Starlink is Introduced to Isolated Tribes, The Cause and Cure (?) of the "Metacrisis", and How Myths Can Heal Inner-City Youth
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The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes
You may have read about this story or seen some of the videos recently circulating around isolated tribes in the Amazon recieving Starlink. We recently used Starlink in Zimbabwe and on one hand it sure was handy to have blazing-fast internet in the African bush (a real utility to communities) and on the other it got me thinking about the rippling effects of having the full-force of global capitalist ideology and culture blasting to your brain anywhere in the world. It seemed like a real trade off. Flash-forward a few weeks later, and this New York Times piece validates the trepidation.
The whole situation reminds me much of what Helena Norberg-Hodge talked to us about when she watched the Ladakh people of Tibet go through a similar experience when they started to be industrialized and gained access to radio and television. The young people started to see celebrities and famous singers from all around the world and began to compare themselves to the most curated — the best of the best — and began to develop inferiority-complexes and self-doubt. It would seem that something very similar is happening in the Amazon where young people are transfixed with celebrity soccer players, or pornography, comparing their bodies and sexuality’s to some weird, hyper-sexualized version derived from the Western internet.
Ultimately, the end effect of this flooding of Western media to a culture that has been isolated for generations in an ecosystem is an abhorence to their way of life, to the nature surrounding them, and a longing to leave and move to the nearest city to participate in the competitive industrial way of life —leaving the forest behind. The whole situation is very much a microcosm for the way current technology hijacks the human brain as it is intended, and has a technological imperatvie to separate humans from their sustaining ecosystems.
Check out the story from Breaking Points below:
The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: A Conversation between Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and John Vervaeke
I’ve been reading The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, and it has been a fascinating read. We’ll go into more detail on an upcoming podcast, but for now I wanted to share an incredibly interesting conversation between Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke, and Daniel Schmachtenberger for The Consilience Project where they discuss many of the themes of The Master and His Emissary in the context of how we can understand how we created the problems we face today, and what we might be able to do about it. Additionally, they discuss at length the challenge of embedding wisdom in the current system as is it is, asking difficult questions, such as, Can we imagine a civilization with the wisdom to steward exponential power?; Can true wisdom be intentionally scaled?; At what point does restraint turn into totalitarianism? and What is wisdom, and can it even be taught, let alone mandated, without turning into dogma?
This conversation is deep, spanning, and covers a range of philosophical questions that really help elucidate the complexity of the crises we face. Our modern problems can’t be resolved by simply creating a new set of dogmas to follow, or by assuming that we can inject wisdom into the “algorithms” of the system. The problems we face are multivalent, layered, and extend beyond the individual in unpredictable and possibly uncontrollable ways.
Check it out below:
This Jungian Life - Kwame Scruggs: The Power of Myth in Urban Youth Development
“The rain does not fall on one roof alone,” said Kwame Scruggs on This Jungian Life, where he describes how he has spent the last 20 years helping young people (namely inner-city youth, high school dropouts, and other neglected populations) with the power of myth. He describes how myth allows us to view ourselves through an archetypal lens, which is important for all people, but particularly young people with difficult lives. Rather than possibly being percieved as a paternalistic older person, Scruggs is able to create a container for self-improvement for these young people by telling stories and sharing myths that have a resonance for all people. After telling the myth, Scruggs will then ask open-ended, yet penetrating questions, allowing the young people to circumambulate the story through their own lens, as myths help us understand that there is a connective tether between all of us - there is no human story that is so alien that we can’t relate and see parts of ourselves in it. The rain does not fall on one roof alone.
I thought this podcast was an excellent example of practical ways to harness our inherent meaning-making and religious capacities for good. By creating a safe container for inner-exploration, Scruggs is bringing beautiful medicine into the world and helping young people all over the United States access their imagination and the connective fibers that exist between all people. It highlights how myths can open us up to viewing ourselves more clearly, more charitably, and as embedded in the world.
Who Were the Luddites, and What Can We Learn from Them in the Age of A.I.?
If you haven’t listened already, we recently released a podcast about the Luddites and A.I. Unfortunately, this probably won’t be our last word on the perils of the A.I.-ified world, but we tried to give an empassioned overview of why it matters that we resist this newfangled attempt at further monoculturing the world.
The Natural State Podcast
We recently had the pleasure of going on our friend Anthony Gustin’s wonderful and expansive podcast, The Natural State Podcast to discuss the project and all of the twists and turns it has taken. We talk about the coming Dark Age, the struggle of trying to make ethical individual choices in a fundamentally unethical system, finding meaning in the collapse of the familiar, and how mortality-consciousness empowers us to embrace the natural cycles of life, death, and regeneration.
Ancestral Health Today - Ancestral Health Society
In case you missed it, this past winter we were interviewed by our brilliant friend Isabel Ramirez for her podcast Ancestral Health Today, where we discussed the converging crises — from the chronic disease epidemics to ecosystem collapse — but perhaps the more permanent and difficult crisis: our crisis of meaning. We discuss what has arisen for us as we’ve explored the fundamental questions of: What is the human animal?; Why do we do what we do?; and Where do we go from here?
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