WHEN DID IT START? A SHORT GENEALOGY OF FEAR

At what point did we become disbelievers and decided to disparage the rest of creation? When did we abandon  respect, love and compassion to fall  into the hands of greed, when did we start to deny  land, sea, clouds and stars their existence in order to exploit  natural resources for an economic balance? When did we start killing more animals  than we could eat, to steal territories that weren’t ours and to believe us to be more important than the land that sustains us? When did we become an embarrassment to the world? When did we first have the arrogance to say this land is mine?

Yeah, right. Man is a being endowed with spiritual capacities, capable of performing mystical feats, but look at the landscape: Man is also an unfortunate accident. If man wasn’t here,  our planet would a be garden in perfect balance or at worst it might be left to natural forces.People are born,  grow, live, die. But if we interact within our sick society without knowing anything about the past or about other cultures, we cannot be aware of the deep levels of rotting that we have reached as human beings. We think what we know is all  there is and the here and now all there ever was. If instead we take a look at early societies such as those of the Palaeolithic, with habits that span to our present day, this mirror will show us what we have become.

 

Reading The voices of the desert is what  prompted me to write this post, but I already knew these facts  ever since I read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee on the destruction of the culture of American Indians. I was also inspired by the Seattle Indian’s letter to the President of the United States, that famous text that proclaims that the land does not belong to men, but men belong to the land. The beautiful film Apocalypto  has only confirmed what I already thought.
Do you understand the meaning of the word greed? If we filter the details and go back to the remote causes, there is no other law than greed. Examine human behaviour: It is about greed. This feeling of greed has been instilled onto us since the womb where we still were trusting to see the light in a fair and beautiful world.
Rousseau says that private ownership of land started when someone placed four markers on a piece of land, proclaimed that space belonged to him and  others were naive enough to believe and respect it. It is a similar phenomenon to selling plots on the Moon: a predatory mindset led by the beast of greed,  which nobody even think of trying to stop because it is the motor of the system and it keeps it running.
I am not idealising the Paleolithic man, but he had none or our miseries. He lived a different life with different values. He inhabited what anthropologists call the ecotone, the edge of the forest, and did not permit clans to grow beyond  the necessary balance of life that was the ration between mouths to feed and  pieces to be hunt. I think they were superior to us in a spiritual aspect because they were submissive to nature and lived in harmony with it and their peers, and it is absolutely true that they were superior to us physically as well, since Palaeolithic skeletons show their considerable size and strong bones. And one day, emotions of degradation, loss of wisdom and physical degeneration began to take place amongst men. Men evolved to become smaller (both spiritually and physically ) and petty, and they turned into the enemies of the world.
It all started to happen in the town of Jericho, in the eighth millennium BC., in the  Natufian culture, in the Epipaleolithic . There we find the first evidence of cultivated wheat and domesticated animals and earlier lifestyles were  over. For the first time  man could rear animals and grow crops and he was able to say this is mine.  But then a misleading surplus and abundance happened and something called a sense of production too. This led  early societies to have a government and even priests. That is,  man was so foolish as to manufacture himself his own tyrants.

This way the Neolithic period was born, where innocence was swept away and  fear was sown into the heart of man. Yeah, I mean fear. Along with arrogance, ambition and conquest, fear was also born. Look at the village of Chatal Huyuk, in the eighth millennium in Anatolia: A Neolithic city with terrace houses solidly attached to each other  in order to have no streets where  the enemy could ride.

This way was born the Neolithic to sweep the world innocence and sow fear into the heart of man. Yeah, I mean fear. Along with arrogance, ambition and conquest also fear was born. Look at the village of Chatal Huyuk, in that same eighth millennium in Anatolia: A Neolithic city with houses attached to each other only in order to have no streets by which the enemy can pass.This way was born the Neolithic to sweep the world innocence and sow fear into the heart of man. Yeah, I mean fear. Along with arrogance, ambition and conquest also fear was born. Look at the village of Chatal Huyuk, in that same eighth millennium in Anatolia: A Neolithic city with houses attached to each other only in order to have no streets by which the enemy can pass.

Look at the walled towns of Jericho in Palestine, or Sesklo and Dimini in Greece. Look at the great fortified city of Los Millares in Almeria, in the first Bronze Age. All enclaves of the culture called the Iberian First Bronze Age (half of the third millennium BC) are fortified villages situated on top of hills. There was fear.

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Like black birds, fanatical doctrines and theories came to men  sanctifying the concept of  conquest because “I’m better than you and my god is real while yours is a false idol”. When the Pilgrims of  the Mayflower landed in North America, they were  carrying rifles, shovels, seeds and Bibles. It was inevitable that they would regard theirselves as The Chosen to whom a male white-bearded god had given paradise. This paradise, though, happened to be the land of the blessed nomadic aborigines who still lived by hunting and gathering, who loved and respected the world, animals, plants and who trusted  other men. They even received the cruel conquerors with great smiles, but they  were ready to humiliate them and rob them of their dignity and their freedom. These conquerors who, when they first brought the railway about, they entertained themselves by shooting bisons  just for the fun of killing and they would let them rot in the sun.
Just as in the Old Testament  the God of the Jews ordered them to enter Jericho and leave nothing alive, neither women nor children, so did those beasts who prayed every night to their white god and above all eager to pronounce the phrase this land is mine.
I write this from a planet revolving and rotating  with muck-oozing rivers, oceans turned into  sewers, air gravid with heavy metals, mountains without a single tree, fountains dried out a long time ago, beaches turned black due to hydrocarbons and an  intoxicated nature that turns you off . Everything began to rot in Jericho in 8000 BC, at the time when someone came up with an idea that seemed good, like cultivating crops instead of gathering and rearing cattle instead of hunting. This good idea was misused by those with a less good heart, those associated with  greed, property, domination and conquest, which have led us here where we are now and they have turned us into a shipwrecked in an impure world.
The tragic death of the hunter and the birth of the farmer led to astonishing arrogant ideologies that would be used as a tool to devastate not only land, sea and air, but also the human soul, which no longer knows what it is , or where it comes from or who it belongs to, and which  is lost in whirlwinds  of false ideologies and above all remains plagued by suspicion.
Once we made our own tyrants, the fear was born within us.  Behind our security doors, security locks and two-metre-thick walls, we have become used to living with fear to the extend we believe it is a natural thing.
Don’t you know? They want us to be afraid. They are the same tyrants that we manufactured all those years ago in Jericho so that we would be dominated and have their discipline imposed on us  and be told what to think. In creating them, we gave them a licence to give orders, establish prisons, fix boundaries, create ideologies , invent gods, inflict punishment and make us slaves.
They are still working to sow the seed of  fear that keeps us apart.
My friends,  no revolution can succeed unless it starts with a great inward change. This change requires that  we leave our ten-thousand-year-old fear, open the locks and embrace each other before walking together to crush the tyrants.

José Ortega

Writer & lawyer & anthropologist