In fact there were laws in colonial america that you cannot go and live with the indians because so many people so many europeans were saying this running into the woods living with the indians that they passed laws in the colonies and the 13 colonies saying it is illegal for you to leave you know this wonderful world that we're building to go live with the indians and there's many cases benjamin franklin wrote about the hundreds of cases even of people who were captured by the indians right their their parents murdered or the husband murdered and the woman dragged into the woods and you know two years later she's recaptured by the whites rescued,
And she's like oh thanks but i'm going back oh man so good so so i think there's a propaganda element to this that we need to be honest about and you know we do it with other societies right we america we're usa we're number one and france is like no actually we know how to live and the italians are like no no we we've got we've got this figured out you know everybody thinks if you know navajo apache cheyenne lakota all these words mean the people right everyone thinks we are the people you i don't know what the hell you are but we're the people uh it's a natural human impulse to sort of say you know i don't have an accent everyone who talks different is has an accent not me um so we sort of have that cognitive bias that everyone else is different,
They are alien they're weird and that's you know multiplied or shaped by the desire to feel that we are lucky we live in the best time and place you know and that feeds into the this myth of perpetual progress that if things are always getting better then you know we're the luckiest ones right we live at the pinnacle of the best possible time and so 20 years from now it's going to be even better jet packs just imagine how great it's going to be our phones will be embedded into our foreheads we'll be so lucky i mean it's just nonsense when you think about it but it's ubiquitous it's interesting too with the uh the tribalism you know humans propensity for the um self-identification right and micro identification of our group it's like we haven't yet many of us at least haven't evolved to be celebrating who,
And what we are as a culture without being against the other one right it's like david hawkins one of my favorite teachers he said you know you can like chocolate without being against vanilla like and i always talk about how i love them i mean i love america i love this country and i think when some people hear that they think oh that usa number one we're better than i'm like no it's not even contextualized anywhere in my being right that i or we as a collective are superior to anyone else i'm just going yeah this is cool there's some cool things here yeah and i i could go to brazil and be like yeah brazil is awesome i love brazil it doesn't mean that i hate chile you know what i mean i think it's just it's just fragment of the human soul to classify possessions like that and generate an us for that sagacity of,
I don't know egoist indemnity or safety it's a extraordinary way that we we activate in that yeah it is it's weird there's that aggression built into it it's totally unnecessary there's uh there's a couple more things i wanted to touch on here i think in it's kind of like okay so here we are we are able to identify in your book and just kind of in this conversation that ah man we've made some some missteps here along the way but i also love my iphone and my laptop and you know the ability to communicate with people across the world live streaming here on instagram i think this is where people bump up against it it's like well what do we do what aspects of kind of the natural human life way can we reintegrate so that we can be where we are on the planet doing what we're doing and not be so out of touch with our uh our nature,
You know because it's not practical this sounds like we're you know you we're glorifying this hunter-gatherer lifestyle well try going to live in the woods the government will come get you and tell them you're on their land like even if you really wanted to take it that far yeah you're you're prohibited because um you've got a birth certificate a social security number you are a mini corporation owned by this giant corporation called the us you know in dc and so it's like even if you wanted to opt out of the system you kind of can't yeah so what well i guess you can if you really know your law you can find a way out but still where do you go then right there's not like autonomous zones in nature where all the free humans that want to be hunter-gatherers can go etc,
What are some ways that we can gain back some of what we've lost you know human connection intimacy our relationship with nature what do you do to kind of re-ground yourself yeah that those are important questions i i think you know it's similar to to what we were saying earlier about sex at dawn right i think the first step is to get an accurate assessment of what a meaningful life looks like and i think a lot the reason the motivation for me to write books and as you said it's hard to write books especially a book like civilized to death that was really hard because it was a downer you know it's a bummer like i'm writing a book about the biggest mistake any species has ever made which will probably lead to the destruction of us and most other living things,
Others is that keith richards yeah like just a little opt-in no big deal exactly can't wait to get up and you know go write that tomorrow um so it was a slog and i i tried to make it as as light and entertaining as possible but it's hard it's heavy i mean there's stuff in there about you know some of the most horrible things that we've done as a species and um but what motivates me is that i think a lot of people are suffering unnecessarily a lot of people like with sex a ton a lot of people are like there's something wrong with me why do i have these desires why do i have these thoughts what's wrong with me what's wrong with my wife what's wrong with my marriage what's wrong and it's the same motivation for civilized.
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