'Zeitgeist' Follow-up

A couple of months ago I sent out a newsletter regarding two ‘Zeitgeist’ films - http://www.untamedlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1568 .

At that time I promised to comment about them at a later date, which I will now do, briefly.

While I have not researched all of the information presented in the films, and thus am unable to defend all of its factual accuracy, I generally share the perspectives presented there and strongly encourage everyone to watch these movies.

However, while viewing, two points jumped out at me about which I disagree.

First, the films state that there is no human nature, just human behavior.

Obviously there exists a wide array of personality styles among humans as well as many cultural differences, developed in response to varying environments.

That being said, at a species level, just as one might generally describe the usual patterns of conduct of elephants or starfish, the human animal has certain general tendencies that can be observed cross-culturally. One might define these tendencies as being ‘human nature’.

As well, a fundamental tenet of what I present is that, for each organism, the secret to well-being is to follow the path mandated by the free expression of its genetic program, leading to self-actualization. It is understood that this expression involves an interaction with its environment, with different outcomes occurring within different circumstances.

Nonetheless, when I strive to be true to myself (and encourage others to do the same), I have a powerful sense that there is a true ‘me’ that I am facilitating the revelation of, and I consider this person to represent my true individual human nature.

The purpose of untaming oneself is to stop following the agenda that our domesticators have imposed upon us to allow that personal version of human nature to flourish.

The second area of disagreement that I had with the films was to do with the conclusion of the second film, the ‘Addendum’.

What is offered there as a solution to the disaster that humans have created is a futuristic higher-tech and extremely centrally organized society in which all problems are solved and all needs are met.

While it is refreshing to be presented with a message of hope in these challenging times, I found what was put forward to be facile and ignoring of both reality and human nature.

Although I do not decry all technology, it is shocking to me that the sorcerer’s apprentice has not yet learned anything from its experiences thus far.

Furthermore, a core cause of the destruction created over the course of civilization, as well portrayed in these films, has been the evolution of very large depersonalized and disempowered groups manipulated by the ‘elite’, sitting on the tops of the pyramids of power.

So while highly centralized approaches may have a certain attractiveness, in a fascist sense, to clean up this mess, the true solution lies in the fragmentation of these large groups and the destruction of these pyramids.

Individuals regaining control of their own lives and developing local solutions to their problems in an anarchic fashion, while reconnecting with natural rhythms and systems, is how we can save ourselves from destruction, both individually and as a species.

With this in mind, I encourage the creators of the film to continue to pursue their own means of addressing the crisis at hand, and similarly invite everyone else to empower themselves and to seek out their own solutions that make sense for them.

It is time for a return to diversity.

Elephants, lions, wolves, cats, dogs, and humans

I often refer to civilization as a zoo and those within it as zoo animals.

While I most commonly focus on human zoo animals, my interest in wildness and untaming and the effects of zoo-like existence extends to other organisms.

A recent article in Science states that elephants in zoos suffer from a significantly poorer level of health and have much a shorter lifespan than those not in zoos (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/12/12/zoo-elephants-lives-cut-short-by-obesity-loneliness/ , http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/1211/2 , http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7777413.stm ).

The authors indicate that...

"Some of the zoo elephants' problems stem from the practices of removing young calves from their mothers and transferring females from one zoo to another, usually for breeding. Both practices break the animals' family ties and presumably cause mental stress. "In the wild, females always stay with their mothers; they never leave the herd where they're born," says Mason. Zoo elephants are often overweight as well, due to a lack of space in which to roam."

The human slave trade has operated for millennia in the same manner.

As one person commented in one of the above links,

"Boycott zoos.We have enough resources for people to become educated about elephants and ALL animals stuck in zoos for human “needs”, without holding them captive in cages. When are people going to realize that nature does just fine without our intervention? Put the money used to sustain zoos toward protecting natural habitats."

The argument that zoos are there to protect animals is bogus.

Visiting a zoo is like visiting a prison. However, at least some of the people in prison have done something to merit their incarceration while all of the zoo animals are innocent.

Further to the theme of innocent animals, I happened to come across an ESPN television program on bow hunting mountain lions the other day.

I have reached a point in my life where it takes a great deal to shock me, but the horror and revulsion that I experienced watching the hounds tree the cougar and seeing the hunter calmly take out his bow to cold-bloodedly kill this cornered magnificent wild creature (that had done him no harm and which he was not killing to feed himself) was so great that I was unable to actually view the murder.

I presently live in Mississippi, where hunting is almost as important as fundamentalist religion, but even the ardent hunters here that I described this TV program to (who always eat what they kill) were enraged with such behavior.

I was reminded of a dentist that I met who recounted a bear hunting trip he had taken to Canada. He described how he and his fellow 'big game hunters' had transported a large tub of donuts out into the woods and placed it near the base of a hunting stand perched in nearby trees and then patiently waited for a bear to come along, which they then shot with their high powered laser equipped rifles. To my amazement, he actually seemed to believe that he had done something admirable, and proudly displayed the stuffed bear as an indicator of his remarkable virility.

I was unable to find the video of the ESPN program referred to above but I did locate the following two clips which are similar enough to what I viewed that day, both in terms of the obscenity of the murders as well as the pathetic nature of the perpetrators of these deeds. They are well worth watching, if you are able to handle their gruesomeness - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChpALNNragI , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNiTDo5W8Js .

The wild mountain lions in these recordings were able to be killed due to the combined efforts of domesticated humans and dogs. This partnership is the longest standing domesticated relationship, one that predates the official start of civilization by thousands of years and may well have been important in its eventual development.

I must confess that I have little respect for either domesticated dogs or domesticated humans but do hold cats in high regard, even the domesticated ones to a significant degree in that, unlike most domesticated creatures, they generally maintain their independence, typically considering themselves to be the master rather than the slave in the human-cat dynamic.

Some cat quotes...

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have never forgotten this.

Way down deep we are all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

The cat, an aristocrat, merits our esteem, while the dog is only a scurvy type who got his position by low flatteries.

Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.

What's the difference between a cat & a dog? A dog ponders his relationship with man: "He feeds me, he grooms me, he takes care of all my needs... He must be God". A cat thinks: "He feeds me, grooms me, takes care of me. I must be God".



The killing of wild mountain lions by the collaboration of these inferior species (domesticated dogs and humans) embodies the tragic devolution of life that domestication and civilization have wrought - the (temporary) brutal triumph of ugliness over beauty.

A Untamed Newsletter subscriber from Europe let me know about an interesting article on the co-evolution of the dogs and humans - http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/s/275/science/coevolution03.pdf .

The article explores the transformation of the gray wolf into the domesticated dog and suggests that humans emulated aspects of wolf pack behavior and in so doing transformed themselves into a species that became more amenable to larger group interaction - ultimately expressed as civilization.

The authors quote Jane Goodall, the renowned expert on the common chimpanzee (please note that when she refers to the chimpanzee she is referring specifically to the common chimp, not the bonobo), regarding the bond between dogs and humans and comparing it to possible human relationships with our closest primate cousins....

“Dogs have been domesticated for a very long time. They have descended from wolves who were pack animals. They survive as a result of teamwork.They hunt together, den together, raise pups together. This ancient social order has been helpful in the domestication of the dog.

Chimpanzees are individualists.They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty.

If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bonds between siblings.Other relationships tend to be opportunistic. And even between family members, disputes often rise that may even lead to fights.

… even after hundreds of years of selective breeding, it would be hard if not impossible to produce a chimpanzee who could live with humans and have anything like such a good relationship as we have with our dogs.

It is not related to intelligence, but the desire to help, to be obedient, to gain our approval.”


There is no question that humans have used dogs to their benefit for thousands of years and value their loyalty, obedience and desire for human approval.

Such behavior is very useful within the wolf pack. The pack is essentially a multibodied organism and undoubtedly gray wolves evolved such behavior as an effective means to survive from generation to generation, often in very hostile environments.

The hierarchy of the pack has an alpha couple as the head of the unit and it is generally just this pair of wolves that reproduces.

The non-alpha wolves dedicate their lives to insuring that the alphas and their offspring survive. It is extremely important to understand that the non-alphas have a tremendously close degree of genetic sharing with the alphas of their pack. Thus the success of the alphas' survival is truly the best means whereby an overwhelming percentage of the non-alphas' genes are able to move forward in time. In an environment with quite limited resources, if all the wolves were reproducing, few if any would be able to find enough food to survive from generation to generation and thus essentially no genes would carry on.

Of course, in the wolf pack, the alphas are wolves and all of the energy devoted to survival on the part of the various members of the pack is invested in the wellbeing of the wolves and in no other organisms.

It is thought that feral dogs branched off from wolves as an expression of scavenging from human communities. Some wolves tended to increasingly rely on human refuse as their source of food and in so doing became less focused on hunting. On might assume that those who were less successful hunters would have been more inclined in the scavenging direction from a survival perspective.

When comparing wolves with dogs, both feral and domesticated....

"Dogs display much greater tractability than tame wolves, and are generally much more responsive to coercive techniques involving fear, aversive stimuli and force than wolves, which are most responsive toward positive conditioning and rewards....Although they are less difficult to control than wolves, they can be comparatively more difficult to teach than a motivated wolf.

Dogs tend to be poorer than wolves and coyotes at observational learning, being more responsive to instrumental conditioning. Feral dogs show little of the complex social structure or dominance hierarchy present in wolf packs. For dogs, other members of their kind are of no help in locating food items, and are more like competitors. Feral dogs are primarily scavengers, with studies showing that unlike their wild cousins, they are poor ungulate hunters, having little impact on wildlife populations where they are sympatric."


It would seem that dogs came from the inferior strata of the wolf population and survived and prospered due to their willingness and ability to integrate into human society (presumably they were considerably less likely to survive without such integration).

Wolves, like virtually all wild animals, have had an increasingly hard time of things as humans became a more powerful force upon the planet. I recall watching a nature program on wolves several years ago in which the narrator (ironically named Peter Coyote) stated that the dog branch of the wolf family tree had clearly made the better choice due to its far superior population today in comparison with the ever diminishing numbers of wild wolves on the planet.

The trouble with being a domesticated dog, however, is that your alpha is now a human animal and not a canid, with whom your sharing of genetic information is significantly limited. While humans have undoubtedly done some accommodating for 'man's best friend', it is beyond argument that the relationship has been set up to favor humans and not dogs. Thus, the 'virtues' of desiring to help, obedience, and gaining approval, originally for the benefit of the members of the wolf/dog species, are now exploited (and of course valued) by dog owners around the world to enhance human and not canine agendas.

That the human animals that have owned civilization have encouraged and artificially selected for the same characteristics as those possessed by dogs among their domesticated human property may well indicate that they recognized such characteristics to be very beneficial to the furtherance of their own avaricious objectives and have thus aggressively promoted them throughout civilized societies for ten thousand years.

Again, one will assume that those humans most attracted to being the dogs of civilization rather than the wolves of the wild come from the lower strata of the human species.
Similarly, it would appear that on the basis of numbers the human dogs have done far better than the human wolves who, for the most part, have found themselves cornered and violently brought down like the mountain lions in the hunting videos.

For those of you not inclined to continue following the dogs' path, however, it is time to reaffirm your wildness (i.e. being true to your internal genetic agenda - i.e. wildness does not necessarily mean having a stone age lifestyle) and to commit to reclaiming ownership of your life.
There is much to be done, given the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Only you can make this happen for yourself.

John Gatto - The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

A friend in France sent me this article by John Gatto....

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all.

What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it. Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive. In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place. Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible. The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory. Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.

The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity. Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist. This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!

In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers. Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too. I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood. The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.

It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you. We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes. Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.

"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.

The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy. None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.

How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.

Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class. Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny.

Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures. With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction. All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.

"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces. Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development.

Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.

At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.

After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.

Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


For more by Gatto please visit his website and review his presentation on 'The Makers of Modern Schooling' - http://johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm . Here is one of many videos on Gatto - http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=26DvPQ7EIQ4 .

As Gatto says, one of the most important objectives of modern schooling is to turn humans into consumers - http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134. Apparently this has been very successful - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27955316 .

Regarding lesson six - being watched - take a look at this - http://www.kidsvision.com/index.phtml .

Let me share a few (of many) personal experiences with the school system ....

I have two children. My son is the oldest and we initially enrolled him in kindergarten in a public school when he was five. About a month into the school year he came home with a notice from the school listing the winners of the 'Student of the Month' award from each class for 'neatness and organization'.

My wife and I were surprised with this information since we had no preknowledge of this award and were concerned that such a process was taking place at the school. We went to speak to the principal and were advised by him that each month a category was selected and the students, unknown to them, were evaluated on their performance in that category. At the end of the month an assembly of the whole school took place and one student of the month per class was named who was called up on a stage to receive an award.

We told him that this was a competition and that we had not sent our five year old to school to compete but to learn. We advised him that we felt that competition in the classroom, particularly at such an early age, was counterproductive and unnecessary and that we were not in favor of this program.

He advised us that the school was following a plan described in a particular book on education (the name of which I now forget) and offered us the book to read so as to better understand why the school had a student of the month award. We read it and, to our delight, discovered that the author of the book clearly stated that he considered competition among students, particularly younger students, to be counterproductive and indicated that it should never be part of a school program.

We pointed this out to the principal and his reluctant response was that he would have the 'Committee on Self-Esteem' look into the matter. They did and some weeks later the chairman of this committee, the vice-principal, called me and advised me that they had come up with a solution to the problem.

Their solution was that henceforth, at the beginning of each month, all of the students would be advised of what the category was for the student of the month award for that month and at the assembly at the end of the month, rather than just one student per class, perhaps two or three students would be selected in each class for the award.

I advised him that he had just made things worse. By telling the students at the beginning of the month what the category was he was now having them determinedly chase the carrot. And by now having more than one student win, the other students would potentially consider themselves to be even greater failures than before.

I asked him why the 'Committee on Self-esteem' insisted on having this competition in the school. He replied that it was not a competition. I responded by asking him what else one would call a process whereby twenty or thirty children in each class are told at the beginning of the month that they would be evaluated in a certain category and at the end of the month some of them would publicly win an award for that category. He angrily advised me that the conversation was over, and hung up the telephone.

I realized that if this man was comfortable hanging up the phone on me, that I was not comfortable having my son in an institution in which that individual had power over him, and we immediately removed him from the school and never returned to the public school system afterwards.

When my wife went to the school to pick up our son's things, the principal approached her and told her, "The problem here is that you people want to run everything your way and that's not going to happen." She replied, "No, the problem here is that your 'Committee on Self-esteem' is comprised of people who don't have any and have no idea how to create it."

A few years later, at a private school (one of many that we worked our way through), a Montessori school that wasn't too bad as schools go, my wife attended a teacher-parent interview with one of our son's teachers. The teacher told my wife that overall our son was doing well in her class but that she had some trouble with him in that he would sometimes challenge her (in terms of questioning her rather than in terms of obnoxious behavior).

My wife informed the teacher that she was very happy to hear that. The teacher was surprised and said, "But some day he is going to have a boss and he is going to have to do what the boss says." My wife replied, "We are not raising our children to become employees but to work for themselves. So if that is the reason for your concern, you can stop worrying." The teacher then meekly replied that if such was the case that there should be no problem with him continuing his pattern of conduct.

When we moved to the USA, we enrolled our children in another type of private school. After a while we became increasingly frustrated there. There were a number of factors that led to our concern but probably the most glaring that suggested that something was wrong was that our son, who absolutely loves music and could by then play three instruments, got a very poor grade in his music class. When we asked him about it he told us that he hated the school and particularly disliked his musical experience there.

So when our son was eleven and our daughter was eight, we decided to take them out of school and from then on they were homeschooled. They are both now highly intelligent critical thinkers, in large part because of being removed from these centers of indoctrination and conformity.

I now wish that we had made the decision to homeschool our children from the outset. I recommend this option for anyone that can possibly do it.

Our son, by the way, has become a self-employed musician/producer.

I invite your comments and accounts of your experiences relevant to this very important issue.

Domestication of the Human Animal

I had the great pleasure of attending the Exuberant Animal Summit near Seattle, Washington, this past weekend.

It was organized by one of my favorite authors, Frank Forencich ('Exuberant Animal', 'Play as if Your Life Depends on It', www.exuberantanimal.com ), and addressed the theme 'Change Your Body - Change the World'.

It was a stimulating experience involving a collection of experts in transformative activities.

I had the privilege to give a presentation entitled 'Domestication of the Human Animal'.

Here is its text as an encapsulation of what my other writings address....



DOMESTICATION OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL

In his wonderful essay, ‘The Damned Human Race’, Mark Twain wrote….

“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the results humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals: since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals….I find that we have descended and degenerated , from some far ancestor – some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance - insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – namable as the Human Being.”

He comments on humans from a physical perspective in this manner….

“Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market…. In a wild state – a natural state- the Higher Animals have a few diseases; diseases of little consequence; the main one is old age. But man starts in as a child and lives on diseases till the end, as a regular diet.”

Twain goes on to address humans also from a behavioral point of view, stating the following…

“there is this difference between man and the higher animals: he is avaricious and miserly, they are not…among the animals man is the only one that harbors insults and injuries, broods over them, waits till a chance offers, then takes revenge. The passion of revenge is unknown to the higher animals…Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity – these are strictly confined to man; he invented them…Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it…One is obliged to concede that in true loftiness of character, Man cannot claim to approach even the meanest of the Higher animals.”

Clearly Mr. Clemens was not enamored with the species that he found himself to be a member of. While there may be some room for debate about some of what he wrote in this regard, I am in agreement with his opinion that modern humans are generally a sad lot in terms of the state of both their bodies and their conduct.

That the theme of this conference is ‘Change your body, change the world’ would imply that the other attendees here share the idea that change is needed both for our bodies and for the world upon which we humans have had a phenomenal impact.

Since Twain is so critical of humans, the obvious question is why are we in such a state?

Is this our inevitable fate? Must we be this pathetic and despicable species, to the point where from the perspective of life on the planet in general it can be reasonably argued that the best thing that could happen would be for us to simply disappear? Must we be so diseased that even with the full availability of the wonders of modern medical technology we seem to be steadily becoming unhealthier than ever before?

And if all of this is not inevitable, what can we do about it?

Twain himself points out that the rest of the animals, those the he refers to as being “in a wild state – a natural state” are superior to us in body and behavior. However, he also makes it clear that our species has evolved from such species, but for some reason we are smitten with this horrible malaise.

If such is the case, is Twain correct that this has just been a downward spiral since our common original ancestor’s appearance on earth 4 billion years ago? An examination of the data would suggest otherwise.

By studying life’s history we can see that each organism’s most fundamental drive is to move its genes forward in time. Those that exist today are those whose ancestors have been successful in doing so at least once in each generation 100 percent of the time for 4 billion years.

Most of life’s lineages have not done this consistently and so no longer roam the planet. Therefore, those that did have been incredibly successful with respect to satisfying the laws of natural selection that govern life’s evolution.

If we are here to address the topic of changing the body, the myriad of living things on this planet are testimony enough that life is very adept at changing, adapting and flourishing in the huge array of environments that have existed over all of this time.

An essential part of this process of bodily transformation involves the genetic changes that can occur from one generation to the next due to errors in gene replication, genetic mutations, and the mixing of genes from different lineages through sexual reproduction.

According to the rules of natural selection, each generation produces an abundance of offspring and those that are most successful at functioning within the environment at hand survive to pass their genes forward to a new generation while a large number of the offspring do not survive to reproduce.

So, when Twain comments about the superior level of health and function of what he terms the “higher animals”, the wild animals, what he didn’t know or simply ignored was the fact that with each generation the majority of their young die through illness, starvation, or by being killed and only those who survive this period of high attrition remain on life’s stage, and are, by definition, truly exceptional.

Regarding behavior, humans are a species of chimpanzee, and if we look at the other two members of this group, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo chimpanzee, we will also discover that behavior is very dependent upon environment – as is the case with all animals when studied carefully. The chimpanzee story, however, proves to be particularly interesting and important for modern human chimps to analyze and understand.

Bonobo chimpanzees evolved in a resource rich environment and developed a matriarchal culture that is relatively very peaceful and very pleasure oriented to the degree that they have been termed the sexiest species of all and, most notably, use sex as their primary conflict resolution technique.

Common chimps evolved in an environment that has fewer resources and as an expression of that fact developed a patriarchal culture and one that is significantly more violent.

When bonobos encounter another tribe they have sex with the members of the other tribe in order to diffuse tension. When common chimpanzees encounter another tribe they will fight and have been observed to engage in war and even pursue a form of genocide.

Different environments generate different behaviors.

Hominids separated from their primate cousins between 5 and 8 million years ago. ‘Modern’ humans appeared on the planet 100 to 200 thousand years ago, and by about 40 thousand years ago we developed the basic body form that we have today.

By 40 thousand years ago our species had already begun its migration from its homeland in Africa and numbered about 2 million in total.

Over the next 30 thousand years there were some changes in our lifestyles as we adapted to the different environments that we dispersed to. However, it is reasonable to generalize to some degree who these ancestors of ours were.

And they were definitely not what Twain saw and those we see within today’s human population that is 3,000 times greater.

Our Paleolithic relatives were in their own way as remarkable as the other wild animals that they shared the planet with at that time, governed by the same tough rules of natural selection.

Those who survived childhood would commonly live into their sixties; apart from those who died from accident or violence. They were in excellent physical condition just living their lives, without deliberately trying to be fit. The idea of exercise was completely foreign to them.

Their remains indicate that they were generally free of the chronic illnesses that are the common lot of our time. They were very well nourished to a degree that only the most recent and most affluent modern populations have matched over the last 10 thousand years.

They spent about four hours daily doing what was necessary in order to satisfy their needs. The rest of the time they rested or entertained themselves.

They lived in small tribal communities of thirty or so individuals that were highly genetically connected and were semi-nomadic. There was hierarchy within the tribes but the power structure was relatively egalitarian both among individuals and between the sexes. Decisions were arrived at by consensus. It was implicit that each person had to contribute to the community in order to share in its benefits. The lone human or nuclear family did not exist. These were very social animals.

Women tended to have a child about every four years and they breast fed until the next came along. If a child was born when its mother did not have the resources to support it, infanticide was often the solution. Children were given a great degree of attention, were not subjected to rigid discipline or abuse, and spent the majority of their youth without significant responsibilities.

Violence between tribes was common but the phenomenon of the soldier that was sent off to fight another man’s battles did not exist. As a result, when there was fighting, those who were involved engaged only when they believed that they had a very high probability of surviving the encounter.

Over time, with the development of the use of fire and rudimentary tools there was some degree of manipulation of the environment but for the most part, like the rest of the living organisms, over the millennia they had learned how to successfully adapt to it and benefit from what it had to offer.

They were highly intelligent in that they knew how to effectively survive in a collection of different environments, without any infrastructure or safety net to provide them with cradle to grave security. They lived very much in the moment and by necessity were extremely reality oriented.

They had few possessions and thus negligible material wealth. However, in terms of meeting their true physical, social, and emotional needs they were extremely affluent.

These were wild humans and I am confident that if Mark Twain had known them he would have been quite impressed –with both their physical prowess and also the quality of their characters.

And so, until about ten thousand years ago all of our ancestors lived in this general manner.

The transformation from this reality to our present situation has, of course, been the story of civilization. As we all know, due to the advent of agriculture about ten thousand years ago, humans gradually transformed from hunter-gatherers to farmers and eventually became mainly city dwellers, particularly over the last two hundred years or so. Agricultural reality led to the development of towns, then cities, and then states, and eventually the empires of the last couple of millennia.

The word civilization literally means ‘city-fication’, i.e the creation of towns and cities. These are territories taken over to form concentrated human communities and they are designed very specifically in order to meet human wishes and needs. One would imagine that if cats or giraffes could do the same, their cities would look quite different than those that our species constructs.

Not only are these cities designed for humans but they also operate according to humanly created rules and regulations, which vary somewhat from one community to the next. A member of a given community may accept the rules of that community unquestioningly; however another community may have a completely different and conflicting set of rules, also accepted by its members. Furthermore, the rules of these communities may have little if anything to do with what one might call natural law, meaning the laws that life itself appears to operate by outside of human civilized control.

As well, it is overwhelmingly obvious that while we once were a very physical species that had to walk to go anywhere and had to engage in physical activity with the natural world on a continuous basis, we have become a collection of animals that in most cases are minimally physically active or involved in interaction with our non-human-created environments.

In addition, since we now generally live in highly populated areas compared to our ancestors and since this increased population density brings us together in ways that our ancestors never had to deal with, we experience what is called stress in manners that one could never have imagined ten thousand years ago. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have been completely unable to relate to the experience of Los Angeles rush hour traffic that millions now take for granted day in and out.

There are many other components of modern urban life and even modern suburban or rural life that have required humans, who evolved over millions of years to function in small tribes on the savannahs of Africa, to make dramatic adjustments over a relatively very short period of time that have been very difficult, disruptive, and oftentimes unhealthy in order to fit into this artificial super-populated civilized world that our species has created for itself.

So, when we note the poor state of health and the apparent moral decay of humans that we observe all around us when considered from the perspective of who we were prior to civilization, our present predicament is commonly blamed simply on Stone Age organisms being forced to exist in an artificial high tech crowded world. And, no doubt, there is some truth to that argument.

However, this relatively benign explanation ignores the ugly reality both of the true nature of civilization and also of its terrible destructiveness.

I have been invited here to present the topic of the domestication of the human animal.

The word domesticate has several meanings.

The benign explanation that I have just alluded to regarding the impact of civilization on the individual would fall into the category of domestication meaning ‘to accustom to household life or affairs’, along the lines of just smoothing out the rough edges of someone or perhaps teaching a country bumpkin how to eat in a nice restaurant – more or less a refining process, learning to enjoy the ‘better things in life’.

But there is another fundamentally different definition of the word domestication. Civilization is at is core based upon the domestication of plants and animals. This type of domestication involves taking wild organisms and taming them so as to make them useful to human beings. Furthermore, a common objective and result of domestication is that the domesticated organism eventually loses its ability to live in the wild, making it dependent on domesticated reality for its ongoing survival.

When humans domesticate animals there are two basic steps to that process. First of all the animal must be captured, its freedom is taken away, so as to make it consistently available to its owner.

The second step of domestication involves breaking the animal’s wild spirit so that it will obey its human master.

These two crucial steps inevitably involve violence and coercion. Wild animals do not just voluntarily turn control of their lives over to humans. Typically there is a vigorous struggle until the domesticated creature finally submits on an ongoing basis.

The process of domestication is often very challenging for the domesticator and some animals either cannot be domesticated or are not worth the trouble of domesticating.

Jared Diamond, the author of the excellent books ‘The Third Chimpanzee’, ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’, and ‘Collapse’ stated that an animal species must have six characteristics in order to be considered for domestication, as follows…

(1) Flexible diet – the animals must be able to live off a variety of foods, particularly those lower on the food pyramid from an energy perspective (i.e. more grain products and less meat) – making them cheaper to keep in captivity;

(2) Reasonably fast growth rate – so as to make the animal usable as soon as possible and for as long as possible;

(3) Pleasant disposition – so as to be less dangerous and easier to control;

(4) Able to be bred in captivity – this is difficult to accomplish for many animals but is extremely important, both to avoid having to repeatedly capture new wild animals and also to pursue a process known as artificial selection.

Artificial selection is a crucial aspect of the ongoing domestication process. The domesticated organisms that we see today have generally been significantly transformed from their wild state due to artificial selection in the following manner.

Those already domesticated animals that the domesticator considers to possess undesirable characteristics are eliminated and not permitted to reproduce while those who have desirable characteristics are kept and interbred in order to bring these tendencies out to as great a degree as possible – often to an extent that is contrary to the species’ natural tendencies and best interests.

For example, domesticated turkeys have been artificially selected to have huge breasts to make them provide more meat on the Thanksgiving platter, to such an extent that they became unable to fly, thus rendering them easy prey to predators if they were to attempt to survive outside of a controlled domesticated environment.

Further to this theme – in the 1950s a Russian scientist, Dimitri Belyaev, studied artificial selection in silver foxes. By artificially selecting for friendliness to humans, within just a few generations he was able to transform a species that was initially cautious, fierce, and hostile towards humans to one that would seek humans’ attention and lick their hands submissively.

He also noted that along with the behavioral changes there was a physical transformation with a softening of features so that the foxes began to take on the form of immature, juvenile foxes. This infantilization of behavior and physical form has been repeatedly observed in artificial selection and is termed neoteny.

Therefore, in terns of Diamond’s characteristic of having a pleasant disposition, through artificial selection, the neotenization of a species can bring this out to an extreme extent.
Animal husbandry has been an area of keen interest during civilization’s ten thousand year history and techniques to alter species have been developed to a very high degree. With modern genetic modification research, unimaginable transformations are made possible.

What is also very interesting, however, is that when a domesticated organism returns to a wild environment, assuming that it manages to survive there, typically within just a few generations it reverts to its feral form, both in terms of appearance and behavior, once freed of the domesticators’ control.

(5) Unlikely to panic – therefore less prone to attempt to flee when startled. Some, like sheep, that tend to startle also have a flocking instinct that enables them to be herded together when pressed – a characteristic that can be used to great advantage in order to get a large group to move in the direction desired by the domesticator;

(6) Modifiable social hierarchy – social animals that recognize a hierarchy of dominance can be raised to recognize a human as a pack leader. For example, domesticated dogs, the descendents of wolves, consider their human master to be their alpha. Humans discovered they could not domesticate alpha wolves but were able to domesticate wolf cubs or lower status wolves.

In analyzing these six characteristics, the most important thing to remember is that the whole nature of the dynamic between domesticator and domesticated is that the domesticator intends to use the domesticated animal - for work, food, clothing, or amusement.

To the domesticator, the domesticated animal is an object and the domesticator’s overriding goal with the domesticated animal is to extract as much as possible out of it. The domesticator is never interested in the domesticated animal’s true best interests. If that were so it would inevitably do everything possible to free it from its state of captivity as quickly as possible.

Of all the different animals that exist on earth, humans have domesticated relatively few. Obviously the animal should offer something that the domesticator wants, otherwise why bother investing the time and energy in the process? In addition, it must fulfill all or most of Diamond’s six characteristics in order to make the investment worthwhile.

There have been a number of very important domesticated animal species but, by far, the most important domesticated animal species throughout the history of civilization has been the human species, a species that possesses virtually all of Diamond’s characteristics.

Over the last ten thousand years, the majority of human animals have been the domesticated property of a very small group of other human animals, those who controlled and effectively owned these civilized societies. They used their domesticated human animals – their slaves, serfs, peasants, subjects, workers etc. - to enable them to achieve their major objectives – obtaining more wealth, more power, and more status.

I am confident that everyone here this evening is the descendent of domesticated human animals and you are all to some, likely very great degree, domesticated yourselves.

So there is no confusion, what I mean by this is that you are not the true owners of your own lives.

If you were to trace your ancestors back far enough you would eventually find that at some point within the last ten thousand years they were wild humans. However, now moving back towards the present at some real point in time an ancestor of yours crossed over to the other side and in one way or another and for some reason or another lost its freedom to a domesticator and then its wild human animal spirit was broken and its life became fundamentally directed to doing what its master wanted it to do rather than being free and living its life for itself.

Once that initial ancestor’s freedom was stolen and its wild human animal spirit was broken, it became consistently easier to dominate those who followed.

One of my favorite articles on this topic, one that I would encourage everyone to read, was written in the 1550’s by a young Frenchman, Etienne de La Boetie and is entitled, ‘The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude’. In it he states…

“It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born….
Let us therefore admit that all those things to which he is trained and accustomed seem natural to man and that only that is truly native to him which he receives with his primitive, untrained individuality. Thus custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.”

All of you, all of us, have been born under the yoke that de La Boetie refers to here and to this day in a multitude of ways continue to carry it.

As he went on to say…

“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows---to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces?”

And so it has been for the last 10 thousand years, to this day, the real history of civilization, the history of the domestication of the human animal.

Very well, what does this have to do with the theme of this conference?

Everything!

It is precisely for this reason, the domestication and subjugation of the human animal that there is a desperate need for human animals to change their bodies so as to change the world.

Wild animals, the creatures that were our ancestors for four billion years until just ten thousand years ago spent their lives fulfilling their internal genetic programs. These programs which evolved over all of that time contained the vital, in the truest sense of the word, information that dictated who one was and what one would and should do in order to optimally live and enhance one’s likelihood of moving one’s genetic information forward into the future.

The remarkable levels of vitality and health that Mark Twain commented on regarding the wild animals were the direct product of those organisms instinctively fulfilling their genetic programs, generation after generation. Each of our lineages of ancestors did exactly that until we were domesticated at some point during the last 10 thousand years.

It is my observation and understanding that the key to vitality and well-being is self-actualization, the fulfillment of one’s own genetic internal agenda.

Once we were domesticated, rather than instinctively pursuing the fulfillment of our internal genetic programs, we dedicated our lives to obeying our masters and doing what we were told, as it turns out, in order to enable them to have more wealth, power and status.

In so doing, we deviated off of the healthy path that our genetic program was indicating that we should follow and instead headed off in another direction, often diametrically opposed to that healthy path.

Once an organism deviates off its internal healthy path that leads towards self-actualization it stops being its true self and becomes a distorted and blocked version of itself and inevitably becomes diseased. The word disease literally means deviation off of a healthy path.

The central reality of civilized humans is that they are the domesticated property of the owners of civilization and are being used to fulfill the owners’ agendas and in that process are betraying their own internal agendas and thus making themselves sick.

Unless they stop their self-betrayal and redirect their lives to fulfilling their self-actualization, true well-being is impossible and any efforts in that regard are essentially futile.

What compounds this catastrophe is that the owners of civilization are typically and perhaps inevitably very pathological individuals themselves.

An inherent and extremely important facet of civilization has been an obsession with control, particularly control of the environment rather than an attitude of adapting to it and living within the parameters of natural law.

Those precivilization humans that were basically content and were successfully living within natural environments did not have this obsession; however those living within more hostile environments perceived the world as something that needed to be dominated and responded to it with aggression and violence, much as the common chimps did.

Within a hostile culture of aggression and violence, those who were the most aggressive and violent, and typically they were so due to having experienced and survived a greater degree of dehumanizing trauma themselves, were the most likely to do what was horrifically necessary to climb to the top of the pyramid of power.

Ultimately the more vicious tribes overran the less aggressive ones and their increasingly pathological leaders became the leaders of these civilized societies.

Thus the domesticated humans in these societies were expected to follow the agendas of domination of these regimes, agendas that were the expressions of the post-traumatic stress disorders of very unhealthy people.

Those who did not submit were artificially selected out of these societies and the harsh methods used against them became examples to the others of what was in store for them too if they disobeyed.

Therefore, those human animals that were most loyal to their internal agendas were weeded out of the domesticated human species and those that remained became the neotenized living dead that now obediently inhabit our planet, understanding at a very core level that the one thing that one must never become is oneself because that is the most dangerous course of all within civilized society.

We who inhabit the ‘first world’ are also the most civilized/domesticated members of our species.

Those of us who have become ‘successful’ within these societies, often in part at least due to surviving 15 to 20 years or more in the centers of indoctrination called educational institutions, are products of the most rigorous degrees of the artificial selection process, and fulfill our designated chores to keep the system operative, to some degree at least by enforcing the domesticators’ rules upon the lower status domesticated human animals.

For example, I am a medical doctor and my real task is to keep the domesticated humans functioning and thus productive and, when necessary, to sedate them when they inevitably start expressing their distress. Helping them become healthy has nothing to do with civilized medical care.

The relative order and lack of overt violence on the streets of these countries may at first glance appear to suggest a greater level of happiness and freedom within these societies but more likely is simply the conduct of individuals who have cycled through more generations of the process of domestication and are thus more neotenized and distanced from their wild selves, creatures who would not be as accepting of the ever increasing violations of their psedoautonomy.

Like the silver foxes, or like domesticated dogs, we ingratiate ourselves to our masters and lick their feet, so long as we receive civilization’s many diversions. Meanwhile, the masters confidently recognize that we are now so dependent upon domesticated reality that we a neither want out nor could we survive outside of it, at least not in our present form.

The damage caused by this enslavement and the agenda of domination has been astronomical.

In addition to the dysfunction caused by the transposition of a Stone Age animal into a high tech environment and the diversion off one’s genetic agenda in order to adhere to the domesticators’ pathological agenda of domination, a tremendously important factor is the harm caused by the violence inflicted upon individuals due to the process of domestication itself.

Civilized humanity is suffering from a collective, ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder. We have been exposed to situations and abuses in one form or another that exceed our ability to tolerate. Our systems are overwhelmed due to the physical and psychic pain inflicted and we are dehumanized, desensitized, and scarred as a result.

After the initial wild human animal of a bloodline is domesticated, its offspring become relatively easier to domesticate for two main reasons.

First of all, the subsequent generations enter the world in captivity and thus never know freedom and, as a function of that, are adjusting to caged reality from the beginning of their lives.

As well, the parents of these offspring have already had their wild spirits broken and they now assume the domesticators’ role, deliberately or unknowingly breaking their own children’s wild spirits in order to make them fit into the system.

A blatant societal example in this regard is the biblical story of Abraham, a man who was willing to kill his son in order to obey god’s will. His obedience was rewarded by god with the promise that his descendents would be god’s chosen people.

The three major religions of western civilization - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (a word that literally means submission) - all trace themselves back to this seminal story and revere Abraham for his obedience to god as a model of conduct.

The explicit message is that willingness to literally sacrifice the lives of your children, i.e. to violate the most fundamental natural law of all, is demanded by the ruling moral belief systems of western civilization.

It should be hardly surprising that generation after generation of civilized parents of these cultures have betrayed their children, and in so doing betrayed themselves, as they in one manner or another have placed their children on the sacrificial altar of civilization.

The owners of civilization, experts in animal husbandry that they are, also recognize the especially important role that mothers play in the development of their children. They appreciate that the more docile and broken down the mother is, the easier it will be to control her children.

A child’s first reality, its first sense of the universe, is within its mother. If that woman is deeply imprisoned, the child will have a sense of entrapment as the fundamental nature of reality and will, by the time of its birth, be operating with that concept, one that will presumably be reinforced as the child grows to encounter the outside world.

Therefore, in order to enhance the domestication process, it is useful to subjugate women as much as possible, and as part of that, ideally take away all control of the aspect of life that they are most naturally designed to be in control of – reproduction.

Please examine the reproductive reality of the other female domesticated animals and consider their essentially non-existent degree of control of this function as an expression of the domesticators’ objective to extract more and more from each unit of female property that they own. The agenda is the same for the domesticated female human animal.

Furthermore, due to the combination of civilization’s disempowerment of women and the consistent parental betrayal of their children, it is hardly surprising that the new generations of domesticated human animals perceive the world that they are entering to be hostile to them, and thus react accordingly, with a combination of fear and anger.

All of this just once more reinforces the domesticators’ agenda that the world is hostile and must be dominated, creating yet another generation that will be receptive to a mindset based on violence and aggression, another generation that is fundamentally alienated from the natural world and, as part of that, unwilling to affirm its natural animality and healthy genetic program, now buried under many layers of pain and confusion.

Instead of the fit, proud, vital human animals that populated the planet just ten thousand years ago, we have become sick, sad, and tormented shells of our former selves.

As a practicing medical doctor with an extensive background in both behavioral and ‘physical’ medicine, I am continuously impressed with the degree of pathology residing within the mind-body systems of virtually every member of civilized human society.

Due to my experience in analytical hypnotherapy, which has allowed me to do some exploration of the unconscious mind, I have come to realize that beneath the thin veneer of normalcy and calm that we commonly attempt to project to the world, the average domesticated human animal is a conflicted, suffering creature carrying around millennia of multigenerational pathology. If the stories were told, we would recognize just how blocked, bizarre, and unhealthy are the existences that the vast majority of humans are experiencing.

This pathology is expressed in every organ system of the body and, of course, in the form of unhealthy behavior.

It is my position that most of us have the potential to be extremely healthy and vital creatures but are not so due to the diverted and blocked expression of our self-actualizing internal genetic programs and the extreme pain that we have been carrying forward due to the collective post-traumatic stress disorder inflicted by the regime of civilization.

Of course, there are those who have genetic disorders which render them less able in varying degrees to enjoy a state of well-being. But these are the minority and, except for the extreme cases in this category, even these people have the potential to enjoy a vastly superior quality of life experience than they presently have.

It bears stating as well, that the artificial world created through civilization has enabled large numbers of human animals to survive with behaviors and physical limitations that a non-civilized environment would rapidly naturally select out. That reality is coming soon I suspect since the laws of natural selection cannot be kept at bay indefinitely.

Not only does the pathology created due to human domestication affect every organ system, it is my position that it is typically the key factor is causing or worsening virtually every disease that humans suffer from.

Therefore, the most important action that any domesticated human animal can take is to untame itself and in the ongoing transformational process that would follow, it will automatically move steadily towards a greater and greater degree of vitality and well being.

There are many components to this self-untaming process.

One that I have dedicated a great deal of time and energy to is a method that I developed and teach in order to enable people to update our out of date learned behavioral responses that prevent us from optimally utilizing our potential to deal with reality.

In the process of applying this method we are able to free ourselves from our mutigenerational pain and suffering that weighs us down and blocks us. I have named this method Rational-Emotional Integrative Updating because it is a means to update and integrate our rational and emotional systems. I explain this method in detail in my book, ‘Liberating the Caged Human Animal’, which can be found on my website
( untamedlife.com ).

However, regardless of whatever techniques or means one might use in order to pursue self-actualization and self-untaming, what I have learned is that the most important factor in moving towards well being is a genuine, ongoing commitment towards becoming the wild human animal that you are genetically intended to be.

If that commitment is there, and if it is there it is the result of a decision that is made and repeatedly reaffirmed, you will seek out ways available to you that work best for you to remove the internal and external obstacles that block your ongoing journey to becoming yourself.

There is no more challenging path to take, but it is really the only one worth taking.

Most will not do this, but some just might.

As Etienne de La Boetie stated 450 years ago….

“There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.”

Zeitgeist Videos

A fellow from New Zealand let me know about a couple of videos addressing issues very relevant to themes that I commonly discuss.

They are entitled 'Zeitgeist, The Movie' and 'Zeitgeist: Addendum'. Zeitgeist is a German word that means - the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.

The two films, each about two hours long, can be found at http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com .

I'll give you a chance to watch them and will be following up soon with my comments about them.

The Agronomist - Jean Dominique

Haiti was the first post-colonial black-led independent nation in the world, as well as being the only nation whose independence was gained (in 1804) as part of a successful slave rebellion.

However, since then Haiti has been the site of almost never-ending tumult, particularly due to interventions by the French (to whom Haiti was forced to pay reparations until well into the 20th century) and the USA, who actually occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934, and who has continued to significantly control the political reality of the country, typically by supporting one despot after another.

Many Haitians believe that there has been a deliberate agenda to make an example of this small country in order to punish it for its remarkably early revolt against both slavery and colonialism.

As a result, Haiti has become, along with Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, one of the most terrible places in the world to live in at this time.

Despite this fact and a long history of severe repression, there remains in Haiti an indominatable spirit and a long lineage of individuals relentlessly striving for freedom.

One of the most notable of these people was Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti's first independent radio station, Radio-Inter, despite operating within the environment of an extreme police state. Using this vehicle, Dominique fought for human rights, particularly for the downtrodden peasants, for many years until his murder at age 69 in 2000 due to his outspoken views promoting freedom and against corruption.

Jonathan Demme, who directed 'Silence of the Lambs' and 'Philadelphia' among many other films, made an acclaimed documentary about Dominque in 2003 entitled 'The Agronomist' (Dominique was initially an agronomist and became particularly radicalized after being jailed for trying to develop agricultural programs to empower the Haitian peasants).

This film gives a very informative overview of the history of repression in Haiti as well as a close personal look at this very courageous and heroic figure who just wouldn't be quiet, despite repeated threats against him.

For more about Jean Domique and his assassination please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dominique , http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HP/4_5_0.html , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_N-YHUO1A , and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fud9lPiisL4 (starting at about the 35th minute).

It is important, in reviewing Dominique's struggles and the horrors experienced by the Haitian people, to appreciate the instrumental role that the USA has played for a very long time in keeping its foot on the throats of those oppressed in Haiti.

Video - Peter Hercules - Phoenix

I came upon the video recording of a talk I gave in Phoenix, Arizona to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix ( http://hsgp.org/index.php3 ) in the spring of 2002, while I was living in Arizona.

It's about eighty minutes long and in it I describe my background and cover my philosophical perspectives relating to human domestication and untaming.

I decided to post it on Youtube under the title 'Dr. Peter Hercules - Liberating the Caged Human Animal' where it can be seen (in eight segments) at http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=liberating+the+caged+human+animal&search_type=&aq=f .

'Honor Killing' and Multi-Orgasmic Males

I came upon an article the other day about an incident of 'honor killing' in Pakistan.

Five women, three of whom were teenagers, were abducted at gunpoint, loaded into a vehicle, driven to a remote field, beaten up, shot, and then dumped into a ditch and buried while still alive. Their 'crime' was that they wanted to choose their own husbands (for the article please see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26469519 ).

Honor killing has a long history and apparently is on the rise according to the United Nations Population Fund...

"Throughout the world, perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families, many of them for the "dishonour" of having been raped, often as not by a member of their own extended family.

Many forms of communally sanctioned violence against women, such as "honour" killings, are associated with the community's or the family's demand for sexual chastity and virginity.

Perpetrators of such wanton acts often receive light sentences or are excused by the courts entirely because defence of the family's honour is treated as a mitigating circumstance.

"Honour" killings are on the rise worldwide, according to Asma Jahangir, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. Ms. Jahangir is working closely with United Nations special investigators on violence against women and on the independence of judges and lawyers to address the issue.

"The perpetrators of these crimes are mostly male family members of the murdered women, who go unpunished or receive reduced sentences on the justification of having murdered to defend their misconceived notions of 'family honour,'" Jahangir wrote in her 2000 annual report to the Commission on Human Rights. Such killings have been reported in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda and the United Kingdom, according to the report.

On the order of clerics, an 18-year-old woman was flogged to death in Batsail, Bangladesh, for "immoral" behaviour, according to the report. In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter's severed head through the streets shouting, "I avenged my honour."

The report says that "honour" killings tend to be more prevalent in, but are not limited to, countries with a majority Muslim population. It adds, however, that Islamic leaders have condemned the practice and say it has no religious basis.
Kifaya, a Jordanian girl of 12, was intelligent and full of curiosity. But when she returned home one evening from a walk in the neighbourhood with some friends, she was confronted by her enraged father. Shouting that she had dishonoured the entire family, her father proceeded to beat Kifaya with sticks and iron chains until she was dead. He told police he killed his only daughter because she went for walks without his permission.

About the same time, Hanan, 34, was shot dead by her brother for the "crime" of marrying a Christian. Her brother left her body in the street and smoked a cigarette while he waited for the police to arrive. Every year between 25 and 50 women and girls are the victims of "honour" killings in Jordan."

(For more on the 2000 UN report on ending violence against women and girls please see http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2000/english/ch03.html#top ).

'Honor killings' represent just some of the murders of women committed to repress and control their sexuality. This is just the tip of the bloody iceberg of violence and abuse perpetrated against females in order to achieve this objective.

Female sexual repression is a theme that I have addressed on several occasions in the past (please see my article 'Liberating the Caged Female Human Animal's Sexuality' - http://www.untamedlife.com/articles/bonobo1.php , my newsletter entitled 'Human Intersexual Relationships' - http://www.untamedlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=311 , my newsletter entitled 'Orgasmic Birth, Monogamy, and Sexual Healing' - http://www.untamedlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1012 , and a previous blogpost on Ayaan Hirsi Ali - http://www.untamedlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1559 ).

While there is no excuse or justification for the millenia of violence and torture inflicted upon women by men in order to repress their sexuality, as with everything else, there is an explanation.

Simply put - when it comes to sexuality, men are woefully inadequate and insecure.

Male violence against women in order to control female sexuality is just an expression of male weakness and inferiority in this arena.

At some level men understand that females naturally have greater sexual needs and sexual potential in terms of ability to engage in sex more frequently, longer, and with more pleasure than males.

The clitoris has has a higher concentration of nerve fibers than any other part of the human body - twice as many as the penis. The sole role of the clitoris is to give sexual pleasure.

It is not at all uncommon for women to be multiorgasmic and to become increasingly sexual as they get older while men are generally just the opposite in both respects.

Civilized men are desperate to insure paternity, despite the biological fact that females have a natural need to be able to access the best genes and resources available to optimize the success of their offspring.

Women are built to have sex with multiple partners, to the degree that it is perfectly natural for them to have the sperm of more than one male within their body at the same time. This behavior is standardly seen in our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, but even better evidence of this is the phenomenon of sperm warfare in humans whereby a significant percentage of sperm have the sole role of blocking other sperm (presumably from other males) from successfully fertilizing the egg.

Reality is that women have a more powerful sexual drive and accompanying needs than men and they will seek out males that will best satisfy them, from every perspective - in terms of pleasure, genes, and additional resources.

Due to their greater individual physical strength (on average), males have chosen to address this reality by beating women into submission, both individually and through the structure of civilized society in a myriad of ways.

However, this violent male strategy does not change the fact of female sexuality. Beating down the natural female sexual drive is equivalent to beating down birds because they want to fly.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss sexual issues with two women in their 50's.

One had been married, virtually continuously, since she was 15 years old. Her second marriage had ended within the last couple of years and she now found herself on her own, having been abandoned by her husband.

Initially she was very upset with this turn of events but after a while realized that she, for the first time in her life, had the opportunity to focus on her own life and what she wanted in every respect.

She discovered a strong sexual drive within herself and became involved sexually with different men, including to her great satisfaction a man in his early 20's. Being freed from previous constraints she found herself invigorated sexually and in every other way.

The other woman had been raised in a very sexually repressive environment. She married immediately upon graduation from high school and is still with the same man.

She has a good relationship with him, including sexually, however, some time in her 40's she became aware of a steadily increasing sexual drive which she had not felt previously. She has begun to act on this drive with several men, again including a man in his early 20's (whose sexual energy she openly delights in), and feels no remorse apart from frustration with herself for not having done this earlier.

She unequivocally indicates that she is not dissatisfied with her husband, is not seeking romance or even a relationship, but simply wants to explore and develop sexually and is committed to increasing her pursuit of sexual pleasure.

For both of these women, it was clear that they had spent the majority of their lives repressing their sexuality but have finally empowered themselves and are now reveling in their opportunity to experience greater and more varied sexual pleasure. It was also obvious that both regret what they had missed out on for many years but are determined to make up for lost pleasure.

Furthermore, their sexual repression had been just one aspect of the overall subordination of themselves that they had experienced during the first part of their lives. Notably, that overall subordination had taken place specifically in order to supress their sexuality, as is typically the case for the majority of women.

The male strategy of violent repression of female sexuality, and womanhood overall as a function of that, is unwise.

Everyone loses. It is, in fact, a loser's strategy.

While, at a practical level, it will be largely incumbent upon women to stop the present war dedicated to female sexual repression, most importantly by unifying with their fellow women and together resisting male violence, men can do something about this as well.

First of all, rather than fighting nature, men can accept and even affirm it. Men have the opportunity to understand natural female sexuality and learn to be supportive of and synchronous with it.

By acknowledging the reality of female sexuality men can encourage female sexual awakening and thus gain the possibility of enjoying interaction with females as they self-actualize sexually rather than operating within a repressed and dysfunctional sexual dynamic.

Why sit in a tiny swimming pool when you can ride powerful ocean waves?

Of course part of that answer is that one stays in the pool because one can't swim.

This leads to the second way that men can work with rather than against female sexual empowerment. Men must sexually empower themselves.

As it turns out, men are generally very intimidated by sexually secure women, and usually quite rightfully so, because of their own sexual inadequacies.

It bears stating that even the most sexually accomplished male could not compete with his female counterpart. Physiologically woman are inherently sexually superior. To that end no matter how far a man develops himself sexually, he should not imagine that he will truly 'tame' or 'conquer' a woman in his sexual league. Hopefully, he will not even want to but will simply be satisfied with the opportunity to engage with her, enjoying the experience for what it is.

For the time being, however, a man who actually invests in his sexual and overall development and who affirms female sexuality and empowerment is such a rarity that he will stand out in the male crowd and thus will enhance his access to those females seeking their sexual and general self-actualization.

As well, unfortunately, at the present time women are such a subjugated lot that they may be well pleased to find just one man who affirms them in this manner and will be inclined to cherish the relationship more than they might if they were more empowered themselves. It would serve men well in such situations to encourage their partner's sexual and personal evolution nonetheless, in order to prevent the relationship from becoming a barrier to healthy growth.

Realistically, for men to empower themselves sexually they must begin by empowering themselves overall. Nothing is more attractive to a woman than a man who is his own man, comfortable in his own skin and truly operating at a high level. I recommend that a man start by doing whatever is necessary to accomplish this objective. My book 'Liberating the Caged Human Animal' (http://www.untamedlife.com/book/) presents my suggestion of how to move in that direction.

To be better able to interact successfully with a woman intent on developing her sexuality, it is also very important that a man empower himself sexually.

Although men may have had very active sexual lives, in many cases they are sexually very underdeveloped in terms of knowledge or skill.

Additionally, the typical male sexual response involves an exercise directed towards orgasm and ejaculation, often occurring within a time frame during which the female partner is not even beginning to really get warmed up in terms of her true sexual potential (even if she manages to experience an orgasm) and then he's done and falls off to sleep.

Generally speaking, once a man ejaculates his sexual drive diminishes at least for a while (less significantly so for males in their teens and early twenties, thus explaining part of their allure to older women - a woman in her forties typically matches an eighteen year old in terms of sexual stamina), thus either ending or at least significantly disrupting the optimal rising female sexual response.

It was in part for that reason that a very sexual non-lesbian woman that I met preferred to have sex with other women, with whom she generally sought and succeeded in having fifteen orgasms per coupling.

For many women, if sex with a man were a meal, it would be over most of the time before they even got to finish the appetizer.

Men who care about their partner's sexual satisfaction often try to delay ejaculation, typically by engaging in mental diversion techniques with varying degrees of success. Even if effective in accomplishing the intended goal, unfortunately the man ends up not being truly 'present' for the sexual interaction, depriving both himself and his partner of a more satisfying experience.

It is hardly surprising that many men end up having more pleasure engaging with pornography than with a real woman since with the former they are able to truly let themselves go without blocking their sexual response.

In a natural system all of this would not be a very important issue. Women would be having sex with males when they wanted to, presumably often with more than just one when ready for sex, and each male would engage sexually until he ejaculated and would feel satisfied until the opportunity presented again. One will assume that this would not be an uncommon occurrance and everyone would be having enough sex both from a reproductive as well as a pleasure point of view.

Thus, unlike our desexualized cultures (organized this way largely to increase one's focus on work and order - since sex does tend to diminish interest in both), sex would be a common part of life and thus sexual energy would be permeating the community on an ongoing basis with pleasurable results.

Most civilized societies have had little to offer in the area of sexuality.

Western culture has had a particularly unhealthy attitude toward sexuality and as a result males in this part of the world receive no meaningful instruction to enable them to become sexually empowered.

Some cultures in the Far East have had a more open attitude towards sex, typically within the wealthy classes, and spent considerable energy focusing on enhancing sexual pleasure. Generally this was done from a male perspective, often for males who had access to large numbers of women.

Nonetheless, in the process some attention was given to the issue of how to make the experience more fulfilling for the women involved. Presumably, they developed some appreciation that female enjoyment enhances the interaction.

Taoists in China, at least two thousand years ago, pursued the sexual arts in some depth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoist_sexual_practices).

A principle idea of theirs involved the 'essence of life' called 'Jing'. They believed that what contained the most Jing was semen and they thus recommended its preservation so as not to run out of it (and thus die).

Due to this perception of things, they developed an array of ways to prevent ejaculation during sex while still having (non-ejaculatory) orgasms. By these means, men are able to orgasm and maintain their sexual desire and erection and thus remain engaged sexually for prolonged periods of time.

As well, due to the phenomenon of non-ejaculatory orgasms, men are able to attain higher and higher levels of pleasure as their orgasms crescendo, thus further enhancing the sexual experience. Additionally, as part of this process, they learn to distribute the sexual energy that originates in the pelvis and spread that sensation throughout the whole body, ratcheting the whole process up to a still higher level.

Rather than disconnecting from the sexual experience, the techniques used to accomplish all of this involve being very aware and focused on what is happening so as to be better tuned into one's responses so as to work with and direct them accordingly.

The result of non-ejaculatory orgasmic sex for men is that the sexual energy generated during sexual activity continues to circulate long after the sex itself is over providing a level of energy much different than the tired feeling that typically occurs after ejaculatory sex.

Furthermore, due to the ongoing enjoyment that this brings, one is both sexualized and energized and thus interested in renewed sexual engagement. It is as if the body is generating energy repeatedly with each sexual act rather than depleting the energy stores.

As for ejaculation, the Taoists recommended doing so as infrequently as possible. While they understood the need for individualization, they had recommendations for ejaculatory frequency dependent upon one's age....

"A man at twenty can ejaculate once every four days.
A man at thirty can ejaculate once every eight days.
A man at forty can ejaculate once every ten days.
A man at fifty can ejaculate once every twenty days.
A man at sixty should no longer ejaculate."

An important aspect of this whole process is to decide not to make ejaculatory orgasm the objective but just the opposite, recognizing that in doing so, even just for oneself, the net pleasure gain is very significant.

A man pursuing this sexual empowerment process develops a positive sexual attitude, enjoys a great deal of sexual pleasure, and has the potential to be a much more satisfying (and satisfied) sexual partner.

By being more sexually confident, one's overall level of confidence is also enhanced.

By being able to engage sexually for a prolonged period of time and be present and focused during the process, one is able to connect to a far greater degree with one's sexual partner and help her get to an increasingly higher level of sexual enjoyment as well, enabling her to explore her own sexual potential much further.

A man who can relate sexually to a woman in this manner should have much greater chance of her coming back for more and feel less need to control her. Instead the interaction becomes more focused on each one discovering what level of pleasure can be reached, each wanting the other to take it higher - overall a liberating dynamic.

These men do not perceive female sexuality as something that needs to be feared and thus beaten to a pulp. Instead they are fascinated by it, delighting in it, and will do their part to enhance its full flowering.

Being more sexually fulfilled in general and knowing that they have the potential to engage in this highly enjoyable manner with women, these men are more attuned to female sexuality overall, and so they will be more open to women pursuing their own sexual agendas which, as previously discussed, are not identical to men's.

A person that is consistently well fed approaches a buffet taking what they need and enjoy but sees no need to hoard the food since they understand that they can always come back for more.

While I am not advocating Taoism as a belief system, I do believe that for a man living today, the skills that they developed to enable men to experience whole-body non-ejaculatory orgasms can be very useful and play an integral role in addressing the important problem of male sexual inadequacy and insecurity.

This ultimately enhances the possibility of women being allowed and even encouraged to become self-empowered generally and especially sexually. If that were to happen the world would become a very different and much healthier and freer place.

The book, 'The Multi-Orgasmic Man' by Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams Arava explains in a clear and practical manner the sexual techniques alluded to above (and more) developed by the Taoists, to enable men to become multi-orgasmic. It does not require one to embrace Taoist belief.

While these practices were likely unknown to precivilization humans, when used for the purposes described above, I consider them to be useful in helping the domesticated move forward on their journeys towards untaming.

I believe that every man and woman should be aware of these options so as to have the opportunity to use them to enhance their lives.

Each man should learn these skills so as to be able to experience and give the quality of sexual pleasure that such practices allow.

Each woman should become aware of what is possible so that they will not accept less from the men that they sexually engage with.

I also believe that this information should be presented to young people of both sexes as soon as they are ready to understand and deal with it so as to help them develop healthy pleasure-oriented sex-positive attitudes and skills.

If enough men became multiorgasmic and focused their energies on such activities for their own enjoyment while facilitating the great sexual pleasure that women desire and are built to receive, 'honor killings' and the sexual repression of women in general would finally be recognized as being the terrible and pathetic efforts of impotent males and a source of shame to all involved.