All Issues and Disorders Arise From a Deeply Dysfunctional Hierarchal Culture.
Second chapter in my memoir to my son
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
I walked next to the swollen river as trees newly quilted with iridescent green danced with the wind. There were multitudes of songbirds singing and a swell of clouds floating across the deep blue sky. My mind was quiet and still. Here, I was connected and whole without a thought. I sat down by the bank and breathed in the fragrances of spring. Bumble bees flew from flower to flower while butterflies meandered through the wild grasses. I sat for a while, then headed home.
While walking, I contemplated something that had been swirling in me for a while. I was thinking about you and the infinite horizons now emerging for you as you leave your home in Montpelier with your Mom and Waterbury with me. You are embarking on a new adventure and making it your own. You are going west to be near the Pacific, to nestle into the great Northwest. It was so clear. I wanted to write you something that expressed and pointed to the eternal, infinite love I have for you, what I have come to understand, and a bit about who your Father is and what it can mean if you can enter life fully with arms wide open, and a heart full of love and an immeasurable capacity to listen. I am sharing with you something that I have been pondering, meditating on, and studying for many years: hierarchy and why there is so much suffering both inwardly and collectively. You will already understand what I am sharing here as we have had dialogues around this. Let’s dive again and see how this culture impacts the human psyche in a toxic way and how culture only exists in our minds.
Our culture is a hierarchical system based on separation, fear, and insecurity. From these roots, collectively, we are constantly in dysfunction. Because one is insecure, one defends through avoidance, clinging, or falling into a belief that power will solve one’s deep issues. This dysfunction is taught to us since we are young. It is a conditioned illusion, a game of higher and lower, better and worse, good and bad, friend and enemy that we play out in an oppressive societal drama we call Western civilization. It is not who we are. Through being immersed in the environment of dysfunction, we are conditioned to identify with the role one plays.
Because it is so normalized, we don’t see how embedded it is within all our thinking and actions and how this is projected within the world around us. These beliefs and identities are the masks we wear and a way that bounds us in a false sense of security. Without knowing it, we defend these roles and isolate ourselves even more. How can I connect with anything if I am stuck in a role that is not myself?
Wealth is just a way for people to have more perceived power. Clothing is another expression of power. What you own or do not own is based on power. If I am a millionaire, I can travel more often, I can deal with breakdowns that happen to my car, refrigerator, heating or plumbing system, without needing to stress about it. I can even create a bunker in case the world goes to hell.
However, if I have little wealth, I struggle with paying bills, putting healthy food on the table, having access to health care and good schools, and worrying about anything breaking down as I live paycheck to paycheck. With little wealth, I am left to live in areas that are most impacted by climate change.
The jobs we have are based on power and respect. If I worked at McDonalds, I would have less respect and power than if I were a high-powered lawyer within this system. If I am a billionaire, I have more power and respect, than a teacher. If I were a President of the US and rained bombs on people of color who live in Gaza, nothing happens, but if I am poor and rob a store, I can be placed in prison for years.
The justice system is based on power. The more money you have, the better lawyers you have. Being a white, powerful, wealthy male gives you more opportunity to get a lighter sentence or be seen as not guilty, even if one is. With wealth, one can retain the best lawyers for our judicial system is not based on justice but who can best argue the case.
The system is based on power. A white male does not have to walk down the street in a hoodie without being worried that a cop may target him for any specific reason the cop decides.
“There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.” Shared Malcolm X. What did he mean by this? Because of the underbelly of the US hierarchy system being racist, people of color had very few rights compared with the white population. Racism is conditioned, not real. The idea of racism was created to justify the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. This collective deeply traumatic event has reverberated through time for blacks on the Continent of Africa and in all the European colonized countries, where they were forced into slave labor. Racism didn’t disappear or disband after the end of slavery.
Our system cares little about dealing with its deep-rooted racist beliefs. And so racism continues under oppressive laws and a penal system that was unjust towards the poor and black communities. It continues to keep people of color in poverty and ghettos with minimal resources and an abysmal educational system. Why are blacks, especially black men, much more likely to go to prison than white people? Why is there violence in poor black communities? Is that because people of color are less than and are more prone to criminality or violence than white people? If you believe this, then you are racist. The real reason this takes place is because of the racist institutions of hierarchy that have created laws that have kept people of color in poverty. The incredible generational trauma perpetuated on people of color from the dominating white class has created deep fear and defensive mechanisms due to living in this unjust system. “Murder was all around us, and we knew, deep in ourselves, in some silent space, that the author of these murders was beyond us, that it suited some other person’s ends. We were right.” shared Ta-Nehisi Coates in his memoir to his son in the book Between The World and Me. This is our culture. Hierarchy. A system that keeps the oppressed in place through fear, policies, violence, and ongoing injustice.
Women have lived in oppression for most of this culture’s history. This is still the case, especially in certain countries, including the US. Presently, many politicians on the far right are trying to find ways to block any advancements that have already taken place. Women are expected to be mothers, homemakers, and money makers and keep the household and family organized. In general, most women would not want to walk alone at night. They aren’t paid as much as men. They have to deal with domestic and sexual violence, inadequate health care, workplace discrimination, body shaming, and lack of respect, to name a few. In the US just recently, women took another step back when Row vs Wade was dismantled and abortion in many states became illegal.
This oppression is linked to all other oppression. Angela Davis expressed this by sharing, “As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the women’s rights movement program as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish that needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner — as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related. Within.”
Our farming system is totalitarian, as Daniel Quinn shared. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian. The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds — with no programs.” Why totalitarian? Because these farmers, based on the belief that they were above and could control nature, now decide who lived and who died in the animal kingdom. They chose what plants they would harvest and eliminated the other plants they felt competed against their (ownership) food crop. Any animal they deemed a threat to their food crop would be killed. Weeds and Pests. No other culture to this point, and after, lived in this fashion. Plus, they would continue to destroy ecosystems to plant their crops, removing habitat from all other species.
This way of settling down, this way of growing ample food in a totalitarian fashion, created a growing population, which, of course, gave rise to a hierarchical patriarchy that moved from one that was egalitarian to a power structure with men holding most of the power. Over thousands of years, millions of women have been put to death so that men can keep their perceived power. Over thousands of years, billions of women have not had a voice or equality. In today’s day and age, women still, whether subtle or overt, are underneath the weight of sexist oppression. Angela Davis also noted, “The roots of sexism and homophobia are found in the same economic and political institutions that serve as the foundation of racism in this country and, more often than not, the same extremist circles that inflict violence on people of color are responsible for the eruptions of violence inspired by sexist and homophobic biases. Our political activism must clearly manifest our understanding of these connections.” She sees the link between homophobia, racism, and sexism. This link also includes all the other issues we see—the system of hierarchy and hierarchical thought.
With wealth and power, one can own more and manipulate more to get more of what one thinks one wants: more money. The major corporations that own most television networks will manufacture consent based on what they choose to put out as content. They do this to consolidate more power for the higher echelon within the company. As a CEO of a major corporation, the main goal is to keep profits coming, and they will do anything within their “power” to continue growth for their shareholders. The CEO runs the corporation's profit-based infrastructure. If they didn’t, they would be fired. Or they can quit. However, the corporation will find another replacement to do their bidding based on the incentive of making millions of dollars each year.
The corporation can use some of its earnings to manipulate politicians to do their bidding without caring for the consequences — for they don’t necessarily see the consequences, for they have been deeply programmed to play out their power role. This role is deemed the highest success level within our cultural paradigm. They can also use their power and wealth to manipulate politicians into rolling away regulations that protect the environment and people from abuse. Yet, corporations do not care and will use their might to continue profiting, to continue harm, even collective murder, such as weapons manufacturers, so that their company can continue to maximize profit above all else for the benefit of the top levels of shareholders, board members, and top-level management.
As children, we sense the injustice of the place we are born, whether higher or lower, within the bands of this hierarchical system. We see the power dynamics in the family and school system, but as a child, it is nearly impossible to understand why we feel this injustice or how to verbalize it, for it is so established. Even a young child born into a wealthy family senses injustice. Injustice of the family system, but also with their peers. They soon see that they have more power than children who have less. Without realizing it, they will push this down, for it seems like this is reality, and then come to find an addictive intoxication that their power has, for it gives them some control and perceived safety within the hierarchy. Yet, a part of them knows this is fake but will push this down so deeply that they come to believe in their role. This is why it is so hard for someone with the power to let go of any of it. Who are they without it?
At a certain level, children have no power to change it. Most parents and teachers are already so conditioned that they have no idea what injustices they perpetuate. Being so firmly entrenched, a child living in this seemingly external hierarchical system internalizes and personalizes the hierarchy. We begin to compare and contrast ourselves to others. We are constantly learning to cling to things to find some sense of security and ways to escape the reality that our lives are meaningless and lonely.
Hierarchy is in the way we think. And this thinking creates violence, for it creates conflict and trauma that can’t exist without this sort of thinking. This is why young kids feel the injustice of hierarchy at a certain level. Yet, as there is nothing one can do, we see the hierarchical view as reality. This is so normalized that we become unaware that we are doing so. Our minds become fragmented with different parts within us that are hierarchical. Hierarchy and hierarchal thought, conditioned into us, making us believe we are separate, breeds psychological fear and all the issues we see individually and socially.
— — -
Generally speaking, people in our culture feel isolated and lonely and are locked in hierarchal planned cities that block nature and real connectivity. Many people feel stuck, confused, and in fear. They find different ways to escape from this isolation through drugs, entertainment, searching for more power, or they may discover escape through religion or spiritual practices. People become locked in the obsession of becoming somebody, following the dream of success that culture has told them to follow without questioning what they are doing with their lives. They are searching for some way to temper and escape from suffering. Yet, the ego, born into a belief in isolation, seeking safety and security, is full of defenses. As a result, we create masks to protect our vulnerability and push away connection and the possibility of being hurt. Consequently, our relationships are not sustainable nor authentic, for they are built upon masks reacting to masks, furthering isolation. So these defenses taught to us when we were young create more pain and sorrow instead of what the young child was trying to do, which was protect and abolish pain. How could our young minds know these defenses would do the opposite of what we wanted?
We have these fantastic tools and gadgets; have they bought us more time to relax and enjoy our days, or have they just added busyness to our already busy lives? They are mainly used to escape isolation. Have you wondered why we keep doing the same things, keeping the hierarchy of our society intact, and continue to create many problems and drama, using violence to keep up the hierarchy and perceived power? It is a vicious, insane loop of suffering. We have known this culture has suffered for thousands of years. Politicians continue to say how, at some point, they will help fix the internal societal problems but instead perpetuate culture wars and divisions to keep people from seeing where the real issues are. Of course, the history of our culture shows us this pattern. Hierarchy, money, and greed continue to find ways to hold onto power and manipulate people into more and more ignorance and thereby continue to live in isolation, sorrow, loneliness, and a subtle discontent.
This conditioning is so normalized in our whole school system that it reinforces day in and day out to ignore our voice, to follow authority, and not to question deeply. Because of this, we see our society as real and how things are. However, this is not true. We can live differently, wake up, and release our enculturated conditioning.
Why do we believe our culture’s lies that more is better? At its core, life is more beautiful, dynamic, and interconnected than we were led to believe. A tree blowing in the wind, a bee searching for nectar in a meadow of wildflowers, a mink searching for prey, a river flowing and meandering with waterfalls and rapids, the Grand Canyon, the Alps, and the Himalayas, the great rain forests that spread across the equator, the oceans, and just so much more that lies within our reach, within our wonder. Yet, we become blind to these things. Stuck in distraction. We see drama everywhere, become addicted to our thoughting, and become ignorant of what is right here, right now. Our cultural drama, Maya at work, makes it seem like violence, suffering, and greed are innate in who we are.
I completely disagree with that premise. I see, know, and feel we can live in health, joy, love, community, and sustainably with nature and within oneself.
I want to illustrate this possibility in the best way I can. As you read this, I hope you will also question if our cultural way of living is the only way we can live together. As indigenous cultures have illustrated, there are a multiplicity of variations in which we can live together, interconnected with our local ecosystems. Do we need to live in a hierarchy? Do we need power and greed? Do we need war? Do we need to poison our soils, rivers, oceans, bodies, and sky? Are all these things in the mind, and does this enculturated way of thinking not create constant problems and drama? The journey to discover this is the journey of Truth. Yet, the paradox is understanding everything that gets in the way of truth. Waking up is not about gaining more knowledge or becoming somebody special. No, waking up is about letting go of everything, and I mean everything until all that is left is truth. Here, one may feel like a fool, but a fool in the sense of giddiness that there was nothing to know, nothing to gain, and how silly this cultural drama is.
Our culture has expanded globally, encompassing countries like the United States, Russia, China, India, Kenya, Ireland, and Argentina. These diverse nations are all part of the same fragmented, dysfunctional cultural hierarchy system played out in different forms of corporate or governmental extremism, power, and greed. In a way, all project a bullying system that governs the hierarchy. Of course, history is written by the conquers and the bullies, so the oppressed voices are rarely recognized or heard.
If we visited any of these places, we would find familiar shops, stores, and a typical domestic currency that can be exchanged at any bank. We would discover that corruption and violence are normalized within the realms of the hierarchy to keep the pecking order in place and stabilized. Some countries may have hierarchal structures that are less extreme then others, but they still are
However, if we immerse ourselves in a culture in the Amazon, we will witness a completely different way of life. Our clothes and cultural beliefs wouldn’t align with the modern world. Our concept of land ownership and progress would not be applicable. They lived in a different dream. Yes, Maya is here too; however, instead of a dream of division and hostility, Indigenous dreaming was usually one of interconnectivity and community. Heavenly rather than hellish. The irony is that the European colonists projected their own hostile, violent ways upon the indigenous peoples, calling them primitive and savage and, in that way, easy to exterminate.
Our culture promotes the notion that our civilized way of life is the only acceptable way to exist. This assumption is fundamentally flawed, as I will demonstrate in this brief overview of our evolving culture and its transformation into the toxic cultural system we observe today.
During the Neolithic period, a little over ten thousand years ago, a group of people in Mesopotamia, now called our modern-day Iraq, created a unique way of farming and living. As the Mesopotamians’ farming accumulated superfluous food — their population increased and became sedentary. As Daniel Quinn shared, “In the natural community, whenever a population’s food supply increases, that population increases. As that population increases, its food supply decreases, and as its food supply decreases, that population decreases. This interaction between food populations and feeder populations is what keeps everything in balance…..We increase food production in the U.S. tremendously every year, but our population growth is relatively slight. On the other hand, population growth is steepest in countries with poor agricultural production. This seems to contradict your corre-lation of food production with population growth.”
[Ishmael] shook his head in mild disgust. “The phenomenon as it’s observed is this: ‘Every increase in food production to feed an increased population is answered by another increase in population.’ This says nothing about where these increases occur.”
“I don’t get it.”
“An increase in food production in Nebraska doesn’t necessarily produce a population increase in Nebraska. It may produce a population increase somewhere in India or Africa.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Every increase in food production is answered by an increase in population somewhere. In other words, someone is consuming Nebraska’s surpluses — and if they weren’t, Nebraska’s farmers would stop producing those surpluses, pronto.”
“True,” I said, and spent a few moments in thought. “Are you suggesting that First World farmers are fueling the Third World population explosion?”
“Ultimately,” he said, “who else is there to fuel it?”
Though some would like to deny this, the simple fact remains: humans are animals, so that law also applies to our species. Our culture has systematically been growing more food each year for millennia. With the onset of the industrial age, which allowed us to produce even more food with more “efficiency,” our population boomed. In 1900, there were approximately 1 billion people. We are now at an astonishing 8 billion people in the year 2024.
This emerging culture became sedentary as it gained access to more food. It needed to coordinate human power and resources during the changing seasons. This burgeoning society developed labor divisions and gradually became a complex systemic hierarchy. This power dynamic mushroomed over the centuries into a destructively hierarchical class-based civilization and has taken us to the edge of ecological devastation and collapse.
Our culture has always been and continues to be at war with the world.
This culture’s lie was that their destructive agricultural revolution came to all humankind, that humans were the pinnacle species of all creation and a Godsend — and yet, also sinful and flawed. Through these myths, this culture created the excuses to continue their war with the world — it was their right to dominate, and they were the redeemers of other sinful cultures who could bring those barbaric and primitive people back to God’s graces. Because civilized people saw nature as hostile, wild, and barren, they thought they could control and manipulate nature however they saw fit. This ideology of separation from nature led to their religious mythology. This mythos represented the individual and collective psyche within this cultural system. A separate ego was formulated and thought of as the only reality. Everything was now seen through the eyes of this separate ego, and this belief became the only way humans could be.
Fearful and feeling separated, the enculturated individual and collective self clings to beliefs and ideologies that try to foster some sort of permanency no matter how delusional while at the same time ignoring and pushing down unwanted painful thought/feelings. These human-created beliefs fragmented people against people, countries against countries, and civilization against nature because of its egoic consciousness based on fear. The system unconsciously perpetuated conditioning to make this way of life seem like it was the only way people were meant to live.
While this culture, like cancer, grew, at least 99% of all other cultures continued to forage, hunt in highly sophisticated communities, and live sustainably with a deep connection to their ecosystems. Even 400 years ago, there were thousands of cultures(with elements of small-scale farming) societies in North America, South America, Australia / New Zealand, and Africa.
Our culture created false labels to rationalize their want for their lands and genocidal violence, such as primitive, savage, racially inferior, etc. Through the veneer of their “civilized superior Christianity,” they systematically tried to wipe them out through genocide and then forced them into reservations or to be subservient workers within the cultural system. Europeans and the Americas also developed the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and, to justify their horrors developed the ideology of racism. For the most part, due to their cognitive dissonance and rationalizations, our culture felt no regret or remorse. Hence, we keep warring and destroying, for the system tells us to do this for progress.
Our culture’s war against nature has been no different. Though we essentially are nature and deeply interwoven into nature’s fabric, through our separate egoic formulation, we have been deluded, seeing anything wild as a barren wasteland and all others that get in the way of our growth, animals, and humans as the enemy, for our culture, nature, and people as something to be tamed, controlled, and used for hierarchical purposes without caring about the consequences.
We now heavily use fossil fuels, pesticides, and plastics, poisoning our soils, creeks, rivers, oceans, and sky, poisoning all of life, including ourselves. As a result, we have been at war with the Earth since our culture’s conception. How does this make any sense?
With over 8 billion people entrenched in our culture’s identity, we are seeing in this war against the earth catastrophic and grave consequences. Climate crisis, mass extinctions, massive ecological loss, war, and poverty bring us to the edge of collapse. We also spend very little time in nature. 99.99% of Homo sapiens’ time on Earth has been in the outdoors, connected with all our senses to live well in the innate wild habitats. People in our global culture spend at least 95% of their time indoors. This is creating a sickening disconnect and impacting us profoundly into more isolation.
Colonial Imperialistic European countries and the USA have created the fragmentation of third-world, second-world, and first-world countries. This enables people in power to rationalize their taking of resources or use of exploitation of the “lesser” countries. Of course, many of the countries that are struggling with poverty and trauma are because of the violent impact of “first-world” countries colonizing and extracting their resources for their own gain against the indigenous populations.
As our culture grew, the national collective egoic power also kept shifting — from the Egyptians to the Greeks and then the Romans, to Europe and Western European countries, and finally, to where the head of the dragon now lies: the United States. The United States is not only oppressive to its people but also has been the most violent country ever on the planet. It now has over 850 billion dollars in military budget, more than the top 14 countries combined. And the head of our cultural dragon, like a narcissist who tries to look so strong and perfect, while underneath is seething with deep, deep insecurities and doesn’t realize how their unconscious dictates their manipulations and lack of care. The United States, the head of the cultural dragon, action has stated its intent. “In the official rhetoric of the National Security Strategy, “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”
As Noam Chomsky shared, “One well-known international affairs specialist, John Ikenberry, describes the declaration as a “grand Strategy [that] begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor,” a condition that is to be “permanent [so] that no state or coalition could ever challenge [the Us} as global leader, protector, and enforcer.” The declared “approach renders international norms of self-defense-enshrined by Article 51 of the UN Charter almost meaningless.” More generally, the doctrine dismisses international law and institutions as of “little value.” Ikenberrry continues: “The new imperial grand strategy presents the United States as a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show,” prompting others to find ways to “work around, undermine, contain, and retaliate against U.S. power.” The strategy threatens to “leave the world more dangerous and divided and the United States less secure,” a view widely shared within the foreign policy elite.”
The system will continue to delude us in creating the illusion that it is strong and unbreakable as long as we believe in it, see it as the only way we can be together, don’t question it, and are unwilling to look at its historical roots. The system will continue if people in the upper classes are reluctant to let go of their power and wealth and the rest of us, the majority,
do nothing. Our cultural system is just a sick, toxic experiment, not reality.
By coming together, dialoguing, and opening up to one another in love and solidarity, we can break free of our cultural conditioning and trauma and live lives of joy, connection, wonder, and curiosity.
— — -
Together, reader, we shall explore how our global culture is a dysfunctional dream state, how it creates all the personal and societal issues within our communities, what it means to wake up, and how to convey and point to wholeness.
Here are some questions for you to begin pondering….
Do you feel like something is off or wrong in how we live?
Why do some people have privilege and others don’t?
What is the purpose of war and can war ever create peace?
How does our culture condition, create, and perpetuate suffering individually and collectively?
What is the enculturated ego? What is its function? How does it form? Is it truly who you are?
Have you had moments where you felt deeply connected with life?
When do you feel truly alive?
What do you think a healthy community would look like?
Are we separate from the world and universe?
Is something inherently wrong with being human, or is our culture’s ideology defective?
Do we have the ability to experience the fact of interconnectivity and wholeness directly?
Can one let go of all beliefs and identities, and what would happen if we did?
— — -
My son, this book is a pondering of wonder within a Mobius journey of exploration. Wholeness is always within you, so while speaking of our cultural dysfunction, Wholeness is still underneath the dreamscape.
This book has no authority. All I want is to explore and express to you invoke how I have come to see that our culture conditions us to be dysfunctional and move away from health, wellness, and Wholeness and how this enculturated dogma is a dream state, for it is all imagined.
Most of our social and ethical justice progress comes from a grassroots beginning: people coming together in their living rooms to talk, question, and speak out in solidarity to make real change happen. Together, we can move away from our cultural dogma, wake up and see clearly, and discover ways to live sustainably and in community with the world around us.
Throughout history, we will notice that progress will be fought. In peril, the power within the system will try to sabotage this collective awakening, and power will try to separate people to maintain the system. Enculturated power will try to destroy what gets in the way of its greed. For example, the US government killed off millions of buffalo to destroy the sustenance of indigenous nations. Or when tire and car companies such as Firestone and General Motors destroyed the mass transportation movement to ensure they had no threat of making extraordinary profits. This has happened over and over again. Power and wealth not only override goodness and community but will institute violence and propaganda to get what they want.
By coming together, dialoguing, and breaking free of conditioning, seeing clearly in presence, and creating more and more egalitarian ways of democracy and communion, you and I, all of us, can not only dismantle this toxic system but develop communities based on wholeness, interconnectivity, and egalitarian principles. It is possible.
