What if society didn't have to be like this?
I’ve wanted to write a bunch of essays about cultural malaise for a long long time now. However I have felt quite blocked in doing so. Kind of mentally blocked. As though the information is there somewhere in my mid-brain but I can’t access it.
When I was back at Some Old University in 2020 on the contrary I had dozens of ideas for essays flooding into my head. Rubbish as the Covid-era online tuition was I had a licence and a space to take on board in depth anthropological research, so I really went to town.
I’m not 100% sure why I decided to leave but I remember getting frustrated with the frostiness of the academic staff.
Anyway I left but I kind of went back to not really writing much anthropologically, apart from the occasional thing.
Its taken me a while to get around to it but I realised I still had an alumni library card and whilst I couldn’t easily access journals I could read amongst the hundreds of thousands of books in the collection.
So that’s what I’ve done.
Recently I checked out two volumes on Andean civilizations (such as the Inca). In the first book I’m reading it struck me immediately that this kind of anthropological monograph was just the sort of information I needed to build my thesis about the cultural malady of the west.
For example in the introduction the book [] the author describes how early Spanish visitors to the Inca empire found a society free of poverty, hunger and disorder. Whilst its possible they may have had a romantic view of this novel society consider for a minute if other societies COULD function without huge social problems and dysfunction and the problems we associate with urban and high tech stratified societies are peculiar to Euro-centric societies. In other words there is something in the DNA of European societies that creates disharmony, poverty amd disunity AND that It doesn’t actually need to be like that. Revolutionary stuff and not revolutionary from a left/right perspective either.
Its only a fragment of travellers tales from hundreds of years ago but this is the kind of evidence and argument I was looking for.