The Last Part of My Conversation with Myself…What is True Paradise?

Image by Alan Frijns from Pixabay

This is the final third of the long “conversation with myself” that I had when trying to work out the content and story arc of a new book, Threshold, The Crisis of Western Culture, following a writing technique I learned from Joe Sugarman in the early 1970s. Here we pick up the conversation:

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So what, then, is it that brings a culture back into the time of the true Paradise? I read these books that say that there are angels or channeled beings who’ll do it for us, and others say that space aliens are “helping” us toward it, and the religious folks are expecting some cataclysmic event or the appearance on the scene of a messianic figure, and some say that it’ll be the triumph of science or free trade. And where we started: some people saying that we’re “evolving” as a species toward Paradise. It’s all incredibly confusing. Which is it?

History tells us that it’s certainly none of the above. They’re all nice fantasies, and all certainly represent the collective mythos, the archetype embedded in our culture, of the memory of past Paradise and the occasional contact with people living in Paradise and what we’ve observed and learned from them. But it’s nothing as exotic or as complicated as any of those things.

You mean there are no angels or space aliens and we’re not evolving?

That’s not my point. There may well be angels and aliens, and certainly the pressure of evolution is shaping every species on the planet, including Homo sapiens. But these are not the things that bring about the return of the cycle from Spring to Summer, from Recovery to Paradise.

Then what is?

It’s when the oscillations stop.

Oscillations?

Say you have a pond in your back yard, and it’s a warm, sunny day with no wind. The surface of the pond will be so clear that you can see your reflection in the water.

Or, at the right angle, see clear to the bottom.

Right. So you throw a large stone into the center of the pond. What happens?

Waves. The whole surface of the pond gets covered with waves, and you can’t see yourself and you can’t see the bottom any more.

Right. The stone — an external force — has introduced disequilibrium. It’s thrown things out of balance. That’s the shift from Paradise to Defiance. Now, if somebody jumped in the pond and said, “I’m gonna take charge of all these waves, and I’ll make sure that they all move in lockstep just the way they should,” and maybe put a wave machine into the pond to stabilize things, then you’d have an artificial, man-made time of apparent stability. That’s the time of Tyranny. But then the machine the new wave-emperor installs runs out of gas. The waves slow down and begin to vanish. You’ve moved into the time of Recovery.

And if the machine runs out of steam altogether and the waves stop and the pond is again calm and clear, you’re back into Paradise, right?

That’s the idea.

It’s a nice metaphor for imagining the cycles, but people aren’t ponds. How do you relate this to how Paradise comes back around?

Good point. The big way that people aren’t ponds, at least in this context, is that people have memories and ponds don’t. If people have a memory of a time when there was no disequilibrium, no oscillations, no waves, then they can recreate that time.

Then you could say that ponds are better than people in that regard, because they’re always trying to return to equilibrium. Gravity and all that: it’s just natural law that when the wind isn’t blowing, the pond gets calm.

And it’s natural law that when people aren’t being pushed around by things being out of balance, they will naturally organize into Paradise time cultures.

But we’re not subject to natural law: we’re humans. We control nature.

That’s the great fallacy, the story that humans tell themselves that leads to Defiance, that maintains the power of the few during the time of Tyranny, and that people waking up from, during Recovery, will lead them back to Paradise.

You mean we’re animals? We have to obey nature?

Yes.

And nature wants us to live in Paradise?

Yes. Or at least in what I’m calling paradise for the purpose of this discussion. It doesn’t mean that everybody is happy all the time, or that life is perfect. People are still people. What it does mean is that people are living in balance with their environment and with each other. They may not have TV, or they may. They may eat fruit, or they may hunt elk. It’s not that there’s one right specific way to live, but that living in balance and harmony is the eventual goal and highest expression of every culture.

So how do the waves stop so the pond can clear? What ends the oscillations?

Experience. There are some excellent examples of this from among the early explorers of the Americas, but the most vivid examples come from the early explorations of the Pacific. Melanesian people had been sending out exploration parties from the countries of Southeast Asia for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. These people would discover an island and often they’d stay there and settle in, or drop off enough people to “seed” the island with a colony and then go off in search of another island somewhere else. Because of this long history, when explorers like Abel Tasman and James Cook came across these islands in the 17th and 18th centuries, they discovered different cultures at different stages of development.

Because of how long the people had been isolated on the islands?

Because of how long the people had been on the islands after they’d first crashed the local food supply.

Crashed the food supply?

Yes. For example, the people we now call the Maori arrived in what we now call New Zealand around the year 1200, about 800 years ago. When they first arrived, this huge island was covered with over two dozen different species of ostrich-like flightless birds, called Moa, which ranged in size from around fifty pounds to over five hundred pounds. The Maori people must have thought they’d discovered the ultimate paradise. The fossil record shows that for the first few hundred years they didn’t even make spears or arrows or hatchets — they just walked up to the birds and broke their long necks and then cooked and ate them. In a place on New Zealand called Waitaki, archeologists discovered over 90,000 Moa skeletons, and virtually all of them had died from just having their necks broken. It was a bone-dump for the local community for hundreds of years, and it’s just one of many they’ve found around New Zealand.

So the abundance of food led them to a time of Paradise?

It gave them what seemed like Paradise. I’d call it a pseudo-paradise, the mini-cycle within the larger macro cycle that I mentioned earlier.

But they had all they wanted to eat. They didn’t have to hunt, they just walked up to the birds and killed them. They must not have had any warfare among each other, either, because they weren’t making killing weapons during that time, so they couldn’t have used them against each other, either.

Yes, that’s true. But they weren’t living in balance. This was the dropping of the stone in the water. It was the early part of the Defiance stage, actually. It just seemed like Paradise to them, which is why Defiance can be so seductive. Like the jungle-dwelling people who’re shown Dynasty on TV and told that if they just leave the jungle and work hard enough in the white man’s gold mines, someday they, too, can live like that.

But life was good for the Maori!

Yes, just after the stone was dropped into the pond. Just after they arrived and found millions of pounds of meat walking around loose, docile, and flightless on the island. But then they ate all the Moa.

All?

Yes, all. The Moa — all dozen or more species — are now extinct. The Maori people ate every single last one of them. Took them about four hundred years to do it, but they did it.

And then?

And then they got hungry. So they started building spears and arrows and fishhooks, and went after the other local animals. Within another hundred years, they’d exterminated or brought to the brink of extinction every other bird on the island larger than a pigeon: the huia, takahe, and the kakapo. Along the coast, Maori people hunted the three-ton elephant seal to extinction, exterminated the half-ton sea lion (Phocartos hookeri), and from all but the most remote regions wiped out the 300-pound New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri).

What about fishing?

They even wiped out the local fish habitats. The seas around New Zealand, like most of the Pacific, were rich with Snappers, but the archeological record shows the fish skeletons and the hooks used to catch them got smaller and smaller over the hundred-year period following the extinction of the Moa. And that was pretty much the end of the easily-hunted food on New Zealand.

What did they do?

Well, by this time, they’d gone from the high of the pseudo-Paradise of the early stages of the Defiance, and now they were moving along the cycle into the period of the Terror. With the easily-killed large animals all exterminated, the Maori turned to what they’d previously considered famine foods: roots, tubers, frogs, ferns, rats, and small birds. And they began to hunt each other.

You mean “Terror” literally!

It’s almost always the case. Read the Book of Joshua. Read the history of the Roman Empire. Listen to the stories of Dickens’ England, when people went to prison for stealing bread but there were still millions so hungry they’d risk it. Similarly, the Maori developed a warlike culture. Around 1400 A.D. they began building forts and making the tools of warfare. They called their forts pas, and the countryside of New Zealand was littered with them: every community had to have one, or they’d be overrun and destroyed by a neighboring tribe who did have a pa. Upon birth, every young Maori male was dedicated to their newly-discovered god of war, and their language became rich with words to describe the tactics of warfare.

And what were they eating?

They began intensive agriculture. Tribes would build pas to stake out fertile lowland areas, and then grow sweet potatoes there. But they had no domesticated animals, and they’d killed off virtually all other sources of animal protein on the island, so they turned to the last source of animal protein available in the years just before Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovered them in 1642. In the hundred or so years before that date, they began eating each other.

Cannibalism?

Yes. Not only is the fossil record irrefutable, but Maori culture itself is rich with stories of the ritual eating of captured or killed enemies. Sometimes when war parties would go out on long expeditions, they’d take along a few well-bound captives — hands tied but still capable of walking — to use as meat along the way. When Tasman first discovered New Zealand, he wrote in his journal on December 16, 1642, about how the Maori sent a small boat out to meet six of his men in their small dinghy. Without warning or provocation, the Maori killed Tasman’s sailors and took their bodies ashore and ate them on the beach. He was so horrified he named the place Murderers’ Bay and sailed away, never to return.

But they’re not cannibals now, are they? I think I’ve read about the Maori people, and they’re held in high respect in New Zealand.

No, they’re not cannibals any longer, and now many of them are trying to get some of their land back from the Europeans who eventually settled New Zealand. But it was over a hundred years after Tasman left that another European — Captain James Cook — decided to check out the islands of New Zealand again. He visited in 1768, and found that they were still living fully in the midst of the cultural cycle of the Terror. In his journal, Cook wrote: “I might have extirpated the whole race, for the people of each Hamlet or village by turns applied to me to destroy the other, a very striking proof of the divided state in which they live.” Touring a local pa fortress, he was so impressed he wrote: “...the best engineer in Europe could not have choose’d better for a small number of men to defend themselves against a greater, it is strong by nature and made more so by Art.” The Maori were still struggling to maintain themselves in the face of a collapsed ecosystem.

How do you know this isn’t just propaganda from Europeans like Cook who just wanted to rip off the local people? I mean, Columbus called the Indians he met cannibals, too, and then proceeded to use that as an excuse to enslave and exterminate them. But there’s no proof they actually were cannibals.

In the case of the Maori, nobody’s disputing it, even the Maori themselves. For example, in 1869 a literate Maori, Tamihana, the son of Maori chief Te Rauparaha wrote a biography of his father’s exploits. Tamihana made clear the importance of the flesh of one’s vanquished enemies as a food source, often even as a primary food source during long raiding trips. He proudly detailed the conquest and murder of communities of hundreds of men, women, and children, in a style reminiscent of the Biblical book of Joshua. He wrote of his father’s pride in ripping out and eating the hearts and livers of his enemies, and how successful he was at taking slaves from among those he vanquished. Tamihana’s accounts are corroborated by dozens of other Maori people before and after, including the Pakeha tribe’s Maori man F.E. Maning, who wrote in 1840 about how rich the Maori language was in words to describe every aspect of military formation and warfare. Clearly, in the few hundred years since the extinction of the Moa and sea lion, the Maori had developed a terror-driven, warlike culture. Twenty-seven dialects of the original language are still spoken, and it appears that each of these groups were often at war with others over food and the land on which to produce food.

So how or when did they transit from the Terror part of the cycle into the Recovery part? And did they ever make it back to Paradise?

The Maori haven’t yet made it back to Paradise, although some are trying. In 1999, Louise and I met with a small group of them in western Australia who are trying to create a traditional Maori community, but based on egalitarian principles. Time will tell if they’re successful. But what lifted them from Terror into Recovery was the Europeans introducing to the island domesticated animals, particularly pigs and sheep. But that’s not the point of the story. The Maori just show one aspect of the South Sea Islands and the cycles of human culture.

There are others?

Definitely! Some were stuck fully in the Terror, just like the Maori. The Easter Islanders were another example of that: when Europeans discovered them, they were on the brink of starvation and aggressively killing each other. The pseudo-Paradise time they’d experienced after first discovering the island — when they built the famous stone statues — was over by a few hundred years, and during that time they’d managed to kill off virtually all the large animals on the island and, like the Maori, were subsisting on roots and tubers.

That must have been a familiar pattern among the islanders.

Yes, but there were notable exceptions. In September of 1774, Captain Cook discovered the island we now call New Caledonia. While the Maori had only been living on New Zealand for about 700 years at that time, and the Easter Islanders on Eastern Island for 800 years, New Caledonia had been settled for 3,500 years when Cook showed up. The fossil record shows that about 3,000 years earlier, the Melanesian explorers who colonized the island had repeated the boom and bust cycle of New Zealand and Easter Island, and then descended into a warlike culture. But then they moved from the Terror through the Recovery, and into the time of Paradise. They’d learned what the limits of the island’s food supply were, and the many various humane ways to keep their human population stable and below the threshold of the food supply. They’d come up with an egalitarian culture, and a cooperative form of governance. Thus, Cook wrote in his journal that they were a “friendly, honest, and peaceful people.”

They’d completed the cycle!

Yes.

What happened to them?

Seventy-nine years after James Cook discovered the islands of New Caledonia, the French discovered nickel, iron, and manganese there. In 1853, France told the natives that they were now subjects of the French government, where they have stayed ever since, despite a few violent attempts at revolt. Currently, the French tear out of the ground of New Caledonia about three million tons of nickel ore a year, and slightly smaller quantities of iron and manganese ore. They also run coffee plantations. The descendants of the people Cook discovered, who now comprise about 43 percent of the population, provide most of the labor.

So they’re back to Terror?

Yes. It’s the most common story when people living under Defiance, Terror, or Recovery encounter people living in the Paradise part of the human culture cycle. Because people living in the Paradise part of the cycle have no need for armies, weapons of war, police, or prisons, they’re not well-equipped to repulse non-Paradise invaders. Remember: invasion is one of the three typical ways that a culture falls from Paradise into Defiance, whether it’s by submitting or by taking up arms and becoming like the invaders themselves.

Does that mean that so long as there are any non-Paradise cultures on the planet, all Paradise cultures are doomed?

Good question. I don’t think so, but it certainly does seem to be the trend. That’s the bad news, I suppose. The good news is that the experience of the New Caledonians, before the French showed up — and many of the Native American tribes, before the Europeans showed up — is that when left alone people will invariably cycle their culture back to Paradise.

Always?

Given enough time and no interference, yes.

Why?

Because that’s humankind’s natural state. It’s how every other animal on Earth lives, in balance and equilibrium with its environment and the ecosystem that sustains it. It’s how all the other primates live.

But wolves eat rabbits! Doesn’t sound like the rabbits are living in Paradise, does it?

Actually, yes, they are. You’re anthropomorphizing, and doing it from the perspective of a culture in Recovery.

Anthropomorphizing?

Yes, you’re imagining that the rabbits think and feel the same way people do, and that all people think and feel the way you do. Neither of those assumptions are correct.

But rabbits fight for their lives, don’t they?

Yes, every animal will fight for its life. Until it knows that it will die, and then it relaxes and submits. There’s probably some sort of biological process involved, like it going into shock and losing consciousness or sensation, but that’s what happens. It is the destiny of a certain percentage of rabbits to end up as lunch for wolves, eagles, and other predators. That’s a system in balance: it keeps the rabbit population from exploding, but the urge and skill the rabbits have to get away from the wolves keeps the wolf population from exploding. There’s equilibrium. The waves have stopped and the pond is clear: the system can work that way forever. That’s the definition of the Paradise part of the human culture cycle.

And the reason why, when the Maori first discovered New Zealand and found more food than they could eat in a dozen generations was not Paradise, was because it wasn’t sustainable.

Right. It was a blip, an apparent Paradise, but a false one.

Like people now who live high on the hog and think our way of life will continue forever?

It’s actually a startlingly good analogy. Our pseudo-Paradise of well-fed, comfortable people in the First World is really an artifact of the availability of fossil fuels. With oil, we can put a hundred horses under the hood of a tractor instead of just one pulling the plow. With oil we can manufacture pesticides and herbicides to kill our food-competitors, the herbs and insects, and so increase our food supply. With oil we can cheaply transport food from the growing areas into the cities. But oil is a finite resource, and eventually we’ll run out of it or the use of it will destroy our ability to safely live on this planet.

Like the Maori ran out of Moa.

Yep. Just the same.

So how do we avoid ending up as cannibals like them?

That, my friend, is the biggest question of our lifetime. Let’s take it on in our next discussion.

Ok, but I don’t think I’m gonna sleep too well tonight.

Well, if it’s any solace, the oil companies say there’s at least a thirty-year supply left in the ground. So we have a little bit of time.

But in the meantime, we’re adding the population of the country of Australia to the world every three months!

Yes, there is that. So we should have our next discussion soon…