We have been given language, empathy, memory, facial expressions, love, grief, time, senses, logic, thumbs, and tool-making, all so that we can function collaboratively as part of a small group. A common spoken language and common methods of trust-building serve to hold the group together––––together in the balance between the acts of survival and the joys of living.
Why is it necessary to balance survival and living? Survival is hardly worth the effort if it’s without a heart-felt meaning. While meaning is what initiates human collaboration, any ongoing collaboration will remain strong only if inspired by care and responsibility.
As for the young individual, he receives life-meaning when his elders hand him both fire and story. Fire gives him warmth, light, and digestion, and the fire sets a place to receive stories. The story gives him the meaning of meaning itself, but only if the story reveals the beauty and the function of the landscape, the beauty and the function of the tribe with whom he survives (in that landscape), and the beauty and the function of the roles and responsibilities that hold both the landscape and the tribe together.
If the story fails to inspire the young initiate to fall in love with these pillars of both beauty and function, then that human lineage will be sure to lose the one thing that makes life worth living. To willingly endure life’s discomforts requires a potent reason for which to bear those discomforts. If there is no worthy story that reveals what is most worth living for, there will be no shared destiny worth pursuing. If there is no shared destiny, there is no raft upon which our lineage’s DNA will travel the river of time. A human lineage dies when its people no longer care to transport something sacred to its rightful destination. That destination is a port residing in the hearts of the lineage’s youth. As to successfully delivering it will depend on if the adults have protected the message. If the message has been lost, there is no way to deliver it. If it’s not delivered, the child’s heart will remain forever broken, empty, lost, confused, and alienated.
So, the one thing that makes for a life worth living? To care. Only a properly crafted initiation-story can evoke the feelings of care required to overshadow life’s discomforts. When life’s discomforts are no longer the main story, but instead are a gnat set within a supremely meaningful story, then the initiation-story has done its job. This story is more important to a tribe’s ongoing survival than any one person in that tribe. A lasting human lineage is a lineage who delivers fire and story to each port along the river of time. The story that produces enough care as to make life’s discomforts feel small in comparison, will become the tribe’s highest object of value.
We begin to care only when shown a reason to give our respect. Both care and respect make us eager to uphold the beauty and function of that which we respect and care for. Only a story will be able to reveal that which is worthy of our respect, hence worthy of our care. We respect a thing only when we understand or appreciate the efforts it's made in producing something both delicious and necessary for our existence. We care for a flower, not just because it is beautiful, but because of how its existence feeds the landscape and how the landscape feeds us.
Those who were handed the secrets of how to inspire others to care beyond themselves, thus those who inspire others to care more for their group than for themselves, are the initiation-storytellers. These storytellers are the ones who hold the lynch pin of the lineage’s destiny. Contrarily, those who hide such stories mean only to deprive people of the joys of living, and thereby leave a people with a task-list of meaningless acts-of-survival. Slavery.
Slaves are made when a people are deprived of a worthy story and are instead manipulated, controlled, and weaponized. To create a self-volunteering slave, a regime need only disguise the worthy story and replace it with faux injustice narratives, false flags, and fake or exaggerated threats of harm. The mentally enslaved individual is one who becomes identified by their life-traumas (or other people’s traumas) instead of being identified by one’s own usefulness in serving both the worthy story and the worthy tribe. (Marxism is designed to manipulate and enslave a story-less people. Those with a story are immune.)
Who are the people who wish to hand you freedom? Who are the people trying to steal it? Who are the people who wish to protect us from losing our humanness? Who wishes to lure humanity into a centralized, story-less, and mind-controlled, dystopian Brave New World?
Caring for the underprivileged means making sure they possess a worthy story. The worthy story holds the small group together. Without that story, the disenfranchised will only become a weapon of elites willing to exploit them for political and economic gain. However, when the disenfranchised unite under a worthy story, a story of dignity, care, and destiny, rather than a story of trauma, victimhood, and meaninglessness, then they will succeed by their own group efforts. If by misfortune the disenfranchised choose the story of trauma, they will seek only to destroy the nation (and themselves), like an autoimmune disease destroys its host (and itself).
How do we truly help another human if the definition of what a human is remains unknown or intentionally disguised? How will we help the disenfranchised when those who intentionally disenfranchise people continue to seduce them with victim and trauma narratives? We can’t help the slave who defends his master.
Even more strange is the compassionate, privileged, and story-less person who claims to want to help his fellow man, yet has himself been mentally enslaved and alienated. By his story-less existence, he surmises that those less fortunate will be helped by our giving more resources.... and victimization narratives, instead of by giving them tools for building a human story that builds community alliances. The gullible choose the exact wrong solution towards helping others, just as the gullible choose the exact wrong solution towards solving their own misery and meaninglessness.
The good news is this, the story-less either don’t procreate, or they eventually eat their own. Their lineages can’t go on indefinitely. A lineage dies if it is without meaning, a worthy story, or well-directed care. Humanity’s destiny is for the humans who hold, protect, and deliver the worthy story. We are story-creatures. No amount of mind-numbing addiction to pleasure, technology, or comfort will change that.
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