Great show on The Discovery Channel. In each episode Bruce Perry visits a new tribe somewhere in the world and spends about a month. His experiences are amazing. He goes deep. He blends with the natives. He has a skill for integrating into societies.
I'd absolutely love to spend a year or two traveling the world, experiencing other cultures. Bruce's work is important because it brings these distant human cultures to the American living room. It's not that he's doing any sort of anthropology. He's left that to the experts. He just goes and plays with these people. He learns about them. Through the hour-long show we get to see that other people, no matter how different they appear, are very similar to we are. They experience the same emotions, require the same things.
Each one-month stay could likely make up many hour long television shows. But the editors get in there and chop, chop, chop. I'd almost like to see a few of them expanded. I'm sure there's a lot more that happens. And through the expanded format we'd gain even more affinity and understanding of the people involved. Just think about how much we learn and bond with characters on the show Survivor.
On tonight's episode he went into an African tribe and was initiated as a man with a two day psychedelic drug trip. A root. Very interesting. He described being inwardly-focused, having to deal with the past pain he's caused others from their perspective. Very intense as he and others describe it.
He also mentioned that traditional hunter/gatherer people generally spend 3-4 hours per day working and the rest hanging out. This allows them to form deeper bonds with others in their tribe. Imagine living with 50 others in the middle of freaking nowhere and having all of that time on your hands. And some good drugs too.
So how did American society mess this all up? We've got great technology. Great healthcare. But are we on the wrong path? Family is so important to all of us and the more we grow up through life the more we realize this. Is tribal life more fulfilling than life in an American city?
I began to deal with this issue when I went to Belize a while back. The amazing thing was that people seemed relaxed, happy, despite living in 10x10 bug-infested huts. Could I move to Belize and be just as relaxed, happy? A theory is that I couldn't... that once you get these creature comforts (the remote control, air conditioning, etc, etc, etc, etc) it's hard to go back. And Americans are driven by the need to make something of their lives... whatever that means. You'd have to change your core belief about what's important in life before you could be happy in a tribe. I'd bet most Americans get there somewhere around retirement age... not exactly prime time for heading into the jungle.
The move towards communal living in the sixties was an attempt to regain some of this self-sustinance and relaxation in life... and connection with the commune's people. In the past I've poo-pooed the movement as some tree-hugger enviro crap. But if you look at it through the lens of building a society that's less stressed and more connected, maybe it makes sense. Who needs McDonalds, Playstation 2 and air conditioning when you can have 50 friends who care about you and lots of free time to spend with them?
One might ask why we can't have both. I think it boils down to the human productivity required to create all this crap in our lives. The Playstation 2 takes plastic, electronics, a box, shipping, marketing, a power cord, etc. All that crap is really human hours and robot machine hours to build it. Certainly Sony is an efficient operation, but obviously they require a lot of man/woman hours to make it happen.
Now, in theory, we reach a point with robotics and self-running systems that we can provide food, clothing, health care and Playstation 2 for every person on the planet and still give everybody 20 hours of free time a day. It's a technology issue, not a societal structure one. But it also involves a shift to a different model. The entity that owns the technology that can create Playstation 2's at a low-enough human capital investment must be willing to give it away or take only a small price from a person. The 4 hours of work a day need to somehow provide the same societal capital as the 10 hours of work Americans do today. The good thing is that we're talking less than an order of magnitude. Technology progresses quickly.
That said, society doesn't. And I'm not sure we're creating technology to move us in this direction. My hope is that we'll naturally head in that direction, but maybe not. Who looks after that sort of direction? Nobody, I suppose. The governments fund war technologies. The corporations fund anything that makes our life easier that we're willing to pay for... but that's different than creating a base technology that moves human productivity up. Charities work on various health technologies.
Or maybe the problem isn't a human productivity thing. Let's look at it differently. We're talking about going from 10 hours of work a day to 4. Could you live with 40% of your crap? I could. How do we model this? Let's just say you work at the same pay rate you do today but you only work 40% of the time. Now go out into society and buy what you need. It'd be a massive change, but would it kill you? No. You'd have the things you absolutely need. And you'd have free time to enjoy your family and friends. Your tribe.
But doing that may prevent us from achieving the vision of progressive technology plus free time. With less money being earned the economy would tank and the contemporary entities that progress technology would crumble. Would other entities pick up the slack? How could these new entities, likely self-organized at the commune level, duplicate and progress technologies that currently take billions of dollars to create?
We may just be in an era of humanity where we have to output a bunch, learn a lot and then eventually figure out how to get back to 4 hours of work a day. Americans may be the vanguard... albeit a stumbling vanguard society. Just one nascent step along the way to making life for humanity comfortable and fulfilling. Of course, we also need to stop wanting to kill each other, but that's another blog entry.
Economists have been thinking about this stuff for many years. They have concepts to describe what I'm talking about. Now I wish I had more econ knowledge to better discuss these things.
Anyhow, I love Going Tribal. TiVo picks it up each week. I don't know how much Bruce Perry can take... these shows aren't exactly easy to film... the man's only got so much blood to lose. But they play an important part in helping Americans realize that our way of life isn't the only one... and that in fact ours may be the most incredibly assinine one ever created. This show can lead to understanding. Understanding leads to tolerance. Tolerance leads to embracing. Embracing leads to world peace... or whirled peas... if the bumper sticker is correct.
Post-Ironman Melancholy