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The Emotional Cost of Civilization
What Severed Our Sense of Belonging to Life
and What Will Lead us Home.
I want to take a few moments to offer an overview of where I believe we stand as a species. We live in a world with a great deal of trouble, sadness, and pain. Since humans began social contracting five thousand years ago, our story has been remarkable—especially in science, technology, and the Industrial Revolution. Why wouldn’t we believe we’re on the threshold of solving all our problems?
But things are not turning out very well. Many people are losing confidence that we have anywhere to go.
No one knows what is coming, but what I am saying to women in abuse shelters—and really to all women—is this: there was a time when humans decided we wanted to control life rather than continue participating in its process. To do that, we had to reject our innate feelings—how we felt in the moment—in order to shape the future as we thought it should be. The problem is that, to do so, we had to leave the feelings we were born with in the dust.
Given recent developments, growing numbers of people sense that something is fundamentally wrong, but they don’t know what it is. They don’t even know how to think about it.
It has occurred to me that if we look at the other social primates, we see them still participating in the process of life. It’s up to each person to judge whether they or we are better off. But if we ever begin to suspect that the other social primates remained on the sustainable track and that somehow we got off, we may arrive at a possible answer to what has gone wrong, one that we have never considered before.
Having formalized our family relationships thousands of years ago, we function as if we were a pair‑bonding species rather than the social primates that science says we are. And because we must pretend to be something we are not in our most personal relationships, our biggest problem is that our families are dysfunctional.
We have organized ourselves around the idea of pair bonding to the point that people measure their moral worth largely by how well they honor their promise to love one person for life. Without pair bonding, we would have no standard to live up to. So when it comes to family, with so much of our identity resting on fulfilling that promise, we can’t imagine living any other way, no matter how dysfunctional our families become.
If our species is to get out of this situation in a way that restores both sustainability and our natural sense of belonging to life, we don’t need more technology or more ideologies, nor do we need to inhabit the far reaches of the universe. What we need are functional family relationships.
When researchers study most other primates, they notice that female social bonds are the core of every family. Without a female bond to provide direction, meaning, and purpose, there would be no families among social primates.
I think that’s our problem: there are no real human families because female bonds—the core of social primate family life—no longer exist. Without sisterhoods, there is no entity on Earth with the emotional authority to guide forty or fifty people in a way that, through taking care of one another in interdependent relationships, they each contribute to the well-being of the species to which we all belong.
It’s not a lack of technology that’s hurting us. It’s not a lack of ideologies or belief systems. It’s a lack of sisterhoods and brotherhoods helping each other bring the next generation into the world. That’s what our species needs. And to feel that we belong to life again, we need each other’s support in that endeavor.
I can’t prove any of this. In fact, it’s unprovable. The only way we will ever know is if women begin being honest with each other about how they feel, an honesty that’s been missing since humans began basing our family relationships on legal arrangements. It’s the kind of honesty women find in abuse shelters. And as evidenced by the growing strength of sisterhood everywhere, it is happening around the world.
By sharing their feelings, fears, and vulnerabilities with nothing to hide, special bonds may begin to form among women—the kind that tells them that if they stick together, things will be okay for them and their children, no matter what hardships they face.
If that feeling becomes so strong that they have no choice but to trust it, they will become sisterhoods—forces of nature that evolution created to govern our species’ life. Then we will find out whether social bonding serves us as it did before humans decided we were pair‑bonders and imposed that belief by law.
Whether the growing strength of sisterhood will lead humans to function again as social primates is unknown. But as we look into the unknown, it at least gives us something to consider. And when we do, the story isn’t all that bad. The idea of allowing our feelings to organize our family relationships may seem strange beyond belief to us, who depend on social contracts, but it has a good record. For tens of millions of years, across the entire primate lineage, feelings were our guides—not by choice, but because evolution offers no other.
Here is something else to consider: What do we want from life? Do we want to realize personal ambitions? Wealth? Privilege? I think what we want is contentment. If we experienced contentment, we wouldn’t need to own anything. In fact, until five thousand years ago—before men began owning women through the sacrament of marriage—no being on Earth had ever owned a thing.
If a group of women is ever inspired to become the force of nature that evolution made them by sticking together—if you and your childhood girlfriends had stayed together, for instance—I might knock on your door with a question: Is there anything I can do to help? And if you let me hang around, and I proved more of a benefit than a nuisance, and other men showed up as well, we’d have a brotherhood. I’d have some guys to hang out with, which is about the only thing I’ve ever wanted anyway. We’ll build you rooms, of course, or do whatever you need, but please don’t ask me whether this couch goes with that wallpaper because then I’ll have to start pretending I’m interested.
The problem with this world isn’t conflicts, diseases, storms, or hardships. We feel most alive when dealing with things like that. The problem is that we must pretend—even in our most personal relationships—that we feel something other than what we really feel. When we are not free to honor our inborn feelings, we can’t serve life. That is a kind of living death—the kind that often renders people emotionally ill.
Our emotions need to be healed, not inflamed. Only in homes where we are accepted for what Nature made us can our spirits heal. And if enough of us find those homes, maybe Nature can begin to heal as well.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and may Nature bless us all.
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