As the title states, we are so WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic). And, we don’t just believe it to be normal but also “best” for humanity to be such (i.e., others should be like us). This belief system blinds us to our biases and prevents us from any substantive change. In fact, we hold values that prevent people from coming together, from sharing, and from solving problems we collectively face. And until we are willing to critically examine how the society we have been raised within shapes what we believe and hold dear, there is little hope of stepping off this path we were set upon millennia ago.
It turns out, we are not normal (by any stretch of the imagination) when compared with other cultures. If we explore values held by Americans in parallel with values held by many Indigenous Peoples around the planet, we find a strong divergence between the cultures. An example might help illustrate this. In the United States, a person who gathers acorns from the forest would feel entitled to keep them all—after all, they did the work of harvesting them. But in many traditional cultures, it doesn’t matter who gathered them, the acorns belong to the collective and would be divided up amongst the members (using some culturally defined method of “fairness”). Most Americans can’t fathom this as being fair—even though we hail from cultures who practiced such methods of harvest sharing. These cultural methods of preventing hoarding are simply buried too deep in our past to have a meaningful impact on contemporary interactions.
Keep in mind that most papers on psychology, child-rearing, and human behavior focus on populations within wealthy, English-speaking countries. That means that your doctor, your therapist, and your child psychologist are using highly biased information that doesn’t accurately reflect the broad experience of Homo sapiens. And this includes such cultural practices as physical punishment of children, forcing children to sleep separately from their parents, and single-age socialization of our young—all normal in the United States but harmful to child well-being. But it goes much further than this. Americans, on the whole, are more individualist, focused on their own well-being, contradictory, and controlling than other people in the world (both geographically today and historically through time). This has repercussions for how we view other people, other beings, and the land itself. If, perhaps, we can come to understand how different (i.e., how weird) we are relative to cultures with better outcomes concerning emotional well-being, conflict resolution, and relationship to the earth, it could assist us in reorienting our values.
While I have doubts that the United States and its populace can ever admit that some of its most deeply held values might stand in the way of solving the problems we face, it is something that communities can accomplish. Such collectives can choose to restructure their systems of power, hierarchy, and individual focus to something more akin to what would be seen in traditional cultures. Values such as participation with the landscape, egalitarianism, and service beyond self can become the norm. Imagine a world (or at least a small piece of the world) where children are raised in a culture that values these over getting as much as they can from every situation they enter. What might people who can prioritize the collective (over the individual) and feel contentedness (over near constant need for more) accomplish when it comes living softly upon the planet, ending ecocide, and feeling a deep and calming connecting with the earth. Keeping in mind that 1 in 6 American teens have thoughts of suicide, it might be time to at least admit that our culture is harmful to almost everything it contacts. Some of you might even have the bravery to engage in change and attempt to swim out of this industrial current that we are all being swept along by. This river of civilization is a torrent, and it eventually carries everyone over the precipice and dashes them on the rocks. Many of you know this already but have hesitations. It can be lonely at times feeling separate from the culture at large. But it doesn’t mean we have to leave our family and friends behind—it just means we have to trust in and practice a different set of cultural values.
Remember, culture is the prism that we see and experience the world through. It is our worldview. There are many prisms, and you are not now, nor have you ever, been locked into seeing through a single prism. If you want a different existence for the beings you interact with, you need to establish a different worldview. That is our long-term goal here at Wilder Waters Community. We want to hand our children a beautiful prism.