say the least. As ai’ve said before, “woman” is a compound of the Old English “wif” (having the same meaning as modern “woman”), modern decendant “wife” (which is quite sexist - women are only wives) and “man”, meaning human, but being a masculine noun. Thus “woman” is akin in meaning to the Ozarkian “womenfolk”, refering to women as a whole. Saying “womankind” is like saying “woman-folk-folk”. “Mankind” means human, it is simply unfortunate that it has connotations of maleness. Thus, my alternative in the first sentence of this post.
Also, ai dont see a separatness with my parents at all. Am ai not of their flesh and blood? Remember how people, even in this country, with as civilized a mindset as they must have had, used to view family. The view is that all the family is the same flesh and especially the same blood. Ai personally see no innate “separatness” with Earth, when ai call her my mother. Nor separateness with the Sky when ai call him my father. There is room for all genders in the great Riverflow of the universe (my personal imagery).
Relating to the Noble Savage: as ai understand it, the noble savage archetype was people seeing that the indigenous peoples did not destroy their landbase, and so must not be subject to the inherent sin of humanity (meaning civilized humanity), making them more akin to angels (perfection). What they didnt see was that they were human, just like the europeans and had all the “flaws” that they had. The difference between the two groups being only that (most) Americans knew how to deal with problems, while europeans largely were ignorant, because of what Daniel Quinn calls the “great forgetting”. The Noble Savage is a contrived myth.
As somebody striving to break free of gender, it can be very frustrating to listen to humans apply their handy gender labels and behaviors to things that (as far as I can tell) have always been free of them. I get so irritated when I am told, “This is Digitalis, notice the fine hairs on her lower petal.” or, “Oak holds the warrior spirit, his strong wood…” blah blah blah.
I’m aware that a large source of my annoyance comes from everybody I encounter in my life having to project “one or the other” gender onto me. I feel like if humans want to cling to and cherish our precious invention of gender, that’s fine, I can do my best to avoid those folks, but heaping it needlessly onto everything we interact with seems a bit superfluous. Of course it doesn’t hurt the earth to be called “he” or “she”, I really believe the earth couldn’t care less. I just feel that it is strange to try and place human gender constructs on non-human things in an attempt to make them seem more like us, and therefore, deserving of our respect.
I want to clarify that these are my opinions and if people want to assign genders to there books, computers, and toilets, I hope it brings them pleasure. It is strange to me however, that folks would get upset about others wanting to avoid doing that.
Geez louise, I sure do hate trying to type. Blue Heron, thanks for your last post on this thread. I’m glad you can rock the keyboard. Sorry for the rant folks. :
Much of this is due to most peoples’ confusion of the two words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. Almost everyone in our society considers these two things to be exactly the same. So, when you have plants that really do have male and female differences in regards to reproductive parts, it’s very easy for someone who hasn’t considered critical analyses of gender to impose gender concepts on a simple flower.
I also think one can confuse sex and roles; My Mother Earth, to me, means a land that mothers those who live upon here. (human and other-than). It doesn’t refer to the Planet or Biosphere, it refers to my landbase, the soil and life from which I sprung from, having received seeded energy from the Sun, which I often have a Fathering relationship with. But obviously the Sun does not have a penis, nor does the Earth have a vagina anywhere that I’ve found.
When I experience a personal relationship of support with the land, I experience it in the only grounded way I can, as a social human being. To not experience it as a human, would compel me to fly into abstractions into my mind, ironically. I don’t abstract the Land when I call her my Mother - I do the opposite, I resist abstraction with the land, and stay grounded in my humanity. As an ant, or a dandelion, or a star, I imagine I might articulate relationships differently. But I don’t need to worry about that - I only concern myself with my own relationships.
Of course the English language beggars belief in its ability to confound and insult those hungry for sustainable and real relationships with anything. Can I say “He” without referring to the exclusively male sex? Can I say “She” without referring to the female sex? What about other sexes, anyway? I don’t even have words for them. Whatever someone’s sex, can I call them my Mother, or Father? Do I then call them She, or He?
For myself, the niggling issues of static labels handed out at birth, and static roles determined by gender, I keep as far away as I can from my animist connections to other-than-human persons. I don’t have a solution currently. In American Sign Language, fortunately, I don’t have to worry about he, she, or it - ASL uses the same symbol for all of it, thus neatly solving the problem.
In animist cultures, they often believe that the more shapes one can take, the more powerful the person. This for me explains the profound respect for “two-spirited” (genderqueer) members of indigenous cultures, who could relate in mothering, fathering, sistering, brothering, in all kinds of ways. No single way of relating defines anyone, anymore than the knife in a swiss army knife defines it as a knife; it also has a corkscrew, a file, scissors, etc. The more ways you can relate, the greater your power to support the life of your land and family.
I think the English language, and the modern culture that goes with it, makes it extremely difficult to talk about these things.
For me, Mothering does not mean “giving birth”, and does not require the equipment to do so. Fathering also does not mean “inseminating” and does not require the equipment to do so.
Mothering means providing that particular kind of nurturing that Mothers feel compelled to do, and Fathering means providing that particular kind of savvy, edgy push and direction that Fathers feel compelled to do. Both roles imply a loving and compassionate relationship.
applause
Couldn’t have put that better myself, Willem.
Willem, well put indeed, and I do agree.
Mothering and fathering can be done by anyone in my opinion, regardless of gender. When people refer to “mother earth” I would not feel inclined to disagree, many of us do feel mothered by the land. Mostly the argument that the earth is female was a bit much for me. I know I feel differently from most folks about this, and expect disagreement due to that if it comes up, but I wouldn’t go so far as to think a person self hating if they didn’t see things the same way as I do.
I just wanted to explain one reason some folks don’t see the earth as feminine for reasons other than self hate or misogyny.
Totally. The whole idea of psychoanalyzing someone for the crime of disagreeing, just fascinates me.
No, I changed my mind. It deeply bores me, actually.
Once again, I extend a middle finger to the culture of secular puritan evangelism, “if you don’t agree with me and think the same thing, you shake my faith, and therefore I must destroy you to prevent that from happening”.
Okay, I feel a little better now.
In any case, I really treasure you and your contributions here. I agree with them thar indigenous peoples. Thanks for sharing your many ways of relating, Trollsplinter!
My kids gave me a mothers day card one year.
Awesome!
By the way, Scout alerted me that I might have made my above “middle-finger” comment in ignorance that an actual member (danaseilhan) here raised the idea that self-hating and misogyny might play into these issues, not some other folks (as I thought). I definitely apologize for the mixup. I’d like you, dana, to continue posting here; I really value your curiosity about this topic.
I do request that instead of speculating about other member’s inner psychology, that you ask them why they think what they do, in the rewild.info tradition of:
- Tell your story
- Ask a question about other’s stories
- Interpret posts generously
You can see how a couple folks responded poorly to the idea that you could “tell their story” for them (why they feel uncomfortable with associating “female” with the earth).
Including me, I believe. I’m sorry. As a person, and especially as a mod here, I try to be as supportive of differing opinions as I can, but I do have to say that the accusation of self-hate sounded like a personal attack and I felt like I had to defend myself, in addition to the fact that this is a pet issue of mine.
While walking down the street the other day, I totally had a revelation; above I mentioned that the Earth doesn’t have a vagina anywhere that I’ve seen. I totally misspoke.
Actually, I’ve run into many of them, usually marked out by local Native tradition, crevasses, caves, certain valleys. I’ve also visited “male earths”, places that local indigenous folks see as penises, in a mythic sense: boulders, mountains, deserts.
So, apparently, my Earth relates in many ways too.