[Note: This is the fifty-fourth sample from my rough draft of
a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy. The Search field on the right side will find
words in the full contents of all rants and reviews. These samples are not freestanding
pieces. They will be easier to
understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE —
if you happen to have some free time. If
you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording
my book HERE.
[Continued from sample
53]
BEING
WILD, FREE, AND HAPPY!
We live in interesting times.
Bunnies aren’t acidifying the oceans.
Salmon aren’t blindsiding the climate.
Geese aren’t nuking rainforests.
Even our closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, remain absolute
champions at sustainable living. Today,
much of humankind has become disconnected from our wild, free, and happy
roots. The rest of the family of life is
not amused.
Many folks believe that electric cars are environmentally
harmless, and that miraculous technology will certainly stop and reverse the
Climate Crisis. Other folks, the wee
minority who pay close attention to the eco-related news feeds, are more
inclined toward anger, grief, and haunting premonitions of extinctions. They perceive that our culture is a runaway
steamroller destined to smash everything in its path.
Big Mama Nature is strong, fiercely determined, and invincible.
She is the spirit of life, and its sacred
guardian. She’s glad to see that the
planet-thrashing catastrophe is accelerating to its exit. Maybe its speedy demise could prevent many extinctions. Rust in peace, and good <bleeping>
riddance! When the storms have passed,
Big Mama will still be standing tall and proud amidst the smoldering ruins,
nurturing the recovery of what was lucky to survive.
Some folks seriously wonder if the human species is
fatally flawed, a goofy divine booboo.
There are cultures that live like hurricanes, and others that walk
softly. History repeatedly assures us
that wrecking ball cultures eventually rubbish their resource base and blink
out. Those cultures are indeed
ridiculous, fatally flawed, dead ends, and the impacts of their lifestyle harm
the entire family of life. Sadly, they
also have a long tradition of brutalizing lower impact cultures.
At the beginning of this long and meandering word dance, I
promised to serve you stories that contemplate how things got to be this
way. I promised to propose zero
miraculous solutions. Well into the
writing process, I became spellbound by an exceptional culture whose simplicity
and sustainability have been highly polished by centuries of heavenly
isolation. They are not fatally
flawed. So, I need to take a side trip
here, and share a bit of their story.
Pirahã
I’m delighted to introduce you to the Pirahã (pee-da-ha)
people of the Amazon rainforest. They
are hunter-gatherers who live in a few jungle villages near the Maici River in
northwestern Brazil. Estimates of their
population range up to 800. The outer
world mostly knows about them via the work of Daniel Everett, who first met
them in 1977.
In the beginning, he had been a missionary and linguist on a
mission from God to learn their language, translate the Bible, and inspire the
salvation of their damned souls. His
project was nearly derailed by the fact that their language had absolutely nothing
in common with any other in the world.
They were able to effectively communicate via speaking, singing,
humming, and whistling. When hunting,
whistles were less likely to spook monkeys and other game. Whistled words allowed conversations between
folks who were not close together. When
Dan was present, private conversation shifted to whistling.
To help you get to know the Pirahã, let me toss out some
snips and notes from assorted sources.
They hunted, fished, and foraged.
Fish provided about 70 percent of their diet, and the combo of fishing
and hunting provided up to 90 percent.
Manioc was recently introduced to them by Steve Sheldon, the linguist
whom Everett replaced. Scraggly manioc
plants sometimes grew in small weedy patches, and their food production was
miniscule. They did not depend on this
food.
The Pirahã knew the usefulness and location of all important
plants in their area. They understood
the behavior of local animals, and how to take them, or avoid them. They could walk into the jungle naked, with
no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts,
and small game. By the age of nine, all
of them were capable of surviving in the jungle on their own, feeding
themselves and making shelter. They were
at peace with their ecosystem because they knew how to live in it. Their faith was in themselves.
The Pirahã had no leaders, or social hierarchy, all were
equal. It was taboo to tell someone to
do something. Violence, anger, and
shouting were unacceptable. They were
amazingly content, tolerant, and patient.
Children were never spanked or given orders. They were free to play with sharp
knives. Adults spoke to them as equals,
no baby talk.
They often chitchat about daily events and personal affairs,
but they were not storytellers. They
have no cultural folklore, legends, fables, or worship. Everett wrote, “Committed to an existence in
which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in
abstractions.” He suspects that they may
be the only group in the world that has no numbers, and no creation myth. They have no concept of sin, punishment, or
god. Nor do they fear death or evil
spirits. Belief in evil spirits is
common among groups of farmers or herders, where a year’s work can be lost
suddenly via bad luck. Fishers and
hunters, on an unlucky day, were more likely to lose no more than a day’s work.
The people were remarkably easygoing and infectiously
happy. They wore bright smiles, and
laughed about everything. Folks from the
outer world were often astonished to be among people who were sunbeams of
happiness. A visiting psychologist,
amazed by their joy, said, “The Pirahãs look the most happy of all the people
we ever saw; they laugh the most of all the populations we have seen.”
In the tribe, memories of ancestors or historic events were
not preserved, they evaporated. The
distant past and future were off the radar of their here and now
worldview. Their realm of reality was
limited to stuff that they could personally see or hear, or things seen or
heard by their living parents, grandparents, friends, and kinfolk. History was strictly limited to living
memory. Folks didn’t worry about what
happened yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow. They had no word for worry. They lived entirely in the here and now.
Origins
The Pirahã have a misty past, and it will likely remain
misty. Archaeologists estimate that they
arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago. Earlier, they were a subgroup of the Mura
people, but they separated from them in 1714, when annoying colonists fell out
of the sky, disturbing the peace. Most
of the Mura learned Portuguese and got closer to the Brazilian culture. The Pirahã said screw this, moved deep into
the jungle, and eventually settled along the Maici River, where a passing
Portuguese missionary mentioned them in 1784.
Everyone’s ancient ancestors originally evolved on African
savannahs. As they expanded around the
world, grasslands were their preferred habitat, because they could be primo
hunting grounds. Thousands of years ago,
when wild hunter-gatherers from Eurasia first arrived in the Amazon, they were
happy to find, kill, and eat a variety of delicious large herbivores. At some point during this era of migration
and expansion, we aren’t sure when or how, the ancestors of the Pirahã also
arrived in the Amazon region.
In 2020, news stories announced the discovery of tens of
thousands of ice age rock paintings in the Amazon rainforest of Colombia (Article)
(Video). They were found on an eight mile (13 km) stretch
of cliff face that was sheltered from the rain.
Images date from 12,600 to 11,800 years ago, when humans were busy
colonizing North and South America.
This was about the time that a megafauna extinction spasm was
underway. The rock painters could have
never imagined how generations of low intensity overhunting might gradually
lead to devastating irreversible impacts (modern highly educated folks are no
less shortsighted and clueless). In the
years of feasting on fantastic abundance, they expressed jubilant celebration
in their art. Life is grand! Yum!
Today, the Amazon rainforest is dense jungle, where it hasn’t
been obliterated by loggers, miners, farmers, and ranchers. The region was much different when the
painters worked. In those days, a
warming climate was transforming the ecosystem.
A patchwork of savannahs, trees, and thorny scrub was in the process of
shifting into today’s leafy tropical rainforest. Among the cliff portraits were extinct
horses, mastodons, camelids, and giant sloths.
These were not jungle critters.
The Pirahã were super lucky.
Long before the invasion of pale faced space aliens with swords, axes,
and smallpox, the rainforest had time to become well established in the Amazon
basin. It created a moist tropical climate
that nurtured the survival of dense jungle.
This lush habitat was not suitable for herds of large herbivores,
hunters of large game, livestock herders, or food producing soil miners. Fish was their primary source of nutrients,
and it was available year round. The
daily catch was promptly consumed, to avoid spoilage, or losses to hungry
nonhuman neighbors.
The ecosystem was also home to black caiman, jaguars, giant
anaconda, schools of piranha, venomous snakes, malaria, and other life
threatening challenges. Roadless jungle
largely prohibited overland travel, which discouraged visits from uninvited
outsiders. This worked pretty well for a
very long time. Obnoxious neighbors can
be a bloody pain in the ass.
In recent years, when the Brazilian government began
providing the Pirahã with food from outer space, folks got fat. Upon receiving sugary junk food, kids began
getting tooth decay. Folks now have a
village generator, lights, a TV, and clinic.
They have a school where the kids are taught math and Portuguese. And so on.
It would be awesome if the government instead directed their attention
to protecting the rainforest, punishing the swarms of two-legged eco-terrorists,
and teaching Brazilian kids ecology and environmental history.
The traditional Pirahã culture generated wastes that were
biodegradable, no landfill needed. It’s
important to remember that they already had a way of life that worked
perfectly, was not self-destructive, and could not be improved by increased
exposure to troublesome stuff from outer space — exotic cultures, technology,
beliefs, habits, diseases, etc. They
enjoyed living in a stable, low impact, time-proven culture where everyone
shared the same belief system, and folks smiled and laughed a lot. What could possibly be more terrible?
Missionary
Work
In the beginning, after three years of tedious struggle,
Everett finally became fluent in the Pirahã language. He translated the Gospel of Mark, and shared
it with some natives. He had no doubt
that the Bible was so spiritually powerful that anyone exposed to it could not
help but be overwhelmed by its truth, and inspired to rush toward a
heaven-bound path. Well, the natives
were fascinated by the bit about John the Baptist getting his head cut off, but
nothing else had any effect on them whatsoever.
His holy objective had been “to convince happy, satisfied
people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.” A traditional missionary proverb says,
“You’ve got to get them lost before you can get them saved.” Everett told them that Jesus could deliver
them from fear, and lead them to a good life.
But they didn’t live in fear, and they already enjoyed an excellent way
of life.
Another missionary proverb says that “everyone has a
god-shaped hole in their heart,” but the Pirahã apparently had whole
hearts. None were converted despite
decades of effort. They were empirical
people who expected compelling here-and-now evidence. Notions from unknown times, places, or people
were beyond their realm of reality — perfectly meaningless nonsense.
Everett had never met Jesus, because Jesus lived 2,000 years
ago. He often tried to tell the Pirahã
about Jesus, but stumbled. They asked,
“Did you see him yourself?” “No.” “So why do you tell us about things that you
have never seen?” Another time, when he
read them names from his translation of the Gospel of Luke, they assumed that
these were people that Everett knew.
When he described crucifixion, they were aghast. It was beyond comprehension. Did Americans really do that? This information was from outer space, not
here-and-now reality.
In addition to his religious role, Everett was also a
linguist, a science-based field. The
scientist in him deeply respected the importance of trustworthy evidence. As the river of time flowed past, Everett
began to question his right to tell them about ancient supernatural miracles
that he had not seen with his own eyes.
He believed they were true. Of
course, believing anything makes it true, but “truth” is a slippery rascal that
can cast powerful spells, and open trap doors.
He loved the Pirahã, and they loved him, but they had no interest in
Jesus, and finally told him so. This was
truly a sharp metaphysical rebuke.
By around 1982, he began having uncomfortable visits from
doubt fairies, and these increased with every passing month. By 1985, the fairies had become a nonstop
whirling cloud of fluttering wings.
Finally, there came a day when he was able to summon the power to see
beyond the stone wall of his beliefs. A
miracle happened — the mission’s first spiritual conversion. His old life had become unbearable. He could never accept that they were lost and
going to hell. “I would go so far as to
suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their
environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever
known.”
He remained a closet atheist until the late ’90s, at which
point he came out, and his wife and three children abandoned him. By 2008, the banishment had ended. In a 2015 interview, he noted that his son
had also been awakened by doubt fairies, and that his ex-wife continued her
holy efforts to save the Pirahã.
Webs
and Cleverness
Unlike the Pirahã, I wake up every morning in an apartment
with hot and cold running water, electricity, refrigerator, stove, flush
toilet, heater, computer, phone, book collection, etc. — decadent luxuries for
idle rich folks confined in maximum impact societies. Outside my window is a busy industrial city,
streets rumbling with thousands of motorized wheelchairs. It’s an outpost of a global civilization
that’s maniacally devouring resources, pooping out mountains of waste,
blindsiding the climate, and racing to oblivion.
In bed, as I wake up, I turn on the radio for an hour or two
of morning news. Every day, there is
abundant evidence that much of the world is out of its mind — tsunamis of
bullshit, mass hysteria, and countless conflicts. I think about the Pirahã, who are also
getting up, smiling and laughing, down by the river, welcoming the beginning of
a new day. Same species, same morning,
same planet. They have not forgotten who
they are, or how to live.
Earlier, I talked a bit about human webs, associations of
people that shared a similar knowledgebase.
The U.S. is in the Old World Web, a patriarchal farmer-herder culture
that likely originated in Mesopotamia, and eventually grew in all
directions. It’s now found almost
everywhere, with a dwindling number of backwater exceptions, like Pirahã country.
I’ve talked about how humans evolved on African savannahs,
and eventually expanded around the world, long before the advent of agriculture
and herding. Humans have traditionally
had a strong preference for grassland and tundra ecosystems, because they are
prime habitat for large herbivores, a highly preferred food source. Open country made it easier to see both
hungry man-eating predators, and delicious herds of walking meat. Over the centuries, vast regions of forest
have been cleared to create grassland openings attractive to herds of grazing
animals.
Open grasslands also made overland travel relatively
easy. There were thousands of miles of
Silk Road routes. By making long
distance travel more convenient, they also encouraged the long distance
exchange of seeds, commodities, ideas, and technologies. Cleverness can be highly infectious and
contagious. When a clever idea from one
culture smacks into a different culture for the first time, the collision can
set off a snowballing chain reaction of brilliant, highly destructive foolishness. For example, when knowledge of the Chinese
substance we call gunpowder arrived in Europe, it sparked an explosion of
innovation, which soon began generating mountains of mutilated corpses.
Epidemics of cleverness can trigger bloody competition for
resources. In these conflicts, the
groups with superior cleverness tend to have the advantage. Winners are able to grab more, feed more,
fight more, enslave more, rape more, and hoard more. It’s essential for clever wizards to pay
close attention to the jungle drums of innovation, because the cutting edge is
a moving target. Great empires were
never built by sleepy half-clever societies.
Living in the wholesome isolation of their rainforest, the
Pirahã have not domesticated plants or animals, built cities and civilizations,
developed industries, obliterated the trees, conquered neighbors, or invented
automobiles and cell phones. Their
cleverness was invested in carefully mastering the art of sustainable survival,
which was all they ever needed.
Diversity
In a 2007 interview, Everett said that his initial impression
of Pirahã culture was that it was colorless and disappointing. “But then I realized that this is the most
intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience. This is a culture that’s invisible to the
naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the
Amazon. Nobody has resisted change like
this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”
To him, the Pirahã success in resisting change seemed
miraculous and otherworldly. How was it
possible that a society so healthy and happy could still survive in the
twenty-first century? It was stunning to
see. I’m not sure that resistance was
the key factor here. Isolation was
probably what benefitted them most. They
had very little contact with clever people from elsewhere who had bad habits, odd
tools, dark impulses, and heads slithering with brainworms.
Everett was born and raised in California, where his cultural
programming conditioned him to believe that innovation was the golden path to a
better tomorrow. This path was not
focused on living in harmony with the ecosystem. California culture is a highly diverse
hell-broth of constantly clashing races, religions, classes, fads, and
politics. A better tomorrow is about
more jobs, more income, more consumption, more landfills, and keeping your head
above water in the ever changing currents.
In a 2017 essay, Everett praised diversity, because we learn
far more (for better or worse) when we are around people who are different from
us. The more we learn, the more
innovative we can become. If we live
among people who are just like us, we’re not going to learn much. In a 2008 interview, he said that his biggest
personal desire was to be able to learn faster.
He had a very busy mind.
Back in 1977, when he first fell out of the sky in Pirahã
country, he landed in a living paradise of jungle diversity that bore no
resemblance to California. This
diversity was ecological, not human, and it was overwhelmingly healthy. He could have spent the rest of his life
learning about the rainforest, and becoming one with it.
Everett was once asked if an outsider could ever become fully
integrated in the Pirahã culture. He
said that he could not, and had never met anyone who could. “It requires tremendous knowledge of the
jungle and its flora and fauna, as well as toughness that one rarely finds
among outsiders.” A complicating factor
was his wife and three kids, who would not be eager to join a mind-expanding
adventure in do-it-yourself rewilding.
If he abandoned mission work, he would lose his lifeline — and you and I
would now know nothing about the Pirahã.
In 1999, when he returned to the Pirahã world from a side
trip to outer space, he did not gather vegetation and build a lovely hut. Instead, he unloaded 14 tons of ironwood from
a boat, and built a two room dwelling.
It had a gas stove, freezer, water filtration system, TV, and a DVD player. It was designed to ban the entry of bugs and
snakes. This pleased his wife and three
kids.
Three
Modes of Society
As mentioned earlier, Jon Young has devoted
his life to promoting nature connection, because without connection, we are
lost and confused critters. He spent
time with the San people of the Kalahari who had a deep spiritual connection to
their land. He said that they had
perfect posture, and that their mental health factors are all positive. They were super-happy, super-vital, and
totally connected from birth to death.
In our society, maybe one in a thousand adults has connection. Youngsters often have it, but it usually dies
in the teen years, as they move into the cultural fast lane, into the realm of
glowing screens and steaming hormones.
Colin
Turnbull, in his most daunting book, compared the lovely wild society of
Mbuti pygmies to the Ik tribe of Uganda, who were in a heartbreaking death
spiral. They had been banished from
their ancient hunting grounds by the creation of a national park, and were
expected to become farmers during a long and devastating drought. Their traditional society was rapidly
disintegrating, as many perished from starvation, and empathy went
extinct. The Ik reminded him of Western
society, where growing de-socialization was also underway. The Ik seemed like a spooky preview of where
we were headed.
Like the Mbuti culture, Pirahã society was also held together
by strong social bonds. Their way of
life depended on the complete cooperation of everyone, male and female, young
and old. This was possible because they
lived in small intimate groups, where all were kin or friends, and everyone
shared the same beliefs and values.
Their way of life echoed the original human blueprint. They had no need for laws and cops.
For the Ik, family relationships had rotted, and society
degenerated into a mob of self-centered individuals. Western cultures can also be madhouses of
rabid dog-eat-dog individualism. We
strive to achieve personal goals via competition for personal advancement. We frequently suffer from the painful
friction of diversity. Our morals,
values, lifestyles, ethnicities, and religious beliefs are all over the place,
and often generate intolerance, resentment, exploitation, and hostility. Our communities are too crowded and diverse
to be kept in order by family connections.
So, we try to control the herd via laws, cops, and prisons.
When cooperation and morals fail, and laws and prisons fail,
door number three is social meltdown — absolute morality-free individual
freedom, like the Ik. In the ’70s,
Turnbull was horrified by the rising tide of social rot in his world. “The state itself, is resting ever more on
both intellectual and physical violence to assert itself.” Heads of state and their assistants fill the
air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.” The populace “must not only not believe or
trust or love or hope, but must not think.”
Sound familiar?
Abstractions
The good news is that the Pirahã, Mbuti, San, and others
clearly demonstrate that the human species is not fatally flawed. They show us that it’s possible for humans to
be happy, healthy, and sustainable. Simplicity
is elegant. What about the rest of
us? Babies born in Washington D.C. have
essentially the same brains as Pirahã newborns.
Being raised in our warp speed consumer culture rewards us for living
like thunder beings. Pirahã kids leave
the world in no worse condition than when they arrived.
Jack
Turner was a philosophy professor who grew up to become a “belligerent
ecological fundamentalist.” Modern
society was savagely and senselessly pounding the natural world to bloody bits,
and this drove him mad, because it was insane.
He was deeply fond of the natural world, because it was the source of
all life. He was far less fond of
eco-activists who tirelessly yowled and hissed at the designated villains,
including capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil
enemy-of-the-day, and so on. They were
overlooking the deeper point.
The root problem was philosophical. Civilized cultures had reduced the natural
world to abstractions — a treasure chest to be looted, a valuable machine that
human brilliance should strive to rigorously control, despite barely
understanding it. (Abstract is the
opposite of concrete. Abstractions only
exist as ideas or thoughts.) The planet
was being pummeled by a culture that was infested with childish abstract ideas
— more is better, get rich quick, grow or die, human supremacy.
These abstractions provided a sleazy seal of approval for
numerous villainous behaviors, and they weren’t the sole domain of rich and powerful
big shots. Ordinary bubbas also got the
cultural green light to clear a forest, drain a wetland, or plow a
prairie. On countless occasions,
ambitious folks have gazed upon a sacred old growth forest, analyzed the
potential board feet of milled lumber, calculated its dollar value, estimated
the profit potential, fetched their axes, and turned living nature into
lifeless cash. This example of
get-rich-quick fever is abstraction powered.
In civilized cultures, the front line abstractions do not
include reverence and respect for the natural world. “We only value what we know and love, and we
no longer know and love the wild,” Turner wrote. “What we need now is a culture that deeply
loves the wild earth.” We must rejoin
the natural world. That’s an intelligent
idea! Is it possible? Can we free our minds from the abstractions
that cripple us?
Long ago, I chatted with Nick Trim, a Shawnee gentleman, on a
Greenpeace bulletin board. In the
mid-1600s, French colonists were teaching the Shawnee how to build cabins,
which involved cutting trees, an extremely dark and unnatural activity. Many trees were home to “little people,”
powerful spirits that required utmost respect.
Thus, it was necessary to knock on each tree, mention the possibility of
cutting it, provide a worthy reason for doing so, and sincerely apologize for
disturbing the peace.
Then, it was necessary to wait for a while, at least a day,
to allow the little people to find a new tree.
A highly irritated French officer complained, “These Shawnee can’t cut a
tree without a lengthy prayer, and a ceremony, and a day’s delay.” Nick added, “I am pleased to say that some
things don't change. We still love
trees.” The frustrated officer found
some French lads to do the murdering.
In our world, parents, educators, clergy, and others work to
pass abstractions from one generation to the next. Abstractions inspire cultures to send trainloads
of heretics, pariahs, and useless eaters to gas chambers. They inspire holy martyrs to put on suicide
vests. They inspire thundering mobs of
Walmart Christmas shoppers to trample others in their maniacal quest to seize a
bargain priced TV. They inspire
thousands of dimwitted fanatics to smash apart the U.S. capitol. They inspire thousands of ambitious
self-centered bumpkins to obliterate the Amazon rainforest.
Our poor brains are constantly raw and bleeding, thrashing
with countless weird abstractions — owner, slave, freedom, oppression, success,
failure, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, organic, conventional, ambition,
apathy, valuable, worthless, sustainable, overshoot, sin, guilt, devils,
angels, heaven, hell, creation, apocalypse, salvation, damnation, gods,
goddesses, scripture, prophesy, dogmas, creeds, priests, shamans, heretics,
infidels….
Skimming through the Wikipedia page on Abstraction, I read
this: “Thinking in abstractions is considered by anthropologists,
archaeologists, and sociologists to be one of the key traits in modern human
behavior, which is believed to have developed between 50,000 and 100,000 years
ago.” The development of complex
language unlocked the gate, and set loose a flash flood of cleverness. The ingenious ability to effortlessly engage
in abstract thinking was a tremendous achievement on the path to domestication,
civilization, industrialization, mass extinctions, and the Climate Crisis.
Every day, many long freight trains rumble through my
neighborhood, blowing their horns.
Similarly my mind seems to be pulling a long train of abstractions, day
after day, a heavy and tiresome burden. They
stimulate confusion, illusion, irritation, distraction. Life would be so much lighter, freer, and
easier if I could simply unhitch my mind, and stop dragging around an enormous
load of cultural goofiness. Imagine what
it would be like to switch to an abstraction-free diet and immediately lose 800
pounds (363 kg) of suffocating mental sludge.
You would feel so light, bouncy, free, and alive!
I must now repeat Everett.
Listen! “Committed to an
existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think,
or speak, in abstractions.” Wow! This beautiful clarity must inspire their
trademark smiles, laughter, and happiness.
It never occurs to them to do stupid things — burn down the forest,
start a gold mine, build a dam. They are
not dangerous, unpredictable loose cannons.
Indeed, it seems that the Pirahã were superb shamans. They succeeded in exorcizing some thorny
abstractions that caused Everett so much existential pain. They were not demons in need of salvation,
they were sweet joyful beings who knew how to live well, think with great
precision, and instantly deflect mental sludge from the outer world. When they held a mirror in front of him, he
gasped, saw the light, and began a journey of healing, growth, and liberation. Free at last!
If only the rest of humankind could spend some years hanging
out with happy, sustainable, uncivilized, illiterate, moneyless, abstraction-free
role models.
PS: For the sake of a
smoother reading experience, I didn’t clutter up the above by noting
sources. If you are curious, and have
two hours to invest, I recommend that you listen to the 52 minute The
Humanist Hour #183 podcast (2015), and watch the 2012 documentary, The Grammar of Happiness. In 2008, Everett wrote the book that
introduced the Pirahã people to the world, Don’t Sleep:
There are Snakes.
If you want more, Everett did a TED talk, Wisdom from Strangers.
He wrote articles Seek Out
Strangers (2017) and About the
Pirahãs. The Instituto
Socioambiental wrote a detailed report on the tribe. See two articles in Wikipedia, Pirahã and Daniel Everett. Several folks interviewed Everett: John
Colapinto (2007), Dominique
Godreche (2012), Clare
Dudman (2008).
