Human Beings are Givers, not Takers

Photo by Ilse Stokking on Unsplash

This week, something small, something insignificant, a knocking on the door, dropped me into a morass. And when the feelings are so much bigger than the circumstance, it’s time to sit still and look into myself, welcome the teacher. Who is visiting?

Every person I’m close to is feeling it, this underground current. We know it’s bad; our world is in big, big trouble.

Softening the instinct to harden, I open the door. And when I see who’s there, I’m tempted to slam it in their faces. It’s my most demanding teachers, Helplessness and Despair, cocking one eyebrow and asking, And who is answering the door?

The barometric pressure drops. Something is coming. The astrologers say there’s an unusual sky next month. Big change afoot. The world can’t go on this way much longer, all of us pretending we’re okay while we know we’re not. When I read things like that, I fear a cataclysmic event is the only solution. Something that takes us back to small, interdependent communities tied to the land, the collapse of governments, perhaps. But what happens to people like me, in cities like Los Angeles, who have no clear water rights, or the legions of refugees and the poor who have no access to land? And my fear asks: Do we all just die?

All of us, the comfortable, the poor, and the billionaires, are facing uncertainty, that part of the story where we can no longer live the way we have and have no idea how to live any other way. We are in the homeless place, the empty place, the no-longer-this-and-not-yet-that place, standing on the edge of a new life. I fear this moment. I’m waiting for a disaster. Certainly, we deserve one.

“Come in,” I say and step aside with a nod and the sweep of my hand. The teachers enter, bringing with them a powerful emotion that overwhelms my whole house, my stillness, my silence, my self-inquiry, my nighttime dreams. It rises from deep below, huge like the leviathan, and swallows me whole. Who is experiencing this?

I drop into the helpless place where I see that things can’t stay the same, but I’m afraid to change. Now, I fear our vast patriarchal culture is dying - dare I say it? At last. May you be born in interesting times. For it has been a terrible culture for the Earth, for people, women especially, even the most privileged children suffer. Perhaps we can say: Goodbye to all that?

But at what cost?

I think about those underwater cities. There are over 2,600 sites of real cities and temples that were once densely populated and are now under the ocean. They were built by real people and were thriving once. It makes me think of Atlantis. So many cultures have those stories of the lost great city. Why wouldn’t we mythologize losses like those with deep longing like that?

We have allowed our wealthy class, our warlords and profiteers, to take and take and take. We have allowed them to set up systems that benefit only them while exploiting us, devastating the poor and the Earth we stand on. We have stood by as some Cassandras wag fingers, some of us wring our hands, others of us crowing about the stock market, inflated and deflated by dominance. Pass the ketchup. And I’m helpless. It’s almost impossible to remove yourself from the systems that pollute and oppress. Perhaps we deserve what’s coming; maybe we don’t. I don’t think that’s going to matter.

So, what’s our deepest fear as a culture? If we look at dystopian literature, we fear an overclass taking absolute power while we are stupidly unaware. We fear the world of The Matrix, our life-energy being farmed while we live in illusion. The perfect metaphor, the agents aren’t even human. Our overclass, while building their bunkers or trying to escape the Earth for Mars, doesn’t always seem human either.

Honestly, if you showed me proof they were an alien race of narcissistic sociopaths, incapable of human emotion, who push us toward extinction so they can be wealthy on a world that will die in the process - like a parasite sucking its host dry? I would believe it.

What kind of nihilistic suicide is that?

It’s the perfect image of our fear of death, the way we pretend that death can be held at bay if we work and work and work, as if nothing else matters. This fear of death is our ignor-ance. This is a culture that ignores suffering and death as though they aren’t real, to make a profit, and that’s the whole colonial enterprise in a nutshell. Ignore it.

Perhaps that’s the core, the heart, of my despair and helplessness.

We are finally coming to the natural limit of colonization - that worldview that used dominance over others, a megalomaniacal brutality that extracts profit from life - organic life, human life. Everything has a dollar value that our version of the East India Company is entitled to just because they discovered how to extract it, and have written the laws so we can’t stop them. It’s the view that human beings are the world’s takers when the truth is 180 degrees from this lie. We must turn completely around and change. Evolve.

When I went through The Change on a personal level, I had to face my deepest fear. Because I grew up in domestic violence, that fear was homelessness. My craving was safety. Now we must change on a collective level. What will it take for us to give up the lie and find we are already the truth? The answer causes my despair.

We have created elaborate mythologies to justify the overwhelming desire to take and take and take - certainly more than we give, because that’s how profits happen. You take more than you give.

But human beings are not the world’s takers; we are the world’s caregivers. Our dominance culture is a sickness, a mental illness born of the fear of death. And of course, the superspreaders are our most dormant.

What is Musk afraid of as he spends his billions to escape this decaying, collapsing planet? Death. What is Zuckerberg afraid of as he builds his 5000 square foot bunker under Kauai? For that matter, why are Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, world leaders like Vladimir Putin, and sports and entertainment stars building bunkers? They are afraid of death and intend to live even if the rest of us die.

They are afraid of us, too, the angry mob created by income inequality.

What is the White House afraid of as they build their bunker? That slow-walking parade of lies. Trump admits now that the building goes 6 floors down, contains a military hospital, research facilities, an impenetrable titanium shield which is entirely missile-proof, and a large military drone base. The Secret Service alone is asking for a billion. The final price tag, without any more additions, will be at least 1.6 billion, but there are likely demands they haven’t made yet. What are they afraid of?

A French-style revolution? That we’ll turn the triumphal arch into a guillotine?

It’s so interesting to me that their solution to income inequality is the massive undertaking of building bunkers, when it seems easier and less expensive to simply address the inequality, solve the climate crisis, and heal our relationships with the world’s people - and our own. Give and give and give.

But when our addiction, this need for dominance, is the thing we never question, the natural solution simply can’t even be seen - or believed. But say we captured ourselves a gazillionaire, someone who has amassed great wealth by doing great harm, and attached his 4 limbs to 4 horses and were about to slap some rumps, he’d scream: Take it. Take it. Take it all. It’s only money. I want you to have it. And as he looked at the sky in that moment of the just before...his head would clear. The scales would fall. His eyes would shine with the preciousness of it all, the fleetingness, the sheer beauty of this world. And he would want life.

So why not choose the you-can’t-take-it-with-you route and invest in solutions instead of bunkers? For that matter, why do we allow it when we’ve known for a long time? Extractive patriarchal capitalism has four outcomes: extreme wealth, extreme poverty, oppression, and climate degradation.

In fact, the whole enterprise is a house of cards, and when I sit with my friends, Helplessness and Despair, they tell me it will fail, and soon, too. What if we all have to admit Helplessness and Despair into our countries, our collective houses? What kind of event would that require?

Or, what if we all responded before the disaster: You can take it all? We want life?

Then, the teachers would give their gift. It’s always the same one: Presto! You are not who you think you are.

Then, there would be nothing we couldn’t do. We could revive the soil by farming differently. We could stop producing plastics. The technology already exists to replace it. We could mitigate the damage. The pandemic showed us how quickly the Earth heals once we stop. In fact, for every problem we have, there are already groups of people developing solutions. In a real kind of parallel universe, they have been working for decades. That includes even the tenacious political problems. We absolutely can do this.

We just have to shift from thinking of ourselves as takers, to realizing that we are givers, and embrace our impermanance. We have to stop thinking that money is love, or safety, or freedom - or anything other than the measure of what we have taken from the Earth, each other, and all the other species that live here.

Not all humans. Of course. There are plenty of people who give for a living. Some people spend their whole lives giving. There simply has to be more of them. It’s possible that all our industries could become focused on giving rather than taking. The winner of the status game could be the one who gives the most, because we are all going to die.

Those who refuse to listen to Helplessness and Despair will say that change is impossible. Can’t be done. Human nature just isn’t like that. But that all depends on what you mean when you say human nature.

Do you think of this brittle, hungry ghost thing we call our ego? Is that human nature? Or is that the result of the warping of human nature that began with patriarchal war, exploitation, and colonization? I’d say that the patriarchal ego is our mental illness, our insanity. Most of us were born into generations and generations of that worldview, but that doesn’t make it sane. It just makes it ubiquitous.

This orientation isn’t nature. It’s culture.

This week, Celeste Davis posted this about the culture of kindness,

When “Dr. Ron Dahl, was researching status he visited a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. The monks and scholars there told Dahl that the way boys earned prestige and respect in the monastery was by showing “kindness, compassion and empathy.” The young monks in their hunt for status tried to out do each other in those values, “each trying to one up each other’s kindness.”

In that profoundly male culture, kindness rather than dominance is an organizing principle. That’s just one example of a culture of kindness. There are many. For example, we could organize around caring for mothers and children in a matrifocal culture. They exist already. We could set up egalitarian systems where care is the norm. All the research shows that the more egalitarian the government, the better off and happier the people.

Helplessness and Despair, my twin teachers, tell me this shift is happening now. It’s massive. Global. Some of us have already reversed our field of gravity. Instead of pulling life toward us to be consumed, now, we are giving forth. We’ve realized that to feel love, we have to give it - we have to BE it. We have to stop thinking that money is anything other than a simple tool for making everyone’s life better.

So, my teachers tell me that whatever it takes, we are going to get to the point where we accept our mortality and let that change the way we live. Collectively, this time, we are going to have to face ourselves and admit we don’t know. We are helpless. Obviously, we’re not in control. All we have done is make a mess, hurt people, and create distress. It’s time to stop.

It’s a dangerous mythological system that claims that men were chosen by some male divinity to take dominion over every single thing. How self-serving. The world that myth built is collapsing all around us. The gift of Helplessness and Despair is joy. We can accept it sooner rather than later if we are willing to feel what we need to feel and then do what we need to do.

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