Posts Tagged → material
Does your kid have autism, ADD, ADHD? Nope. Modern society is what’s off, not your kid
For about 70,000 years (or 5,780 years for literal Bible believers) our species Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been on Planet Earth. In that time we have proven ourselves to be not only the dominant life form capable of killing everything else, but so good at killing that we are capable of killing ourselves, as well.
Over this long period of time, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. We spent all our time hunting and gathering food, and we spent most of our time sitting around a camp fire eating meat we had hunted and fruits and herbs we had gathered. It is a lifestyle perfected by the American Indians and known to us today because we largely ended it through mass migration into their pristine Eden.
During the European conquering of America, very few Indians became European, most resisted to the death. The few who willingly adopted European clothing and religion can almost be counted on two hands. Indian schools like the one in Carlisle were renowned for runaways and coercive methods to convince little Indian children to adopt European ways.
On the other hand, many, many, really countless numbers of European Americans “went native.” They willingly sought out and joined with Indian tribes across the continent, wore their tribes’ clothing, spoke their language, adopted their habits and customs. This happened because something innately natural about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle powerfully speaks to the hunter-gatherer that is inside every human.
Even when it is covered by the thin veneer of “civilization” like today.
This is why people today still hunt, camp, hike, fish, seek wilderness etc. Our species evolved in these natural environments doing these exact activities, and these are the activities that are most natural to us humans today.
Look at it mathematically: For 65,000 of our 70,000 years on Planet Earth we humans were only hunters and gatherers; subsequently for 4,500 years we learned to farm and grow our food; then for 150 years following we became industrialized; for 125 years after that we have been eating out of a tin can and driving motorized vehicles; then for 100 years we have lived in the Information Age. Only in the past few decades have we lived as we currently do, in a massive consumer society driven by high sedentary living and complete materialism.
So 30 years divided by 70,000 years equals only 0.00042857% of human time on Planet Earth spent as we live today. This is to point out that our technology-heavy western lifestyle today, which we take for granted, is in fact not even a blip on the radar screen of human existence on the planet.
Which is to say, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is most natural to us, it is hard-wired into us, and the iPhone-heavy digital lifestyle is totally new to our species. Our current lifestyle has a lot of costs that we do not yet understand, and yet we have embraced it in a death grip.
So when your beautiful child is “diagnosed” with autism, ADD, ADHD, etc., be skeptical. It is unlikely that there is anything actually wrong with your kid. What has happened is that our modern industrial, sedentary, virtual, digitized society has developed new standards for living and behavior, and for measuring success, that are completely at odds with how we evolved, how we are hard-wired, how we have lived most of our time on this globe, and how we need to be in order to be our most natural, most happy, most successful.
In a hunter-gatherer society, those young people who notice movement the quickest are not easily distracted. Rather, they are going to be the most successful hunters and warriors on a landscape where movement equals either food or danger, and those who see movement the fastest either live the longest or eat the most food. In that hunter gatherer environment, what we today call ADD is actually an important adaptive skill needed to survive.
So an “autistic” kid today who is obviously bright and technically gifted but socially quirky, was, five thousand years ago, probably the best flint knapping spear head maker in the tribe.
It is today’s Western society that is living at odds with our most human traits, long adapted and refined over tens of thousands of years, and only now considered to be liabilities in a physically weak, feminized, pacific, diabetes-riven technologically-based culture where food is served up by the unhealthy bucket-full with no effort required by the eater.
Got an autistic kid? Put him or her into a more natural setting, away from dominant society where they are mis-judged by unhealthy, unnatural material and behavioral standards, and watch them flourish. Even better, withdraw from it yourself!
Thank you
Dear friend, thank you for your friendship, affection, and trust.
Dear clients, colleagues, and partners, thank you for your trust. Taking risks and making sacrifices with you in the spirit of entrepreneurial pursuit is tremendously satisfying.
Dear family, thank you for your love (which I try to return equally), hard work, support and for getting good grades in school.
Dear God, thank you for making me a natural-born American citizen, and for having me live in a time of great material abundance and comfort.
Dear fellow citizen….Enjoy Thanksgiving in the greatest nation on Planet Earth.
Weakness in the West has consequences
Adolf Hitler rose to power in a sea of pacifism and “peace-ism,” that euphoric act of sacrifice that kills all the innocent people and empowers the evil ones.
Hitler knew the West was weak, and therefore ripe for consumption. Pacifism empowered Hitler. Weakness invited his genocidal attacks.
In beating Nazi Germany and then confronting their sister, the Soviet Union, at huge costs, the West found again its spirit of liberty and survival instincts. During that time the West experienced incredible material success and unimaginable increases in the quality of life.
But you know how over time material success breeds creature comforts and disinclinations to do anything that might upset the comfortable lifestyle emanating from material success. So pacifism and peace-ism have risen again, among European countries and many Americans, even as war is carried to our doorsteps.
Andrew Tahmooressi is a Marine Corps sargeant who took a wrong turn in the wild, unmarked American desert with his legal guns, and has been imprisoned by Mexico for months ever since. America has done zero to get him back, but the Obama administration has done everything possible to open the border to terrorists, children, criminals, and assorted other illegal burdens on two legs.
In Israel, three teenaged boys were abducted three weeks ago by Muslim supremacists, and then found today, dead, killed soon after they were taken. Half a dozen Israeli military and police officers have lost their jobs over the boys’ deaths, which were avoidable: One boy called the police and said they were being kidnapped. The policewoman called it a prank and did not act on it. Her Israeli military counterparts have been primed by overwhelming political correctness to look for Jewish kids with spray paint cans as their primary target, not murderous Arab terrorists, and they, too, ignored the phone call.
Europe is filled with Islamic institutions where hatred is preached and acted out every day, non-Muslims are gunned down in the streets, and the perpetrators and proponents are called “victims.”
The list goes on and on. The West is awash in enemies and insecurity, anarchy, but nothing is done.
Weakness breeds contempt and increased attempts to dethrone the boss. It is happening across Western Civilization: Our collective and individual weakness is being exploited by people who would take over our countries and change them into something else, something unrecognizable, something where liberty is unknown.
Will you choose to be weak? Or will you take action to preserve American liberties?
A brief, simple reminder
With the obvious flaws in the new religion of human-caused global warming/ global cooling/ climate change, way too many conservatives lump together all of the environmental issues and then dismiss them with equal carelessness.
Just a reminder: Clean air comes from nature’s natural processes, mostly from trees and other large plants that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.
Another reminder: Clean fresh water comes from underground filtration through rock layers and sand, in undisturbed or otherwise healthy watersheds.
Both clean air and clean water are necessary for human life to continue as we know it. Both air and water are produced by free ecosystem services that nature perfected for a long time. Humans can kind of reproduce these processes mechanically, but they are energy-dependent and hard to maintain.
Yes, the whole global climate change religion thing is a political effort to shut down western civilization and transfer its wealth to authoritarian countries. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real environmental quality problems. Fact is, humans pollute, and pollution needs to be resolved. Fouling our own nest is a sloppy, stupid thing to do. We don’t need to do it.
So quit lumping all environmental issues in with human – caused global climate change politics. Focus on the real, measurable problems and solve them. Ignoring them is foolish, and humans are not fools. Basic land and water conservation are necessary to keep people healthy.